About four months ago I quit my job at Doublepoint and decided to start my own thing.
I'd been working on a little project with Pedrique (who would become my co-founder) for a bit over half-a-year and decided I had enough signal to determine he was someone I wanted to start a business with.
I was excited about the idea we were working on at the time, but being truly honest about my motivations, I mostly wanted to run my own thing. In a dream world I'd have had the "idea of my life" while working at PostHog or Doublepoint and have gone on to build that with maximum conviction but this wasn't the case, so I got tired of waiting for a spark and decided to go out and make it happen, with the idea we were working on being our best bet at the time.
Since I'd just quit my job, I had my finances well in order. Thus, my ideal scenario would have been to work on the idea we had the MVP for, try to get it off the ground, and if that didn't work, try something else, then something else, until something did indeed get off the ground, and only at that point we would consider whether or not to raise VC funding, depending on whether it made sense or not.
My ideal scenario wasn't going to work for Pedrique, though. He had told me for a while that the money he had saved up for trying to build his own thing was running out and that soon he'd need to start freelancing or something to make some income in order to sustain the search for a little longer. Prior to us working together, he had a bit of success with his MicroSaaS products but only just enough to increase his personal runway, which was now reasonably short.
We had spoken about this before, but with me now being 110% in, we had to do something about it. I had just come in full-time so we weren't about to go back to a dynamic where one person was full-time and the other part-time because they needed to make ends meet. The decision then became clear: we're gonna raise.
At that point, it was an easy decision to make. Again, we have two co-founders who have a lot of confidence in each other, and we don't want to let the opportunity pass us by. So while this wasn't my ideal choice, we were a business now and this was the best decision for the company. "Just don't die" goes the advice I think, and Skald had just then been born.
And so raise we did. We brought in four phenomenal angels, including, and this is relevant, my last few bosses (PostHog co-founders James and Tim and Doublepoint co-founder Ohto), and then decided to look for an early-stage fund. We eventually landed with Broom Ventures and passed up on a few other opportunities to limit dilution.
Great, right? I didn't need a salary yet, but for equality purposes, I now had one. Our investors are amazing. James and Ohto have been particularly helpful as angels (thank you!), and our investors are all founders of successful companies, including Jeff and Dan, the Broom GPs. We're super early, but Broom has been massively helpful and all-around just a great hands-off VC to deal with.
Most importantly, none of them put any pressure on us. All understand the nature of pre-seed investing well, and that can't be said about all the potential investors we took meetings with.
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