Resilient

9Raising My Seed Round

There will be mountains you won't move. Learn to climb.

—Unknown

By far my seed round was the hardest raise. What seed rounds look like today has drastically changed. For comparison, nine years ago Uber raised a $1.57 million seed funding round that valued the company at $3.86 million, and there were 32 investors in Uber's seed round with checks as small as $25,000. Today Crunchbase has dubbed large rounds of seed investments as “supergiant seed rounds,” counting seed rounds that are larger than $5 million.

In 2017, I set out to raise $2 million in a seed round. It was no easy feat. My first mistake was believing that just because I had built an MVP, that we had customers and revenue, and that I was a second-time founder and CEO, things would be easier for me. Not only was I wrong, the process of raising a seed round would prove at times defeating. What I realized early on, or so I thought, was that I needed to be where the capital was, and for budding founders of tech startups that was the Bay area. So, I saw that Black Enterprise was holding their annual tech connect summit where Freada Kapor Klein was speaking. Freada is a well-known venture capitalist and, along with her husband, Mitch Kapor, is the founder of Kapor Capital. They are well known and respected in the Valley for not just their investing, but also their targeted investing in minority founders like myself. I decided that I was going to book a flight and purchase a ticket to attend the ...