Do. Fail. Learn. Repeat.: The Truth Behind Building Businesses by Nicholas Haralambous

Author:Nicholas Haralambous [Haralambous, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Management, Management Science, Industrial Management, Organizational Behavior
ISBN: 9780639926438
Google: UhXQuQEACAAJ
Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
Published: 2018-06-24T17:00:00+00:00

22

THE SECOND (FAILED)

FUND-RAISE

Around the same time that we were starting to think about hiring someone, we were also planning a trip to the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Why? Because we could afford to after landing a few clients and getting more money in the bank. Our traction was so significant (in our view) that we believed we could start hunting for further funding to grow even more. This is the way of the VC backed tech company: exponential growth or death. We were aiming for the former.

It didn’t help our egos that we were being approached by VC firms from all over the world shortly after we launched and announced our traction (PR kings). Firms in New York, Boston and London had all reached out to me, struck up relationships and were fishing for information. I struggled to bat them away as I should have. Instead I became quite swept up with the idea that we could raise a massive round of funding in dollars and really start to expand our mobile social network builder into developing markets across the globe. All we needed to do was meet with these investors face to face and we’d be golden. I began to meet with these firms over Skype and build relationships with the point people who were looking after the African markets and mobile technology. I was stunned at how far ahead of the market Motribe was, how much knowledge we had regarding mobile and how well our platform was performing. Every VC we spoke with showed interest and was impressed.

Except for one.

One of the firms that I managed to get a meeting with was Sequoia Capital. If you don’t know this firm, that’s OK. They have backed massive businesses like Airbnb, Apple, Cisco, Dropbox, Google, Instagram, PayPal and many, many, many others. Sequoia is the holy grail of VC firms. Roelof Botha is one of the partners at Sequoia. He’s a South African expat who made a name for himself working with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel at PayPal. I don’t know Roelof and I had no direct way of getting in touch with him. But at the time I absolutely had to show Sequoia what we were doing so I composed an email to him and titled it: Cape Town Startup Taking Over Africa. I played to his roots in the Cape and started to guess at his email address. I sent emails to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and every other variation I could think of.

It worked.

Within a week I had been contacted by Tim, the head of mobile and Africa investments at Sequoia Capital. We set up a Skype call and pitched Motribe. We did our best but were completely overwhelmed by the obvious, simple and straightforward questions that the Sequoia team asked:

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