So what do you think about that show Shark Tank? What are your thoughts on that? I think it sort of gives the idea that people who have money can invest in me. “This is so easy. All I have to do is get in front of them and pitch it,” and there’s nothing else to do. You know? It’s like a two-step process. And I feel as if that’s sort of deceitful, you know?
Shark Tank is a binary show. You get investment or you don’t get investment. You go home with one of the sharks, or you go home alone. I just finished Barbara Corcoran’s Shark Tales, which is great. She’s such a funny writer. A lot of her business lessons she learned from her mother. Barbara remembers really tiny details like when she first met Trump. When she walked into his office, it was model after model that was showing her from place to place and she was laughing about it. It made me laugh too.
But no, raising money is definitely not as simple as Shark Tank. Shark Tank is like speed dating. Raising money is like looking for the love of your life. He may be a barista, he may be a cute guy at the gym. You’re always keeping your eyes peeled. First, you have to find investors. If you don’t have a large network or you don’t have a network of high net worth individuals, it’s very hard to find those people. I happen to have that network from living and working in D.C. and from friends and family. I definitely have a leg up there. But, when I started, I didn’t know any venture capitalists. To get to those people, my approach is meeting one person and then asking them to introduce me to three more people. Then I meet three more people and three more people, etcetera.
The biggest problem is not that investors say yes or no. Someone once told me the second best answer is no, because most of the time, investors will wait and they’ll say, “Not right now,” or they’ll say, “I’ll get back to you,” and…they don’t get back to you….ever. You thought you had a really good thing going – it’s a lot like dating. I think everything’s like dating: we have a great date, we really vibe and then I never hear from them. Or they send me one cryptic email back. Confusing. Very similar themes.
After that, let’s say you get somebody who is interested. Then you have to get them to commit to a number. And if you’re valuing your round at a certain number, they need to know what terms they’re buying into. Let’s say your valuing your company at $100,000,000 versus $1,000,000, and they’re going put in $100,000. That’s a very different deal depending on what the valuation is. In short, there are a lot of steps. There’s legal involved, and there’s follow up.
Like follow up from your part to the investor?
Yes. I’ve learned asking a question in emails means they have to answer you. It’s a bit of a game. Investors also – what Barbara talks about in the book – want in on a deal where everybody else wants in. If nobody’s committing, they’re not going to commit. It’s very hard to get the first person to say yes. Ideally your first yes is someone of influence, then people will say, “Oh they’re in? I’m in. Oh I want to be in.” It’s a little bit of a dance.
That sounds a lot like fundraising.
Definitely. Before I started my own company I worked for Network For Good, which is a social good tech company. It was founded by AOL, Sysco, and Yahoo!, in the aftermath of 9/11. The idea was to make it as easy to give online as it was to shop online, because at the time, you couldn’t make donations online. People were writing checks and those checks rarely got in the hands of people in need.
What we found at Network for Good is that people mostly donate during times of crisis…or right before the end of the year, which is tax-related. This pattern is consistent and it’s across the board. There are people who contribute on a monthly basis to charities, nonprofits that they like, but for the most part, there are those two patterns. It’s similar with investment in terms of if investors feel it’s an immediate deal, they want in. Obviously it’s not a crisis, but it is time sensitive. There’s some adrenaline to moving quickly. It’s also similar to end-of-the-year-tax reasoning, as when investors are at the end of their fund, they have to deploy capital really quickly. At that point, they write checks faster.
No way!
Yeah, it just depends on when they need to finish deploying the fund’s capital.
People always say to me, “If you ever need help, let us know,” and I never cash in those chips just because I feel as if it’s just what people say. How do you take advantage of that with investors?
When I first started pitching investors … let me back up. I rarely get nervous because I have training as an actor and I trained myself not to get nervous. So I don’t really get nervous that much. However, when I started raising money I was super nervous because I was pitching friends and family who I know and love. Injecting money into this relationship felt strange and transactional.Many people don’t like pitching friends and family because they think they could lose all their money. I never had that problem of, “Oh I’ll sit at the Thanksgiving table with you and I lost all your money.” Why? Because first of all, I didn’t think I was going to lose anybody’s money. I take their investment seriously. And second, I felt people were intelligent enough to make their own decisions as to what they wanted to invest.
People invest, and I imagine donate, because they believe in the person who’s leading that charge. It may be different for a nonprofit – maybe you’re donating because you really believe in the cause. In my case, people would say time after time, “I’m investing in your company because I’m investing in you.” Women in particular are really uncomfortable taking people up on their offers to lend or invest money. When someone says, “Hey, I want to invest in you one day,” we tend to think, “Oh it’s just a thing that somebody says.”
Plus, “Hey, will you invest in me?” can feel like an aggressive question. But asking that question is empowering. Little secret: the worst thing that can happen? They say no. That may feel painful. So you may go home feeling deflated and maybe even cry about it. But then okay, it’s over. That’s it. Conversely, best case scenario is, you have money in your pocket. I weighed those pros and cons, and I’ve pitched so many people… I mean yeah, I don’t feel immune when somebody says no but I don’t take it personally anymore. I took the “no” personally for a very long time.
I would encourage you to go to those people offering you money and say to them, “Hey, I was thinking about your offer and it’s so generous, and actually I could use X amount to do Y. What do you think?” I know, it sounds crazy. Say what you need and be specific. If you say, “I need $100,000,” or whatever the amount, they might say, “Okay.” Because you don’t know. You don’t know until you try.
So there’s a Keds and LOLA event that I went to, and there’s a woman, her name is Whitney Casey, she and her friend Brooklyn Decker started, Finery.com. She said the same thing you said, “Just ask. What am I going to say, no to you?” Like I hear no all the time! I was like “Oh, wow.” But I just make things awkward, so when people say no to me, I’m like, “Oh yeah! So cool! Okay!” And they’re like, “You’re making it worse.”
Yeah, you’re thinking, “Just stop talking. Just stop. Stop, please stop.” (laughs) I learned a trick. When you ask a question, “Will you invest?” for example, take a sip of water. That will literally force you to stop talking. When getting an answer you don’t want, it’s hard to stop talking. I get that too. It can hurt because you believe in what you’re building. Talk to my boyfriend – he’ll tell you I won’t stop talking and I can get really hurt when I get noes. I’m building something and it’s going to be really big. I want everyone to be a part of it. I see no reason why Walc can’t be as big as Snapchat.
I’m learning that I can convince everyone of that…not yet.
Oh for sure.
No question. So when people say no because of some reason that I feel they pulled out of thin air, I get hurt and I get annoyed and I’m frustrated and angry and sad. I want it to be easier because I worked so hard, and I get it. I get all those feelings and I’m not immune to those things. But practice talking to yourself in the mirror. Practice with your friends. Practice with me. Really.
A thing that I’ve done for a long time, and I’ll ask for an investment, women typically don’t say at the end of their pitch, “Is this something you will invest in?” Which investors need to hear in order to answer the question because you know, you’re not sitting there for your health talking about whatever you’re pitching. So ask, but what I tend to do, and what a lot of women tend to do, is we’ll say, “So is this something you’re interested in investing in? Because I would really like to get you invested and I have a lot of great investors,” and go on and on and on. By the time we’re finished talking, they don’t even know what we’re asking because we’ve talked so much. So saying, “Is this something you’re interested in investing in?” Having a glass of water next to you, drinking that glass of water to stop talking, to let them answer, I’ve found is a great way of doing it. Especially when you’re on the phone. You can do it in front of them, as you’re about to talk more, drink up. And that really helps me to stop talking.
Oh wow. Because you can’t talk with …
I mean, you can, but then you spill water all over yourself and then you’re … I mean, I guess you could, but hopefully that doesn’t happen to anybody.
Do you have other tips that you use besides this one, on before going in to any sort of meeting?
Definitely. I do a lot of research on the investor. A trick that I learned when writing cover letters, which was go on their website, figure what words they use consistently, and then drop in those words strategically in your pitch and your cover letter and your conversation. If I go on a website and it says other than “innovation” and “disrupt”, other than those things, if they say, “sustainability” and that’s a little more of a buzzword too. “Scalability,” another buzzword, but if they say “marketing KPI, we’re really interested in making sure people hit their marketing KPI’s or have marketing KPI’s,” for example. Put that in your pitch. Just drop it casually as if you thought of it. Which is a little bit of an acting trick too, but that works for sure.
Before I go into meetings I always ask to go to the bathroom first. I usually always have to go the bathroom before I go anyway, but what’s great is that I stand in front of the mirror or if there are a lot of people in the bathroom then I don’t do this, but I’ll be in the stall. I strike some sort of power pose. Which I don’t know if you’ve heard of, what these power poses are. Like the Superwoman one. Or your hands up and your legs out, which I do most frequently, and I inhale deeply, exhale deeply for six breaths and that inherently calms down my system.
And there other times where I talk to myself in the mirror and psych myself up. But something else that I read and I started to use, is if you feel nervous, instead of trying to calm yourself down, because I’m not trying to calm myself down in those instances, I’m trying to center myself. If I’m feeling nervous, then matching that energy with an equally high vibration energy, matching it with excitement. Instead of, “Oh my God, I don’t really know what’s happening, I’m so nervous,” saying, “Oh my God, I’m going to kill it. I’m so excited, this is going to be awesome!” Because if you then try to pull it down it then exacerbates the nervousness and pulls that up.
Oh wow. That’s great. And so what’s in works with Walc? You said you’re launching something in a few months?
So we are raising this next round of financing. We have some really awesome, interesting investors. We are building out the Waze for walking, if you will. A lot of our team is from Waze, and so we’ll use our visual cue-based navigation to get you around, but you’ll know that there’s a protest over there. Maybe you want to go check it out. Or maybe you’re in a rush and you don’t have time. Or there’s a parade, or a pop-up fair, or there’s something cool. Or there’s something not cool and you don’t want to go there. So we’ll give you customized directions for you.
It’s interesting you say that because a friend of mine who moved from Houston to New York, he just flew out the other day and he was saying that it should take him this amount of time but Waze didn’t take into account the flood zones. So it took a couple of hours. With protests, when you’re walking, you may want to avoid that.
Yeah, so it’s with driving, it’s pretty binary. It’s not binary. There are only two or three factors that you want to think about when you’re driving, typically. I want to avoid traffic, I want to avoid getting a ticket, and I don’t want to hit a pothole, or something in the road. With walking, it’s totally different. If you and I are strolling, maybe we want to walk on the West Side Highway, but if we’re trying to get to a meeting, we can’t get all the way to the west side, we have to be in the middle of the city. There’s so many factors. I’m wearing heels, I don’t want to go where there’s marshland. I mean, so it depends, and we want to have an effect anytime you’re walking anywhere. When you’re at the airport, when you’re at the mall, when you’re at a concert, when you’re at Glastonbury festival, when you’re at South by Southwest, when you’re home, walking the same route that you do every day. You’re incentivized to go and check out something new. Discover something new.
We’re building this in an augmented reality capacity, and we’ve been doing a lot of research and development with young women and girls. We have partnerships with schools across the U.S. and China, and what’s fascinating is that these girls and young women create higher quality content, so there’s a lot of crowdsourcing content that you can send to your friends. They share their content faster than boys do, and then any platform girls are on, boys will join. So I’m not worried about the boys right now, but that’s a very fun thing that I get to say to investors, that I love watching their reactions to. The idea is that imagine walking down a street in New York you know really well, but this time it’s different. This time you see on your right hand corner where your friend proposed to his now wife. On the left is where your mom had her thirtieth birthday. So all of a sudden you have this rich context for places you know and love and then places that you’ve never been.
That’s why fundraising is not fun in my view, because I love talking about the vision and getting people on board about that, but the constant rejection can be wearing and can test people’s not only patience but can create self doubt. So that’s why I try to keep coming back to what I believe in everyday.
Is there anything that you want to tell us that I didn’t ask? Something that a lot of people don’t really ask in interviews?
I’ve been stressing this a lot lately and I will keep stressing it. I give a lot of talks, I’ve given talks and presented and keynote and all that across the world. What I find is consistent in particular that’s embedded within young women and girls from a very young age. In fact I just read this book called Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, which is worth reading and everybody should reading. What I’ve noticed is that, and I have the exact same problems, is that we are bred to be insecure based on our bodies, based on our brains, based on our looks, based on anything. What that means is that we are then risk-averse. I am not a risk-averse person, clearly, because I’ve changed my whole life around this crazy idea I have. And really want to change the world and make an impact and be somebody. A lot of women want to be that, are inspired by that, are excited about that, but can’t get themselves psyched up enough.
So the number one thing I would say is work on believing in yourself. If it means waking up every day, looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, “I believe in you,” and it sounds super stupid and cheesy, but after a while, you’ll start to believe it. The best the thing we can do for each other as women is hold each other up as opposed to smearing each other, pulling each other down, saying, “That’s stupid.” Using the B-word which I hate more than anything. I think our language, especially a lot of people call women “girls” that drives me crazy. Calling it out when you see it. If you’re confident in yourself, very rarely will people call me a girl. And I’m a petite woman but nobody in their right mind is going to call me a girl because I ain’t no girl, but embracing that confidence. Our world will be such a better place is women are more confident because we will take over.