- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J5NM1WEM3946ES598A318ZXY (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Ben Ornstein: Hey, how’s it going? Ben Ornstein: It’s going good. How are you? Ben Ornstein: Doing well, doing well. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, great to meet you as well. Thank you so much for doing this. Ben Ornstein: Of course, of course. Ben Ornstein: Um, I looked up, I can’t believe I haven’t heard of your company because I love the HR space. I love, I, I’m not like an AI fanatic, but, um, I love what you’re doing. It’s, it sounds amazing. Ali Ansari: Thank you, man. I appreciate it. And yeah, Hoke is a, he’s been a great customers of ours. He was one of our first customers and he’s been, he’s been with us for a long time. So I appreciate you guys and the whole team and everything that you guys are doing as well. Ben Ornstein: Absolutely. How it’s pretty cool. Yeah, it works out. Um, yeah. So did he give you, I think he probably gave you like a very high level overview of what this is. Ali Ansari: Yeah. He told me that, uh, he’s kind of like, I think just launching this and, uh, you know, kind of would want to have me on and, um, describe the fundraising story, but I don’t have too much context. So yeah, I would love to kind of hear it from you. Ben Ornstein: No problem. Yeah. I’ll definitely give you that. So, so, uh, how wants to launch this, this new thing where. He wants to help help people raise funds, but the best way he figured to do that was why not speak with founders who have actually done it and ask them questions surrounding the entire experience, get a whole bunch of these and then payment game them behind the newsletter to then, you know, of course, for the founders who are paying for this to be able to access a bunch of these different case studies from all different founders across all different stages. And yeah, he figured why not talk directly to the founders themselves to get this done. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Ben Ornstein: Awesome. Have you guys launched it yet? Ben Ornstein: No, we’re very close. We have over, God, it’s almost probably 60 by now of these. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we’re going to have a ton to be able to release. And how we’ll kind of do this is I’ll run through softball questions. This should not be anything you’ll have any trouble with. The only reason we have the AI guy in here is so we have the transcript to be able to turn this into a case study afterwards. The video is just for us for now. It’s not going anywhere. And the actual case study is going to be a text document. So after we’re done here, I’ll start the case study. I’ll create the document. I’ll send you the draft. If you can take a look over it and say, hey, I didn’t like this. Hey, actually, I want to add more context here on this. Easily can do that. And then we’ll, uh, you know, I’ll edit the document and then create it. Ali Ansari: Awesome. Awesome. And I assume they’re kind of like a, just like a blog format, you know, few pages type thing. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just going to be like a really like a, you’ll see them when I sing the draft, but it’s like really a question with your answer. Um, and really as simple as that and just like a few pages. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Awesome. All right. I’m excited. Let’s do it. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it’s gonna be fun. Awesome. I’m really excited to learn about your company. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Ben Ornstein: Okay, yeah. I mean, a great place to start would be if you could introduce yourself and your startup, please. Ali Ansari: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Ali. Maybe a quick background on me. I studied computer science and math at Berkeley. And I started Micro One when I was at Berkeley, and it kind of started taking off. So I decided to graduate one year early to kind of focus on it. And what we do at Micro One is we essentially are building an AI recruiter. That helps companies, mainly right now focused on hiring software engineers, but really it’s a pretty generalized model. So a company comes to us and they have sort of two options. One is, which is the one that HowCommit mainly uses, is they can they can hire engineers, they can hire pre-vetted engineers from our platform. The second option is they can use the AI recruiter slash AI recruitment engine that we’ve built as a SaaS tool to kind of take candidates through their own funnel. So some clients come to our platform, they essentially create the job that they’re hiring for. We help them generate the job description. They post it on all platforms sort of automatically through our platform. And then they get a ton of applicants from those platforms, like LinkedIn and Indeed and other ones. And then those candidates show up on our dashboard, get sorted by AI automatically, and then they can send the top candidates 10% that kind of match their role an AI interview. And so the first step would be for those candidates to go through this AI interview that is like a 30 minute conversational interview with our AI system, as well as a coding exercise. And then once they go through that, interview the person, the employer receives a report on how the candidates did, and then they can decide which ones they want to move forward with. And so that’s kind of the SaaS side of our business that clients use for their own funnel. And then that’s also the same funnel that we use to create a pre-vetted talent pool of engineers, which then clients like Hoke hire directly from UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So, yeah. Ben Ornstein: So cool. I love that. Um, yeah, I’d love to hear about the fundraising journey. You know, this can be, you can talk about, uh, valuations, funding rounds. And by the way, this is only going to a house community, but the payment gated community. So, uh, if you’re comfortable, you can talk about valuations. Most of, most of the founders I’ve spoken with have, um, so it’d be like funding round with the valuation and the journey so far. Ali Ansari: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I should bring up Crunchbase to remember. Ali Ansari: Take your time. No worries. Ali Ansari: Uh, okay. So, so yeah, let me, let me give you the full timeline. So we, we launched in, uh, in, uh, 2022 and raised our, um, raised our precede, um, late 2022, we raised 3.3 million. Um, we did kind of, uh, we did kind of rolling precede where we started at a lower valuation and then we kind of kept upping it as, as we went. The latest valuation was 30 million for our pre-seed. The main people that joined our pre-seed was Joshua Browder from Do Not Pay and Browder Capital, Corey Levy from Z Fellows, Jason Calacanis. Of course, you’ll know that one. Ben Ornstein: Of course, I know both actually. I know Corey as well, through someone else. Okay, nice. Ali Ansari: And then Dream Mentors. Those were kind of the main four. And then we had a bunch of angels. The way that I designed the pre-seed was like, let’s just get many supporters. So we had a kind of a, you know, like 25, 30 people joined the cap table with like a lot of smaller tracks, but the main, the main four were the ones that I, that I just mentioned. So yeah, that was the pre-seed. And then we, right after we raised our pre-seed, we actually, this is kind of a odd, but pretty good place to be, which is we became profitable. And, you know, we kind of, it wasn’t like, you know, like crazy net income or anything, but it was like above break even, you know, we were, we weren’t losing money. And for the longest time we had more money on our balance sheet than raised. So we weren’t really thinking about raising or anything like that until, um, about, uh, three ish months ago, maybe like four months ago now, where, um, we had a couple of people that, that we really, we were really interested in that wanted to, to kind of invest then. One of them was Sean Rad, founder of Tinder. And he’s, he was actually one of our clients. And that’s, that’s what kind of sparked the interest of him wanting to, to, to invest. And then also Dan, the COO of Deal wanted to invest, which obviously is a very like relevant company. Yeah, exactly. So, so because of like some, some sort of interest there, we decided, okay, let’s do a, let’s do a seed round. And we ended up raising actually the same exact amount that we raised in the pre-season. We raised another 3.3 million, this time at a 80 million valuation. And yeah, that’s kind of the quick timeline of the fundraising. That’s wild. Ben Ornstein: That’s, I mean, look at those strategic investors. Those are amazing. Yeah, yeah. Especially the deal one. That makes a ton of sense for you guys. Ali Ansari: Oh, 100%. Yeah, that one I’m really, really excited about because we’re going to be able to, because part of what we do is, You know help companies Once they have their candidate go through the full flow of recruitment of like sourcing vetting them with our AI system The last part of that is like hiring that person on our platform and for that we have something called COR Which is which is basically contractor of record that we actually use a deal on the background And so like having them be a partner is phenomenal. Ben Ornstein: That’s perfect. Yeah, you love I love one that works out, right? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, exactly Awesome. Ben Ornstein: So, so you raised the money, right? Raised a couple of rounds. Um, you know, what did you plan to use the money for ahead of time? Was it simply growth? Was it something more strategic? And like, before you raised more capital, were there milestones that you kind of wanted to achieve? Um, yeah. Anything around all that? Ali Ansari: Yeah. Um, so there was, so, so first on the, you know, sort of why, why do we want to raise them? What is the money for? I think mainly, so this is a little bit, I guess, paradoxical because we kind of were profitable. So like, and like we still sort of are, we now have a little bit less on the balance sheet than total raised, but it’s essentially break even. And so, you know, technically the money’s not being used, but the idea is to have a nice cash cushion and speed up product development without having to worry about you know, losing some money some months. In fact, like the last two months, we lost a bit of money around like 100 grand each month. And of course, that’s not the way that we like to operate. We want to be kind of at a break even regardless as we grow and as we have, you know, high velocity on product development. But of course, months like that happen and we want to just have a cash cushion for that. The reality though is like we were in a pretty good position to get a pretty good valuation, which is why I was like, okay, let’s take on a few more million right now. It just made sense to do so, even though you can argue that we didn’t really need the money at that point. Ali Ansari: But yeah, did that sort of answer your question? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no, it definitely did. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. You hear the VCs or the founders to talk about, you know, if you can raise money, like take the money. Ali Ansari: Yeah, exactly. And like the milestone that I was sort of thinking about, I was like, before we even think about this again, let’s get the 10 million a year run rate. And our 10 million a year run rate is a little bit different than pure SaaS because our revenue is not pure SaaS. So the gross margins are lower, but the goal, the goal was let’s, let’s get there before we even think about raising. But since we had some like, sort of, I guess you can call it preempt interest. I decided to do a little bit before that. So we were at around 7 million a year or so run rate when we decided to take on the few million in checks. So, you know, the valuation was a good one. I mean, it was over 10x multiple, especially when the revenue was not purely SaaS like that. That felt like a good valuation and we had to kind of take advantage of it. Ben Ornstein: It also doesn’t sound like it’s a valuation you’re not going to be able to grow into. Like it sounds very reasonable. It’s like a healthy, it’s a healthy valuation. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ali Ansari: Yeah, I agree. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. So how did you decide which investors would be a good fit? Ali Ansari: Yeah. So for me, this round, since it was sort of small strategic, I wanted to make sure every check we take on is, um, is, is, is going to be like super helpful in some way and, and each of them in, in different ways. And and so the strategy for the seed was quite different than the precede the precede like I said was like let’s get a ton of supporters and just kind of Max out the people that care about the company which which helped and then this round was more So let’s get like four people that that are gonna be really helpful. So so I’ll kind of name each of them and how and and how they’re and how they’re helpful so Sean rad was uh was one of our biggest clients so him kind of aligning his incentives and That on its own is super helpful. Like he’s gonna continue to be big clients and he’s gonna you know The account that we have with him is gonna is gonna grow um, also The the second thing on sean rad is he’s he’s he sort of became my my mentor in a way like I I basically like text him every day and like we call a lot and so forth and And I kind of relate to his like very early days and in like the most humble way He’s he’s also persian and kind of that that really It feels good to have a mentor like that. So that was the main sort of value add for Sean Rad. For Dan, of course, this one was clear. He’s COO of Deal. We’re not only going to get Deal as a client for both ends of our platform, but also, you know, when we use Deal’s platform and have dependency on it for certain parts of our products, we don’t have to worry about that at all. And the sort of third thing there is we’re going to try to do some deep integrations with Deal as well. Um, so yeah, that, that one’s like huge. The third investor that joined us in our, in our seed was, um, Motley Fool ventures. I don’t know if you know Motley Fool. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the goal with them was to have one sort of enterprise VC that is going to become a big client. So yeah, that was sort of the main thing there. And then lastly, we had Companion VC, which is a smaller firm that is newer, that we knew that they’re going to go to the bat for us. Like they’re going to go try to get us intros and get us leads and so forth. And they’ve already been super helpful in that regard. So we wanted the one VC that is going to be like pretty hands-on in terms of go-to-market, especially on the SaaS side. And that’s what they’re really good at. Ben Ornstein: That’s amazing. Yeah. You really did a great job of taking on investors strategically and aligning. That’s hard to do. And you, it seems like you mastered that. Ben Ornstein: Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Ben Ornstein: Of course. And so how did you get in touch with these investors? Ali Ansari: They’re basically all warm intros through existing investors. Um, and actually another thing is we’ve been sort of building publicly for the last, um, you know, year, year and a half for the last few months. I’ve kind of slowed down on it a little bit, but the, the overall sort of building in public has really helped us get inbound interest from VCs. So throughout the time that where we weren’t raising like post precede, I would get emails, like probably two to three emails a week. And, you know, it’s not like, it’s usually not like the founder of the funds or anything. It’s, it’s a lot of times associates and sometimes it’s partners. So you gotta, you know, you gotta be honest about that, but, but we’re almost like meeting those people and kind of building a relationship with, with them, but also more generally with, with the firm beforehand really helps. So, so when we started to kind of say, okay, we’re raising a seat now, I set up like, you know, 50 beanies kind of right away. Ben Ornstein: Wow, that’s amazing. So was there any cold outreach or was it really all inbound or warm intros? Ali Ansari: There’s no cold outreach Thankfully this time and and to be honest like cold outreach I I Think for like the first round if you like really need to do it, you know, then I think you know you should but I I haven’t seen really much success with cold outreach to be honest. Um, we, we actually got one, one of our investors in our precede round, um, which was seaplane ventures that put in a few hundred grand from just a straight up a Twitter DM. But like every other one was, was like zero success. So, so I think, yeah, I think you should really try to use cold outreach as like last resort. And, and of course this sounds kind of like, okay, sure. What if you don’t have like, other existing investors, it’s a little bit of a, you know, chicken and egg problem, I suppose. But, but what I would say is like, you, you probably have founder friends, right? And, and, and if you don’t have that, you, you could probably try to join like a community with some founders that have maybe raised a little bit and become friends with them. And if you don’t, and if you don’t even have that or the sort of will to join a community like that, you can just DM your connections on LinkedIn that are founders that you don’t really know, but you can kind of ask for an intro. So I think founder friends is like a really underplayed strategy. A lot of people use the strategy of like connecting with existing investors to get more investors. But if you don’t have existing investors, of course that again is a problem. So founder friends is a really good strategy, I would say. Ben Ornstein: That’s a cool one. You know, it’s interesting. I haven’t heard that and it makes total sense, right? If you’re, especially if you’re, if they’re introing to VCs that invested in them. It’s like that’s social proof on its own. Ali Ansari: Yeah, exactly. Ben Ornstein: That’s really cool. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, exactly. Ben Ornstein: And for the investors that you did reach out to cold in the earliest rounds, could you provide an estimate of the total people that you reached out to, meetings that you then had from that pool, and then from that subset, the amount that ended up investing? Ali Ansari: Yeah, these are very rough numbers, but I probably reached out to like, maybe like 50 people. This was a combination of like Twitter DMs, email, LinkedIn, et cetera. And I think probably like, there was probably like 10 reasonable responses. And then maybe like four meetings and sort of like one message. Yeah, pretty rough numbers. Ben Ornstein: It’s a numbers game if you’re going with that approach. So that’s not bad. That’s just how it goes, right? Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Ben Ornstein: And when you were pitching to investors, what did you emphasize in the pitch? Ali Ansari: So my pitch really sort of changed as I, frankly, as I learned about the process, this was the first time I was raising. And so I learned a ton really quickly and was very, sort of embraced the idea of iterating on my pitch. So in the beginning, there was… In the beginning, I really didn’t want to spend any time on pitch decks or like spreadsheets or anything like that. I had this like, this philosophy of like, just spend time on product, nothing else matters. And I would say like, I still have that philosophy, but if you’re raising, you should spend some time on it. That’s sort of one thing I learned. So in the beginning, when I kind of rushed the pitch deck and didn’t really have a good narrative, I realized that the meetings are not going that well. So I was like, okay, let me actually just spend some time on this. Let me make it a good pitch deck. Let me think about what the actual narrative of my personal story is, but also of what the sort of company’s narrative and vision is. Ali Ansari: So two things that really helped me that, that I iterated on, I would say probably after like, you know, the 15th pick or something. One was I spent a lot more time on my personal story and by a lot more time, I don’t mean like, you know, like five minutes or like half the pitch, but, but like at least like a minute and a half, like two minutes in the beginning, I would just be like, Hey, this is, this is me for like 10 seconds. And then, and then just jump into the pitch. And I realized if you actually just spend like a minute or two kind of describing your personal story and how you, started Micro One and what came before that, humans relate to that. Like obviously you’re talking to another human and the point is to actually build a connection. Especially in the earlier days when their numbers are not really there, the most important things become the actual sort of connection you build with the investor. So that’s one of the main things that I changed. The second thing was I focused a lot more on what this company will be which I guess is sort of, you know, the vision versus what it is currently. Again, in the earlier days, like what it is currently is like crap. So, so you really have to sell the vision and, and, and get investors excited about that. And, and, you know, one sort of one word that I that, that I kind of kept repeating is like, how can I, How can I induce FOMO in this semester? How can I make this vision so big that it gets them excited, but more than excited, gets them fearful for missing out? So yeah, I started pitching the company as what it will be. Of course, not saying that it’s that right now, but the pitch was much more around what it will be versus what it is currently, which was a bunch of forms and spreadsheets. It was nothing. Those are two big changes that I That I made and actually like the third thing was in the very early days we We had a revenue, but we didn’t really have a product It was like sort of like a very scrappy bunch of spreadsheet stuff like put together so what I ended up doing is actually like designing the full product on on Figma and like Really conveying the vision better that way and that helped as well That’s amazing. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. It’s sometimes it’s just about that narrative, right? You, and you, you nailed it with the, with the creating the connection. That’s that’s so key. Um, that’s awesome. And you actually hinted at that and partially answered the next question, which was about how you drove urgency among investors to close the round. Ali Ansari: Yeah. So this one’s a tough one because. I think most very early stage founders would probably agree with this that there isn’t really urgency. You almost have to fake it. And again, this is mainly for the first round. You also have to fake it because there isn’t much there. So one thing that I learned is you have to be very careful about faking urgency. Ali Ansari: Um, you know, I, I sort of set timelines for the round to close like many times. And that actually ended up being a mistake a lot of times where a lot of the investors were like, okay, like, you know, we can’t do it in this timeline, like really like you, but like, we can’t do it during this timeline. And then you can’t really change. You can be like, okay, don’t worry. Like I’ll give you another month because that, that’s going to look like an idiot. So, so I would say be careful with, with trying to build a narrative for, for, uh, you know, urgency. Um, I think once you get your first couple checks, it becomes a lot easier, especially if it’s a couple, like you’re a nice names like, Hey, J Cal just invested. Um, and, and, and we, um, we, we’ve reached our goal for, um, for how much we want to raise. So let us know if you want to put in a check, uh, in the next like five days or something. So, so I think one thing I would say is, if you, if you set your goals like a low amount in terms of raising, uh, that’s a good way to build urgency. Like, let’s say you want, let’s say you say you want to raise 500 K you feel that and you’re like, Hey, we’ve, we’ve now filled it. It’s oversubscribed. Um, let me know if you’re in or out. Like you kind of like don’t care. Right. That’s the narrative that comes about, which is you don’t care. You already filled your goal and then people are going to want to come in at that point. And so at that point, let’s say you get another like two, 300 you’re like, okay, you know what? Now we upped the goal to one million. You can just kind of keep upping it and it’s fine. Like it’s not like a, you’re not like, it’s not, there’s no like SEC filing for like how much you want to raise. Like you can just kind of keep upping the goal. Um, and uh, so I would say that’s one good way to do it, which is start with a very sort of low goal. Um, and then just up it until it makes sense. Um, let’s see if there’s any other strategies that come to mind here. Uh, I think I would also say like maybe don’t Maybe don’t push so much on the fact that that you need to close within like a month or two Especially for a first round. I think this advice doesn’t apply to Second rounds and beyond you do want to close pretty fast for for anything sort of past the precede but but I’ll say for the precede like it’s, it’s sort of okay to just do a rolling precede and, and, and keep increasing the valuation and close it within, you know, a few months, maybe even like six months. That’s, that’s kind of what we did. So like, if it’s not closing quickly, I would say just be okay with that. Like if you’re just getting, if you’re still getting money in the door, it’s fine. Like we, we ended up having a pretty good outcome of raising a reasonable size precede of 3.3 million and then latest valuation of 30 million, which was like the majority of the 3.3 million. Um, so, so that turned out pretty well and I think, Founders should embrace rolling pre-seeds more. In fact, a lot of founders do this, but they don’t talk about it. They pretend like they close in like a week or something, but a lot of times they don’t. I would say maybe even like, obviously I’m not sure about this, but I think maybe even like close to the majority of pre-seed rounds are actually more so like this sort of rolling pre-seed versus closing in a week type round. Ben Ornstein: That’s awesome advice. I, I, we have not heard that yet to drive urgency with smaller rounds. That’s genius. I didn’t think about that. You’re in creating FOMO there. Ali Ansari: Yeah. And you don’t, and you don’t even have to like call it a sort of different round. You could just say like, we’ve, we’ve reached our goal for this, uh, you know, for, for the precede. Uh, but we’re going to, you know, we’ll take on a couple more checks. You take on those couple more checks and then you, you’re like, okay, you know what, we’re going to now raise a million. And no one’s going to remember. It doesn’t matter. It’s your round. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Absolutely. Ben Ornstein: No, that’s amazing. That’s great. And it seems like a lot came pretty easily, but I’m sure there were challenges that came up along the way. What were the biggest challenges that came up during your fundraising processes? Ali Ansari: Yeah, I mean, definitely it wasn’t easy. I think in retrospect, it’s always feels easier. It turns out okay. And then you’re like, okay, that wasn’t that bad. But when you’re in the midst of it, It’s not easy. Ali Ansari: I think in terms of challenges, one of the things is, this is sort of what a lot of people talk about, but it’s hard to actually understand fully what this means until you experience it, which is the number of rejections, over, you know, like right after each other is pretty intense. And I think if it’s your first time raising, it’s probably the first time that you’re going to get this many rejections in a row. And, you know, it’s an odd thing. It’s one of those things where you learn, I think, pretty quickly that it’s just like part of the game. And it kind of stops, I think, for the most part, stops affecting you. But one thing I very quickly learned, and this was like, you know, sort of the big challenge, which was the psychology of it is you, you, you have to, you have to be very much okay with the nose. And you’ll, and I think even more so you, you have to assume that an investor is still is not investing, even if they say they are until they’ve wired the money. I think that I sort of like put probabilities on it, which is, If, if they say they’re interested, it’s like a very low chance, like maybe like something 10% that they’ll invest. So like take that with like, like it doesn’t even matter, you know, just try to set up the next call. I’m saying they’re interested is like kind of irrelevant. If they say, you know, if they say like, send me the safe, I’m ready to go. Maybe you could put a probability of like, okay, now there’s a 40, 50% that they’re actually going to invest. Ali Ansari: But again, it’s not a hundred percent. Like you have to, you have to still take that with a huge grain of salt. And then, um, and if they’ve signed this safe, I think it’s like now very likely, but still not a hundred percent chance. And then of course, when they wired the money, now it’s a hundred percent chance. So, so really like understanding that in the beginning, not understanding that was a, was a, was a big challenge. Like every time an investor would say they’re interested, I’d be like, wow, this is like, this is easy. Like we’re about to close this. But then like, they wouldn’t answer. I’m like, what the hell happened? So, um, So yeah, that was a big one. The second one, I think, is the amount of time that you have to put into it is pretty intense. And if you’re doing a rolling precede, that, of course, is prolonged. And that takes away time from building the actual product, which sucks. But again, it’s part of the game. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so those are a couple of things. Ben Ornstein: That was a great. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Great. And are there any other, you know, unique or interesting stories that, that came up during your process that you haven’t mentioned yet? Ali Ansari: Um, yeah, I think one, one is, uh, when Josh invested, he, uh, I remember I did a call with him and it was like a 15 call and like on the call, he was like, okay, I want to invest a hundred grand, like, where do you want me to wire it? And I was like, what, like, this, this, this was the first time this, this is basically like one of the first semester calls I had. So I didn’t even, I barely knew what, like what safes are at that point. So I was like, this guy, like wants to send me a hundred grand. I was like pretty, I was like trying to like research him and see if he’s like, fraud or something. Ali Ansari: So that was interesting. And I think that that really, um, I really value that like high conviction, fast moving sort of investors that can make a decision very quickly. Of course, after he said that, like we did due diligence and he, uh, you know, it took about five, six days to actually close it out. But that was like a really interesting thing to me where he was like, okay, I want to invest in, uh, so does Corey. And like Corey wasn’t even in the call, like, all right. Um, So another one was, um, J Cal actually, I, when I met him, we, um, we had like a 30, 40 minute call and I, I kind of messed up the, I kind of messed up the narrative on this call, which was, and again, a lot of this is like the sort of narrative that you build, even on a per investor basis. Um, And so like what I told J Cal is like that we’ve, we’ve raised about a million and we’re actually like not really raising anymore. And of course that was like sort of true. Like I, I was open to checks, you know, as, as I kind of always am, but, but I wasn’t really like super actively looking to raise more than a million. Um, but I was like, you know, we were kind of already in the process of meeting with J Cal. So, so I was going to meet him anyways. And so when I told him that at the end of our call, He was like, okay, he’s like, that’s a bit of a bait and switch. Like, and, and it felt like, I was like, shit, like, I didn’t really know what to say. Cause obviously I was meeting him and we were doing like an investor call, but then I told him that we’re not really raising. So he felt that, like I said, that’s a kind of like induced fake FOMO. Um, And so, so after that calls, okay, he’s, he’s for sure not investing, like, whatever, like it’s all right. But then like a day later, he just like sent me, sent me an offer. I wanted to put in like close to a million. I was like, all right, I guess that worked. So that was pretty interesting as well. But, um, but yeah. Ben Ornstein: Without actually trying to induce FOMO. That’s hilarious. Those are great. Um, yeah, moving on to like advice, you’ve already given some great advice. Is there any, any other fundraising advice you’d like to give other founders? Ali Ansari: Um, I think, I think for rounds that are maybe your second or beyond the second round, maybe, maybe beyond the third round. And I’m not sure that this, this, this might be, um, you know, I don’t think this is like entirely true, but I think for the most part, you want to do sort of preempt routes. And, you know, of course I realized this is a lot harder if you’re in like position where you need to raise money and, and, you know, it’s not preempt, but like you’re, you, you do have a great product, but you’re kind of running out of money. Like that’s obviously different, but I think if you’re in like a reasonably good position, the best way to raise a round is a preempt wrap. Um, because you’re, you’re, you’re just so much stronger on the calls. Like if you already have an offer and ideally you already have like a, a lead investor offer and then you just hop on calls to kind of close out the rest. Um, you know, I realized this is a lot harder, you know, done, done than, than said. But, but I think the way that, that, the first or second round should be designed is as you approach the time that you think you want to raise, you should start meeting these sort of key people at these key firms that you think could be the lead and tell them that you’re starting to explore a raise, but you’re not actively raising yet. And you can even maybe say that you’re even sort of open to offers now. And let that result in a sort of a preempt round. And once you get your first offer, ideally more than one, then you sort of kick off the round and try to close it out quickly. So that’s one thing I would say. The second thing I would say is, and I think this is sort of related to what I just said, which is, I think I would sort of argue against the fact that raising is a numbers game, especially the post the, you know, post the first or second round. Um, because if you’re, I think if you’re getting a lot of nose, you, you, you’re, you’re, you’re not, I think that’s going to sort of, um, that that’s going to sort of continue for the, for the most part. Um, and I, and again, this is not true for the first round, but anything past that, I think. You should, you should create a sort of environment where people that align with your product and thesis like are going to basically show interest and are going to give an offer. Um, and so yeah, that’s sort of the second thing I would say. And let’s see if there’s anything else. Ali Ansari: Um, Yeah, those are, I think those are like two things I would say. Ben Ornstein: That’s great. And you already added a couple more, so we’ll, we’ll put those together. No, those are great. Um, are there, who’s an investor you’d recommend other founders work with? Uh, and this is just a chance for you to call out, uh, investors that you, you know, that you’re a huge fan of and, and who you would truly recommend others to work with. Ali Ansari: Joshua Browder by far. He’s, he’s been incredible. He’s, um, always answers, always answers the phone. Um, you know every time I text him he like calls me like no matter what time it is He’s been truly helpful and and not only helpful in terms of like solving problems But but also like has directly added a bunch of revenue with with introductions that he’s made. He’s added probably around Somewhere in between half a million to a million a year in run rate Wow, like just from his introductions So yeah, Josh is incredible Like there’s a lot of people to name on our Capitol, but like if I were to name one person it would be Josh and Yeah Don’t put this part on the article, but we’re probably gonna have Josh like on our board and yeah, he’s just been incredible Yeah, no, that’s him. Ben Ornstein: It sounds like he’s well deserving of deserved of one Yeah, very cool Almost a million a day are that’s crazy. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that’s wild And any resources you would recommend to founders? This could be books, podcasts, newsletters, anything. Ali Ansari: Oh, I think, I think watching a bunch of this weekend startups to get the lay of the land of like what the current VC market is. I think that that’s kind of the best way to get the sort of lay of the land. And of course, not every episode, but especially the ones that have partnership on them. I think you kind of like, you know, passively listen to it at the gym or something. And, um, that, that, that was one good resource. The second, this one was a little bit, I think probably controversial. Now I think he’s in a little, a little bit of a like shit show with like lawsuits or something. I’m not sure about that part, but, but his fundraising strategy is incredible, which is Ryan Breslow. So his book, uh, which is literally called fundraising. Is really good. Again, regardless of his other things, which, you know, I’m not sure if he’s gonna sort of win the lawsuits or not, his fundraising is great. So I would recommend reading that. It’s a very short book, like 50 pages. Ali Ansari: And yeah, and then more so just like, as you go through the process, you’re gonna learn a ton and really the learning happens then. So especially if it’s your first round you’re ever raising. So, you know, just be, Just, just be ready to learn as you’re sort of raising and don’t be afraid to iterate based on those learnings. 100%. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, Ryan’s been a, it’s been a relatively common answer and every single person. Starts with, you know, he’s in, he’s in the shit, but his book, everyone keeps saying that. It’s so funny. It’s hilarious. Um, but no, it’s a very common answer. So I, I, I should probably read it because everyone keeps saying it’s really good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ali Ansari: You could read it once. Ben Ornstein: That’s awesome. Yeah. And last question, um, do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? You, the one about the numbers game saying it’s not a numbers game. That was an interesting one, but do you have any other thing because that could be the answer but do you have any other ones maybe Yeah, so So, let me let me quickly comment on the numbers game one to Ali Ansari: Be honest, I I don’t have fully flushed like Like I haven’t thought about it deeply enough for me to have very high conviction in my answer there but I think for the I think what I believe on that is for the precede and It is a numbers game, but anything beyond that It’s less so a numbers game and it’s more so of like try to get a preempt round going sort of game So yeah that that I think is true, but let me see if there’s any other controversial takes I think one of them should be like This one’s a, this, this was a little bit extreme, so maybe don’t include this quote exactly, but, but having this sort of like fuck investors mindset of like, you know, like who the fuck, who the fuck are these people? Like a lot of them are not even like operators. Like I think having that sort of mindset helps a little bit to kind of, uh, to kind of be in the driver’s seat more because at the end of the day, I think. You know, this is definitely sort of, I guess, not humble and cocky, but I think founders are a lot more important than VCs. And we are the sort of customers of the VCs and should be treated in that way. And as much as VCs say they add value, a lot of them do, especially with like, Connections to other VCs is kind of the main value add Other than people like Josh and of course some other people are capital but but like this sort of main value like let’s be honest is is the money and and like that’s obviously a Commodity, it’s like the epitome of a commodity. So You know, I think having that sort of like Fuck the investors mindset. Think is it helps a lot So I would say that that’s probably another sort of controversial take. Ali Ansari: Another one would be… If you’re not… I think maybe this is not controversial, I think people actually probably agree with this, but if you’re not… I guess, quote unquote, vibing with the, with, with the firm and the sort of partner at the firm, like don’t engage further there. Like we do have a couple of people on our cap table that I didn’t initially vibe with. And I was like, you know what, like, it’s fine. Maybe, maybe it was like just that meeting or something, but it ended up like, we ended up not really having a relationship or like, you know, a good relationship at all. So, um, so I think if there’s any like, This is more of a general statement, but if there’s any signs of early rudeness or anything from any firm or any partner, tell them to fuck off. Don’t actually tell them to fuck off, but don’t assert. Yeah, so those are a few things. No, it’s a great call out. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. It’s like the investors, they’re selling money to you. Right. So like what you’re, what you’re taking is you can get that money out anywhere, but you want investors that you want to enjoy interacting with. If, you know, ideally, if you can, if you can afford to do that. Um, that’s awesome. Great. Well, yeah, that’s, that’s all the questions I had. I thank you so much for the, for the answers. Um, I think this one’s going to be a great one. And I realized I didn’t say this at the beginning, but I also realized I didn’t need to because how probably told you about the podcast already, right? Ben Ornstein: Yeah. I think I actually already booked that too. Ben Ornstein: So I, and I remembered that so that you had also booked the podcast. So at the same time, what was that? Ben Ornstein: Is that with you also or is that Hauk? So Hauk is the one interviewing. Ben Ornstein: I’m helping him come up with questions and a lot of stuff on the backend. So, um, a lot of, we’re, we’re kind of like double teaming it, I guess. Um, so yeah, it’s, it, I’m very pumped about that. I’ve hosted a couple of podcasts in the past. Um, so being able to work on this with Hauk is, it’s really fun for me. So, um, so yeah, so looking forward to doing, I’m going to be obviously diving way deeper into Micro One. So I’m excited for that. Um, and yeah, so that we’re kind of like, both of these are going to be combined, you know, the podcast and the newsletter. So, I mean, podcasts and case studies. Ali Ansari: Perfect. Perfect. Excited. Yeah. And in the meantime, let me know if you have any questions or anything happy to happen to answer them. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no, this is a ton of fun. Uh, yeah. So I’ll send you over the draft. I, maybe sometime this week, I will. I’m not sure yet. Um, yeah, you can take a look at, I’ll give you like edit access and change, add, delete, anything you’d like, And yeah, then we’ll, we’ll let you know when it’s live after that. Ali Ansari: Perfect. Perfect. Great meeting. Really nice to meet you, Ali. Have a good one. Talk soon.