- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JC1CEH8GYTW75ZSZW8HNE8G7 (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Juha Mikkola: Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah, every everybody’s companies are registered there, right? Ben Ornstein: Everyone says every time It’s true that’s where well, we’ll see Elon wants to change that. Juha Mikkola: Oh, I didn’t hear about that I only heard about doge and his Department of Government efficiency So it’s like I didn’t know about I didn’t know about the Delaware change What’s he trying to do just make it that people register in other states or or that you’d register? With the same benefits everywhere. Ben Ornstein: Specifically for Tesla or SpaceX, I think it’s SpaceX, where it was moving from California to Texas. Juha Mikkola: Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. And when he did that, he also ridiculed Delaware. But regardless, yeah, really excited to chat with you today. How much context do you have for this call? Juha Mikkola: Only a little bit. I remember the email slightly that it’s about fundraising and the journey, if I remember right, but that’s probably it. So yeah, maybe we can start there. Ben Ornstein: Perfect, yeah. So I work with this founder named Michael Hauk. He’s got a newsletter called, well, it was called Hauk’s Newsletter. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Ben Ornstein: Are you familiar with it at all? Juha Mikkola: No, I’m not, I’m not. I’m bad with newsletters, my apologies. Ben Ornstein: No, all good, all good. So he was a previous founder himself of a company called Launch House, raised $15 million from A16Z. He then left the company, started a portfolio of businesses under kind of like a holding company. One of those resources was an email newsletter that was up to 100,000 subscribers at one point. It was, you know, for founders, VCs, aspiring founders, etc. That's pretty much his audience. And another one of the things that he has started or wanted to start was a resource for founders. Regarding funding regarding fundraising specifically and you know, we figured what better than to actually speak with founders who have done it themselves, so yeah, um That is what this is this this call will be about we've done I think 80 plus of these at this point um, and It's been amazing companies and founders of all different industries regions uh stages and yeah, each one's unique and it's been really exciting to do this, uh, So I've got a preset list of questions here and I have to read AI guy in here because I turn this call the transcript in this call into a text-based document that you don't get to review before it actually goes live and and where it goes live is is For our email newsletter our premium subscribers get get access to this study library Of all these different founders and their stories You'll get a chance to review it that document before it goes live. So you can- Awesome. Juha Mikkola: That sounds great. And who did you say was the founder of it? Was it Brent? Who you send? Michael Hauk. Michael. Okay. All right. I was just looking up the company. So I think that's where I got it. Let me... Awesome. Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: I'm good whenever you are. Awesome. All right. We'll get going then. Juha Mikkola: And it's Juhawk, correct? Juhawk. Juhawk. Island. I'm from Finland originally. So it's like John over there, but here everybody's always like, how do I pronounce that? Ben Ornstein: So it's all good. The unique name. I love it. Okay. So Juha, can you please briefly introduce yourself and your startup? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, for sure. Juha Mikkola: So my name is Juha. I'm originally from Finland. This is my third startup. So I've been doing this for a little while. Right now we've actually pivoted and we've built a marketplace that connects Americans with high quality dental providers abroad. So our goal is basically to help people save on health care costs, the costs here in the US are skyrocketing. And we started in dental basically helping people connect with awesome vetted dentists in Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica and Turkey. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Incredible. Ben Ornstein: Can you please share a little bit about the fundraising journey? So this could be, you know, how many rounds you've raised, maybe the amounts in those rounds if you're comfortable sharing, but Of course, no pressure, the valuations in those rounds, and you know, how long they took to close. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, for sure. Juha Mikkola: So I mean, I've done this a few times as an entrepreneur. And when I first started, I wasn't in tech. So I built a bootstrap sporting goods company, basically, with no funding at all, we just our sales were what propelled the company to grow. And that was really my first experience. And it was a very hard journey, something that I now look back on, and, you know, remember a lot of the lessons fondly, but it was, there were hard lessons to learn along the way. And I think in those days, it wasn't even that common to go out and raise capital. You know, that probably I was based in Canada and Toronto at the time, like the tech scene there has developed a lot. It wasn't, I wasn't running a tech company, even though I had an e-commerce angle. And that's kind of what led me into my next project. I ended up building that sporting goods company and got acquired back in 2014. And that gave me an opportunity to start something new. And my wife and I actually decided to take a huge leap of faith, move to Miami and start a coding school. And people thought that was nuts. They're like, how are you going to teach computer programming in Miami? There's no coders there. There's no tech. There actually was a small scene here that was really open, like super supportive. And we felt like this was like an opportunity to try to rather than maybe join a city that had a bigger tech scene and try to just be part of it. This felt like a place where we could help grow something. And we, again, didn't raise venture capital. Actually, the capital we raised was from selling our condo in Toronto and just taking a huge risk and putting it all into play in Miami. And luckily, it turned out to be a good decision. Miami's tech scene has grown a lot in the 10 years since we started down here. And that company was acquired three years ago by BrainStation, which is the global leader in digital skills training. So we had an amazing journey going through that. We did raise some strategic capital along the way. And then we ended up actually buying out of strategic investor with some other investors. So like a lot of back and forth, like all behind the scenes kind of craziness, you know, that as a, maybe from the public side, you have no idea it happens, but as a founder, there's like moments where not even sure if you're like owning your own company the next day with some of the stuff that happens. So yeah, that was a lot of lessons learned there too. And then just to kind of bring it to present day, the present day today, we, It gave me an opportunity to start again, which I love. And I thought I want to do something completely different and be challenged. So I ended up raising 1.8 million for the current company, which is called Usko. That means trust in Finnish. And originally, the focus of the company was to allow people to monetize their personal data. So we have this vision of allowing you to basically collect your personal data from all these sources around the internet, put it into a true value set of data that nobody else really had. Facebook knows a bit about you. LinkedIn knows a bit about you. What if you combined it? Could you create something more valuable? And we thought Web3 was that technology that would allow us to monetize that for you, like through a token. And we got it built. And unfortunately, the time we launched, Web3 took a dive. It wasn't the right moment. I don't think legally we could even create a token anymore. So it ended up being a bit of trouble. And that's what allowed us to basically think about this from the point of view of, do we close or do we try to pivot? And that's what led us down this path to medical dental tourism where we are today. So currently in a company that has, you know, a cap table of investors, we have a mix of angels, a couple of local funds, really amazing people who pretty much took a bet on me as a founder. And I've been very supportive along the way. Ben Ornstein: Wow, what a journey you've been on. That's incredible. Miami, I was like, you must have been in crypto at some point. Juha Mikkola: Yeah, I'm sorry to have to be part of that story. Stereotyped, but never had a green Lambo. So I don't think I was truly in crypto ever, but yeah, it was a Web3 angle for sure. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no, I was in crypto myself for about three and a half years. Awesome. And I worked through a pivot myself. So I know, not as the founder, but first employee at the company. So I definitely know how that goes. Juha Mikkola: I know that space pretty well. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. But no, that sounds awesome. So when you were raising the funding for USCA, What did you plan ahead of time to use the money for? Juha Mikkola: So at the time, it was for the idea before the pivot. So we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to do, which was raise enough funding to get essentially an MVP of the platform up, you know, and be able to prove that there was product market fit for this. And we had some some folks that believed really early, which was which was amazing. And we kind of did two separate rounds. Actually, we first did a smaller round, which is 400k. And that kind of helped us build a bit of proof of concept. And then we did 1.4, which was really to build the product and get it to market. And we managed to do that. We built a product that it didn't collect all of your personal data. We started with the Amazon shopping history. So we basically allowed the app, you would give it access to your Amazon shopping history. There's a way Amazon kind of through the back door allows you to download all of your purchases. So we found a way to tap into that, allow the app to store all of that, but what we did really unique is it was on the local hard drive of your iPhone. So as a company, we never got any of our purchase data. So it was super private. And then what we could do is basically tell a brand, Hey, if you want to reach everybody out there who recently bought a kombucha, like we would send that out to the network and your phone would query it locally. And if it matched, it would say I match. And then the brand could pay to send you a message. So we really loved the idea. And unfortunately we never stage where we could add other platforms. Our goal was to add Facebook, LinkedIn, every other data source you can think of, every other shopping source, and basically create this, let's say, asset for you personally that you can monetize in a passive way. So I'm still very passionate about it. I'd love to work on this, but it just wasn't meant to be at least this iteration around. And I think when we were raising, even though we had that kind of clear vision of what we wanted to do, I also wanted to be very aware of what the market was telling us. And when we were in a situation that we weren't getting the traction, it's kind of a decision between like, do we just keep going and hope something changes by just doing the same thing over and over? Or do we try one like really crazy pivot here? And that's what we ended up doing. And we luckily closed our first customer like in the first month of doing the pivot. And it's still been a lot of ups and downs. There's no guarantees in the early startup game. But it's definitely been something that, you know, I'm happy, happy we then kind of got another shot at that. At the price. Amazing. Ben Ornstein: And just for clarity, the round would be considered a seed round, probably? Yeah, probably. Juha Mikkola: Yeah, yeah, I always get those terms mixed up. And it depends on what what year you're talking about, I guess, because the round sizes can all vary a lot. But yeah, I would say probably it was maybe a pre seed and then a seed is kind of how I would look at those two. And then what's interesting, which I haven't been through before, I mean, that's my first time like kind of raising venture capital is that now that we've pivoted, you know, if we were going to raise money, we're kind of like starting again, we're maybe like pre-seed again, but we got some of the existing funding. So it's been interesting to kind of navigate that with our investors who've been super supportive. It's like, Hey, if new capital comes in, you know, how does it kind of recap everybody or what changes? Ben Ornstein: Because now we're onto a new idea essentially. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Um, and so when you were, deciding which investors you wanted to go with. How did you decide which investors would be a good fit? Juha Mikkola: That's something that I really did focus. I guess let's say, I'll back up a little bit. I focused initially on investors that were Miami based. And the reason that I did that is that I was fortunate to have built a company here before and built a reputation. And I think a lot of the folks that I pitched had seen me in action, they had been a hiring partner, or they had been a judge at one of our pitch days, or they were part of the entrepreneur networks that I'm part of I'm part of entrepreneurs organization, Endeavor, local leaders collective. There's a lot of groups that I found a lot of value to kind of be with peers and also learn from kind of mentors. So I think that helped. And then essentially what I noticed when I looked at the round was, even though I ended up getting introductions to investors outside of Miami and Florida, all of my investors were Florida based. So it really ended up being a lot of the combination of people that I knew or had some type of connection to. And I think that's something I've often thought about. I talked to a lot of first time founders and they're like, how do you do this? And how do you raise capital? I was very fortunate that I had a previous success that I could kind of lean on. I don't think it's guaranteed by doing that, but it's definitely something that makes it easier. If I was starting again, one of the challenges that we had with the first two companies is we didn't have that option. So we just basically had to bootstrap. So there's probably people who start from scratch and you just have such a great idea or such good early traction that you can raise. But I guess what I'm trying to say is not to get discouraged if that doesn't happen. If you really believe in the idea, it's about finding ways that you can bootstrap it or work at night initially and just kind of get it going like the old days. I think raising money got really easy for a while. At least easier. And now it's more about you have to show those results and that traction in order to be able to do it, especially that first time around. Ben Ornstein: 100%. And you kind of already answered this, but maybe there's some more detail you can add regarding, you know, how did you get in touch with these investors? Juha Mikkola: Yeah, so a lot of it was using my network of basically peers, mentors, and then also cold reach but I didn't do a lot of those. I ended up having one of the guys who's an advisor for me, is a good friend of mine, who's raised from all the big VCs. So that was super helpful. He kind of looked at his VCs that he thought might be a fit and made some introductions. So those resulted in some great meetings. Investors will introduce you to other investors, even if they don't invest. So I've tried to use that, especially now with the pivot idea, because now all and we're in travel and healthcare, we're in a totally different place than we were before. So that's a different set of investors too. So often I'll ask, can you think of two investors that you could refer me to that maybe would want to lead our round since this doesn't fit what you guys are doing. So I think that's important. I think another resource that people could use is local angel groups. So I had actually pitched with our coding school, WinCode, we had pitched a group called Miami Angels. It's the largest Miami Angel group. That was a really great experience. We ended up not getting selected for funding. And then when we sold the business, I joined as a member and made a couple of investments. And then when I started the new company, they ended up investing in the new idea. And now I'm on the board of the angel group. So I've kind of like seen all the activity that it does. And I think that kind of very, I wouldn't say it's a community like focused organization, but there's a big community element. So if you have a local, a New York angels, who I also pit two are amazing, you know, you can basically get in with some of these local investors and get some feedback from from what they're looking for. The other thing that I would recommend, which sometimes is a bit hard is just always trying to get feedback from the people you do pitch to understand like, what are they really looking for? Because I think that's like, it can sometimes be hard. These investors and VCs in particular are super busy, you know, but I always try to follow up until I get an answer. And I'll always ask for a bit more, they might not give it to me, but I'm like, that's great. Tell me a bit more about that. Why was this a concern for you? Because they've already passed, I don't see them as an investor, except maybe in a future round, or maybe a future business, you never know. But it's going to help me think about a problem differently. So I like that, because it's almost like free analysis of my business. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no, absolutely. And so many investors just don't get back. So if you keep pushing them on why they said no, yeah, that's how you Yeah, totally, totally, for sure. If you think about the fundraising experience as a funnel, so, you know, all the people that you did some of that cold outreach to or got intros to, you know, could you provide like a rough estimate of that funnel of like the initial conversations or, well, back up, the outreach that you did slash warm introductions you got, how many of those, the subset of those that led to, you know, first second, third conversations and ultimately ended investments into an investment, you know, rough numbers. Juha Mikkola: Yeah, so it's been a few years since since we did this with almost three years ago. So I'm just actually as you asked that kind of pulling up some of the places where I track this and when I was looking, if I look at like potential, it looks like between the first and kind of second meetings that we did, I pitched 125 people, but I would say that there's definitely more that probably towards the end of the round, I got a little sidetracked of updating this because we were already starting to build the product and kind of keeping an eye on it. And we ended up getting in total, I believe we're somewhere like 30-ish people are on the cap table, but a lot of those people are smaller investments that maybe came through angel group. So I'm not counting all those people in those individual conversations. I just kind of, because we didn't have that many groups, I wanted to like individually know each investor. So I would ask the angel group, like, is it okay? Can you give me their names? I want to add them to the list directly so I can kind of get to know them. So, so that's definitely, yeah, maybe we would say like, 10%, 15% of the meetings, like ended up in some type of investment. But really, the bigger, more meaningful investments are like maybe five, right? So you're looking at 5% or less with the numbers. And there were a lot, a couple of really awesome, huge funds where we made the third meeting and got to pitch people that I've only read about. And those are really cool experiences. And unfortunately, we didn't end up raising from them. But I kind of view those as wins, too. It was really cool to be like, oh, I had a Zoom call with this guy, and I got feedback directly. And what's really interesting is even once we pivoted, I went back to those people and one of them wanted to have a meeting again, you know, so that it's, it is an opportunity even when you get those no's to Ben Ornstein: like build that network. And build a relationship with them. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. And so when you were pitching, what what did you emphasize in the pitch? Juha Mikkola: So we, you know, just traditionally, obviously had had a deck that we used, you know, in the fundraise that we did for the data privacy company, there, it was basically a deck that we didn't have a product yet. We didn't have a lot of market data. With what I'm doing now with the dental tourism, it's different because we have revenue. We just had our best month, which was awesome. So we have like these things we can kind of focus on like a marketplace activity and how many dentists we have. We didn't have any of that on the other deck. So it was more about the potential. It was really like going for that big idea and trying to paint that picture of this is something that is meant to happen. The data belongs to us, people want to own this data, and over the long term, this is going to happen. And the pushback we would get is people have been trying this for 15, 20 years, you know, why is this different? And I think that's now looking back a bit of a warning, you know, a lot of very smart people have sung hundreds of millions of capital to try to try to fix this problem. And we were always like on the lower end of that funding scale. Anyway, you know, we're kind of on an underdog status, but, but I still believe that there there's a solution. It's just about figuring out what that is. So we really tried to paint that picture. Obviously, talking about the way to break down the problem that like, we're not planning to start with, you know, a $10 million app build and have every single data, you know, being pulled into it. Let’s start with something that we can prove that there’s a need for it. And Amazon, now looking back, had pros and cons of why we launched there. But we also tried to kind of offer people like, an understanding of their data too. So we’d give them budgeting information, like how much they spend per year, is their spending up or down, and some of those insights were pretty cool for people. Ben Ornstein: So we tried to break it down in the pitch also, like we’re gonna go step by step with what we built. Awesome. Yeah, no, that’s a great strategy. When you were pitching, did you apply any urgency tactics, anything you did to investors to kind of close the round? Juha Mikkola: Yeah, I think well, we were lucky that we got commitments early. So I’ve been on both sides of this, because with what we’re pitching now, we’re super early. And we’re, we’re looking at two options. We’re like either raising capital if we can, or then we’re going to try to keep it going as long as we can to just keep growing it because there’s revenue. So what is that kind of number we need to be at? So I’ve kind of seen it both both sides. I think when we were pitching, the original idea was the perfect time. Web3 was super hot. Miami was on the map. Everybody was super excited. A lot of new investors moved into town. There were a lot of existing founders in Miami that I knew who were getting funded from some of these. So there was a really great kind of moment. And I think it was really great to have these calls with folks and be able to say like, look, we already have these commitments. We already have these commitments. It’s really great. We’d love to have you on board. But you could kind of… We didn’t have to create, I don’t think, too much fake urgency. I don’t want to say fake, but like kind of like to get them to commit. I think now with what we’ve been doing, it’s been a little bit more challenging because like we’re, it’s a hard fundraising climate right now. You know, we’re very early. It’s a new idea. We haven’t, we have revenue, but we haven’t proved out that it’s a, it’s a slam dunk. So one of the things that I’ve been trying to do with some of the investors is we’re basically looking for a lead right now. So trying to give us much positive reasons to jump into it, including like, We have commitments for hundreds of thousands from other investors that are kind of ready to go just pending a lead. So I’ve been trying to use that for anybody who’s a potential lead to be like, hey, can you make the decision? Are you able to jump on board? We had a great month. This is what we have going on. We have capital ready to go. Let me know where you stand. And that’s been basically the way that I’ve been doing it. I try to be super transparent and honest in how I do things. I know that there’s kind of tactics And then there’s the truth. I’m okay with using the truth to make things happen, but I’m always very careful. I don’t want to overstate things or make it seem something that, yeah, then somebody does say yes. And the second they look under the hood, they’re like, whoa, this is not at all what was going on. So I would always recommend or suggest that for people to just be themselves and really try to be as upfront and honest with an investor, just like you would want them to be with you. And I always think about it as a long term thing, like if even if they say no, like they might say yes later. And I want to make sure that they leave the meeting with a feeling that this person is telling the truth and is somebody trustworthy that they would, they would, you know, invest money with. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, 100%. That’s really good advice. Absolutely. And you actually mentioned the word in your last answer challenge. You know, it seems like there were definitely a few. What were what were the biggest was the biggest challenge that came up during fundraising? Juha Mikkola: Yeah, so I would probably talk about the current round right now. So I mean, there’s a couple of challenges. One, we’re a major pivot from what we were doing before, but I’ve wanted to protect the existing investors that we have, because it matters a lot. You know, it’s people that I know and folks that are in the ecosystem here. So I maybe took like a non-traditional approach of just like, maybe somebody else would have just closed the company down and started another one. And I felt like, no, I to make sure that we have some type of connection to the investors who believed in me, even if it didn’t work. And there’s pros and cons to that. So when you’re pitching new investors, some understand that and really appreciate it because they can probably put themselves in the shoes of the other investors and be like, wow, I wish founders thought about it this way. But also others are like, oh, that’s messy. You’re early and it’s going to take time to fix this. Those people have already written this off. Just walk away and start something new. Um, I think that I can understand both sides now kind of being through it and then I think the other challenge that we have is is more of um Probably just a market Fit like scale. Um what part we are at the journey, you know, like how far along we are like is it And is medical tourism something like we can show how large the market is. Can we really paint it into kind of a bc backable? Um raise funds type of scale up story rather than And this can just be a really great business, you know, that’s going to generate a lot of cash. So I honestly believe that it can be like my vision that I try to share with as many investors as possible. It’s like when you travel to Miami back in the old days, maybe you would go and look at hotels. And today you look at two places, you look at hotels and you look at Airbnb and you pick which one is a better fit for you. Same thing with medical procedures. Today, you just go to your local place, you’re kind of stuck, you book with them or not. What we want to be is that other place where you look and be like, man, I could save $20,000 on this $40,000 dental procedure is worth traveling for worth looking at. So ideally, we could open up a whole new market that’s not even thinking about this as an option for them. Ben Ornstein: That’s a pretty compelling pitch. I like that. That’s awesome. Are there any other unique or interesting fundraising stories they haven’t mentioned yet that might be worth mentioning? Juha Mikkola: Yeah, I mean, there’s probably so many I’m trying to think of, think of things that that that I could share. I mean, maybe one on just like for people who are just getting into this or looking for tips. I mean, the relationships thing, I could definitely tap on that a little bit where I mentioned the first company that I was doing in sporting goods and completely different world, like nothing to do with technology. We were based in Toronto. We used to run these really huge events and tournaments for a sport called four ball. That was the indoor hockey that I was importing the equipment for. But also nobody played the game so I had to create the market so I had to teach people to play the sport. We ended up building tournaments that had 70 teams and thousands of players and it was like a really cool opportunity to interact with a lot of people. One of the people who came to that tournament and actually won was this guy from New York and what ended up happening was he went back home to Sweden where he was from, he joined this big consulting company and we were raising money for WinCode for the coding school at the time and really looking for strategic capital to like help grow the business and by chance we reconnected and he remembered everything about the floorball world and everything and it turned out that the company that he worked for was building a coding education arm in Sweden and they wanted to expand to the U.S. And what started as like a random like reconnect on LinkedIn to talking and realizing I mean we were really good friends back in the in the floorball days and talked probably for 10 years now we’re meeting in person it turns out the owners of that company had a property in Florida, we’re having coffee in Wynwood and next thing happens that they buy a chunk of our business, you know, and become partners. So that kind of stuff where it like goes across not just businesses, but like decades and countries and everything else. I always try to keep that in mind that like the person you’re talking to now, you, we could be co-founders, I could invest in you, you can invest in me, you have no idea. So it’s always worth basically bringing your best and putting your best foot forward and trying to treat people with the way you’d like to be treated. So that’s definitely a little learning for me and just seeing it come full circle that way. Ben Ornstein: What a cool story. And also great advice, because you’re so right. You just don’t know. You never know. Juha Mikkola: I have like seven more of those that I can share if anybody wants to reach out. Crazy connections. From the past that come back. Ben Ornstein: I believe it. I’d love to hear those sometime, but yeah, no, that’s amazing. Incredible. So we have a few left and one of those, you’ve already given a couple of really good pieces of advice, including of course, what you just last said. Is there any other fundraising advice that you’d like to give other founders? Juha Mikkola: I would say try to connect with somebody who’s done it before. So I mentioned I’ve had two businesses. I’ve been super lucky to have, exits from both of those companies. But I hadn’t raised venture capital before. So this was a new world for me. It was one that I wanted to learn, which is partially why I went into this world. And I’ve seen the good and the bad sides of it now kind of going through the process. But what I was really lucky about is, in particular, one of the guys I mentioned is an advisor for the company. Another guy is a friend of mine from one of the forums that I’m part of through Local Leaders Collective. And they’ve both gone through this, raised tens of millions, know, had successes, had failures, like known how to deal with investors, how to set up deals, how to create urgency, like how to write great investor updates, how to kind of do that whole side of the business, which is kind of like what a CEO for a tech company needs to dedicate a certain chunk of their time to regardless, you can’t outsource it, you need to really do that side really well. So that was very helpful for me. And it was great that they were friends, you know, so they would kind of tell me directly to like, I asked one of my investors, I have a couple investors, like who I talk to every week still. We have a standing call, he’s helping. Incredible person, but he’s still an investor. So it’s great to have someone who’s just a friend and has nothing in the company, is kind of looking out for you, but also checking you to be like, look, this idea isn’t great. What about thinking about it this way? So I would definitely recommend trying to search in your network and getting introduced to someone who’s been through the venture capital fundraising story. And I would say they don’t have to been successful, because most startups fail at the end of the day. But if they’ve managed to raise capital or have pitched and gone through the process, they’re going to be a massive resource for you to learn from Ben Ornstein: Yeah, you can skip through a lot of the pitfalls that normal founders would buy. Yeah, absolutely. Who is an investor that you would recommend other founders work with? Juha Mikkola: Oh, that’s Yeah, I mean, I would say on my entire cap table. And There’s some people who came in with very small checks, that were people who came through an angel group, like I mentioned. There’s one person who’s been trouble. Everybody else has been incredible. And that’s not the kind of story that I hear from a lot of founders. A lot of founders have had issues where their companies closed because of an investor didn’t agree to some type of terms that they needed to, or an investor made a deal with the founder and then sent legal documents that said something else and tried to screw the founder over. And that’s, by the way, an investor that’s like well known that everybody listening or reading this would know. So it’s like crazy to hear these stories that these guys are like that. But I think, you know, I don’t want to, I, what I’d like to say is everybody’s amazing. But in particular, Solo, who’s with Ocean Azul Partners, he’s the guy who’s done a call with me every single week for like three years. And we haven’t missed it. Like it’s just like on our calendars, like he’s so helpful. Every time checking in, seeing what’s going on, and really awesome Miami-based investor and such a great fund as well. So I would say for anybody that’s looking for that type of investor who cares about you as a founder and the company and is on your team and helps in the right way, that’s a great model and a great Ben Ornstein: person to follow. He sounds amazing. Sounds like a great investor to have on board. That’s incredible. Juha Mikkola: I just put his name in the chat, by the way, too, just in case. Ben Ornstein: Oh, perfect. Juha Mikkola: Let me copy that real quick. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I can find his LinkedIn as well. But yeah, I got the name. That’s fair. Okay. And, you know, are there any resources that you would recommend to other founders, you know, newsletters, podcasts, books, anything? Juha Mikkola: Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s, yes, there’s probably a lot of those resources. And I do try to those whenever I can. For me I love like the in-person or the local connection where you can talk to other founders. So I mentioned these founder groups and and they’ve gotten quite popular now. There’s a lot of these like virtual ones too where you can be part of a forum where you’re like with eight other founders and and all of you guys share the 5% the highs and the 5% lows that you wouldn’t tell anybody else about what’s going on and that’s been like a game-changer for me. So originally I learned about it through Entrepreneurs Organization which is like kind of a mini YPO which is a more well-known kind of group like that and very valuable I’m still with my forum like we I’ve been there almost eight years, you know learning from these guys and then The only challenge at least with the local yo here in South Florida is that it’s not a lot of tech founders it’s a lot of traditional companies and I think there’s a crossover between the problems you have but But that’s mostly on the people side. The fundraising is very different because these guys are all running cash flow, positive businesses that make money. Crazy concept, right? And everybody else is burning money and needs to raise more to get to the stage. So I was really looking for people who understood that. And for us, there were three folks here in Miami that started Local Leaders Collective, which kind of takes that same vibe from EO and just applies it more to an earlier stage tech founder mentality. That’s where one of the guys I mentioned is in my forum, who has been so helpful to kind of review these term sheets and help me out. Alex Nucci is his name. He’s an awesome founder. And then also Will Weinraub, who’s the founder of Local Leaders Collective, is the guy who advises me, also has raised money from a lot of the big players. So those have been awesome resources to have, and I found those to be more valuable than maybe… Maybe there’s some people who can just listen and kind of learn from a story. I think I like like to supplement that, but the real thing for me is like being able to talk to someone and be like, here’s my problem. Ben Ornstein: Like, what do you think about this? What could we do? Yeah, nothing better than actually hearing from founders who have done it themselves, right? I mean, that’s why we are creating this resource because everything, like all of this is so valuable. Juha Mikkola: Totally, I agree. I’ll throw that in the chat too. That’s the group that they created. It’s like, I don’t know if it’s anywhere else except Miami. I think they’re only in Miami right now, but it’s definitely a fun group to be a part of Ben Ornstein: I appreciate that. Awesome. And the last question I have for you is, do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? Juha Mikkola: You mean right now in particular or like as you’re going through the process anytime? Really anytime, yeah. Can you give me an example of what someone else has shared? Maybe it’ll get me to think of something. Ben Ornstein: Sure, yeah. So when I say hot takes, I fully mean things that maybe not everyone agrees with you on. One of the recent ones was founder market fit is so much more important than anything else. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Yeah. Juha Mikkola: I mean, the fact that you mentioned that one gets me thinking, because I’m always completely switching industries. To relearn everything, that’s part of the challenge and the fun for me. But I think it also makes it harder to fund, you know, like if I was doing something in education, I feel like people would just be like, Oh, that makes sense. You built and sold an education company. So let’s let’s go ahead and fund this guy. So I would probably agree with that, that hot take. I’m trying to think of what what else I could share that would be that would be a good one. Um, I think one thing that I would share, especially since the company has had challenges with the pivot and everything that’s been going on, I get this feeling, I don’t know how other entrepreneurs are, but I don’t know if a lot of people pick up the phone. I think a lot of people maybe send updates and they’ll send emails and whatever. We recently had a really critical moment in the company. And what I did is I called every single person. I just decided I’m going to make calls, you know, thank them for the support, I’ll let them know where we’re at, explain the pros and cons of what we’re doing, and also what the options are that we might not make it. You know, we’re in a situation where this is happening. And I think what was really surprising to me is that for most of those folks who do a lot of investments, it was the first time anybody had called them about something like this, you know, and they really appreciated that. And to me, that’s like, the bare minimum, these people gave me money, and it might not be worth working out, we might be making it, who knows. It’s one of those things where, to me, it just felt logical. Nobody told me that I should do that. But I’m like, at the very least, I want to make sure that they knew I tried to call. And I would definitely recommend that for other founders. And maybe it’s just something that people don’t think about. Some investors told me, usually, if companies struggle, or they had companies that had closed down, they don’t even get an email from the founder. They’ve had founders that have disappeared and just never even closed company down so they didn’t even get the write-offs and just seems crazy to me that like if you’re putting so much of your personal reputation and who you are into this business and so much work to make it happen like yes it’s so disappointing if it doesn’t work out but like closing it up properly is kind of the least you need to do or at least I would need to do in my opinion at least to make it work so yeah maybe that’s hopefully most founders don’t need to deal with it but the stats say that most will actually deal with that so I feel like knowing how to have how to deal with that side of it and just being prepared to do it right even if it doesn’t feel good is the most important thing. Ben Ornstein: I love that. And it’s so strange that a lot of people don’t do that. I guess the counter argument to that is probably founders don’t want to tell investors that bad news or because it could be seen as like a stain on their reputation You know, it makes them, doesn’t put them in a great light. I don’t know, that would maybe be the argument against it, but I love your approach and I would probably have done the same thing. That’s really cool. I think also it’s hard. Juha Mikkola: I mean, it’s a hard conversation to have, but I think that’s why we’re in, that’s why I’m in this is like, this is hard. It’s challenging. Like there’s going to be something difficult to do, like whether it’s hiring a new person or having to let an old person go, like those are both hard things in different ways. I can’t stress enough that it’s just, to me, that would be the way to play that. And maybe it’s something that if anybody else like listening or reading or whatever happens, like is in that position, would definitely recommend doing it. It’s gonna help with whatever they do next. Ben Ornstein: I love it. That is great. That’s a great hot take. Not many people have mentioned phone calls. Juha Mikkola: That’s great. Ben Ornstein: But Yuhua, thank you so much. Has been incredible. I’ve really enjoyed hearing your story, your journey. So yeah, it’ll take me probably up to a week or so, maybe sooner, it just depends, to get you the first draft of this. So you can then review it, edit it. I’ll give you direct edit abilities so you can kind of say, hey, I wanted to say this or whatever, all of that. And you’ll have a chance to make all those edits before we push it live. Juha Mikkola: Awesome. Love it. That’s great. That’s great. And yeah, one of the things we’re doing with the current startup is also like trying to build our SEO. So does this, can you guys link to the, to our site for the current thing that I’m doing? Ben Ornstein: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. This will be behind a paywall, so people won’t be able to see the document directly. But what I will say that will go public that you could potentially backlink to is each Saturday, Um, we we kind of in the public newsletter, which is like 60 000 plus right now We we each saturday we say which case studies were added to the library. Oh, cool. Juha Mikkola: That’d be awesome. Yeah Yeah, perfect. Perfect. Yeah, and I also wonder like I mean obviously like we help with with dental if anybody needs it We could always do like I don’t know if there’s ever been like founders that give some kind of promotion to the community or something Like if it’s a large community, I don’t know if you guys would be open to that. But maybe we could give some kind of special rate or a discount if anybody actually needs dental work done. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it’s interesting. I wonder how we could approach that. And zero pressure. Juha Mikkola: I just thought like it’s there’s, it’s so funny, the commitments that I have right now are actually from people who went through this issue with like family members, they couldn’t like afford dental. And they remember how bad that was. And they had no option but to pay for it locally. And they’re like, I wish this existed. Like when, when I was looking around for this. So yeah, it’s kind of, I haven’t personally gone through it. So I didn’t realize what a pain point it is for people. But it’s talking to some patients, they’re like, I can’t even smile on a zoom call, because my teeth are in such bad shape. Ben Ornstein: And it just affects everything about their lives, right? That’s killer. Yeah, let let me chat with with how can I go out to see how we could kind of add that? Yeah, zero pressure. Juha Mikkola: I mean, this is this was super fun. I’m happy to do it. And yeah, there’s a way to like, you know, we can give back and help and it can be great for us to if there’s folks that want to want to give the platform a try. Ben Ornstein: Absolutely. I’ll I’ll let when I when I get back to you, I’ll see what he has in mind. But yeah, I’ll let you know regardless. And yeah, no, but thank you so much for the time. This has been incredible. I’m really looking forward to putting this one together. Juha Mikkola: Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Really appreciate it. Ben Ornstein: Nice to meet you. Have a good one. Juha Mikkola: Nice to meet you. Cheers.