What it's like to raise money

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](https://publons.com/)

For those of you that don’t know, Publons, the company I co-founded, was part of the 2013 Lightning Lab cohort.

Last week I had the pleasure of joining Rollo Wenlock (CEO of Wipster) at the Lab to talk to the current batch of companies. We discussed what it’s like to pitch at demo day and then go through the due diligence process on your way to raising money.

I don’t feel I was able to fully convey how much of a distraction that process is. We talked about it within Publons and Daniel (my co-founder) pointed out that it’s evident in our git commit logs.

So we went back and took a look. We found that during the three months of the lab we made a cumulative 317 commits; in the month we were raising money we made 23 – roughly as many as we made in the two weeks around Christmas.

We effectively stopped working on the product for that month. With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think that was avoidable, at least not for the founding team. The fact is we still had a lot of work to do to figure out who we were and where we were going. The diligence period helped us to do that; a good group of investors provides a lot of value.

At the same time, it does speak to a potential weakness in the Lightning Lab model. What happens after demo day and before the money is in the bank? If we’d had the resources to build a team during that period then perhaps we’d be further along today.

Just a thought…

My Notes

It’s always fun to share what you’ve learned. For the record, here are the points I touched on:

  1. Know what your mission is;
  2. Demo day seems like hard work but a year later you’ll be doing pitches like that on a weekly basis;
  3. A good pitch helps but don’t forget that traction (around a scalable, defensible business model) is best;
  4. Find a lead investor who believes in you and your team and let them guide you through the fundraising process;
  5. It’s OK to raise money to figure things out. This is what a seed round is for. You’ll be sorely tempted to pretend you know all the answers. Don’t. It will only come back to cause you grief. Do your best to pitch what you know and also be clear about what you still need to find out;
  6. (On a related note) this isn’t what you’ll be doing in five years. Focus on learning as much as possible and building relationships; and finally
  7. Don’t underestimate how much of a distraction due diligence is, but recognize that it’s really good for you!