Fundraising Secret

You were on to something great, but with every new company there comes hurdles. So what were some of the biggest hurdles you faced in trying to get a new company off the ground? And how did you overcome those barriers?

It was financing, it was always financing, and I would say it was just knocking on more doors. So every entrepreneur gets more no's than yes's, that's just the way it goes. Soon as I got to the female, the answer was yes. But let's just talk about how many female early stage investors... Now there are more. Now, you have groups set up to really focus on women and with female investors. But this was almost... now we're going into our tenth year. So I waited till, let's say eight years ago. I didn't raise capital for the first year. So eight years ago, I bet you we could count the venture capitalists that were females doing early stage deals on one hand. And Maha Ibrahim of Canaan said yes. And then Dana Settle at Greycroft said yes. And Mathias Schilling of eventure said yes, a male, European male. And after that it all came together. But until I met Maha, it was no, after no, after no.

That's a lot of no's, Julie. So how do you, I don't know, how do you keep yourself from not becoming totally depressed and deterred by so many no's?

Well, look, I didn't even go out and start looking for capital until I hit 10 million in revenue. And that happened the first nine months of business. So I just thought, right, I'm dealing with men, they're in the land of raising capital with eBay, they really didn't get it. So I would say I use the old trick a lot of entrepreneurs do, you basically think the people you're pitching to that say no, were stupid, at least as it applied to your business, not stupid on the ground, but basically they're wrong, I'm right. They'll come around at some point. And I figured I knew more about the opportunity than they did. And look, it's a hard business. There's no question about it. But I really looked at them as being wrong. And I'm being on the right track. So and I would say I'm really much more.... Most entrepreneurs are just crazily positive. I mean, they're the ultimate optimist. I would say, you know, I'm more balanced. I'm more of a pragmatist. But on this nothing was going to slow me down. I knew I was right. And I also didn't expect them to understand what I was working on.