 Thanks so much. So I was asked to come here on Wednesday, so I was thinking what what's missing here What could I add and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about fundraising from the entrepreneur point of view Last year at slush we announced our latest seed round for Company echo founded sudden coffee. We make instant coffee. That tastes really really good and We're basing San Francisco And today we've raised three point four million dollars from a variety of top tier VCs Including white combinator. We were in the winter 17 batch earlier this year and Charles River ventures and and the local Lifeline ventures year and I thought that it could be interesting At least for me to actually see how a pitch That sort of raised this amount of money might look like so I thought of of giving you the pitch and Sort of a little bit of background. I left sudden a couple months ago Company still doing really well my co-founder is running and and and I'm still as a shale holder involved and Yeah, so here we go So basically here's the thing everybody loves good coffee, right who here doesn't like good coffee Now few love instant coffee I mean This is the sort of gnarly stuff that you end up getting in airplanes when you're waiting at a dentist office and so on It's basically just liquid coffee. That's dehydrated But here's the thing instant coffee is the king when you look at the coffee market. It's a 35 billion dollar market Imagine that out of the 85 billion dollars that coffee is worldwide And there hasn't been any innovation in the past what 50 years basically since Nescafe came out Then on the other hand The consumer interest is trending heavily towards the high quality specialty coffee That's sort of in here as well. That's the sort of much more differentiated much more interesting Approach to coffee and on average the millennial consumers spent $80 in coffee per month, which is a lot of money Now here's what we wanted to make Instant coffee that you'll actually want to drink. I was sitting on a plane I was really desperate for some caffeine and I had a coffee and it was horrible and I thought is there a way I could have good coffee right here So why not make instant coffee that would actually taste good. It's basically liquid coffee. That's dehydrated So we approached it by making taking good coffee brewing it well and not screwing it up, essentially so Basically it's about combining the convenience and all the good things of of instant coffee. It's super light has a huge shelf life It's cheap to transport easy to use designed to scale with all the best aspects of specialty coffee great branding great taste high-margin and that it's growing rapidly and As you can see it's like two huge markets overlapping So far we have customers who absolutely love it. We have an amazing amount of basically shares in social media and The the demand is showing pretty strong organic growth now redacted the numbers But these are still the sort of graphs are actually what we had in the pitch and We also have a really good team my background is is heavily in coffee before I got into startups I ran a bunch of coffee shops at slush three years ago We served all the coffee that was served here about 22,000 cups Throughout seven seven cafes throughout the event and also studied food science at University of Helsinki Then my co-founder Josh is Stanford industrial engineering grad We spend a lot of time at McKinsey optimizing factories and we have a scientific advisor who's basically the world's leading coffee scientist Who is helping us making making good coffee? He was the head of taste and aroma at Nespresso, which is a pretty cool title Now that was basically the pitch we pitch investors When we raised this about 2.7 million round and for our first round which was half a mill It was basically the same but with fewer numbers But the the market was market research was same and the the validation for the product was same now keep in mind that This is sort of my experience is limited to this one one company and one race when it comes to raising money for a startup So the end is is one and also I think that a really important thing to keep in mind when you're an entrepreneur is that You know your company best People will give you advice you can hear about things but take it all with a grain of salt Nobody has the full context on the company the same way you do I've been screwed many times when I listen to somebody who doesn't really know what they're talking about But they're really confident in saying like oh you guys should do this Absolutely, and then it turns out to be a horrible horrible idea And now I think I want to sort of try to deconstruct this and share some of the factors that I thought made this a successful race and I think the three quick three key questions that we knew investors would be asking and and that we wanted to answer were basically is What you're making something that a lot of people need or want ideally need and this is basically is there a market for what you're doing Is it something that a lot of people love and want to pay for it? And at that point we Basically, this is the market once I show this slide. Nobody's questioning if there's market for specialty coffee Or specialty instant coffee where there's two huge markets We have a product that's overlapping We're first to that market and I don't need to put a number there Anybody can figure out that any sort of overlap will probably pretty pretty significant and then secondly is basically second parties to traction so When you're raising money for a company the best way to raise money is to make your company better So the more traction you have the more sort of confidence that builds in your ability to execute and Sell that product and also prove that people like what you're doing And in our case for the second second raise we had been Shipping product for about a year and we had very sort of strong organic growth Secondly You want to answer the question why is your company in the top 5% in the world to solve this problem? Why are you the best team to solve this problem? Early-stage startups are essentially a function of its founders if the founders are great They can probably overcome a lot of obstacles and barriers and make things work You can have a great idea in a mediocre team and it'll probably turn out to be something mediocre Or you can have great founders And an okay idea, but the great founders will probably turn it into a great idea sooner or later And in our case, this is a photo from my first barista competitions I've I'm a two-time finished barista champion before I embarked on my startup career and and was ranked as the ninth best Barista in the world and then also I've been involved in slush since 2011 and also studied food science And then we have my co-founder who is a really like incredible operations geek and amazing at optimizing Sort of physical production environments And then we have this scientist who is the world's leading authority in figuring out how to build something like this So it's a team of very sort of complimentary overlapping skills that a Lot of investors said that that's basically like why they wanted to back this Since there's sort of strong proof that we can make this actually happen And I think thirdly is why what prevents from somebody else doing this. How is this defensible? And in the case of sudden sure Nestle could do this, but they don't know how to market it We sell it online as a subscription to consumers in the US Which is very disruptive in the instant coffee space And sort of a lot of people wouldn't realize that so it's a combination for us of combination of factors of it's very It requires a lot of skill. It's hard to make it. It's hard to scale it and the barrier of entry is fairly high So that's also something you'd want to bring in And then I think some sort of more tactical General tips for fundraising based on my experience and what I've seen and learn at Y Combinator And this is something that I really love and I'm a really big fan of being positively weird And by that I mean something that a VC or an investor who sees a hundred pictures a day at best remembers and in our YC batch there were 112 companies, I think and I could bet Quite a bit of money on it that we were probably one of the most rememberable ones The guys that make instant coffee that looks kind of like drugs So you want to take advantage of that Sort of being positively weird in a good sense It makes it easier for people to talk about you for other people to pitch you I Can give somebody a tube and say like this is our instant coffee and you can give it to others It's really easy to remember you can go to somebody's office and you see it there like oh, what's that? It's really hard to do that for a you know your regular B2B SaaS app You can usually find a way to do that and if you can I definitely embrace that as a key differentiator And then basically fundraising is about creating FOMO. So if you're missing out Momentum is your friend. That's what you want to build and so at YC They Recommend you To say no to all investor meetings and say that we're just heads down building our product Because the best way to raise more money is to make your company better the more attraction you have The more track record you have the better the more paying customers you have the less money you need to race and so basically Not taking any investor meetings and then having a like a week or two week period where you book all the investor meetings back to back And you become you work on to become the hot new deal in town The one that everyone's talking about and I read this quote the other day that nowadays All the deals are That was it so basically They're really under subscribed until they become hugely oversubscribed So nobody wants to be the first to give you the money, but once you have somebody everybody wants to be in So it's about creating that momentum and creating that FOMO for investors For the deal and that can sort of really make it a much more shorter and efficient Project for you to raise the money so you can get back to what you actually want to be doing which is building your company And then lastly you're only looking for a market of one. Yes You basically most of time need that one investor who's gonna say yes There are a lot of companies who've pitched to a lot of investors who've said no so many times until they find one company and Become a huge success. So don't give up keep going Good luck. Thank you from Slido So the first question from Daniel is how difficult is it to copy the product and enter the market maybe outside of the US? I would say that It's pretty hard to copy the product. We worked on it for a very long time Part of the proof is that nobody's done it yet at least nowhere near as good as ours is and So I think it's definitely doable and and I don't think it's When you're creating a new market with your product, which is basically the case for us we're the first premium instant coffee that is on the market and It might sound a little country-intuitive, but at some point you do want competitors as well Because that validates the market If you're first to the market and then all of a sudden, you know Like Nestle and all these other big players are coming to the market That's amazing validation for you that proves that you've found a market niche That these other big players realize can be a big thing but at that point you're also so far in the product development that you have a huge head start and You can keep iterating and owning a large proportion of that market when the big boys are basically Growing the pie for you is is is how we think it but it's not something that we're worried about and again One of the sort of YC mantras is that startups don't get killed They they commit a suicide most of the time So the vast majority of startups don't die because of competition or sort of external factors But because the team falls apart or something else happens What did I go to be us? so It was a variety of factors partly because I really wanted to get out of Helsinki and and not Living in snow, so California see a loop for lucrative San Francisco is a great hub for technology and coffee both and I knew that we need to raise more funding than would be available for us here. And frankly, there's not the type of technology in terms of food Science and so on just available in the Nordics Although it is in the US and that's again one of the one of the things of being positively weird being in San Francisco is Is the fact that it's a tech company? It's a it's a tech city and then all of a sudden there's this coffee company That goes to I see and make these tubes of coffee We have a factory in San Francisco and and it makes it sure it's a little more expensive than somewhere else But it makes it so much more rememberable and so much more interesting It's kind of like a juxtaposition which is a great when you're pitching it to journalists for example So I don't I don't say that I definitely don't think that going to US is a prerequisite for something or Will make your life so much easier it depends if I'd started a gaming company I probably wouldn't go to San Francisco it doesn't make sense and In terms of getting funding in Nordic Lifeline is one of our first investors, but most of our other money came from from the US So I can't really talk about fundraising in the Nordics Except that I've helped some other startups raised funding here, and I'm doing some angel investing myself now as well And it's definitely quite a bit harder here It's harder to create that FOMO and that momentum because there's so there's just fewer investors And it's harder to find that one. Yes among a smaller group So how much equity does the team still own after all these rounds? I mean that depends on obviously the valuations and how you structure them We don't disclose the sort of valuations that we take the investment in But there are some sort of general outlines That you can find online how much teams usually own after a seed round or so on So yeah, I don't really want to delve into that did you notice difference between American and Nordic investors? To a certain extent, yes, I don't have a ton of experience with Nordic investors in terms of US investors. I think they See a lot more deals can be a lot more professional especially angel investors It's just the fact of being in San Francisco where there's so much more Happening so much more deal flow that they're usually quicker to move and maybe are willing to take bigger risks on on new products Where to try something coffee and Helsinki? Unfortunately nowhere right now. So we're focused only in the US market now It's really hard to ship it We did ship Internationally in the beginning, but it turns out when you ship brown powder and like tubes a lot of customs get interested so a lot of packages got missing and got stuck somewhere so we Decided not to do it and it was just more of a hassle. How do you define the perfect investor? frankly really The main thing that you get from investors is money So many investors advertised themselves as smart money. Nobody wants to be dumb money But still and that's like what a lot of the top investors would tell you I was just watching Steve Jervitson's talk from slash last year where he said that if any investor tells you like he said that at most investors are sort of your Best cheerleaders, and if they tell you more or they're probably lying or something along those lines So it's good not to be sort of too. I Don't know soft or idealistic about it It's it's mainly money. They can help you with their Rolodex So introductions hiring and in some cases if they have like a deep Knowledge or substance in your field maybe more in terms of like super angels Let's see you started a wearable company and and somebody who's done Misfits before is probably a great angel investor for you But I don't think there's sort of the perfect investor So do we have a product when we entered YC or only a concept? We did we actually apply to YC four times and only got in on the fourth time because they viewed as a Basically the first ever food production company that's got an end But the big big sort of picture We had for Saturdays to become a technology company. So we did have a product We did have a pretty strong growth already and and most of the time YC is Heading to the direction now at least what it seems to me can talk for them, but Looking for teams who already have some traction and have validated that what they're making is Scalable and interesting and some people actually want it What is my favorite book that's taught me most about business? That's a good question I am a big fan of Ben Horowitz's hard thing about hard things. I think it's a it's a must read for any startup founder It's it's Dale Carnegie is what the book about it's a really classic one Basically, it's attacking names like how to make friends and be successful or something like that but it's a it's a really good one and then one of the things one of the looks recently that I've read that I've really liked is is Leonardo Leonardo da Vinci's biography by Walter Isaacson that just came out and highlighting the importance of curiosity and Doing anything and I think it's hugely important for a startup founder to be curious to be learning all the time to be asking questions and Also to be interested in when you want to start up you want to be very focused on what you're doing But you want to be curious about your customers about how they use your product how you can make it better for them And ask a lot of questions and talk to your customers to make your product a lot better Is setting coffee ethical? Yes, we source the coffee directly from the farms with a bursting partner who really know and trust So it is as ethical as coffee gets basically Right, I think we're out of time. Thanks for listening to everyone And I hope you enjoy the rest of your slush if you have more questions, feel free to email me My email is is for as I call a Last name first name at gmail.com. Happy to help. Thanks. And that's it. Thank you so much. Call it. Thank you