How I coped with starting from zero

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Jon: How did you manage the anxiety of turning the ship in the right direction?

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Raad: I was super depressed. This was the market segment that I studied for

the last 3+ years. Lots of thoughts were going through my head. We were

starting from zero again. What would we tell our investors? We had to fire

80% percent of our team because we were starting from scratch.

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There was a lot of anxiety. I was depressed around that time period too that

we had to do this again. You feel like an idiot and wonder how did these

other start-ups do it? That’s why I did the thread that I did because

whatever you read, it’s not reality.

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We got press for the Series A and that was cool but it was surface level.

It made it sound like everything was great. You talk to reporters and only

get thirty minutes of their time. I'm super grateful for everyone that wrote

about us but it's very surface level.

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One of the reasons I'm doing this podcast, one of the reasons I put out that

thread is people need to see that the vast majority of companies are

messy as hell. There’s not a clear path. They’re not going from seed,

A, B, C, and then to IPO.

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At the time I thought that was just us. As we stuck with it I learned so many

more stories similar to ours. It’s really important because if I heard more

of that when I was doing this pivot I probably wouldn’t be as depressed.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, it was sink or swim. I put all my chips

in this company, and I wasn’t ready to give up. There was no way I was

going to give up. So we just kept at it.

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Jon: I really appreciate you sharing that and being vulnerable. It’s really

important for other founders to hear. The reason we put this show

together is to help the folks before you or at the stages prior to you

to understand what the reality of building a company looks like

through the lens of fundraising. I'm also glad that you said it’s

the easy part of building a company.

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I liken it to having a guide take you up a mountain, you still got to climb

the mountain yourself and along the way you get some food but you

still got to climb the mountain. You learn everything about climbing the

mountain when you’re at the top so it’s too late.

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One thing that really resonated with me about your story was there was

this massive company that was out there that had raised a lot of

money, specifically Atrium run by Justin Kan, who’s a seasoned

entrepreneur and very well-liked around. How did you handle that

when you were running your fundraising process, what was that

experience like?

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Raad: The initial reaction was, “The guy that sold Twitch for a billion

dollars is doing a legal tech start-up as a marketplace...what are the

chances of that?!” I know legal tech is pretty big but in the bigger

landscape, a relatively niche industry.

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Afterward, it was just this realization that it was out of our control.

We can’t do anything about that. Why focus energy on it? If anything,

it made us even more focused on building the thing that actually worked

for us.

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Around this time we were going through this pivot so when we saw him

enter the space, predominantly in the start-up space, we brutally realized

that it was very unprofitable. It’s a really hard unit economic market to build

upon. So we just focused on ourselves.

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It’s scary, it completed derailed our Series A. He ended up raising from a hundred

plus VCs. We were raising our series A around the same time and he raised from

every single person we were in talks with. It made so much sense why people

stopped responding back to our emails. We realized it was just us. We’re not raising

again. We have this product, we have a couple of people that are still dedicated

to the mission. Let’s just rebuild this thing, let’s get it profitable, let’s just go even

harder. If anything, it motivated us to make it work one way or another.

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In terms of benefits, it definitely put legal tech on the map. Ironically we also raised

from 100+ investors. They were all customers, users on our supply side, and operators.

We had a VC but the majority of the funding was from these individuals. It put legal

tech on the map.

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Atrium ended up shutting down after raising $75M bucks. I'm not happy about that

but, it really goes to show you that it’s not just about the capital that you raise.

It’s about the market, it’s about the business model, it’s about the team. It’s about

how long you’re willing to take the pain and stick it out. I think we gave a shit more

about the space for whatever reason.

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