Puroon Shahada

I will say, you know, a fundamental thing before you raise money is to make sure that you nail the unit economics.

It's just not going to scale if the unit economics are bad, whether they are, you know, your CAC or, you know, your payback period, you know, retention rate, all of those.

So for me, the fundraising cycle was a very short one.

It was just a week and a half.

But all the work went in prior to that where, you know, the business was fundamentally solid.

We knew that there was lots of market opportunity.

We'd proven the TAM was well developed.

In fact, I spent, you know, no less than two, three weeks just working on the TAM analysis.

The TAM analysis should be done extremely well simply because big investments only come in big markets.

So unless you have a huge potential, nobody's going to write a big check.

So think about that and spend a disproportionate amount of time just figuring out your TAM.

I also prepped really hard as to what would be my growth thesis and the one that my then current board shared with me.

So when I went out, I turned the question around to every one of the firms I was talking to.

This was a self-run process.

What would you do with this firm if you were actually partnering with me on the same side of the table in the boardroom?

And I sat and I listened to what they had.

And I got the chance to think about, you know, five, six different really awesome takes.

And then I could accurately figure out which ones would be the best group to work with, where the culture fit would be.

So to build your growth thesis and to test it out, that is a golden opportunity to do that.

These are the slides that are available in the key fob.