Q: What has your approach been to raising money? And how is it different being a first time founder?

Rich Chetwynd
​CEO & Founder
ThisData

A: For me I had never raised money before. I’d built and sold a company and that was great, but I’d never raised money before. It was the classic case of ‘ask for advice and you’ll get money, ask for money and you’ll get advice.’ There wasn’t any funny business going on there, I just really wanted the help. So I found the single person I knew who had a lot of experience raising money, and I went and asked that person if they’d be interested helping me put it together. Then ultimately they ended up putting in money as well. That person was really key; I didn’t need their money but I really needed their help. And they helped me work out what that initial valuation might be, how much we should raise, who we should raise from, as well as opening a few doors and making a few connections. That’s is how I started off on that raising journey.

There are so many questions when you go out to raise money. You’re all obsessed about what you want to do and how you’re going to change the world; and you need x dollars to do so. But then there is are sorts of other things that come into play. How do we value this opportunity? What sort of investors do we want? What are the timelines we’re looking at? How do we put together good terms?

One of the things that also came up for me was to stop thinking about the first round. To start thinking about what the subsequent rounds actually looked like. You can get hung up thinking it’s all about that first round of money, but once you’re on the capital raising buzz it’s hard to get off it. You have to spend the money, but then if you haven’t hit the targets you’re still spending the money. So you’ve eventually got to trim your costs, raise more money, or more likely both.