- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JBCE371S6KWCKSER1PSRZYPF (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Scott Goldman: who you are and about you. Ben Ornstein: Sure. Yeah. So, my name’s Ben. Right now, I’m working with an entrepreneur named Michael Hauk. Do you know Michael Hauk? I don’t. Okay. So, he was the one whose email you got for this conversation. Michael is a serial entrepreneur, but he’s founded a couple of businesses His last one was backed by A16Z, $15 million Series A, started an email newsletter while at that company. And that newsletter has grown to, at peak it was over 100,000 subscribers, all in the startup space, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, VCs, everyone in that realm. So he's got a huge entrepreneurial audience. And one of the things he wanted to provide guide founders with was a fundraising guide, some sort of document to help or some sort of resource to help founders navigate the fundraising process. And so kind of what he figured was, why not ask founders who have done it themselves? Is there a better way to do it? Probably not. And so that is what our conversation here is today. So basically we've done over 70 of these now and it's with founded across all different stages, industries, regions. Um, we've got a preset list of questions and, um, really softball questions about your fundraising experience that you have fundraised. So, um, yeah, it would, you know, just softball questions, nothing you have not answered before, or at least, um, And so I have this read AI guy in here because we take transcript from this call and and I turn it into one of like a text-based document that then gets placed behind a paywall for Interested entrepreneurs who are you know premium subscribers newsletter? Scott Goldman: Okay, sounds good awesome, do you have any other questions before we get going No, I mean, you know my biggest concern been doing this is, as I mentioned in an email earlier, I've been pitched about things before. You get a pick from somebody who says, yeah, we're going to get you featured on some video and so forth. And the next thing you know, you're getting a pitch from them for 10 grand to be featured on some airline advertising video or something. I'm not interested in that, certainly not at this point. We were acquired just a few months ago. Well, thank you. I guess every founder's ultimate result, we were acquired by an excellent company. We have a great home for our employees. Everybody on the employee team and the founders made money. So I'm not interested in going through pitches for advertising and marketing and so forth. I've got another month and a half or so to go on the remainder of my employment contract. And then after that's done, I'll probably be looking for something else to do. Although I don't think I'll be starting another company. I've done that a couple of times and I've got other things in my life that I want to do at this point. Ben Ornstein: A hundred percent. Yeah, no. So, and I'll restate that this, whatever you share today, this is going to be behind a paywall. This is not to the general public and the people that do see this are founders or aspiring founders. So these are people who they're not looking for money You don't even you don't even have to put like you're there's not gonna be like any kind of contact info That's fine my bigger concern was What am I spending Scott Goldman: my time doing? You know at this point? I've got enough money to do what I want to do. I want to make sure that I'm Investing my time well, and if it's to help other entrepreneurs other founders, I'm perfectly okay doing that I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to invest a lot of time and then get ditched. Ben Ornstein: Oh, nope. Got it. Understood. So basically, we're going to do this conversation. I'm going to send you a draft of it when it's done so you can see it before it goes live. And then when you give me approval, we'll go live with it. Cool. Fire away. Amazing. Scott, can you please briefly introduce yourself and your startup? Scott Goldman: Sure. My name is Scott Goldman. I'm the co-founder and former CEO of TextPower Incorporated. TextPower is a company that provides notifications via text messaging for utilities, municipalities, and courts, or a platform that other companies use to integrate with in order to send messages that are mainly triggered via API calls when an event occurs. A database is changed, a power outage occurs, something along those lines. A juror has to report for for jury duty and so forth. Those kinds of things they used us for rather than reinventing the wheel. We are a plug and play solution for text messaging for people specifically in the utility, municipality, courts, and some universities, although that's a minor aspect of our service. Amazing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Very cool. Ben Ornstein: Can you please share a little bit about the fundraising journey? So this could be, you know, how many rounds you raised, if you're only if you're comfortable, the valuations, those rounds were raised at, and yeah, like how long the rounds took to close. Yeah. Scott Goldman: So when we first started the company, which was 15 years ago, we bootstrapped it, my partner and I both put in, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars each. And we had intended not to take any funding. But we had a couple of family and friends, investors who bailed out at the last minute. And when they did, we figured that we needed to get some funding in order to really capture the market that we wanted to capture. But we weren't sure of the market that we wanted to capture at that point because we had just bought a software library for sending text messages on an integrated basis. And we didn't really know which niche we wanted to go after. And by the way, I would recommend to any founder, any entrepreneur. If you are looking to get into a market, find a very narrow niche. You can always expand later, but you can't boil the ocean. You really got to scoop it out one pothole at a time and bring yourself up to speed before you can expand. Even though you might have really big visions, you have to keep your focus narrow. Having said that, we did raise about a half million dollars during the first year. That was from angel investors. And we use that half a million dollars to establish ourselves in a couple of these markets. And then as we began to establish ourselves, we went back to the same angels and raised another half million dollars. So the total that we raised was about a million bucks for the company over the course of its lifetime. The second raise occurred remake that four years into our existence. So we really subsisted on that half a million that we first raised plus our cash flow, which we ramped up fairly quickly using that first half million to seed the market and to pursue some business that we thought would be not profitable, but revenue wise, we could generate some immediate revenue from it. We were less concerned, like most founders are, with generating profit until we really were able to capture parts of the market. Ben Ornstein: Does that help you? Scott Goldman: That's perfect. Ben Ornstein: That's great. Thank you. And so when you raise that money, you kind of already said it a little bit, but maybe more specifically, what did you plan ahead of time to use that money for? Scott Goldman: A lot of founders, I think, make the mistake of going to investors or prospective investors with a research project. That research project is, hey, I've got a great idea, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. For investors, particularly angel investors, and as you probably know through your experience with these interviews, about eight out of 10 investments completely fail for angels. One of them breaks even and another one is a hit. Whether the hit is you know, a home run or just a single or double is largely irrelevant as long as they come out whole having covered the cost of the other eight that failed. And what they want to do to a great extent, what investors want to do is they want to get involved with a good team, but they want to mitigate their risk. And if they cannot mitigate their risk, they're going to be much more reluctant to invest their money. So what we wanted to do was to get the ball rolling and find the niche that we wanted to go after, establish ourselves in that niche, and make sure that we were already becoming recognized so that when we went to the investors, what we really needed the money for was for scaling. And scaling a business is what investors really like best. They really like a couple of things, scaling a business and our business in particular, recurring revenue based subscription revenue really you know that that speaks to exactly what investors want they want to put their money someplace where they can see that subscription revenue continually rolling in and any additional new accounts are additive as opposed to a project based business for example let's say an ad agency you know you get a campaign for one product, a company, then they're gone, you got to go find other business. So you're constantly searching for that additional account for that new replacement to account for the attrition of these other accounts. Well, we started right from the start of the business, establishing a recurring revenue stream. And that was the thing that that first round, we can go to the investors and say, look, we're very small. Here's what we plan on doing. Here is our target market. Here's who we're already in at the target market. Here's our recurring revenue. And here's what we think we can do if we had half a million dollars, if you did not, or whatever amount of money it is that you're looking for. If you don't have that story to tell, when you go to talk to an investor, the chances of your getting an investment are significantly lower. If you're just going in with a research project, hey, we got a great idea. We think that if we can only get 1% or get only 1% of that market, we'll be able to kill it. Investors see that as a research project and they're not, I wouldn't say not interested, but they are far less interested in that than they are in scaling an existing business that has some even very modest level of success. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: 100%. Ben Ornstein: No, that's a great answer. And I appreciate the detail. So when you went to these investors, how did you decide they would be a good fit? Scott Goldman: Well, the investors that we went to came from, of course, we look at and we look at who the investors might be, and both my co-founder and I, and by the way, I think anybody who doesn't have a co-founder, probably making a mistake. Don't try to keep it all in your own house. You're a lot better off sharing the load and coming up with a natural division of labor than you are trying to do everything yourself. Founding a company is very, stressful. It's very work intensive. And if you don't have someone to share that load with and lean on, I think you're making a mistake with that. So my co-founder and I both looked at our own list of contacts and came up with some people that we knew had invested previously in technology companies. And we pitched to them. And of course, we didn't get everybody interested, but we got a few of them interested. Interested. And when you go to talk to people, if it's beyond the family and friends level, and you're talking to people about investing, not $10,000 or $50,000, which is still, in my world, that's still a lot of money. But when you go to talk to an investor and you're talking to them about investing a couple of hundred thousand dollars, that's real money to anybody, no matter how wealthy you are. Nobody wants to risk losing that amount of money if they can have some reassurance. So we went to people that we knew had already invested in other companies. And there are plenty of sources, in fact, many more today than you could find 15 years ago. There are a lot of sources, you know, PitchBook on TechCrunch and other places like that, where you can find lists or names of people who have been investing in companies like yours. And then once you target those investors, then you need a pitch deck that you can take to them that would be really concise. And if I was a founder again today, I would spend even more time on the elevator pitch on the pitch deck than we did. And the amount that we spent was considerable because we did have investors tell us at the very beginning, you guys need to boil this down. I'm not going to spend an hour on the phone with you during your first call. You need to boil this down, distill it to what means something to me. Who's your market going to be? How do you scale it up? What are the potential revenues? What's your potential profit margin and why? Who's the team behind it, et cetera. So I would tell people if they have not already become familiar with it, tell people to take the Guy Kawasaki model of pitch decks, you know, 10 slides, two major bullet points per slide, three sub bullet points per bullet point, and use that as a starting point. And if your pitch deck gets to be 25, 30 slides, you're not getting anybody's attention. You really need, at least at that level, if you're talking about going into a venture round where you're looking at 10, $20 million funding rounds, that’s a different story entirely. We never got to that. I can’t speak to that. So that’s something you’d have to talk to somebody else about. But for the angel level funding that we talked about up to say, you know, a few million dollars, we were in about the million dollar range, the angel level funding, you really need to have a very concise, very distilled pitch and pitch deck. So when we pitch to these people. We were ready. We did our homework. We did a lot of role playing with each other. We do a practice, you know, Zoom call, though Zoom was really not popular at the time. Later on there during the second round, a few years later, it was, but we would do a practice, a role play with each other. And, you know, one of us would play, you know, the hardheaded investor and the other one would play the founder. And we would figure out what are the questions going to be that you would ask if this was your money and you were putting it into a company that was not established, was not profitable, the founders were not even taking the salary at that point, what would you want to know if it was your money going into that company? So we use that as the foundation to develop our pitch and pitch deck. And the blurb, the verbal blurb that I gave to you at the beginning of this call when you asked, you know, introduce yourself and what does your company do? It’s not very much different than it was back then. We worked very hard on refining that. And I will tell, you know, the people who read or watch this, words matter. And you really need to refine the pitch so that each word has a significant level of impact, and you keep the number of words to a very small number. And so when we ultimately delivered that pitch, there was impact. And if you talk to people who give speeches, if you read quotes by Abraham Lincoln or FDR, they will all tell you the same thing. Brevity is what’s important, and you have to make your impact through as few words as possible. And that’s what we try to do. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s incredible. Ben Ornstein: And you kind of talked a little bit about it. You said there were lists, but how did you get in touch with these investors? You said there was, yeah, yeah. Maybe talk a little bit more about that. Cold call them. Scott Goldman: And you know, we cold call them and you know, of course they’re not going to answer the phone the first time that you call them. Don’t expect them to. You’re going to have to get through the gatekeeper, whoever it is, an admin, executive assistant or somebody like that. And you have to make your pitch to that person in kind of a different manner. But, you know, hey, you know, I want to speak to Joe. I know that he gets a lot of calls like this. We believe that we have something that he would be interested in. It’s in a market that he’s familiar with. We’re already generating revenue. It’s recurring revenue. I need 10 minutes his time, that’s it. He can start a clock and at 10 minutes, he can cut me off if he’s not interested in any more than that. And if you give people the opportunity to limit you to a certain amount of time, you will probably have greater success in getting a call back. So that’s how we approached it. Ben Ornstein: That’s a great strategy. And it actually leads right into the next question of roughly how many investors did you reach out to? Well, if you think about the funnel? How many people did you reach out to? How many initial meetings did investors take? And then ultimately, how many of those resulted in second and third ones and then ultimately investments? Scott Goldman: Yeah. So we had initial conversations with probably about a dozen. Remember, we’re talking at the angel level. So it’s probably the angels that originally invested in the company were a hundred to a couple hundred So we only needed a few. So in looking at the big picture of this, we thought, okay, if we can narrow this down to 10% of the people that we talked to actually being successful, how many do we really need? So we targeted 15 or 20, but we actually only spoke to about a dozen. And out of that dozen, we got four. That was a pretty high hit rate for us, but I would attribute that going back to what we talked about a couple of minutes ago, which was really being prepared, really having the pitch deck down, because I got to tell you, I get pitched by startups now frequently, and I want to give them the same lesson that I’m giving to your people now, but frankly, I just don’t have the time and in many cases, cases, the interest to explain to people, you’re not doing this right. You’re not going to get my attention. You’re not going to get other people’s attention, but I’m not going to be your teacher. When you get this figured out, come back and we’ll talk. So we, because my co-founder and I had already been through a couple of startups each prior to this one, we had a better idea of what it would take to, uh, to deliver that message to the investors that would capture their interest. And that’s why I think we were able to get a higher hit rate. So out of those, out of the dozen or so conversations we had, we got about four and we got the half million that we needed and we moved on from there. Yeah, no, that’s great. Ben Ornstein: And it’s all about like the prep in the beginning. And just to confirm, you said you reached out to to initially around 20? Scott Goldman: We targeted about 20. We got through to about a dozen. Okay. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s an amazing hit rate. Absolutely. Ben Ornstein: Again, I mean, preparation is your friend. Scott Goldman: I mean, most people just start, you know, kind of dialing for dollars and, you know, they figure, Oh, I’ve got a good idea. Let me call all these investors or send out some cold emails. And, you know, cold emails are only going to get you just so far. And for anybody who’s pitching by using a cold email, you’ve got to do your homework. If you don’t have something in the first line and the subject line of that email that is absolutely irrelevant to that particular investor, you are getting deleted. There’s just no question about it because these guys are getting hundreds of emails a day. Ben Ornstein: Exactly. Have to stand out. And you also talked about this a little bit already, but maybe diving a little deeper. In, you know, what did you emphasize in the pitch to these angel investors? Scott Goldman: Yeah, so one of the things that we emphasized a few things, a couple of them were the fact that we were both pretty established businessmen at that point. Excuse me. My partner, hang on just one second there. No problem. Sorry, not enough hot coffee left in my cup there. My partner and I both had been well established in the technology world, mostly in wireless technologies through the years. So one of the things that we established was, hey, we’ve been down this road. We understand how startups fail, and we understand how they succeed. We are building a business that is going to be 100% recurring revenue. We are looking for a business that will not be a high attrition business. So when you sign up municipalities or utilities, they are typically in it for the long haul, particularly if you provide them with a set of APIs that they start developing into. Their developers don’t want to have to go through it repeatedly. So you want to get married to these people as closely as you possibly can. And that’s one of the things that we emphasize to the investors was, we’re not building a business where we’re going to have to go out looking for new accounts every day. We want to build a business where we keep 80 to 90% of our current accounts every year and build on top of that. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. I mean, that’s a great pitch right there. I’d invest. Did you apply any urgency tactics to close the round? Anything to induce FOMO or anything like that? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Not really. Scott Goldman: I think that we had kind of a different approach. Text messaging had really not become prevalent or really popular until a couple of events occurred. And those events were 9-11, when people could not get phone calls through and they realized that they could text. At that time, BlackBerrys and BlackBerry messaging, BBM was very popular, and you could text, but only to other people on the same carrier network up until, I think it was only about 20 years ago, which would make it, you know, 04 or thereabouts. I’d have to check the exact date, but you couldn’t text inter-carrier. You could only text intra-carrier. You had a Verizon phone, you couldn’t text to an AT&T or T-Mobile customer. Ultimately, that changed. That was a big event. And another thing that changed for text messaging in particular was American Idol. American Idol encouraged people to start sending text messages. And these people were not all teenagers or adolescents that were, you know, swapping messages, you know, gossiping or where do you be the pizza. It got a lot of people in a different demographic, accustomed to sending text messages, and that was actually a pretty big thing. So one of the things that we tried to capitalize on was taking a technology that people were really becoming familiar with and making that technology smarter and more useful and more productive for people and for companies. Now, we faced an immediate a challenge. We started the business in 2009. We actually faced two challenges in the company. One of them was the economy. We ran smack into the worst economy in about 75 years, which was incredibly difficult for us. The other thing was when we launched, the iPhone was only a couple of years old and it was popular, but it wasn’t ubiquitous at that point because of the expense but also because there weren’t a lot of apps. It was only a couple of years after the iPhone’s introduction that the app store opened and you could upload apps to your phone. So we faced what we thought was an existential crisis because we thought that people were going to replace text messaging with apps. So immediately or almost immediately into the life of the company, we thought, Oh, my goodness, we are doomed. Because nobody’s going to use text messaging anymore. Everybody has to have their own app. And that almost happened. The problem that people faced was that the end users resisted that the reason that end users resisted a lot of the utilities that we pitch for said, No, we’re going to build an app. Okay, you know, go build your But what they found was they had to convince their end users. First of all, they had to make them aware of it. Then the end user would have to find it on the app store, download it, learn how to use it, and then remember to use it. Whereas the text message just gets pushed to them. So one of the things that I think we could have done better that we did not do was live demonstrations for our prospective investors. We could have signed them. Up to a dummy account or something like that and said, hey, here’s what happens when there’s an outage at your home. We didn’t do that. And in retrospect, I think that that would have been more impactful. You know, one picture or one demo being worth a million words. So I would encourage people to get their investors involved in the product or in the process. That’s something that I think would have helped us accelerate the process significantly. I love that. Ben Ornstein: I was not expecting to hear American Idol on this call. God, I remember when that was big. When I was a kid, it was huge. It was massive. Right. Scott Goldman: And you see right up on the screen, text your vote to whatever their code was at the time. And that really popularized text messaging. Ben Ornstein: That’s so interesting. I never thought about that. But that’s crazy. That was an inflection point in your journey. And so you mentioned the word challenge in your last answer. And certainly it seems like there were a few. What was the biggest challenge that came up during your fundraising? Scott Goldman: I think probably the biggest one was the fact that the economy at that point was very slow. There was no guarantee that we were going to make in any business that we were in. We did not take a salary for the first year, year and a half. We were putting our own money into the company. So the challenge that we faced, of course, was convincing investors that we were going to survive. And, you know, if you are at risk of survival, the investors’ money is at risk of being lost. They don’t want to hear that. It took a little bit more time than it would have in another economic environment. I think the other challenge that we faced was because text messaging was not as ubiquitous as it is today, people didn’t instantly get it when we explained that, hey, this is going to integrate with outage management systems, and instead of you having to call your utility and you know, press a button or talk to a customer service rep, and so forth, you’ll be able to get information pushed to you. I think that that slowed us down. That was a challenge that we could have overcome if we created a better demo for our investors to participate in, not just something on the screen, where you gin up a website or something like that. But you get them involved, you get them participating, get them to text the word out, get them to see messages that come in that say your estimated time of restoration has been changed from two o’clock to five o’clock today. Things of that nature so that they can actually feel the impact of what you were doing. That was a challenge that I don’t think that we rose to as well as we could have. And a real live demo that gets the investors interactively involved would have gone a long way. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Absolutely. Ben Ornstein: I mean, I remember during Hurricane Sandy where like we had to call Con Ed and like, you know, it was impossible and you couldn’t even get through. And when you did get through, you, and if you did, you had to wait an hour and then you wouldn’t even get the information that you needed. So like, I see the value in your product immediately, but totally, if there was a demo, I could see how the investors, Oh, now I get it. Scott Goldman: Now I get it. Right. That’s, you know, that’s kind of, Those are the dream words that you want to hear from an investor. Now I get it. Ben Ornstein: Now I get it. Scott Goldman: Right, right. Ben Ornstein: Are there any other interesting, unique or interesting fundraising stories that you haven’t mentioned yet that happened during your journey? Scott Goldman: I think one of the things that we were fortunate about was we focused on trying to find investors that were reasonably local. And the reason that we wanted to do it locally was so that we could visit with them on a regular basis and not have to jump on a plane and fly to Silicon Valley or New York or someplace like that. When we founded the company, I’m based in an area north of LA. My co-founder is based in an area that’s south of LA. We used to meet in an area that I would refer to as mutually inconvenient. Because in LA it’s, I don’t know where you live, but in LA traffic is just a fact of life and you don’t want to spend hours in the car. And so what we tried to do was to find people who were reasonably local in either LA County, Orange County, and Orange County has a big technology community. And that was where we wound up finding a lot of the investors And we don’t really have that many. Most of the investors that we went to for the second round came back in for another round. We only added one more investor in the second round that we had in the first round. But keeping it local made it easier to meet people for lunch, not only to pitch them on the investing, but to keep them updated. And you’ve got to be ready to communicate with your investors. You never want one of them contacting you and saying, I haven’t heard from you. What’s going on? You know, you got to prepare quarterly reports. You got to stay in touch with them. And we made it a point to ask any or all of them, Hey, you know, we haven’t spoken to you guys in three months. It’s quarterly. Do you want to meet for lunch? Not all of them did, but the ones that did, we’d meet for lunch. And my co-founder and I would meet for an hour or so. We’d run through, what are they going to ask us? How are we going to respond? What story do we want to tell? And that’s, I think, the way that we help the investors remain comfortable, go back in for the second round, and support us in ways that I think is important, ways that are important, rather. For founders, you don’t just want people’s money. You want their support. You want their advice. You want their contacts. You want their connections. So those things only come when they have a comfort level with you in addition to your business. They invest in your business. It’s transactional. They invest their time in you. It becomes a reflection on them if you contact one of their portfolio companies or something like that. So that’s important thing to do. You really have to stay in communication with your investors. Ben Ornstein: Could not agree more. That’s amazing advice. And you’ve already given so much advice. Scott Goldman: Is there any other fundraising advice you’d want to give founders? I would say don’t underestimate the stress. Everybody thinks that starting a company is a matter of having an idea, working really hard, and getting some money from investors. All of those things are true. However, the stress of not having money coming in, you being the only one who is going to generate a paycheck for yourself and for your family and so forth, it may have been more stressful for my partner and I because we were at a later in life, and we both knew that if it completely failed, we didn’t have as much time to recover as somebody who might have been, you know, a lot younger than we were. But I would say during that period, when you are under this tremendous amount of stress, you’ve got to allocate some time for yourself. And getting away from the desk, getting away from the phone is extremely important. Take a walk, get out with your dog, take a hike, a bike ride, you know, whatever it is that you need to do to help blow off steam, alleviate some of that stress. If you are not in good health or good mental health, you’re doing a disservice to your investors and to yourself. So I’d really encourage investors, you know, it used to be a badge of honor to sleep under your desk and work 20 hours a day that doesn’t it just doesn’t cut it anymore. Now investors wanna know, are you more efficient? Are you getting your work done? Do you have time for your family? If you’re not happy, if you’re stressed out, the business isn’t gonna do well. So that would be the advice that I would give to founders is to leave a little bit of time for themselves or to try and make that time for themselves. An hour out of the day to work out run, hike, walk the dog, do whatever. It’s not going to change your business, but it will change your life. Ben Ornstein: Amazing, amazing advice. I love it. And this may be a bit less relevant of a question for you because since you have these angel investors, unless these angels are frequent check writers, the question is, who’s an investor you’d recommend other founders work with? Could also be just a shout out for your investors. Scott Goldman: I won’t name names, but what I will say is it’s best to go to a group. For example, one of the groups or go to a group to look for investors in a list of investors that participate in the group. The one that I can mention here is the Tech Coast Angels. And Tech Coast is a nickname that’s given to the Orange County businesses that focus on technology. So the tech coast angels, there’s also Pasadena angels, and there are others in California, look for those groups, because that’s where people aggregate, who are interested in hearing ideas, they go to meetings, because people are given a five minute pitch, pitch stage, and so forth, you really have to become familiar with who they are. And if you, if you know people with a lot of money, people who have real wealth. You may not be comfortable asking them for money, and that’s okay, but you could ask them, who do you know that might be interested in investing in a business like ours? And if they’re interested, they’ll tell you. They’ll say, well, what about me? I might be interested in investing. And at that point, it kind of takes the responsibility off of you, you to exactly pitch them. So I would say go to those people if you know anybody with any significant amount of money, retirees that are looking for a greater return than they can get on the typical treasury bonds or treasury notes or bonds or other things. They’re not looking for their average 6-7% return owning an apartment building and so forth. Those are all investments, but often they don’t keep up with inflation. So sometimes an investor is willing to, or a retiree might be willing to put in $50,000 or $100,000 at risk of losing it in order to make a big hit, a 5x or a 10x return on their investment. Ben Ornstein: I love that framing. It’s a great way of getting in touch with the right investors. Two more questions. So are there any resources you would recommend to founders? This could be books, blogs, podcasts, really anything. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Scott Goldman: One podcast that I listen to regularly is Acquired. And Acquired is, for people that are not familiar with it, it’s a deep dive into companies that have become very successful. The podcasts are quite lengthy. I typically like to find podcasts that are 15 or 20 minutes. Or so that I can take in bites when I go out for a quick walk or something. But I do listen to Acquired because they roll all the way back to the beginning of a company before Meta became Meta or Microsoft became Microsoft or Hermes became Hermes. They go into what generated the idea, how did they come up with funding, where did they fail. So I think that that’s a great resource for people to do that. I also listen to Scott Goldman podcast quite a bit. In particular, the one that he does, there’s one that he does with Ed Elson, his partner. They do one first-time founders. That’s a good one for founders to listen to as well because they get a founder in an interview and they do a half an hour directly with that founder. He’s got some other good podcasts too, Marketplace is pretty good as well. But the first time founders is a good one for founders to listen to as well. From a reading standpoint, I have been a Wall Street Journal reader since I was a kid. And you learn not only about what’s going on in business, but if you read into the stories and you don’t just read the headlines, if you read into the stories you begin to discover where those needs are, where the niches are, and I think it gives you more insight into the business environment in general, and I would encourage people to read that newspaper. Whatever your politics or ideology might be, you can skip the opinion page or opinion section if you want to, but from the business standpoint, they offer what I think is the best deep dive into businesses on a daily basis. There are plenty that do it weekly, monthly, and so forth. But on a daily basis, you’ve got to read that newspaper to know what’s going on because your investors are definitely reading that newspaper. Ben Ornstein: Great, great recommendations. I love it. Thank you. And our last question is, do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? Scott Goldman: Define hot take. Ben Ornstein: Things that people may not agree with you on, maybe not all people would agree with you on. Scott Goldman: Yeah, I think that after having discussed funding and investing for this period of time that we’ve had this discussion, I will tell you that for founders, money isn’t everything. And a lot of people will go to investors just because they need I’ve touched on this briefly before. Don’t look for investors just for money. There is money everywhere. You can find money in a lot of places. People bootstrap companies up to a couple hundred thousand dollars with credit cards or second mortgages. You can do that if you really want to. Look for people who can help you, who can advise the company, who can guide you, who can tell you when you’re running off the rails, who can tell you what to do as well as what not to do. That I think is far more important than most founders, especially founders that haven’t had the experience of going through this and getting beaten up a couple of times. It’s a really important factor when you’re getting started in a company and most people underestimate the impact of having investors that they can talk to and get connections from UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Love it. Ben Ornstein: That was great. Scott, thank you so much. This has been amazing. I really appreciate all the detail, the great stories, advice. I think this is gonna be a great one. I may take about a week to get this, the draft over to you, but I’ll send it over to you and you can check it out, review it, add any comments, say, hey, I didn’t wanna say this, et cetera. And then we’ll push it live when you give me the go-ahead. Scott Goldman: Sounds great, I’m looking forward to it. Amazing. Ben Ornstein: Thank you again so much. Scott Goldman: My pleasure talking with you, Ben. Awesome. Have a great day. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Bye. Scott Goldman: You too. Bye.