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Don't hesitate if you have questions :) It was 13 days but it was INTENSE!
If it was an 'intense 2 weeks' what compromised the back and forth intensity? Negotiation, waiting/anxiety? Were there any big surprises during raising or do they 'like it or not'?
Airbyte: https://airbyte.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Airbyte-Seed-D...
Fivetran: https://images.cms.fivetran.com/mgtdf72hs0mx/6qYtmEEotXqScar...
Don't hesitate if you have questions :) It was 13 days but it was INTENSE!
How sophisticated are investors in general with niche or arcane technology segments that might not be widely understood? Do they know enough to tell if your product solves specific problems, or are they trusting your market validation? If it was an 'intense 2 weeks' what compromised the back and forth intensity? Negotiation, waiting/anxiety? Were there any big surprises during raising or do they 'like it or not'?
On those investors, you could see that 50% didn't know much about data infrastructure, or that it was a fresh topic for them. But for the 10 funds we liked best, they knew A LOT, invested in it, brought a lot of insight and value, just by interacting with them.
So for the next round, we will mostly focus on those 10 funds, keep them posted on our progress, so that the next round is just a question of when and how.
In terms of negotiation, I would say we had a lot of interest, so we could have negotiated the valuation higher, but for us, it was more a question of who we wanted to work with.
But will try to write a blog post on the process for more details, if you think that could be useful.
Second, I would say though that often having a team from the industry with previous exits, etc. is usually a winning formula, so YMMV if your team doesn't look like that, even if you have a great deck, etc.
FYI - Just tried to view your demo at http://demo.airbyte.io - got a blank screen across multiple browsers (Safari, Edge).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you get in contact with investors? I went to the accel website but I can't tell what role they play.
They were incubated by YC, presumably that's how the connections were made.
1) We did have some intros thanks to being a YC company. That definitely helped.
2) For some funds for which we really wanted intros, we asked our investors.
3) We timed these 2 weeks of fundraising to happen 2 weeks after some important product release for us (0.2.0). And we did get some inbound from investors (them reaching out to us).
Also being at the crossroads of data infrastructure and open-source helped a lot, as both are important topics for investors right now.
We tried to keep the meetings with the funds that we liked most at the end. For instance, Accel was the 42nd investor we met with.
Interesting to see the competitive analysis with Fivetran in the article but then see almost identical copies of infographics used between their site and Fivetran's. Airbyte: https://airbyte.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Airbyte-Seed-D... Fivetran: https://images.cms.fivetran.com/mgtdf72hs0mx/6qYtmEEotXqScar...
Regarding the differences between Airbyte and Fivetran, here's an article about it: https://docs.airbyte.io/faq/differences-with/fivetran-vs-air...
But essentially, open-source enables us to:
- address the long tail of integrations (our goal is 200+ by end of 2021) - we're working on a low-code/no-code framework to make it easier to build and maintain connectors
- give you flexibility/customizability to adapt pre-built connectors to your needs
- debugging autonomy (we're standardizing how connectors are being built, so maintenance can be done by us and the community)
- No more security and privacy compliance, as self-hosted and open-sourced (MIT)
- No more super high prices (volume-based) that don't make sense for big data companies.
Cool project and story! FYI - Just tried to view your demo at http://demo.airbyte.io - got a blank screen across multiple browsers (Safari, Edge).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were incubated by YC, presumably that's how the connections were made.
There are 3 ways we got connections: 1) We did have some intros thanks to being a YC company. That definitely helped. 2) For some funds for which we really wanted intros, we asked our investors. 3) We timed these 2 weeks of fundraising to happen 2 weeks after some important product release for us (0.2.0). And we did get some inbound from investors (them reaching out to us). Also being at the crossroads of data infras…
