Business Innovators Radio - Episode 2: A Founder’s Journey Through VC with Sara Ledterman

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

What’s it like to raise venture capital as a woman founder- even with a successful exit under your belt? In this episode, Sara Ledterman shares her eye-opening experience navigating the world of fun...draising, the unconventional questions she faced, and the investors who took a chance on her.Whether you’re an aspiring founder, an investor, or just curious about how venture capital is evolving, this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.Fractal Focushttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/fractal-focus/a-founders-journey-through-vc-with-sara-ledterman

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Starting point is 00:00:01 Welcome to Fractal Focus, the podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. And welcome to Fractal Focus. My name is Philip Lorenzo. And what a pleasure I have to talk to Sarah Letterman today. And what the focus of our conversation is going to revolve around quite a few things. One, it's going to revolve around how do we get money to do the things we love to do. Right. And then the other thing we want to talk about is how to keep our track of, of how you're actually getting your fundraising done. How effective are the tools that you're using? How effective is your team? And so those are a few of the topics that we're going to touch on with Sarah Letterman today. So Sarah, let's go ahead and get into one big thing that we always ask people when we talk about what they do.
Starting point is 00:00:49 What got you into doing this for a living? Doing and helping people get to where they want to go. I think that it started when I was a founder. So I did my first company with a friend in my early 20s. And it was really interesting because at the time, we didn't really know what we were doing. We built our own sort of friends and family round. We put together the money we had saved for like cars after college and started a company with that and grew it.
Starting point is 00:01:23 And we did that in a traditional sense. We actually got loans through banks and did all those. things to grow the business and really were heavily reliant on cash growth and debt growth. So we started another company in the tech space and we did that because we were building tech tools to support our non-technical company. And in that, we thought we needed capital to really accelerate that growth. And I was in the valley at the time. So we started raising venture capital in 2010 when there were very few women raising venture capital and that was quite an interesting experience in that it was really different than building from a cash flow basis where you had money coming
Starting point is 00:02:13 in the door and then you were getting loans against and borrowing against either a physical property or borrowing against, you know, what we had coming in through the books. And starting from zero and saying, we want to fund this idea with nothing was a really strange proposition. But once we got our heads around it, it was like, this is really cool. But it's a whole different type of environment to reason. And it was the first time I was ever really questioned for being a founder as a woman. and I had successful exit under my belt, and I got really strange questions that I felt like
Starting point is 00:02:52 other founders weren't getting. So it really opened my eyes. And in the process of that, we found some really incredible investors who took risk for us, but also a lot of people who opened doors for us. And that was helpful in getting our first, like, round closed and then building our MVP and getting that to the market because we never could have built a product like that at the time without venture capital. It just wouldn't have been possible. And so do you feel like that experience, the good and the bad of it, has that influenced the way that you approach venture capital today
Starting point is 00:03:33 and the way that you approach other founders in your seat? And also, how has it changed since you first started to where we are now? So I have tons of empathy because I've seen. sat now on both sides of the table. And I also think that it's important to note that venture capitalists also raise funds. So we're now raising funds and deploying funds. So it's still, there's a lot of empathy for founders in there. And I think I look at product differently because I've been a founder. So I look at the teams and how they interact and where they're at and how they're thinking about product from that lens of knowing what it takes to build a product and get a product like that launched. I'm always really curious about how founders are thinking about traction in the early days
Starting point is 00:04:27 or even how they organize their fundraise because I feel like that is a really important piece. If you can't organize a fundraise and build a product at the same time, you're probably just not going to be a successful founder because it takes a ton of grit and determination to do both and a lot of knows. And so if I see founders really disorganized in their fundraise, it usually is a sign that the product probably won't be able to stay on track for the build. And I think that's an interesting analogy that I don't hear very often, but it is a sign for me.
Starting point is 00:05:00 I ask them how their fundraise is going. I ask them how they're managing their fundraise, how they're managing the team, who's leading product while they're doing that. And it gives me a good sense of how the founder can, manage sort of early growth. So that's one of the things they really focus on. In thinking about managing fund growth, is it a problem of you have an idea, you're really excited about it?
Starting point is 00:05:23 You're like, I really want to do this. I really want to make this happen. And you have kind of blinders on where you're not thinking about how to really organize it once you get those funds in for your amazing idea. Is it a matter of just sometimes people are too eager and think too many steps ahead without actually doing the work that they need to do in between? Is that maybe an issue that you run into often? So I think where the disconnect sometimes is,
Starting point is 00:05:51 is founders think if they can just raise the money, everything else will be easy. And that's really a problem. And we've seen a bubble around this. I feel like the last five years where they're just like raise, raise the funds and the product will come. And that really doesn't work. What I think I see in really stellar founders is they have a very strong idea of where they want to end up.
Starting point is 00:06:20 And in their mind, the steps that they need to take to get there. And they've actually done the work on planning it out and testing the market. And that's really helpful in us understanding that they A, can take feedback and pivot from it or adapt around it, that they're also willing to really do the work to make sure that they're going in the right direction. Because venture capital isn't to start from day one for most things. Most things are not even as capital intensive as they were 10 years ago because technology has come so far. Like you can get an MVP off the ground with nothing. Like you can do a no-code MVP.
Starting point is 00:07:01 So we expect founders to have at least done something. and then they have a really clear idea of what they're going to do with those funds. Because we've seen, you know, rounds that have closed that are crazy amounts of money. And if you don't have a strategic plan, you don't have any kind of market fit on what you're building, then that money just dissipates. And that's really not what venture capital is for. I think it's to accelerate to market whatever you're building or to be able to expand your team to build the right type of product. but I don't think at its core it's to test an idea anymore.
Starting point is 00:07:39 The one thing that comes to my when I hear about founders who either haven't hit that mark or haven't really done all the due diligence that you're talking about is an imposter syndrome. I think about that being a possible thing with some people. And is that and forgive me if this is a misstatement, but could it be also over time as women have shaped these leadership roles more and more and become more founders, has that been part of the experience where it's like, I'm going into this space, am I going to be good enough to do this? And does that, have you found that that's affected you at all?
Starting point is 00:08:14 Or not you personally, but affected people that you've talked to or women that you may have been working with. And does that kind of mix in? And I know that may be a little complex sauce I just give you, but I don't know. I actually think it might be a little bit of the opposite. Women are much more prone to proving themselves first before, asking for funds, like the last thing they will do is raise capital. Typically, they'll already have revenue. They'll have already figured out how to get a product in market, whether they're
Starting point is 00:08:43 flintstoneing it or, you know, it's actually a tech viable product already. They've done the testing. They've got some funds coming in. And they usually typically have customers already. Women are 45% more capital efficient already, just as a statistic. So I think that do the opposite. I think they're much more attuned to building something and then asking for funding when they've derristened it versus their counterparts that sometimes start a little earlier and are just like, we're just going to raise the money and we're going to sort of test this on someone else's dime. And I think that that's the part of the equation that's really shifting in the last 24 months. As the market's constricted, I think people are moving back towards the, you need to put
Starting point is 00:09:30 in the work and you need to test this and you need to prove. bit out a little bit before you come and ask us for funds. And that's how the old market was. And I think that we need to maybe move back a little bit. There's a lot of maturity in that, right? There's a lot of like, I feel like that's a mature stance, like when proving your product or provability before asking for funds, because for a while it was like the Wild Wild West, right? Like the early days of Silicon Valley, the early days of tech was all about just throwing money at a thing and figuring out if it worked or not, which, um, I don't want to get too much into gender politics here,
Starting point is 00:10:06 but it could speak greatly to like who was actually more of the founders spectrum, right? So that's amazing that it's actually kind of, that that's a reflection point where it's like the way that women have done it is actually probably the right way to do it or at least as close to the right way to do it, right? Yeah, I think non-Silican Valley folks in general tend to do it that way. We love looking at other parts of the country. We tend to find founders build that way more because they don't have access, but they also just intrinsically seems to build more solid companies. The other thing, if you think about it, venture capital should be accelerating what you know works.
Starting point is 00:10:54 And a lot of founders are using it to test. And I think that becomes problematic at some level. obviously testing new streams of revenue, maybe, but if you fundamentally don't know who your customer is or how you're going to sell to them or that you actually can sell to them, you can raise and burn a lot of money before you actually ever find that fit. And so that kind of goes back to the team and understanding how the team thinks and whether they're going to be good stewards of those funds and how they're going to use those funds in a way to make sure that they are capitalizing on the most efficient growth possible.
Starting point is 00:11:35 What do you find is the biggest mistake? Out of all the mistakes a founder can make in this process, right? Whether, wherever they are, whatever stage they're in, in raising funds, what is the biggest mistakes you have found founders make on the way to trying to get their product to market or on the weight of fundraising? Oh, how long do we have? fundamentally, I think the most important thing early is founder product fit, not necessarily product market fit for us because before there's a product,
Starting point is 00:12:13 before there's revenue, it's really seeing, is the founder looking at this problem in a way that gives them a competitive edge? And are they seeing something that other people aren't seeing? or are they seeing something in a different way? I think that's really important because a lot of times founders think that they're not, they're the only ones building something. And typically, if they've stumbled upon this problem
Starting point is 00:12:38 where it's become glaring enough that they're figuring out how to solve it, there's a dozen other people doing the same thing and not because of anything other than the problem is becoming more apparent to the market. And so when we're evaluating them against the 12 other people that are trying to build a very similar product. So we're really trying to figure out how they
Starting point is 00:13:02 look at the problem, how they uniquely want to solve the problem, and then how open to being adaptable if that doesn't quite go the way they think and how are they going to move within the market. And I think that's where we really look at diversity and thought within a team. So we require a female co-founder on the team because in our philosophy, if you aren't building with 51% of the population, you're not building for 51% of the population. And it also adds just general diversity to a team. And I think that's really important when you're able to assess a product from multiple lenses internally. And so we look for that, number one. And I think within that, I'd say team, team, team. So how does the team interact? How do they engage? How are they, you know,
Starting point is 00:13:58 in relationally like organizing tasks and assigning tasks? Because it's really stressful, even just fundraising. We see a lot of teams fall apart in fundraising really early on. Because you hear a lot of knows and how, how do they sort of manage building a product and a lot of rejection and probably a lot of products stumbling blocks. So we watched teams for a little while and just see how they manage that, how they're organizing things. That's probably a lot more detail than people want. But super early on, those are your benchmarks, right? Because you don't have a product yet. When we start to see people in fundraising mode and really talking about like budgets and are they thoughtful about spending? Do they actually know how to put numbers together
Starting point is 00:14:51 and do projections and what do those look like and where are they pulling revenue sources from? I mean, I think those are some questions that we probably deep dive on a lot because it gives us insight into how they're thinking about the market. And a lot of founders don't take the time to build out those models. And the exercise isn't about being right. The exercise is about how fluid is your thinking around the market and how are you sort of building in backstops if something doesn't work to pivot or to adjust? Like how fluid are you in reaching the outcomes rather than just following a very specific process? Because it requires a lot of adaptability. And I think that's one of the things that we see. We like founders who are really anchored in the solution.
Starting point is 00:15:44 but not necessarily in how to solve it. But there is nuance in that. And it's that they have like an ABC plan. So they can move fluidly and then, you know, be open to changing. So in other words, to kind of dumb it down for me, I guess, is know where you're going, but don't be strict about the path because it could change. As long as you know your goalpost, you can find different plays and stuff like that. forgive the sports analogy, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:16:15 Be very to the problem, not the solution. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And we see a lot of products. I mean, pivot. You've seen this through time, like some products that started as something and then ended up solving a different problem or becoming something different.
Starting point is 00:16:31 And I think that is also something like having that ability to just really stick to being a part of the team and being in that company because there's a lot of troubles that come up. I mean, it's definitely a roller coaster or never be a straight shot. I mean, we see companies raise $500 million and fall apart. You're like, how did that happen? How did they get so far down the road? And it's probably because there was not a lot of structure put in place early on and they just grew, grue-g-ro-g-roo. So it's really important to have someone looking at the, you know, one-foot
Starting point is 00:17:14 level and someone looking at the 3,000-foot level. And we look for balance like that on those teams. Because if everyone's up in the clouds, then who's actually, you know, counting the dollars down below or making sure products on track or the other thing we really look for is teams that will stick to deadlines. I think it's really hard when you're building a product to kind of distill it down and make sure you fundamentally trying to solve the problem as efficiently as possible.
Starting point is 00:17:44 And so we look for teams that just aren't overbuilding because that is like the death of a product. That is absolutely the other product because you've lost sight of the whole point. You still have to release a product. It could be the most wonderful product you've ever thought of.
Starting point is 00:17:59 Yeah. And if you have no deadline to launch it, then. Well, not only that, but you should, no product, I have a saying, No product you build should be pretty. It should be ugly and dysfunctional in this,
Starting point is 00:18:11 but it should work well enough, and it should solve a problem well enough that people want to use it anyway. Like they'll use it when it's ugly. Like, beta is great for them. And if you can get people on board at beta, then you know that you're, you know, you can make it prettier,
Starting point is 00:18:26 you can always make more bells and whistles. But fundamentally, whatever you're building, people should just want to use, right? That's brilliant. Sarah Letterman talking to us today about venture capital, the impact of women in the space, and also the power of deal send. So Sarah, we've been talking about so many different aspects of getting started with venture capital, getting into deal flow, but tell me what deal send is all about and what it can do to help anybody that is in this process.
Starting point is 00:19:06 make it a little easier and introduce people to the sales of a platform, but more importantly, what can it do for someone that's going through it? Well, I think there's two components of that. Being on the investor side now and having previously been on the founder side, I think there's two very distinct value propositions for each group. One of the things for a founder is just keeping things organized. And we always use a spreadsheet. And there's just no good way.
Starting point is 00:19:36 Like we've tried every CRM out there and all the things. But it's just really hard because there's a lot of detail that has to go into those pieces and just a lot of follow-up. And there's a lot of moving parts. It's who are you sending your data room to? How are you organizing your information? Are you keeping it updated every month? So it's not going out of, it's not obsolete. And all the things that happen.
Starting point is 00:19:58 And then also managing who has access to all that data. Because a lot of times, like an investor can ghost you and then you really don't want them having access. So there's a lot of components of just managing the fundraise that are really time consuming. They're hard to keep updated. And things are really spread out. Like you've got a Google Drive or you've got a docksend folder and you've got email and sometimes Slack. And there's just a million places that you're managing all of this communication. And it really makes sense to have it centralized because it's just easier.
Starting point is 00:20:31 Also, there's a lot of tracking and accountability, and it's a lot easier to share with your teams, and everyone can sort of update their piece rather than one person having to, you know, herd the cats and get all the data in. Another great component of is that it will automate, obviously, all of those pieces. So writing updates is a lot easier and less time consuming. And diligence is easier to manage, and also all of your data is cleaned for you. So you're not worried about. them seeing all the, you know, bank statements, like the information's there, but, but your privacy
Starting point is 00:21:06 is protected or your, you know, your statements are protected. So there's really interesting components for founders that are really compelling. And obviously after you have all those investors in and your round is closed, like you've got all of your docs in one place that will easily translate to the next fundraising round. It's easily updatable and shareable and just manages a lot of those components for the long haul in a much more effective way. So I think that's the compelling side on the founder side. Now, on the investor side, I think it's great, obviously, for compliance. It's great for partners managing, you know, the analyst pieces and conversations and where they are and updates. Speaking of updates, you just got one, which is fine. Let's just roll right along.
Starting point is 00:21:58 I did. I thought I had shut up. that notification down. That's okay. It's good that someone wants to reach you. But on that note, like, when you get updates, you don't know where you're getting them. And people are so fluid with communication channels. I mean, it's WhatsApp. It's text messages. It's, you know, email and Slack and all of these things. And there's a lot of compliance issues around having this scattered information everywhere. And also, I think, for just keeping track of deals and all of the components of a deal in one place is really compelling. And we've built out in the past elaborate air tables and forms and all of these things. And it just becomes like this mess of 20 different platforms that you're
Starting point is 00:22:47 trying to like cobble together. And it just doesn't really work well. Like there's nothing efficient. So I like that deal is an efficient place for us to just manage a deal and really have transparency into all the pieces and all the people involved. It also allows us to get real-time data about the companies that we're deligencing, which I really like. It's validated third-party data. So that's really important. And then the last component I'll say is having all that stuff for the next round or for future rounds to be able to go back and transparently see what happened, I think is really important. The last thing I will say is that there's a whole piece of just being able to organize your
Starting point is 00:23:38 team effectively now that people are co-located everywhere. And Slack becomes like this jumble, like you can't have a Slack for every deal. And then how do you like manage the archive of that and all these things? So that's on the sort of team management and deal management piece, but there's a bigger piece in filtering out what actually is an investable company to us. And because Dealson has the founders fill out these robust demographics, they only have to do it once. I think that's the other thing for founders. Like they do this robust intake, but they're one and done in terms of not having to go to 20 different websites and like, fill out some random form here for this investor. I think when we surveyed people, it was like
Starting point is 00:24:26 close to 40 different deal application sites they had to fill out. And so if you can just drop a deal send link and everyone gets that and gets all the information they need because you've done so many different intake fields that whatever someone's looking for on the other side is in one of those fields. And for us in our direct investments, there has to be a female co-founder. We look for diversity, we look for a lot of different things. We also look for markers in terms of either where the product is or what their fundraising or what the terms are. It allows us to flush out a lot of deals right off the bat. And it's beneficial to founders. You know, like, you're not a fit for our portfolio. Like, who wants to put an analyst on the phone with the founder? Waste the
Starting point is 00:25:09 founder's time in fundraising, waste the team time and have it not be a productive conversation where you could just go back and say, hey, like, this is too early for us. Come back and, you know, add us to your update list. We'll keep getting their updates and deal send, which we can manage an archive and have available when we need them. But on the flip side, it saves us so much time and is so much more transparent of a process. And I think what's great about that is that you're looking at filtering the whole way through. In other words, it just cuts that time down.
Starting point is 00:25:43 I think there's so much unnecessary time. in a process, especially if you're talking about like introductions that go nowhere because something wasn't fully vetted or something wasn't fully addressed and these systems being so disparate traditionally, having a single source of truth, I think for everybody, is pretty valuable. Knowing that, like, who is there an ideal user of Dilsend or is there a spectrum of ideal users right now as you see it? I think there's a spectrum of ideal users. but if you were to break it down and say like who today should be using this is anyone in the fundraising process in VC land I say and then also I think the most beneficial it probably is is for emerging managers smaller teams or teams that are spread out in different places that aren't in the office together I think it's a great replacement for the slack air table Google Drive
Starting point is 00:26:41 Docs and all of the stuff that we're maintaining and zapping together or whatever. I think that that's a great place to start. And I think it's an easy sort of turnover. The nice thing for the long term is for managers that they can then pull ongoing data. So there's a lot of valuable portfolio data that they can access that's validated in third party. And I think we've seen the market kind of do crazy stuff. And you're not really hearing what's going on, but you can actually visualize the data and see what's going on with portfolio companies, which I think is very valuable for both the portfolio companies because sometimes they just don't know what they don't know. And also for the investors to have transparency and how things are progressing because they
Starting point is 00:27:24 can stop loss a lot earlier and sort of get in and help those companies right side things before they become like massive problems. I kind of think this product in our conversation so far, it makes so much sense that you've developed this or that you've been working on developing this product because throughout our conversations in this podcast, there's been a lot of emphasis on organization on systems on ensuring operations are solid. And I think it's a kind of credit to this product is actually addressing a lot of those issues that maybe are not in the foresight of founders and perhaps maybe disorganized managers, I guess, for lack of about, better term. Do you feel that this is your most passionate project or one of them or something
Starting point is 00:28:13 that really speaks to how you have been in this community for as long as you have? I think the tool is empowering, especially for diverse founders, but I think the thing that happens is there's no one tool out there right now that does kind of all of the things that you need to do. So you start with one and then you. add another one, you add another one. And it just becomes like the SaaS soup, I like to call it, where you just like keep adding band-aids to a problem. And then pretty soon you're overwhelmed. And you've got, you know, I think we saw one BC say they like 42 subscriptions to make their deal flow work. And I just, you want to put that into dollars. Like that's wasted company money.
Starting point is 00:28:59 Number one, but it's also highly inefficient. And I think for founders, when you talk about fundraising, it's such an inefficient process and it takes so much time that anything you can do to just make that be a simpler, more straightforward, an organized process, especially if you think about you want your company to last, you know, through either an IPO or some kind of acquisition, and having that data organized, secured, trackable, all of those things become really important as you build towards, you know, with this legacy product you want to be eventually. And I always say like start with that 3,000 foot view. Like don't start with what has to happen today.
Starting point is 00:29:39 Like look forward and kind of build backwards. And if you think about it, like this product will over time save so much time, energy management. You start each next raise in a really good place. Like you're not having to go back and do all this cleanup work. It's just there. And I think that that efficiency is really great for founders. And it also gets them thinking about building, you know, not just a, product, but a company. And then on the VC side, I think it's so helpful, especially when you
Starting point is 00:30:11 have LPs who want to look down into what you've been doing and how you're tracking and how you're managing your portfolio companies. Being on the LP side, I'm really curious. If you're not hands-on with your portfolio companies, then how are you at least tracking your investment and how are you managing that? If you're just telling me like, oh, I got a quarterly update and we just file it over here, okay, well, you know, that hasn't worked out very well last few years. So maybe it's time for something new. So I think there's a lot of benefits on both sides. And I've sat on both sides of the table. I think that's why I'm so passionate about this. I also hate like waste and disorganization because I think it just causes chaos within organizations, especially as they grow and
Starting point is 00:30:54 scale. So I think having a product like this that can at least take off a bulk of sort of that, you know, dysfunction, I guess for lack of better word, is really helpful. And I hate that CRMs do like the job of sort of managing communication and not always well, but they don't combine with a lot of the other pieces. And so you end up layering, you know, the affinities and the hub spots and Omnis and all of these tools on top of each other and it just becomes so cumbersome that you've got to have five people just to manage the software. And I think that becomes where it's so inefficient that it just like anyone who's built software is like, it just builds something better than this. And that's what we did. We built a tool that we needed internally and solves a problem for a lot of other people
Starting point is 00:31:49 in our community. I think that's always the first pain point, right? It has to be like, it has to be like you're feeling it. And then all of a sudden, wait a minute, here's a solution that we should maybe come up with to address that. And I love that approach because I think a lot of the people that we're talking to on this podcast are going to be those kind of people that are like, I have a personal pain that I'm going through and I need to address it. And then this is the opportunity where we can talk about, okay, and this is the product
Starting point is 00:32:19 of developed to take care of this pain point that I have. do you where do you see deal send in and we talked a little bit touched on a little bit about where you see it in in the future but in five to 10 years where do you see this product where do you see it impact um as have you thought about that at all uh in in kind of especially when you were coming up with what this should be yeah i think it starts with VC and then I think it really moves up the food chain into PE I think it all also becomes really important for debt firms that are trying to validate data and cash flow and all of those things.
Starting point is 00:32:58 So I do see the product being a larger part of the financial ecosystem, not just in necessarily VC, but it's like, where's your step one? And this works really well for VC right now. But as the product grows, I think it grows sort of upstream towards, you know, P.E. and then also a lot in the M&A space, because if you think about the transparency of being able to see from the pre-seed round, all of the documentation, all of the communication,
Starting point is 00:33:33 all of the diligence and numbers, and be able to validate that in a very fast way, I think it's really beneficial to large organizations as well that are just trying to check the boxes on diligence. I think it saves a lot of time. And so I do see this, becoming a product. And eventually, I mean, if you think about it, there's a lot of other types of deals that you could potentially, you know, expand into, even, you know, REITs and other real estate
Starting point is 00:34:01 transactions, other investments. And I think that it can be really helpful just for tracking in a lot of financial transactions. I love that you said M&A on that because it does. feel like it aligns perfectly, especially on the transparency and the collaboration piece, where there's so much involved, especially in a large M&A, like that there's so many pieces in the chess board, if you will, involved in that. Well, it was funny, there was a company that got bought by a large bank, and people who are familiar with the transaction will know what I'm speaking to, but they had created 3 million fake users for a software that they ended up selling.
Starting point is 00:34:51 And they had email addresses, right? So, of course, you know, there's a list of 3 million or whatever email addresses and they go, great, there's 3 million people on this mailing list. Well, if you had done diligence through Dealsend and you had made them plug in their CRMs, and you had made them plug in their original sources for their, data collection, like you would have been able to see that those didn't come in organically because you would see three or 400,000 people being added to that mailing list within, you know, a 12-hour period, whatever it is.
Starting point is 00:35:30 So you would have been able to flag that and say like these growth numbers don't look legitimate and you could have dug into that farther, right? But also they're protected because you would have seen that their growth on, you know, subscriptions was really high, but you would have also been able to compare that against revenue, which was non-existent. So you could see that potentially there was a problem, and that would have helped an analyst do that. And it would also, on the portfolio company side, be like, hey, we don't actually have to give them access to our CRM, but they can see the numbers of it in a more...
Starting point is 00:36:10 protected way. So I think it helps founders too that just don't want to really turn over all the data day one and all their financials, but it'll give them sort of those validated reports of what's happening. Amazing. I have to tell you this product after talking about it. In brief, there's so much more we can talk about, but we only have so much time on these podcasts. So what I want you to do is I want you to tell the audience where can they go for more information about the product and And when can they start using it? So you can sign up right now at dealsend.io. And there is six months free for founders.
Starting point is 00:36:50 And there's a spot for emerging managers to sign up, try the product for free as well. Fantastic. Sarah Lottoman, what a pleasure to have a conversation with you. I know that when we met, I think it was a year ago or something like that, I didn't get to have this kind of conversation. And just what a joy to hear your perspective on this entire. process, which can be so intimidating, and yet you make it feel so common sense, I guess, which is a wonderful thing to do. So with that, I thank you so much. For more information, again, go to dealsend.io. There are great beta offers available for you there. And again, stay successful.
Starting point is 00:37:30 And Sarah, any last words before we go. Well, thank you for having me and keep building, folks. Keep building, indeed. All right. So please subscribe. thank you again for listening. Stay successful, y'all. Bye. If you want to know more about deal send, go to deal send.io to get more information about this amazing product and to see how it can fit into your strategy as you go through fundraising. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Fractal Focus. We hope you found valuable insights. If you enjoy the conversation and want to stay updated on the latest trends in expert advice, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.
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