- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JBZ0XHW2Z23Y15G35EQV1XMR (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Raghav Gupta: connected us. Oh, so you, you know, Michael? Yes, Michael actually reached out to me. He, he mentioned that, you know, you were interested in writing a case study on our fundraising journey. And, and gave me a link to schedule a call with you. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Amazing. Ben Ornstein: Yes. So so you’re, you’re pretty familiar with with what Michael does? Raghav Gupta: Not so much. He He reached out, yeah, he reached out. I think we did, I think we did an article with Bold Journey earlier. Ben Ornstein: Oh, but this is Founding Journey. So yeah, his newsletter used to be called Hauk’s Newsletter. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Ben Ornstein: We recently rebranded it to Founding Journey. Raghav Gupta: Got it. Yeah, no, I think he reached out cold And I thought it might be a good idea to chat with you and share my story. Amazing. Ben Ornstein: I’m very excited to hear it. Yeah, so to give you a little bit more context about this call. So yes, Michael Hauk is a startup founder. His last company raised a $15 million round led by Andrew Chen from A16Z. He is a founder himself, two-time founder again with another company, Fox Newsletter, and really just a whole holding company of all these different assets. One of the things we wanted to create was a resource for founders related to fundraising. And he figured, is there any better way for founders to learn than by speaking with founders who have done it themselves? And I personally don’t think so. So we’ve done, I think, 80 of these. It’s pretty amazing. It’s been, you know, founders of all different stages, regions, industries, and yeah, each story is unique. So that’s what this call is about. This will be added to a case study library of, you know, all the other 80, 80 ish. And so yeah, that’s where we’ll go. The video recording here goes nowhere. I just have the read AI guy in here I use the transcript to create the text-based case study document. You’ll get a chance to review a draft of it before I post it live, so you can make edits as you please. And yeah, I’ll stop there. Raghav Gupta: Any other questions? I was telling Michael that we’d ideally like this story to go out after we’ve announced it. We haven’t announced our fundraiser yet, so we’d like to embargo the piece, if that’s okay. And secondly, we have rebranded the company from Nimble to Porsche, which again is something that we haven’t publicly announced. So is it okay if we push this piece out closer to Q1 of next year? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, whatever you tell me, whenever you would like it posted, we can post it then. Not a problem at all. Amazing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Thanks. Raghav Gupta: That was my only request. Awesome. Ben Ornstein: I can definitely do that. I’ll make a note of that after this. And make sure it doesn’t get posted before you don’t you want it to. Raghav Gupta: Right. Awesome. So I’m happy to take this whichever way you want to take this. And I’d like to read from here. Amazing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes. Ben Ornstein: So we have I got a pre list set of questions here. Softball questions that you’ve definitely answered before no one will have no or at least thought about. And again, And this is pre-recorded, so if there’s anything you say you don’t want to, no problem. And it’s Raghav, right? I pronounced it correctly? Raghav Gupta: It’s Raghav, but Raghav is fine. Ben Ornstein: Raghav, okay. So Raghav, can you please briefly introduce yourself and your startup? Raghav Gupta: So my name is Raghav. I am one of the co-founders at Nimble. At Nimble, we’re helping busy people eat freshly cooked meals every single day without spending tons of time in the kitchen. We’re doing that by building cooking robots for home. These are devices that cook delicious meals for you all at the tap of a button. All you do is choose a recipe, put in freshly chopped ingredients in different containers, tap cook, and out come the meal. It’s really like a coffee machine for food. It helps people who have families and who want to feed their families freshly cooked meals. But for some reason or the other, life gets in the way of them doing so. And we help make sure nothing gets in the way of them providing love and care to their families through freshly cooked meals every single day. Ben Ornstein: Awesome mission. I love that. Can you talk a little bit about the fundraising journey? So this could be how many rounds you’ve raised, the amounts in those rounds, if you’re comfortable sharing, but obviously no pressure to, the valuations. And how long they took to close? Raghav Gupta: So we’ve done two rounds so far. The first round was led by two VCs in India. They’re called Zero to One Capital and Waterbridge Ventures. This happened long back when I was in India, when we started the company in India. Over the years, we continue to show progress, build the team, set up offices across different geographies. We now have presence in China, in India, obviously, because that’s where I started. And we’re now headquartered in the Bay Area. That’s where I decided to move roughly four years back. Raised our next round recently by Accel leading it. And as I said, we haven’t disclosed this yet, but we intend to closer to Q1 next year. And that round was like, it took a lot of years of relationship building for us to close that round. The partner who led the deal was observing us for about four years. He was looking at progress updates, was looking at how the company was growing, understood that the zero-to-one journey of a robotics company can take longer, was patient through that zero-to-one journey before we finally decided that this was a company we wanted to back. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Amazing. Ben Ornstein: Are you allowed to share any details on, you know, the amounts in those funding rounds, obviously. Raghav Gupta: I think closer to the embargo, I can, I can disclose the exact amount because even we don’t know how much we’ll be announcing, because with most funding rounds, you know, there’s, you know, sometimes there’s rolling money coming in and you want to decide how to package the entire round. No problem at all. Ben Ornstein: We’ll keep it, we’ll keep it at that for now and then we can edit later. Okay. So when you were raising this money, what did you plan ahead of time to use the funding for? Raghav Gupta: We planned to, so when we raised the round, we had early signs of product market fit. We had a proof of concept that we had in consumer homes that was being used by consumers roughly three times a week. There were about 50 units out there in the field. And with the money, the intention was to prove PMF at a larger scale, was to show that we don’t just have these 50 people who are super happy with the product, but there’s a larger quantum of people who would be super happy. The way we measured product market fit was this. This framework defined by Sean Ellis. It’s called the Sean Ellis framework. You ask your users how they would feel if your product no longer existed. Give them three options. Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed. And measure the percentage of people who say they’ll be very disappointed if your product no longer existed. You have achieved product market fit with that cohort of users. 40% or more of your users say they’d be very disappointed. So we were able to prove that number for our early set of beta users, and the intention was to scale that up meaningfully for our next round. The intention was also to get our bill of materials down. With the early beta users, we had built a product that worked very well, but it was not necessarily a product that had positive unit economics. So the intention was also to figure the positive unit, was to figure the unit economics out. And then it was also important for the investors to see that this business was something that could provide recurring value to users. And a measure of recurring value is recurring revenue. Our customers, happy that they continue to pay for some part of our service, demonstrating that there is a recurring value to be built using this business. So those were actually the three things we set out to achieve when we raised the capital. We’re well on our way to achieve all three of those before we hit the market for our next round of funding. Ben Ornstein: Incredible. And when you were deciding what investors to go with? How did you decide which investors would be a good fit? Raghav Gupta: I think one of the biggest criteria for us was to partner with investors who played the long game. I think hardware, robotics, even any company that is building foundational tech, be it be it AI foundational models, be it robotics, needs to partner with patient investors. So we wanted to make sure we partner with an investor who knew that this was going to be a patient game, at least for the first few years. We also wanted to partner with an investor who understand or could relate with this problem very well. One advice that was given to me by another founder, friend of mine was, you know, always go with an investor where you get, you know, two types of people on your cap table. The first kind is, you know, the managing partner who has tons of relationships that you can leverage when you need to. And the second kind of person who is hungry and, you know, wants to help you every week, every month has you on top of their mind. And this typically can be an associate, a vice principal, a junior partner who is in line to be a partner because they want to make bets and they want to support bets that help them make a name for themselves. So with Excel, we found that perfect combination. We had a very senior person in the firm who was who showed the potential to become partner very soon. So he was hungry and always helping us out. And we also had one of the managing partners, you know, take interest in the company and his Rolodex of connections were available to us. And his advice, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Excel’s amazing, by the way. Congratulations on that. That’s really awesome. Thank you. You know, tier one for sure. Raghav Gupta: And so how did you get in touch with these investors? The partner who led the deal, he was at a different fund long back. So I somehow got introduced to that fund. We continued to nurture our relationship. Then this person moved to Excel and he continued to track us while at the new fund. And that’s how we got introduced. Axel also happened to be one of the early investors of one of my larger seed investors. His name is Binny Bansal, B-I-N-N-Y space B-A-N-S-A-L. So Ben was the co-founder at an e-commerce giant called Flipkart. Flipkart competes directly with Amazon in India. And Axel happened to be one of the early investors in Flipkart as well. Ben Ornstein: Yep. Cool. Amazing. That’s a great investor to have on board too. Yeah. Especially for your space. That’s great. So did you do any cold outreach at all for getting in touch with investors in the early days? Raghav Gupta: I did cold outreach, but my focus was on of warm introductions. So I spend more time networking with and building relationships with founders than I would with investors. And then when the time was right, I would request these founders to make introductions to the right kind of investors. And I think that was far more useful than continue to build relationships with investors because you continue to get feedback from all are the founders on building and operating. And they have no vested interest in giving you this feedback, whereas most VCs try to be polite as opposed to giving you targeted feedback that might help you build a business. Ben Ornstein: I love that strategy. And I’ve now spoken to only a few of the 80 who have approached investor conversations and networking in that way of speaking of founders first. I love that. It’s a great strategy. It’s probably more fun too, speaking with founders. And then you’re getting those answers. So that’s amazing. If you’re thinking about your entire conversion as a funnel, how many introductions slash cold outreach at the top of the funnel, how many, you know, what percentage or how many of those converted into initial meetings, second meetings, third meetings, and then ultimately, you know, funding in rough numbers, obviously. Raghav Gupta: So we were in a very fortunate position where even though we had a funnel, the funnel was, you know, to reach out to at least 80 investors, the hope was that roughly 50% of them give us a first meeting, talk to those, the hope was about 20%. Give us a second meeting, so that would come down to eight. Maybe another 20% give us a third meeting, that eight comes down to about three. And of those three, maybe we get two term sheets. So that was the math. But even though that plan was in place, we ended up getting preempted by Excel. So thankfully for us, we did not have to run the entire process. In full, we did run a partial process where, you know, after we had some interest from Excel, in the limited time we had, we were able to reach out to some investors, you know, try to understand if there was interest and if they could give us a deal that was, you know, as competitive. But given Excel had observed us for a very long time, it was easier for them to build conviction as opposed to other reasons. Ben Ornstein: Got it. Makes sense. And, you know, when you were doing this pitching, which I guess you didn’t do too much of it if you were mostly preempted, but, you know, what did you, what did you emphasize in the pitch? Raghav Gupta: Um, large story. So, um, you know, basically a VC story that, uh, that this company has the potential to, to transform the way humanity gets freshly cooked meal every single day. Uh, it’s not just a company that makes, you know, beautiful looking appliances, but far more than that. So a big story with the potential to really transform the way we eat food. Good execution. We had achieved the metrics we had while spending, you know, one fifth of the capital that most people in our space have spent. So execution and some some product love. So I think that would be Club Render execution. The execution would have some traction, some product love, some sense of how you’re going to acquire your customers. So all of that would come under execution, but basically a large story and some execution. Also, because we had previously had a very hard time raising our seed round of funding, where we had pushed to tons of VCs, and we had gotten enough feedback to know how to answer the most difficult questions. Yep. Makes sense. Ben Ornstein: Did you do anything to drive urgency among the round, like to close investors? Any tactics there? Raghav Gupta: This time around, not really. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I guess probably not so much because, again, you’re preempted. You didn’t really need to. Anything for the seed? Raghav Gupta: For the seed, we were in the situation where the company was, you know, company had no money left. So we had, you know, maybe a maybe a month or two of runway. So we had to tell our seed investors, hey, guys, you know, you’ve been sitting on it for too long. Either you take a decision now or there’s no company to invest two months later. So, you know, in all honesty, that’s the it did not put us in the strongest position. But that’s what we had to do to And we were lucky that we had investors then who weren’t really predatory, so they did not give us the worst of terms. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Wow. Ben Ornstein: So they did end up funding you with that? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes. Ben Ornstein: Wow. That’s pretty. And when was that round of funding? Raghav Gupta: I think in 2019 from what I recall. Wow. Ben Ornstein: So you went from one month of runway, one to two months in 2019. To raising an A from Excel? Raghav Gupta: Yes, we did have some bridge round in the middle, but those were small bridges just to help us tide over COVID and things like that. Sure, sure. Ben Ornstein: No, that’s still amazing. Very impressive. And I think that last comment leads well to this. You know, what was the biggest challenge that came up during fundraising? Raghav Gupta: I think when we, during our seed, the biggest challenge was, you know, I was trying to raise, I was a first time founder trying to raise capital for a hardware company for, in India, which has no precedent for any hard, which did not have any precedent for hardware investments back in the day. For consumers, that would be based not in India, but overseas. It was just a very hard investment decision to make for any VC. And so I think the hardest challenge was just to convince VCs that this ambitious vision that these founders have, they will actually continue to build towards it, rain or shine. With Series A, I think it was I think the bigger challenge was getting all our fundraising material in time so that we can actually run the process, which I don’t think we were able to run properly given we were preempted. So I think the bigger challenge was, yeah, I don’t think it was as big of a challenge in CDJ. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no, it makes ton of sense. Are there any unique or interesting fundraising stories that you haven’t brought up yet that might be, you know, worth mentioning? Raghav Gupta: I might be able to think of something. I think the only question is how the larger, you know, fundraise piece, like, I need to think about what exactly is the press release going to look like for our Series A and then decide on what stories are worth telling and what Aaron were telling, I just don’t want any inconsistency. And I’m so sorry, you know, our intention was to actually announce in January or like December or January. And so I thought this might be a good time for us to chat, but we’ve delayed those plans. And then I’m not being able to be as forthcoming. Ben Ornstein: No, no, it’s fun because you giving me that context, I can go ahead and put in the draft basically what you just said. And then we can edit it when it gets closer to being pushed. So it’s fine. Raghav Gupta: Not a problem at all. Yeah. And I think I should be able to give you a few anecdotes, maybe closer to, uh, closer to January, if that’s okay. Ben Ornstein: Or again, perfectly fine. There’s no, we got no rush here. Raghav Gupta: Um, yeah. Ben Ornstein: Okay. So, uh, a few more questions. Um, you know, what’s one piece of fundraising advice you would give other founders? Raghav Gupta: Uh, calendar density is important. I think the month or two of fundraise matter, but what matters more is the six months of prep you do before that. And what I mean by six months of prep is knowing exactly who in your network would be willing to make a warm introduction, not just an introduction to the VCs that matter, having your deck right having your metrics right thinking about all of this way in advance you know six months out when I go to raise money I want xyz to be nailed out is one thing that’s important the second thing is when I go to fundraise six months out you know I will reach out to you know these 50 vcs these are the people who can make those introductions let me keep them warm tell them in advance that I need those introductions get feedback on my deck way in advance. So you don’t, you know, distribution matters. And what I mean by distribution is pitching to like 50 VCs matters, but distribution of a shitty product would result in shitty outcomes. So your product should not be shitty. And what I mean, and in fundraising, the product is your deck, right? Your deck should have gone through multiple stages of vetting with other founders, well-wishers who don’t have any vested interest in funding you, so that when you do go out there to raise, your story just clicks. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. It’s so interesting because so many people have had different things to say about the deck. Some people are like, it doesn’t matter. In fact, sometimes a shitty deck shows that you’re so focused on building the product or whatever you’re building, that it’s bullish to investors that you didn’t take the time to create the deck. But I’ve heard plenty of people say the same thing that you did. It’s just interesting. People have different perspectives on that. Raghav Gupta: I think context matters here. And context is, there are different types of companies. There are companies where their numbers speak for the progress. So if you have insane numbers, if you have millions of downloads with daily active usage that’s through the roof. You don’t really need your deck. Your numbers speak for themselves. But then there are companies like Waymo or Tesla in the early days, where it’s a long gestation time company. You are spending tons of money in capital assets well in advance. And you need to tell investors that all these capital assets will pay dividends way ahead in the future. If that’s the kind of company you’re building, you’re building SpaceX and you need to convince investors that it is important to build reusable rockets and you don’t have a single chip that goes into that reusable rocket, I think you can’t raise without a deck. But if you’re a SaaS business where there’s not deep technological defensibility, but but you have insane revenue coming in and you know, it’s not, the horizon you’re thinking is not 10 years out, but you can give a return to Ben Ornstein: investors like 18 months out, probably your numbers will do all the talking. Yeah. You succinctly said context matters. And that is, that’s so true. That is, I agree with you completely. Raghav Gupta: Who is an investor you would recommend other founders work with? Working with our investors. And so Accel is awesome. You know, Zero to One Capital, Waterbridge Ventures, all the funds that have, that we’ve got the good fortune to work with have been amazing. So from the inside, you know, I would certainly recommend these funds. From the outside, I would say the fund matters less. What matters is who in the fund is taking a bet on you. But at the end of the day, the fund is just an umbrella, you know, it’s covering like, what really matters are the people that you end up working with. The people you work with should understand your business, should ask you the questions that you aren’t asking yourself. And they can only do that if they’re super involved. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that’s a great answer. Are there any resources that you would recommend to other founders, you know, books, podcasts, newsletters, anything? Raghav Gupta: So there’s this, there is this, let me look this up. So I like this newsletter by Adamant Ventures. Jason Yeh, I think has- He’s great, yeah. He’s written some good pieces on fundraising. Excel has this website. I forgot the name of the website, but Excel has this website which only focuses on pitch tuning, on pitching. So that’s a great learning resource. Let me look it up. I’ll send it to you. I don’t remember what it’s called. Let me see. Yeah, I can’t see the scale.com. What’s it called? Speed to scale.com. Oh, okay. Awesome. I think it’s got some good case studies. Um, but then obviously every, every VC has a nice podcast, which, you know, if you listen to, enough, you’ll get some good insights. I can only think of a few of these. All of my other learnings on fundraising, pitching have actually come from other founders. I haven’t found a single structured resource that works for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. So talk to other founders. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Talk to other founders. Raghav Gupta: That’s a good one. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. And our last question here Do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? Raghav Gupta: Let me think. I’ll get back to you. I think, yeah, I’ll get back to you. I don’t think I have anything on the top of my mind, but I think it’s just grant work. It’s just, when it takes up, takes up your entire energy. So be prepared to give stuff off to other people in the team. When you start fundraising, make sure your company is running itself, and that you’re not really involved, because it’s a full-time activity. Fundraising does take up a lot of time, bandwidth, energy. Ben Ornstein: Yep, 100%. Awesome. Well, Raghav, thank you so much This has been amazing. Um, yeah, so I’ll make, I’ll review this. I’ll make a bunch of notes. I’ll say, Hey, you didn’t answer this. You said this, whatever. Um, and then we’ll just stay in touch. You can let me know when it’s ready. Um, you’ll have access to the documents. So whenever you’re ready to edit it, you’ll be able to, I’ll follow up. I don’t know. Every once in a while and, um, we’ll make it happen. Raghav Gupta: Sounds good. Thanks, Ben. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more prepared for this, but hopefully in January I should give you more meat for this story. Ben Ornstein: Not a problem. Really exciting journey for you guys. I’m pumped to hear more about it. And yeah, again, congratulations. I know fundraising isn’t the end goal, but getting a big investor on board is no joke. So congratulations on that. And yeah, excited to follow your journey. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Raghav Gupta: One question I have before, we wrap up. Wanted to understand what Founding Journey does exactly. Are you guys VC funded? And if so, what’s the business? Is it a newsletter service? Is it a newsletter service moving towards a media company? What’s the game here? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, yeah. So Hauk’s newsletter was a newsletter in itself, but Hauk has a portfolio of businesses. He has, it’s a holding company. And so he’s got the newsletter, which is Founding Journey, which also has the case studies. And we actually started a podcast. So we’ve got the podcast, we’ve got the newsletter, we’ve got the case studies, that’s under the Founding Journey brand. Hauk also has a startup called Megaphone. It’s for kind of like organic boosting of social content. So really awesome. It’s doing quite well. So he’s got that. So really, he has a portfolio of businesses that have different routes that they could potentially go. There’s not really one set route. It really just depends on how the different businesses in the portfolio perform. So yeah, there’s a bunch of different routes. There’s ideally a media company that scales. But it could turn into a whole bunch of other things too. Raghav Gupta: We’re still figuring it out, basically. Still figuring it out. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, we’re seeing where it goes. The case study library, I mean, we only started this this year and there’s, you know, we’ve got, you’ll be one of 80 and we’ll probably, by the end of the year, we might even have like close to a hundred. So yeah, we don’t know yet. We don’t fully know yet. Understood. Raghav Gupta: Got it. Okay. All the best, you know, all the best with founding journey and look forward to chatting more. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Amazing. Ben Ornstein: Looking forward to it as well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Amazing. Raghav Gupta: Thanks, man. Bye-bye.