How To Talk To Investors

How To Talk To Investors

Martin Tobias

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

1/28/2021

Sponsored by findcourses.com and findcourses.co.uk

Also sponsored by Cereal Entrepreneur

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

number one slide that every investor spends time on is the team slide who are the founders who are these people the number two slide is the um business model like how are you going to make money um and after that it goes down very significantly so all those slides about this is going to be a giant market in five years what i tell people to do in their presentation is to focus around the funding window and and what you're going to achieve you should have a slide in there that shows in five years is going to be a big market but that doesn't matter the more important slide is what do you what's your business model what's your operational plan for the next 12 to 18 months that is going to get you into the market [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan miller uh the serial entrepreneur that has started several businesses and grown up to seven and eight figure companies as well as the ceo and founder of miller ip law where he helped startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and today we have another great guest on the podcast and this is an expert episode so even even more special which is martin and i think it's tobias as i always say the last name all right so martin is going to share a little bit um everything about money so money here's money is always important to startups always a question on startups minds or small businesses so how do you raise money what investors are looking for how to do a pitch what are some companies that get invested in other companies that don't get invested in how to talk with authority to investors and or whatever else we happen to dive into as the podcast goes on so with that welcome on to the podcast martin thanks for having me devon so maybe before we dive into the topics that i just ran through give everybody just a quick intro on yourself and kind of your background and why you're such an expert on this episode on this topic um well um you know i guess it's because i've just been doing it a long time you know i'm one of these serial entrepreneurs who started my first entrepreneurial thing at six years old i had a kool-aid stand outside my house which was near the university of florida i saw a business opportunity because everybody on sundays would walk to the football games from the parking lot past my house i'm like wow i could make money and i got hooked on entrepreneurship and um i've started a bunch of companies been ceo of three of them and i've also been on the investor side i've been a venture partner at ignition partners which is a two billion dollar fund out of seattle i'm a limited partner in 12 funds i've raised over 500 million dollars for my own companies including two ipos and i've invested in over 150 companies as an angel investor or a venture investor so i've been on both sides of it and uh recently sort of in the last six months i've decided to go back and focus on angel investing and investing with my friends to add value uh to startups because frankly you know personally i like the early stage the sort of you know first three or four people under 50 employees because that's where all the fun is that's where people are willing to take risks that's where you can get better returns financially um and i just really enjoy working uh with startup founders and uh you know adding any value that i can and i've been through the cycle quite a few times one of the things i've seen recently is there's a lot of people jumping in in every cycle you know near the top um but i've been through the downturn of the dot-com bust i've been through the bust of clean tech and a couple of other cycles and that perspective can be helpful a lot of times to young entrepreneurs as well no and i think that you know i was smiling and almost kind of reflecting because a lot of different uh type of job but a lot of what the reason i started miller ip law was for the same thing i like to work with the startups of small businesses the ones that there's just an extra layer of excitement of hey we're doing something new something that you know we find exciting they you know they're excited about it they want to share they want to build and it's just kind of adds that extra layer that's you know enjoyable and fun as opposed to when you work with a bigger business you know they're a little bit more they've established themselves they know what they're doing they you know they have their products and this is kind of building on what they've done rather than starting something new so i think that that you know i i shared the same level of excitement that you do on a lot of that um from a different perspective so now with that now that we've talked a little bit about you let's talk a little bit about the what we want to talk about in the experts episode which is now how do we go and raise money right so i always like to joke but i think there's a lot of truth to it that startups always have more things to spend money on the money to spend they're always in kind of that conundrum of can should i spend it on new employees should i spend it on new equipment should i spend it on intellectual property should i spend it on development and r d and software and should i do independent contractors and so they've got and you know not to mention a building facility so they've got all these demands on if they really want to make a go of it they need to ha you know they'll have to have some money and yet there isn't never enough so you're always kind of bootstrapping and figuring that out so with that with always having those demands on money give us a little bit of insight what is kind of the ways that investors can start looking at raising money how they might want to raise money and what their options might be well i've looked at this from both sides and frankly the constraint of not having enough money um is a good one because then you have to make choices and you're forced to make uh choices and to decide between relative probabilities and relative options which is a good thing you know in the dot-com boom and even in some startups that i see now when they become over-funded these companies that raise 100 million dollars if you take the money pressure off and you start buying herman miller chairs and stuff like that all of a sudden your wework and um you know it's it can be a bad uh incentive um if you have too much money so frankly i think having uh constrained money is is a good thing um the way i think about it as an investor and the way i've always thought about it as a ceo is that i always want to raise basically twice as much money as i think i need for the next logical milestone in my business and if you think about i don't know if you're a poker player i'm a poker player as well and um poker is a game of incomplete information you know you have two cards you have no idea what anybody else has you have no idea what's going to come and you have to make a decision to put money to work given the incomplete information and you put some money in and you get more informed then you make another decision and startups are exactly the same way you have an idea you might have some savings yourself you might have your friends and family give you a little bun of money you have to decide given the money that we have how much information can i buy you know knowledge about is this a good idea do customers wanted all the important things and um you know what's the most efficient way to get that money to get that information and that but the real key to raising money is to and ask the right questions that can be answered within your funding window um a startup one of the things a lot of startups make a mistake on is you know i talked to one yesterday and he's like you know we have this five year plan and we think in five years blah blah blah i'm like i'm not giving you five years worth of money what are you going to answer in the next year and how does that move the story forward so investors are willing to take risks if they know what questions are going to be answered given the amount of money and the reason i always tell people to put a budget together and try to raise twice as much is because things always go wrong so um you know let's say you are a development stage and you haven't written your product um but you and you think that uh cut you you can get a thousand customers for a consumer product um okay how much is it gonna cost to build the mvp and get those thousand customers if that's a million dollars raised two million dollars um but you know define the objectives of the financing round and uh i see that as a common mistake a lot of startups make is that they don't define for investors what they hope the main two or three questions they hope to answer with this funding round i see a lot of pitch decks which say we're going to use it for general corporate purposes well what does that mean you know beer parties salary is that a pay increase salary so they're like they're like you know we've been we we've been working without pay so we're going to start paying ourselves i go that's good for you but as an investor how does that answer the question of is this a good business do customers want to buy it um does can you build the product um you know the key questions in a startup is um you know have you identified a gap in the market um is there a product is there a product that can be built to fulfill a customer need and then will customers buy it and can you reach those customers at a cost-effective way and then the question after that is can you scale uh acquiring those customers and the cost effect explanations in any startup and they come in normal you know chunks and so when you're raising money you should say okay what stage am i at what chunks am i going to answer and you you do not try to answer any question that takes you more than a year or 18 months to answer um and i like a five-year fishing expedition and i like because i think that even as a startup you're not i think life in general is hard enough to figure out where you're going to be at in five years and then you take the dynamics of a startup and where it's likely and it's going to be near impossible to really know where you're going to be at in five years unless you're so niche and except the exception of the exception to the rule and so i like the idea of really what you should be doing is doing more bites i don't know sizeable chunks of saying now the next year 18 months this is what we're going to spend it on this is what we're going to accomplish this is how we're going to use the money now i want to ask a couple questions on that they kind of come up you know they come up with people i work with in that one is on you know so let's say you are in startup mode right so you're a startup a small business you have a great idea you maybe have a product development a bit and you've been bootstrapping and you can show that you know hey we have a plan here's the next 12 to 18 months and oh by the way i've never taken a salary and i've never taken you know i've never taken a dime out of the business i'm funding this as a side hustle and if i go to investors and say hey part of what i want to do is i want to give myself a salary so i can work on this full-time is that a pro or a con or an indifferent to an investor in the sense that they say well i don't want all my money going towards a salary because then it's not going towards product development or they can argue on the other hand if you're not if you're only working on this as a side hustle we're never going to get it done and it's going to die in the vine so how do you kind of what do you think is you're going into when talking with investors how do you address that as an investor uh i always want to see the company's expenses be fully funded i can't tell you how many uh companies i've seen early stage that say we're profitable you know on fifty thousand dollars a month of revenue and i go are you paying yourself and they say no and i go well then you're not profitable you're you're you that this is not a real business you cannot scale that business so as an investor i want to see all the expenses in there and um i i do not want to see people part time i just passed on a company yesterday where um you know the ceo was paying themselves and the developer was an outsourced uh contractor and um it was primarily a develop technology company building technology and the technology employees were not employees of the company and um he he gave me a budget which assumed that they remained contractors and i said well then i'm not investing in the people that are building the core asset that you say is valuable i can't fund the company so you know i want to see the salaries in there and i want to see them fully burdened i do want to see them you know uh reasonable um you know every time i take a job as a ceo you know i pay myself less than a normal ceo because you're getting um you know stock options uh but you have to be paid some and you know that's one area to look at as an investor is you know are they under pricing um any of the expenses and and at some point you have to pay everybody what they're worth or you know you and if you can't afford to pay people based on the revenue you don't have a business so no and i think that's and i think that that i like that answer and that's kind of where i always fall is you know if you're going to be if you're going to show this is what it takes to get it done then show what it takes to get it done and if you're showing that we're not going to take a salary for the next year and a half we'll either you're not going to really be invested in and working on it because you're going to be doing your full-time job and side hustle and then to your point if we don't even have the key players that we can afford to pay them they're not going to stick around for very long so one other instagram i will never fund anybody that's doing something as a side hustle um you know they things might start as a side hustle but if i fund somebody this has to be their only hustle you know one of my themes is that you know the founders have to be really committed i just funded these guys three guys uh two weeks ago and um it's a gpt three email client and the guy told me a story the first time he found this gpt3 uh client he and his two co-founders stayed up for three days drinking diet coke and didn't sleep and built the mvp in three days of no sleep and i'm like those are guys i want to find those are guys who are working you know 24 hours a day they didn't ask for salaries nothing just they just did it and um you know now what they wanted was money so that they could quit their do what they loved and would we're doing on the side for free full time no and that's certainly a convincing story and i think that and we'll dress in just a minute of how to talk authentically i did have one more question before we kind of move on to the or another topic which is so you talk about friends and family around which is oftentimes when you're wanting to get starting if you can't necessarily you're not ready to go investors you're not at that stage or something of that nature you'll go to either dip into your personal savings maybe use a credit card and if you can't do that or that's insufficient we'll go to friends and family say hey i've got a great idea you'll go pitch them and they'll come on board now as an investor and you know as you're going out seeking money is that a good thing you're a bad thing and here i'll give you the two arguments or things that i hear is to when people ask a question on both sides on the one side they're saying you know friends and family i don't want to go pitch them i don't want to burn them i don't want to have their their money on the line so to speak so if this goes bad i don't i don't when i see him at christmas or thanksgiving dinner i don't have to worry about you know did i get them their money back and yeah on the other hand some of the times i hear is for you know getting friends and family and money around is beneficial to show to investors in the sense that they no no you're you've got a lot of skin in the game because you don't want to or fail when you go to christmas or thanksgiving you don't want to let the family know so how do you view that or how do you know what's a way to way to reconcile or view that i i view it as the latter one if i see an entrepreneur who has not been able to convince anybody including his parents to or her parents to put money in before me that's a bad sign so um you know i i want to see their money and i want to see their time in i want to see you know some other people and you know as a professional investor um you know i don't want to be the first money in um i want to be this second money after you know some amount of sweat equity from the founders and or you know angel investments or friends and family investments i mean every company that i fund you know has had fifty a hundred two hundred 200 000 of investment before i see it um i very rarely write the very first check uh because if you have an idea and you can't convince even your friends or your family to give you money it's probably not a very good idea yeah no i think that's a fair point now lastly the flip side let's say you you've been able to bootstrap it or you don't have to go to friends and family should you go to friends and family first or if you bootstrapped it to enough of a level should they just go right to investors it depends on what they've done um you know and it depends on your balance sheet um you know second and third time entrepreneurs who've made a little bit of money can bootstrap something themselves and don't need friends and family i've funded guys like that but i mean they did put a much a lot of their own personal money into it before they did it i mean friends and family are not necessary um but you know you have before you go to professional investors at least for me i don't know if you've seen it there's there's a graph that like if the bottom left were i wrote my idea on a napkin and the top right is the thing ipo'd there's stages all in between and the stage where a professional investor is going to want to look at it is usually after you have an mvp after you have had this is for a software idea i mean this isn't doesn't work for retail or maybe some other things um after you've had half a dozen to 10 customers and you've done some market validation and so between mvp first handful of customers and market validation and the napkin you know if you can do that without any financing great if you have to take a little friends and family fine but you know the professional investor is unlikely to take that pre-mvp risk unless you're a second or third time founder which is then almost as you're investing as much on hey they've been successful they've built successful companies in the past and made an exit therefore it gives you some credibility which kind of segues into it so i'm going to let you direct a little bit but a couple of the other things i think would be interesting is so you go into a pitch and one thing is you want to talk authentically to the investors and you know so maybe speak a little bit about do's and don'ts of what matters in a pitch what doesn't matter in a pitch should you have a long you know here's all of the and i'll say the thing i don't think and you can correct me if i'm wrong as an example things that you don't need to go do in a pitch and say now this market is a 33 billion dollar market and if we just capture one percent of the market and that's your whole plan is all we got to do now we don't know how we're going to capture one percent but think about it we only have to capture one percent and generally the feedback i've heard from different investors is you know generally they want to hear how you're going to capture the market they don't care if it's a 5 billion or 50 billion but how do you go and capture the size of the market that matters to what your investment is but maybe give us a bit of an idea of do's and don'ts and what matters in the pitch and what doesn't um there's really only two or three things that matter to me in a pitch and it's actually interesting you can look at there's a study online people can look up the doc send pitch deck statistics presentation and you know lots of people use pitch deck or doc send to promote their pitch decks they've got statistics on what slides investors pay attention to and percentage of time spent the number one slide that every investor spends time on is the team slide who are the founders who are these people the number two slide is the um business model like how are you going to make money and after that it goes down very significantly so all those slides about this is going to be a giant market in five years what i tell people to do in their presentation is to focus around the funding window and and what you're going to achieve you should have a slide in there that shows in five years it's going to be a big market but that doesn't matter the more important slide is what do you what's your business model what's your operational plan for the next 12 to 18 months that is going to get you into the market um what is and and what is your product and what is the advantage your product has in the market that you believe will get you the first uh traction in the customers um and then the reason the team slide is important and what everyone and you what you should spend most of your time talking about is why you why is this personal problem to you why is do you have an insight that other people don't have and why can you deliver this thin edge of the wedge that's going to get these first customers um and you know what is your plan uh to do that and how have you done that in the past um so the most important thing for ceos to talk about in their presentation is you know themselves you know why this is a personal problem what their plan is for the next 12 to 18 months and what are the two or three questions they're going to answer with the investor money that is going to mean they have a more valuable company 12 to 18 months from now now it's not going to be the end but it is going to be something which can then either raise more money or do something else um that is going to be useful so all the slides if you talk about anything in any of your slides that's a partnership in these quadrants and we're up here and to the right and five years from now here's this hockey stick i don't care about any of that i don't care about financials beyond 18 months i care about who are you what is your approach to the market why is it going to win and why are you and your co-founders uniquely positioned to execute that uh plan so let me i know and i think that is incredibly insightful and helpful now let me ask maybe one follow-up question so let's say i am a solo guy a startup guy is that and so you know i don't have a team yet maybe i'm saying hey to get the product developed i don't really need a team so for whatever reason they haven't started a building team they have a great idea maybe they've implemented it started to reduce it to practice but they haven't built that team would you suggest hey before you go in that you should start building that team bringing on additional people should you go to an investor kind of give me an idea because you know we get you know whether it's one guy or a couple guys you know a couple friends that are hey we've got a great idea one guy is in marketing and sells one guy's a product development or the coder and they get to work on it but they've never really spent time to build that team when should they focus on building that team should it be from the start right before we go to the investors or can you do it without that full team it depends on the stage uh if you have not built your mvp yet and have not gotten your first customers um sometimes all you need is a developer and a ceo that has business experience that can get the customers you don't need an enterprise salesperson but if you have your mvp you have your first customers and you're raising money to really get the next 50 customers then you better know who your what your sales strategy is either you have a vp of sales or director of sales or you you know have a recruiting process for them or you are raising the money to get that person and that's something you want from an investor is a referral to build the sales channel i looked at a company you know yesterday uh four years in development um great technical founders ceo who was able to get the first 10 customers absolutely no enterprise sales experience the product works but they have no idea how to build an enterprise sales team so they're raising a round of financing so the question to answer in this round of financing is can we take this product which we built for the first couple customers and get another 50 people to buy it and um and so in that case the objective your funding is hiring a sales team and scaling up sales and and and investors will do that um you know investors that specialize in that um stage so it really depends on the stage and the questions you're trying to answer um you should have a plan you don't have to have all the people but you should be very uh open and honest and forthright with the investor into as is who you know you don't have on the team that you believe will be critical to help you answer those questions which you're going to spend the money on you don't have to have everybody but you have to identify if you've got a hole if this is all about you know consumer marketing and you don't have a consumer marketing person you're like the reason i need money is because i have to hire a consumer marketing person you know and um you know this is why i need the money and investors will either say you know great you have enough traction and i love the product enough now that i'll fund that answering of that question and try to recruit someone or not um but you should not oversell your capacity you should be very honest about what you do have and what you don't have and um you know typically that's what i see is a business person and a technical founder um but you also need a sales person a marketing person customer support all of these things so and no i think that's certainly a very insightful and helpful as well now one question i'd almost follow up on that is you know it seems like some people are a bit reticent to point out the flaws in their business right they don't want to point out that they you know and it's it's human nature in a sense that hey we don't want to point out our weaknesses or things we don't do well and yet on the other hand if you don't point them out then it you know investors are very astute they're going to likely be able to figure that out and so should you if you have whether it's flaws and i say flaws but let's say you don't have the right person on your team but you as you're pointed out this is what we're doing with the invest investment dollars we're going to get that one person that key person we're missing or hey we've got a great technology but we need to upgrade and i'm just making it up we need to upgrade our servers or technology to really compete or whatever that flaw is it's as long as it's fixable and addressable should you just hit that head on and tackle it should you skirt over it and wait and see if the investors you know catch on to it or how do you address flaws you know things that need to be fixed or bet or made better in the business you should never skirt over it and you should be as specific with the use of funds as you can um you know if you have to increase your server capacity you tell them that you don't say general corporate purposes you say we need to buy servers or we need to you know hire these people and that people the more specific you can be you know about how you're going to spend the money and also the help that you need um you know most investors that are engaged are going to help you with recruiting are going to help you with business development um you know connections and you know what you should be doing is choosing investors that give you more than just money um you know if you need to talk to somebody at microsoft and the vc used to work at microsoft and has a great microsoft network um you should tell them that the reason i would rather take your money than the other guy's money is because i really need a connection at microsoft um the the more you can tell the investor what you need besides money and the more that fits with what they can deliver the better the partnership is gonna be no and i think that that you know certainly makes sense if hey this is why i come to you or i'm choosing you and you know and i in some sense you know letting the investor know i'm not didn't choose you at random or i'm not just pitching to everybody will open the door but no i have a reason why you make sense and why you fit and not just need money just for the sake of money but hey you can offer this and i think this your involvement will also help to build the company is i think an in an important thing to hit on well i've asked i've been with you really go ahead yeah yeah it really it really is and the best investors that's what they do um they they you know know that it it's a team effort um yeah and the other thing you know i ask all of my ceos to tell me a story about a time that they failed at something and what if they can if they can't think of anything they failed i everybody's failed at something and you know they're lying um and if they um you know talk about the failure and blame it on somebody else you know another company the economic environment the pandemic whatever i also pass because that person doesn't take responsibility um for their own actions um and uh but if they have a convincing story of where they learned something where they are now smarter because of the failure uh one of the companies i invested in um is in the hr uh space and they were selling uh hr software to um enterprise customers in the pandemic they were doing about a million dollars a month in in the pandemics started their revenue went to zero in one month uh all of the um um hr all of the enterprises basically said we're not hiring we don't know what to do you know we're basically not hiring and so the ceo had a choice she could have said oh well whoops you know here's you know we're done but she pivoted and she started selling um hr interview practice interviews to um high value candidates like expensive coders and things like that pivoted the business around to be services for people looking for jobs and looking to change careers and within two months she was doing more revenue direct to consumer than she was from hr companies um here is a ceo who uh has proven that they can pivot and respond and not throw up their arms when things happen and things are always going to happen in startups things are going to come out left field like a pandemic things are going to you know that first customer who strung you along is not going to sign the deal and what you want is ceos and management teams that are resilient and um you know know how to keep moving um when disaster strikes and they have to be able to explain how they did that in the past because it's going to happen in the future no and i completely agree whether it's you know people whether it's coved whether it's 2008 with the housing crash whether it's a dot-com bubble whether it's anything you're going to have things that are unexpected and you've either got to figure out how to or to be profitable and build a business in spite of that or you're never going to be able to i think a long-term business now one question and we have a lot more questions and we're getting towards the end of the podcast but i'll ask you what my final question which is so if if you are a business let's say you are building it and you've had to pivot you know how do how do you and you're and you're now you're saying er let me rephrase you're going to have to pivot or you think you're going to have to pivot and yet now you're going to have to go back to the investors and say what we had planned on what we were going to do just isn't working covet hit or whatever it is is that you know how do you approach an investor and say we're going to have to change what we sold you on isn't what we're going to be able to do how you know we got to pivot we have to adjust how do you kind of raise that issue with investors that have already given you money based on something that you've already sold you know you've already sold them on an idea you do it as soon as you can uh if you because the whole point is um you know i started a company once i raised five million dollars uh i spent a million and a half building a product that i thought would work i realized it would not work i immediately went right when i meet rather than keeping banging my head i immediately went to the investors and said that that that didn't work um and i don't think it's gonna work and they said okay you have three and a half million dollars left i go do you want your three and a half back or do you want me to try something else and they said we want you to try something else and uh but you have to have that conversation you have to be honest with them if you really mean you're they're not going to know the ceo has to say um you know this is what's going on um and um if you have made it first of all before you make a pivot you get buy-in from the investors because if you pivot without telling them they're going to be really pissed off most investors will understand and that's what they want um you know one of the most famous stories was um hotmail um you know hotmail was i forget their original pitch they went around the valley pitching i think it was advertising or something but it turned out that cloud-based email which is what hotmail was the first one was the real um product there not whether an advertising platform and um so it turned out that they that just simply doing your email in the cloud was the people they didn't really want the ads targeted at them you know because of their email contacts so um you know there are most startups pivot uh but yet but the ceo has to be honest with the the um investors and tell them as soon as he knows and get their buy-in uh on the pivot and usually they'll let you keep going because that's what they did they invested in you to find the right way and to respond as the market goes and to you know change the product as appropriate very very few startups that i've invested in ended up making money on the plan that i funded in the beginning it's usually some combination pivot some something that where they got smarter over time and um what came out was actually better than what they thought because they'd engaged in the market for some time so this is not unusual but ceos that um try to hide that um you know i can think of theranose i can think of you know there's a lot of companies where the ceo when the thing isn't working or end up lying to the investors that's a very very bad uh end no and i i completely agree i mean you can get examples of netflix everybody knows netflix netflix first of all started by selling dvds in the mail and then they then they shifted to you know or dvds in the mail and then they had to say well we can't do this forever we're going to have to pivot to streaming and then they go from streaming to subscribe i mean they had to do it and you take as an example uber which is another big company they started with black taxi or you know black you know cab drivers uh black cabs that are the luxury and then they said okay we've got to we've got a shift because we're getting outdone by you know some of the other competition and so they shifted their business model to what it is today of now we're doing ride sharing and i think that to your point there's going to be those pivots yep yeah yeah and and delivering food and all these other things which became opportunities as they grew and as they they added um and and that's what you want you you want the ceo to keep going after the growth areas even if the first area that he thought of was not um you know where it ended up you know being yeah so we could chat i'm sure this is a area i find fascinating you can find a chat about but unfortunately we're reaching towards the end of the podcast and there's always more things i want to talk about than time to talk about them but if people wanted to reach out to you whether they want to pitch you for an investment that you qualifies for what you're doing they want to pick your brain about a little bit more about how to set themselves up for success hear about your the rest of your advice and your story they want to be your next best friend anywhere all the above they want to reach out to you what's the best way to contact or connect with you uh just go to my website and that's incisive dot v c i n c i s i v e dot v c uh i post all my themes up there what i invest in the stage i like to invest in um you know there's a contact form and um i would love to hear from any entrepreneurs that are incredibly passionate about a personal problem that they've had that they think lots of other people share and they want to create a profitable fast growing company uh doing that so i would love to talk to any entrepreneurs and other you know vcs that have uh companies that want additional financing i'm very excited about everything related to technology all right well i definitely invite everybody to take you up reach out check out the website get in contact and uh who knows maybe somebody will have the next great idea and you'll be the one that found them so well thank you again martin for coming on it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now if you're a listener and you are either you're an expert you want to share your expertise or you're a startup founder co-founder and you want to share your journey feel free to go to inventivejourneyguest.com apply to be on the podcast love to have you if you're a listener and you make sure to click subscribe so you get notifications as all the new awesome episodes come out and last but not least if you ever need help with patents and trademarks feel free to go or reach out to us at miller ip law just go to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help thank you again martin it's been a pleasure and appreciate you having me on