- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JD83TKPPNM2V8VWS9XGMR23V (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Daniel Liebeskind: Are you from Barn Hills? Ben Ornstein: My mom taught there. And so I was wondering if you remember who your first grade teacher was. Daniel Liebeskind: First grade teacher, hold on. Let me think about that. What’s your mom, Ornstein? I don’t think that name rings a bell for me. I’m a lot older than you though. Ben Ornstein: My mom was teaching for a very long time. Daniel Liebeskind: I don’t think so. Okay, well, that was a long time ago for me. She taught first grade. Yep. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. I don’t think so. I don’t think she was my teacher. All good. Ben Ornstein: All good. Daniel Liebeskind: I don’t know though. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: But yeah, no, thanks so much for taking the time here. Excited to chat today. How much context do you have for this call? Daniel Liebeskind: I looked at the site. I know you guys do advice. I think Michael originally emailed me. It was probably just a general outreach email, given that it was a different domain. So my interpretation is you’re reaching out to a lot of founders, having a lot of conversations. My guess is you’re looking for really interesting things to write about. Particularly, it seems like it’s around founding journeys and advice to founders about how to actually, or like fundraising and advice to founders. But that’s, you know, I spent five minutes looking at it. So I’m not, I don’t have that much time. Ben Ornstein: Along those lines, you’re pretty close. So yeah, so Michael Houck’s a founder. He’s got a newsletter called Houck’s Newsletter. We recently rebranded that to Founding Journey. And that is a newsletter with 65 plus thousand subscribers with, you know, founders, aspiring founders, VCs, everyone in the kind of startup ecosystem. Another resource that he wanted to create for founders was related to fundraising. And so, we kind of figured what better way to do that than by actually speaking with founders who have done it themselves. And so, that’s what this conversation is today. I’ve got a preset list of questions here. It’s very, you know, softball questions, things you will not have problem answering. Even if you haven’t answered them before What happens is I have the read AI guy in here because I turn this call the video into a transcript I use the transcript to turn into a text-based document. The video goes nowhere. It’s kind of just for us today and What we do is we post these the these case studies into a library for our premium subscribers Behind which is behind a paywall, but you still get that exposure to the entire email list because each Saturday when we post these publicly, or we post these to the library, you still, we still say to all founder, all newsletter subscribers, which ones were added to the library. So you still get the exposure there. You’ll have a chance to review the document before it’s posted. So I’ll send you a draft after the conversation. So you have a chance to kind of review and edit as you please. And yeah, that’s I think that’s about it. Any any questions? Daniel Liebeskind: Uh, I guess one would you be open to having me add my bot into just so that I can also uh, Have the things that I say be things that I can Uh, oh, I guess it already is in here You’ll get the um the transcript you’ll get the the conversation with the reader this guy Second, in terms of the goal for one of these case studies, we haven’t raised since 2021. We raised in the frothy market times, we’ve been generating a lot of revenue. We’ve gone through a bunch of different waves of what the company is focused on. I guess, just trying to figure out, is this actually thing for your readership. I also haven’t really talked publicly. I realize this isn’t quite public because it’s behind a paywall. But I’ve been up until this point pretty hesitant to talk too much about what’s happened with the company or even our positioning. That’s sort of shifting. So that’s why I took the meeting. But I guess two sides. One is, what are you… I don’t know what the questions are. So I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to get out of it, but what is typically, having not read any of your case studies before, what is typically like the angle or the objective that you’re trying to get out Ben Ornstein: of these case studies? Yeah, each story is unique, right? Every founder has different stories. We’ve interviewed founders that have raised barely a million dollars of their company now, but a previous company of theirs raised hundreds of millions or $50 million. We've had founders who have exited companies and they're looking completely backwards. We've also had founders that are extremely early in the journey and we're literally talking to them as they're building. So the stage of where you're at doesn't matter as much. What is exciting here is the unique insights that you have. Yes, 2021 was a different time. We've had a lot of founders who raised around that, and we've done like 80 of these. Each one's unique, and I would say we should at least give it a shot. And if after the conversation, or when I send you the draft, you're like, you know what? I don't want to talk about this publicly, or I don't like how this turned out. We can always, you know, scrap it. I think out of the 85 conversations we've had, I think one, That has turned out to be that way because like you get that the the you know You get to be able to tell your story, which is kind of exciting. Um, And yeah, I I'd say that should be the angle. Daniel Liebeskind: How do you feel? Yeah, I think that's fine. As long as I basically have like final cut and you're not going to publish anything without me Okaying it. Uh, yeah As you said, I guess what would be the timeline on publishing as well do I have any control over that? Because part of what I'm trying to think about here is structuring this strategically in what is happening with the company right now, which I can tell you about, you know, as we talk through this, but there is a timing component to all of this, as I'm sure it is for some of the founders that you talked to. And so that would be another big question, you know, is this released next week? Is it released in February? How does that typically work? Ben Ornstein: Yeah. As you mentioned, yes, there have been founders who have done the case study with us and say, hey, I can't release this till next year. If that's an issue, we can, you know, there's no urgency to post it immediately. We turn this around pretty quick. But if you say, hey, we're doing a fundraise, we're pivoting, whatever it may be, we can hold off until you give That's the go ahead. You, you have the final say. Daniel Liebeskind: Okay. And then last question I have is the readership that you have sounded, I forget the number you said, 80,000, 60,000, something like that. 65,000. Ben Ornstein: It used to be a hundred K, but he actually scrapped users that weren't reading. And, um, it was down to like 50 or 60 at some point it's climbing again. So, um, what is, what is the demographic? Daniel Liebeskind: What's the construct? Is it mostly founders? Are there VCs in there? What is the makeup? Do you have a sense of that? Ben Ornstein: I am not as familiar with like the breakdown, but I know it consists of many founders and aspiring founders. I am sure there are a decent amount of VCs in there as well. Daniel Liebeskind: Okay. Cool. All right, let's go for it. Let's go for it. Ben Ornstein: Again, no pressure. Yeah, I got it. Daniel Liebeskind: I understand. Ben Ornstein: You got it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Ben Ornstein: So, Daniel, can you please briefly introduce yourself and your startup? Daniel Liebeskind: I am Daniel Liebeskind. I'm founder and CEO of Topia. I'm actually a software engineer by vocation and sort of the engineering class of human. And I've been building things like Topia. Topia is basically a spatial communication and spatial navigation of content platform. And so we have topia.io, that is our consumer SaaS. We have something called schoolspace.io, that's our education SaaS. And then we also deploy the entire application suite as white label deployments that are dedicated single tenancy, can run on our customers' servers and single tenancy databases. And they're also completely white label, so they run on our customers' domain. They control the branding, they can customize everything. We have a full suite of APIs, an SDK. We have an experience engine, which is like a no-code game or experience builder. You can integrate it into any third-party system. And essentially, the core loop of the primary application called Topia is that you have an avatar in a world, in a 2.5-dimensional world, so it's not 3D. It's not overwhelming, it's not too much of a video game, but you do have this avatar, and you move it around, and whenever your avatar gets near other avatars, you connect over an encrypted data channel using something called WebRTC, which is what I've spent the last 10 years playing around with. And through those data channels, we can send all sorts of information. So we send streaming audio and video. We also can stream other kinds of data. So our experience engine is also built on these rails. We have a family of patents around it, but most importantly, this allows us to, we're using peer-to-peer WebRTC, so we're creating encrypted tunnels between users' devices, and that allows us to have massive scale and to stream both audio, video, and game state or experience state with a serverless multiplayer experience. And so we can put thousands, hundreds of thousands of people on these servers, or, you know, in our platform, even in a single world construct, we can have 1000s of participants concurrently. And not only does it scale that way, and you know, it's possible, right, as opposed to other platforms where you have a limited maybe to 25 people in an experience, we can have 1000 or 1000s. And it's serverless, so it costs nothing. Ben Ornstein: Wow. That's fascinating. You guys have a lot going on. Seems like amazing technology. That's really cool. Yeah. What can you share about the fundraising journey? You know, how many, how many rounds did you raise the amounts in those rounds if you're comfortable, but obviously no pressure to the valuations of those rounds and you know, how long they took to close? Daniel Liebeskind: So, uh, the first version, of Topia was actually a VR platform in 2018 called Everyspace. And when the pandemic hit in 2020, so about two years after we were experimenting with VR and 3D, pandemic hits, everybody suddenly really needs a better way to connect with each other online that feels more like you're in person. And in particular, there were some big events that were happening in 2020 that there where there was a big scramble to bring them online. And how do we bring these in-person events online in a way that feels human, feels organic? And so one of those big events, which prompted us really to switch to this 2.5 dimensionality and go to market three months after the first line of code of the new platform was written, was Burning Man. And we hosted, we were the official virtual Burning Man platform in 2020. We then did it again in 2021. But after the 2021 in August, so we rebuilt, we restarted the platform in basically April. We hosted Vertical Burning Man in August, and we had 20,000 people come to that. It was a huge success. My co-founder and I were scrambling every day. In the weeks leading up, we were building a lot of feature systems that enabled people to build their own camps. And the whole platform wasn't as scalable or performant as it is now, but we managed to get something together and we had 20,000 people come. On the tail of that, we had a lot of people who were blown away that we had built this thing and wanted to put money in. So we did a friends and family round in basically October of 2020. And there we raised, I think, 600 grand. And that led, also Burning Man led, to a series of deals with enterprise companies like Asana and Autodesk and Okta and Yale and Princeton and a whole slew of folks that were growing events. Online events were a big category at the time, if you may recall. And we were using those events as a way to build the technology. There were a few companies that were doing something similar. Similar proximity chat spatial communication at the same time. Most of them abandoned, in fact, I would say all of them abandoned peer-to-peer WebRTC in favor of something called SFUs, which are Selected Forwarding Units. They're basically server-based communication. We invested a lot of our resources and energy in perfecting peer-to-peer communication because we knew that if this platform in the long run actually going to be a viable way for people to build products and applications on top. It would need to scale in a way that SFU doesn't scale by itself. We wound up actually building a hybrid system. So we have SFU and we have peer-to-peer. There are benefits, pros and cons to each. For example, we use for broadcast. So that's a way now in the platform for one person to be able to broadcast their communication to 1,000 participants or 5,000 participants at once while everybody is peer-to-peer connected to each other. So we have the best of both worlds. And after we held a bunch of these events, massive success, we then raised a seed round led by 776, Alex Ohanian, Kayla Holloway, and Bonfire was our main follow-on. We also had 35 ventures, which is Kevin Durant, and some other investors in there as well. We raised about 5.2 million. At that time that was in, I think we closed that in May of 2021. And we haven't raised since then, right? That was our last fundraise. We then got inbounded by Ubisoft and the game studio and they, It made us realize that what enterprise companies were actually gonna want was not to bring all of their users into topia.io, but instead to be able to run their own platform, use our technology, build their own products, customize everything, white label it, have nobody even know it's Topia. And that brought us down the road of what we at the time called Metaverse Cloud. This was also at the same time that Facebook changed their name to Meta. Metaverse was kind of a big topic, and we were of the opinion that there shouldn't be one metaverse, but instead we would deliver technology so that everybody could create their own platform, just like how the internet actually works right now. You know, Salesforce isn't sending all of their users to Facebook. Instead, they run their own platform. They're using React, maybe, which is a coding framework created by Facebook, but they're running their own system. They own their own server, they own their own database, they have single tenancy, they can run their own SaaS platform that is controlled and customized by them. So we went down that road of building out that technology. We got inbounded again in mid-2023, or early 2023 actually, by a company called Stride. And they, this is where I need to be a little bit careful what I say, hold on. Ben Ornstein: Again, this goes, this is between you and me. So if you say, oh wait, actually, so yeah. Daniel Liebeskind: My biggest challenge as a founder CEO who's actually a software engineer is I often overshare. So I just need to be, I know this isn't like, this isn't a podcast that's going out there, but I got you. Yeah. So Sprite Inbounded Us, they are the largest provider of, they're a system of online virtual schools, I guess online virtual is kind of redundant, but they, they run virtual schools. And they had at the time, in the Republic company, so at the time that they inbounded us, I want to say they had 120,000 students that they were publicly, you know, saying in their enrollment numbers, that'd be worth checking what the actual numbers were, I don't remember offhand. And it inbounded us because virtual school is provided to homeschool kids. One of the challenges with being a homeschool kid is community and socialization and connecting with other kids, right? And so they had one of the primary reasons that kids leave their virtual schools is because they don't have a sense of connection to other students. And so they went out and they evaluated all of the They had conviction that a spatial communication platform would be the right solution for them, and they went and they evaluated all of the options out there, ultimately went with us because of our scalability, our cost structure, which we can achieve through our peer-to-peer WebRTC, and our white-label deployments that enable them to actually run their own platform on their own servers and control all of the data. And access control and so on. And so that brought us down this journey. I guess even before that, you know, when we were having events with folks like us on an Autodesk, what we found is that a lot of times kids would be looking over their parents' shoulder as the parents were working from home during the pandemic. And kids were really attracted to the platform. But having under 18-year-olds or under 16-year-olds in a platform platform like this is a little scary. And so we were always extremely hesitant. It was against our terms of service. You had to prove that you were a certain age in order to even get in. And so with Stride, what we had to do together was build a lot of systems for safety and moderation and strict access control to make this, to really transform this entire platform, re-architected so that it is built now from the ground up as a platform that can have a very robust moderation capability and very strict access control. So not an open network at all. The only way to get in is being a verified student of a school, whether it's a virtual school or brick and mortar school. Anything that has single sign-on or accounts that we can work with. And so that went really well. We did a pilot with them that turned into an expansion. We are now hitting all-time high usage on a weekly basis. We've expanded to other virtual schools outside of the Stride network. We're expanding into higher ed. But we are pretty firmly now in education. We've realized that is a massive market for us and especially for our technology and our capabilities. Others in our industry have focused more on virtual office. We haven't really spent that much energy on that. And yet, because of our robust API and SDK, which nobody else really has, certain companies are finding that they can do magical things with our platform that are not possible with any other platform. And so we have tons of virtual offices, we have hundreds of subscribers to topia.io that have nothing to do with education. We have developers that are building all sorts of interesting products and applications on top of our infrastructure. But ultimately, our primary focus right now is in the education market. Ben Ornstein: Wow. What a journey you guys have had. That's crazy. Cool, cool pivots. Man, that's wild. That's very exciting. I'm glad we did this because that story was awesome. So okay, amazing investors as well, by the way, very impressive. When you were raising, what did you plan ahead of time to use the funding for? Daniel Liebeskind: So we originally started as a B2C platform, right? We were running topia.io. That was what we were doing. Again, this was in a time when Facebook changed their name to Meta. Everybody was thinking about how do they build a metaverse platform. And so when we raised, it was actually to really go after this B2C social platform. Now, the timing of the close of our raise actually coincided with the writing being on the wall, from my perspective, as a founder, it became so clear to me that events and that B2C social needs were, you know, the pandemic was coming to its final legs and I saw that in a non-pandemic time the social platforms that enabled real-time communication maybe didn't have the same value they had during the pandemic and more often of online events, you know, when's the last time you even went to one of those, right? So it became pretty clear to me that we needed to evolve what we were doing away from just doing that. And that has been an incredible decision for a lot of different reasons. There was a company, I should have looked this up after last time I blanked on the name of it. There was a company that was basically the largest of the event providers that became valued at $10 billion. I think they were valued at $10 billion at this moment when we did the fundraise right in 2021. And two years later, they sold themselves for $15 million. So the online event market completely imploded. And so we pivoted away from that. When we did the raise, what Ohanian came in and was fired up about was really social. But also, a lot of VCs, when they invest, they are looking for a founding team that is capable, that can build their own technology, that can evolve, that can ride the market trends. They’re gonna be able to be the shepherd of whatever the product is into evolving markets. I’ve now heard a lot from my investors that that was also a big element of this, is that this was a big juicy thing. What we had built was pretty unique and our angle on it was pretty unique. They had confidence that we would be able to figure out how to navigate the market going forward as the market needs change. Even though we pivoted. We didn’t really pivot the product that much, but the markets that we were going after and the use cases we were going after have definitely evolved over time. Ben Ornstein: Incredible. And again, you’ve got some pretty impressive investors, but how did you decide which investors would be a good fit? Daniel Liebeskind: My goal in the fundraise was to find Somebody who is basically what I found was like the mayor of community in alexa handy and I found a reddit and then bonfire. Is very b2b and what I was looking for was. Really smart vcs that know what they’re talking about that I would want to work with that would not be. Overly controlling, you know, as a, that wouldn’t try to tell me what to do with the product. You know, I am a product person. I’ve built 30 different products over the last decade. I ran a dev shop. That’s what I did. Uh, and, uh, so I didn’t really need any product advice. Um, and you know, I was a VC in a former life in 2011, um, probably when I was about your age, I was a VC. Um, and, um, so, you know, I was looking for, smart investors that would basically let me be autonomous, wouldn’t try to exert control, but that would be really good sounding boards. And in particular, I wanted somebody on basically the consumer and community side, because that’s one side of what we were. And then somebody that was on the B2B side, because we were already doing deals with Asana and Autodesk and figuring out how to navigate enterprise deals. Challenging, not something I’d really done before. And so it was really important for me to get one of each of those. Ben Ornstein: So that’s what happened. Yeah, smart. Daniel Liebeskind: You clearly thought about it. Absolutely. And how did you get in touch with these investors? I don’t remember exactly what my process was. I knew some VCs already because I came from the VC world. I lived in San Francisco. What I did was reach out to them, those that I knew, and I would ask for advice. I would ask for connections to other VCs. So I wound up actually talking to 36 different VCs, something like that. And most of these were pre-seed seed investors. And yeah, I think that the advice to founders is, you know, somebody, right, that can make introductions, probably. And the key is warm intros, outbounding, I didn’t reach out to any VCs cold, like the, maybe the world’s changed, maybe that’s more of thing now. But at the time, you know, there was no like AI, write the email for me stuff. I generally find and you know, anybody that runs a sales business knows this, you know, cold outbound is just not that effective. VCs also have this. I guess this isn’t a podcast, I can just say it and then we can figure out how to write this into the article. But VCs have The key with VCs is to build momentum, and to have a tight timeline and to try to get them all excited at the exact same moment. So and part of the reason for that is that there is a confirmation bias, there is a somewhat of a herd mentality. That’s the thing I’m hesitant to say, but there is definitely a herd mentality when it comes to VCs. And they all want to be in the same deals, they want to confirm with each other. They want somebody, you know, if one VC is really into it, then a whole bunch of VCs are going to be in. But until you can find that lead, it can be very challenging to get anybody interested. And so having a tight timeline is the recommendation I give to most founders, because what you don’t want is a whole string of no’s. You don’t want an open-ended fundraising where everybody’s waiting for somebody to say yes, and then you’re not getting those, and then you start getting some no’s. You want to instead, if you can, manufacture a tight timeline, two months, I’m going to close on this date, or we’re not even doing the fundraise. And before you can get any no’s, you want to get some yeses. And then you tell everybody that you got the yeses, this is happening, who’s it? That’s the ideal way to start for this. And it helps if you have some friendlies that are interested, it helps, warm intros are pretty critical. You can get warm intros from VCs, from angels, from other founders. Networking with founders that are a stage ahead of you is the best. That actually is one of the things I did. So I knew some VCs already who gave me referrals. And then I knew other founders or I networked with founders, found out who their investors were, got intros because they thought what we were doing was cool. You should talk to my VC. They might be interested. And then whenever you’re talking to anybody, regardless of how the conversation goes, you ask them whether they know any other VCs that might be interested in this? Could they make an intro? And usually they’ll intro, if you can get them to intro you to two, for every VC you talk to, you get two intros, you have an expenditure curve and you can talk to as many as you want. I would also, when you’re having those first conversations, you’re not actually fundraising yet, right? You’re asking for advice, what metrics would they wanna see? You’re telling them that you’re planning on doing a fundraising, but again, you wanna actually manufacture a window. So you want to do all these conversations before you’re actually fundraising. And you tell everybody that you’re you’ll let them know when you’re actually doing the fundraise. And then you let them all know at once. And you give them the timeline on what you’re doing. I would also say, you should have two versions of your deck, one that’s really short, that’s your teaser, VCs are going to spend 20 seconds looking at your deck. So if you send them a 30 page teaser, whatever you’re trying to communicate, they’re not even gonna see. Short teaser, and then you can send that beforehand, you meet with them, and then afterwards you can send the long form, because they’re either gonna be interested and they’ll read that, or they’re not interested and they won’t read it anyways. Yeah, I don’t know, what other questions? I can keep going on this advice. Ben Ornstein: Those were amazing. You answered like three of the questions. Which is amazing. So we can skip over a couple of them because you gave me more than enough, which is awesome one thing you said there was You had 36 conversations. I believe you said If you think about it like a funnel How many people did you have initial conversations with how many of those led to second third? Conversations and ultimately how many checks did you end up with you know roughly? It doesn’t have to be perfect. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Let me think about that. Daniel Liebeskind: 36 is just a number I’m pulling out of a hat. By the way, it’s not the exact number, but you know, something like, Ben Ornstein: No one ever has the exact number. Daniel Liebeskind: Yeah, I don’t know. It was something like 36. Some of them, went into next meetings, some people, you know, you’re always going to get some nose. And part of fundraising is also just having thick skin, right? There’s a million reasons, you know, at the time, we didn’t have even really insights into some of the metrics that VCs care about. And we just weren’t even tracking some of them. So that that made us sort of out for some like, some of our retention insights weren’t that strong at the Now, we have a lot of analytics around these kinds of things, but people passed for various reasons after the first meeting, weren’t interested in a second meeting. But in a lot of those cases, in almost every one, they still intro’d me to other people, which was interesting. And then I would say probably half of them turned into second meetings, maybe more, maybe three quarters turned into second meetings. Often the VC would bring other people for the team in. We talked through metrics, sometimes they bring in experts or like product experts, VCs often are not that technical. And so a lot of the technical things that me that I was talking about, they just had no way to assess whether they mattered. And we Also, we then got down to, I guess, the exact percentages. Let’s see. I think we had something like 10 that were interested in investing. And I did my tight timeline. I started basically interviewing them to understand. So usually, I guess the way it went is first meeting was kind of like a teaser, we’re talking through the stuff during the vision. Second meeting, they’re bringing more people from their team to do a deeper analysis and evaluation. Third meeting was usually, if you know, third, if they’re taking a third meeting, they’re, they’re interested, they’re very interested, right? They’re not in the habit of wasting their time, they there’s a lot of huge market of companies out So if they’re meeting you a third time, they’re extremely interested. Usually in those third meetings, it’s more me interviewing them and understanding how they help, how they work with founders. What other companies have they invested in that are similar to this? Who would be the partner? And by then you kind of know who the partner is that you’re working with. But what would be the relationship between us? What are the touch points? How involved do they like to be? What are their unique angles, right? So whether they’re B2B, some are experts at hiring and can help you with HR and recruiting. Some are very technical and can help you with your technology and product. And here, it really matters who you are as a founder and who your founding team is, right? What you want to bring in are people that are complimentary to you, think of them as teammates. And what can they bring to the table that’s going to allow you to the gaps in your and your founding team’s weaknesses. I tend to find that when hiring, what you want to do is hire superheroes at a few different things rather than generalists who are not actually superheroes at anything. But that way, you wind up with a construct of a team of superheroes that can all fill in each other’s weaknesses. So it’s fine to have weaknesses, but you need to have superpowers. And so your VC should be a similar kind of thing. Right, where you want them to be really expert, at least this is the way I look at it, really expert in a couple things that are going to be extremely helpful to your team and help you amplify. And then your construct of VCs that you’re bringing in, you also want to be complimentary to each other. And for everybody bringing something to the table that’s going to help you explode out of the gate. And so that was what I was trying to do. You know, I sort of narrowed it down to, to a handful of them. And ultimately, around Ohanian being the lead, you know, he was kind of my, you often have your one or two or three VCs that are like, for whatever reason, are kind of a no brainer, you know, if you can get them in, then it’s lights out for you. Because maybe they’re somebody that you just would really like to work with, having your gravitational orbit. You think that they can make a huge difference. Maybe they have a lot of connections in your industry, whatever it is. And so Ohanian was one of those for me. Bonfire, I actually had known of the partner. I’d heard of him before. He was pretty legendary salesperson in the B2B area. And this is Brett Queener. And he was an early, Salesforce guy, just savage in B2B. And when I was talking to him, he also was kind of no bullshit. He was very straightforward. I liked that a lot. And what I found with Ohanian, when I showed him the platform is he pitched me on the vision I already had, which blew my mind. I’m like, okay, we are like kindred spirits. He gets it. And then Brett was It’s just really straightforward and I knew I could trust what he was saying. He also has a, he’s, he’s a great coach. And so that was ultimately why I picked the two of them. They just were, were, they got it. They were good people. You know, I try to hire good humans who are also ninjas. And who loved topia and so I sort of had that same Evaluation for my vcs, right? That’s the ek guy. We’re looking for and uh, A lot of words about that That’s awesome. Ben Ornstein: You mentioned brett and I realized I was connected with him on linkedin. I don’t remember how we got connected or What now but his content on linkedin is phenomenal. So, um, he’s great Um legend. Daniel Liebeskind: Yeah, anybody that can raise from from brett or bonfire, uh, you know all the partners there are really incredible. They’re just a really standout firm. And again, not all VCs are created equal in their approach to founders. So Bonfire is extremely founder friendly. They’re very helpful. They go out of their way to give you coaching and advice. I don’t use them that much for like therapy, but I know a lot of founders do, and they’re happy to do it. Out of their way to be helpful and nourishing to their founders. And so that would be another factor that founders should evaluate when it comes to VCs. The size and scale of the VC also matters a lot. If you’re raised from one of the big players, you might be a little bit of a cog in their wheel. And finally, the last thing I would say is if you have a VC on your board, it’s also important to know that the partner that is on the board is not necessarily going to be a partner that’s always on your board. VCs have the ability to swap out partners whenever they want, or maybe a partner leaves. And so you should actually try to make sure that the other partners that might be put on your board are people you’d want to work with as well. Ben Ornstein: That’s a great point. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that one. That’s really interesting. And that’s like the next level of diligence on your side. That’s great. Daniel Liebeskind: Well, and it might, it might build it down from what is the mission and the ethos of the VC firm itself? Who are the partners that they bring on? Ben Ornstein: Make sure you’re aligned with that. Yeah. A hundred percent. Daniel Liebeskind: You know, when you were doing these, the, the pitching, what did you emphasize in your pitch? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh man. Ben Ornstein: I assume a lot of it was the technology. Daniel Liebeskind: You know, we had a little bit of an advantage here because our platform is a communication platform. So we were able to bring people into the worlds and into the, it was like we were doing a demo during the pitch. And so a lot of it was bring people in. We always talk about, and this is true for sales too, the light bulb moment. So we’re trying to get them to have this epiphany where they realize what it is that is happening here. That can be a combination of technology or use cases or experiences that we have that we either construct or that happen organically. And then you can kind of see it happen and the light bulb happens where they start getting excited and they start pitching you on all the things. So we always, you know, when it comes to sales or VCs or anybody, you know, that’s what we’re trying to do is get to that light bulb moment. And so a lot of my pitches were basically that I never used a deck, you know, I’d send the teaser deck, I never walked through a deck, not once. With the exception that sometimes there were a few I think, maybe I did this later, I don’t remember. But you know, we can actually put decks in the worlds themselves and have like content journeys in our worlds. So we would flex our platform to do something cool that that also gave them the information. But generally, I never pitch from a deck. And, you know, it was more about like, what’s the vision talking about, you know, as I when I first started talking to VCs, I had no idea really what they were going to ask about. The more you talk to the better you get. That’s another piece of advice is don’t necessarily talk to your like number one VC that you desperately want to invest first, like whoever you talk to first, you’re probably going to have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re not going to say the right things. It takes like six of these before you start actually realizing through their questions and what they’re digging in on the things that they’re going to ask. And by, you know, VC conversation 10 or 15, you’re anticipating everything they’re going to say. And even the first question they ask, you realize which thread they’re going down because you’ve, you’ve seen the patterns. Uh, and you, you also update your teaser deck and your investor deck every time you have VC conversation. You have to do some research. If you don’t know the answer to something, don’t just make it up. You don’t want to lie to your VCs. The worst way you can possibly get started in a relationship and a partnership is to lie. So don’t lie, first of all. Some founders do. We never did that. People are able to raise big amounts of money on lies, but you wind up kind of trapped. And if you are lying playing, you’re like almost Ponzi scheming yourself, right? Because now you have to like for your next round, the whole point in any VC round is to get to your next round really, right? Or to use this money to make it so you don’t have to raise again, right? To generate revenue, to get to profitability or to raise your next round. And so it’s very dangerous to make things up or to lie or to embellish too much where you’re now like playing this catch up and you raise it too high of a valuation and your next round is unreachable, be careful about that. But in the pitches, if you don’t know the answer, just tell them, you’ll get back to them. Go do the research, let them know. You can do an async, send them a follow-up email. And then that information can go into your appendix. If it starts getting asked or you start talking about it, pull it up into a primary page. And that was the process. I was continually updating the deck. It’s also really useful even if you’re not going to raise money or you’re not sure that you need to raise or whatnot. This process is actually very helpful in understanding how others think about your business and a lot of VCs weren’t necessarily operators but they have a lot of anecdotal experience in talking to companies that succeed and those that fail. So you from them in how to think about your company in a way that companies that succeed think about their companies? Ben Ornstein: I love that answer. And the last part there about creating the deck and going through the process of it, even if you’re not going to actually use it. We have a podcast and we interviewed the Cameo founder, Stephen Galanis. He said the exact same comment, never pitched for the deck, but going through that process as he did, super valuable. It enabled him to master what to emphasize on the pitch. Daniel Liebeskind: So I love that. And, and, and look, you know, we now in sales conversations, we’ll sometimes get questions from, uh, from prospects about the same similar things to what VCs asked actually, because if you think about it, especially in the enterprise world, these companies are, you know, think about it from their perspective, you’re asking them to partner with a startup. Which is taking a lot of risk in execution. Are we going to be able to pull it off? And are we going to be viable? Are we going to be around in nine months or 12 months or two years? And if they’re going to invest their energy and resources in partnering, then they want to know that that’s true. And so they actually often have a little bit of a VC hat on and going through this VC process actually makes you more effective instead. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: 100%. Ben Ornstein: Couldn’t agree more. Okay, few questions left. So, you know, in retrospect, it looks so easy. It sounds so easy. Daniel Liebeskind: What was the biggest challenge that came up during fundraising? Biggest challenge. It just, you know, it takes a lot of time and energy away from the founder, focusing on building the business. Now, as we just talked about, there can be a lot of value, especially to the CEO who is charged with having the vision, understanding the metrics, what metrics should you be focused on, VCs can help you figure that out. But, you know, it does take time away from you have a limited amount of resource in yourself and your team. So it can be distracting. And one It was a little bit for us. Net, I think it was valuable and worth it. But that’s one that was one maybe one challenge. You know, we also were fundraising, we were doing our pitches in our product. And this was six months after the first line of code in a pretty complicated platform. And it didn’t always work at that time. Perfectly. It was very scary. Every single I went to a meeting, I wasn’t 100% sure we were going to connect. All that’s been fixed, right? You know, and the platform is extremely stable and reliable and performant now. But at the time, it was a little scary. And I think the corollary for others is if you’re doing a product demo to a VC, and it doesn’t perfectly work, you know, live demoing is a little scary. Other people get around this by just sending a video or playing a video even during the pitch. I never did that. I was always live demoing. So that was challenging. Let’s see, what else? Yeah, I guess the things that make you successful as a founder a CEO may not be the exact same skills that make you successful as a fundraiser is another one. So, you know, as a software engineer, I’ve worn a lot of different hats through my life. So I was able to do this, and I was a VC. So this wasn’t a huge challenge for me. But as a software engineer, it’s not always easy to talk to VCs, it can be very intimidating. They’re often very direct, they often at least as though they have very limited time and will like cut you off and tell you that your answer was wrong or that your idea is stupid. You know, that sort of dynamic can happen and you never really experience that with your employees or even really in sales. You know, VCs can be like the most aggressive conversations that you have. So I think the key is to just realize that this is all a big game that everybody’s playing and not take anything personally. Use everything as a learning and evolving yourself. Ultimately, as your company succeeds, you’re going to have to have, you’re going to wind up in these kinds of conversations. And it’s actually better to practice with VCs than in the sales deal that you’re really trying to close and you’re talking to the CEO and it turns out that person’s extremely aggressive, aggressive than the VCs, it’ll be good that you actually had that experience. Ben Ornstein: But it can be a little darn at times or at first, at least. 100%, absolutely. Are there any resources that you would recommend to other founders? Daniel Liebeskind: This could be books, podcasts, newsletters, really anything. I’ve started successful founders, I find the stories really interesting. There’s a series called acquired, for example, that talks about the rise of different companies that I’ve found to be extremely interesting. And you realize that, you know, everybody’s journeys are different, but often the companies that wind up being Microsoft, or at least in Microsoft case, for example, And Zuckerberg does the same thing. They’re sort of masters of being really determined and playing a few different games at once where no matter what happens, they win. And often these companies are also just riding tailwinds, usually multiple tailwinds at once that are magnifying into this tremendous moment in time where this company can actually ride it. Now, not everybody is able to do that, but a lot of the lessons that you learn from other founders, and you can get these lessons from talking to other founders. I find that talking to founders that are one stage ahead is most useful to me. But you want to sprinkle that with talking to founders that are a stage behind, because there are founders that are willing to talk to you when they’re ahead. So pay it forward, right? And always be talking to founders that are a stage ahead at your stage and behind. Founders that are like three stages ahead can be helpful, but it’s going to be usually anecdotal or more remembering what they used to deal with rather than what they’re dealing with right now or like what you’re going to deal with over the next year. And what else? I have a book called the CEO Within that’s been kind of useful for CEOs. What’s that? Is that Matt Mockery? Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good one. I read books like that. They can be helpful. I would also say that as a founder, you get a lot of advice from a lot of different people. And I am a big proponent of advice. I love talking to people and getting their perspectives and opinions. But if you’re going to do that, you need to be really careful that you use all the advice and data points. Nobody knows your business like you do. Nobody knows your industry or your product like you do. Nobody can actually tell you what to do. Everybody’s giving data points that you have to then use to formulate your own perspective and your own conviction around things. And that’s true of podcasts and books and people and other founders. You’re the one that has to make this thing happen. They can’t do it for you. Ben Ornstein: It’s a great point. And okay, the last question here is, do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? Daniel Liebeskind: Have AI in your company right now if you want to raise. No, that’s not a real that’s not a real hot take. Daniel Liebeskind: I feel like I’ve already shared some of mine. Yeah, the best way to get people interested in giving you money is to have them own a vision that is very similar to yours, but have them have conviction about it. So like, ultimately, rather than telling somebody what your vision is, if you can get them to have their own vision, and it happens to be what you believe as well, and what you then share, that’s really effective. Yeah, I sold knives for Cutco. And one of the things that I always did there was, whenever I was meeting with somebody, I’d ask them for referrals. So again, that’s critical. I was critical for gold. It doesn’t work. Warm is extremely effective. So definitely use referrals. Have lived in Silicon Valley, it’s helpful. That one’s not real either. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I shared a bunch of, I can just kind of like regurgitate a lot of this stuff. I don’t know if I already said, but what is a hot take to you? Just the Harvey Bent looks at you frozen. Testing, testing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: you Bye. You