Share with Your Network
No not this boat. We’re happy to announce we recently closed our Series A round of funding led by Tugboat Ventures with Hyde Park Angels joining the team as well. We’re both honored and excited to be working with them both. Dafina and Dave have great track records and bring a lot to the table in both the security and technology startup spaces.
They say that raising money is the second hardest part of starting a company. It can be an exhausting process, but the insights you gain from pitching your idea over and over, listening to feedback — and yes, the occasional rejection — are invaluable, and hard to come by any other way. Jeff and I spent quite a bit of time speaking to investors, including both VCs and Angels. We met a lot of really smart people through personal introductions, were asked a lot of good questions that made us think hard about our business and our product, and ultimately made refinements to our strategy and product which we hope will make Conduit an even more valuable tool.
In the end, we were fortunate enough to meet Dafina Toncheva from Tugboat Ventures, through an introduction by a later stage VC we had previously met with. What they say about fundraising is true: meet with EVERYONE, and keep pitching your idea. Both the security and venture investing industries are amazingly tight knit communities. If you are able to communicate your concept to someone who gets it, they will help you in any way they can. Additionally, your timing may be off when meeting with an investor but by meeting early you get on their radar. This can pay off later after hitting your milestones and advancing to a stage which is in their target investment sweet spot.
The Loggly guys wrote a great post on closing their round which I won’t try to replicate here, but one theme rings very true — “Start small, go big!” You not only have to have a great idea, but also something built that proves out that idea, and a plan on how the opportunity gets REALLY REALLY BIG.
Relationships matter. It’s not just about a good idea, a great product, or a plan on how to blow it up. Rely on your relationships to get things moving. You don’t know everyone, but you know someone. And that someone knows someone else. Like I said, it’s a tight knit community and these relationships really matter. Our Advisers were of huge help to us. Oh, did I not mention our Board of Advisers…? Well allow us to brag a bit here. They are all-stars in every sense. We were able to pull together four top names in the industry: Jeremiah Grossman, Gene Kim, Wolfgang Kandek, and David French. They have been a huge help by giving great feedback, making introductions, and evangelizing our crusade. I cannot stress their importance enough.
We’re really excited to welcome both Tugboat Ventures and Hyde Park Angels to the team, but now it’s time to wrap this post up and get back to solving the worlds vulnerability management problems!
