Time to get funded? Don't be a Moray!

The past several weeks have been very exciting at Kukunu. We've finalized our round of funding and are now launching a public beta of Kukunu, working with you guys our users, a.k.a. Kukunauts, to improve our product and bring you an awesome travel experience.

But the goal of this post is not to celebrate our funding or our launch, we're planning to do that in a few weeks at a pub in London. Instead I wanted to share some learnings from the recent months of pitching to investors.

I won't start a Pitching 101 talk here since there are people far more experienced than myself that have written great content on the topic. 6 slides by Fred Wilson or The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint by Guy Kawasaki are good starters; or you might enjoy this video, Startup Viagra by Dave McClure.

Dave McClure - How to Pitch a VC (aka Startup Viagra: How to Give a VC a Hard-On) from Chris Hutchins on Vimeo.

So what advice can I give? I though a lot about that in the past weeks. What did we do right, what did we do wrong? What's the one piece of advice I would want to share?

I found my answer 70 feet under water, where I realized there were 2 basic types of startups looking for funding: 

The first one, I call it the Moray; great technology, full of confidence, will stay hidden until it finds the right prey. Many start ups are behaving this way, each with a different excuse. "We don't want someone to copy our idea" or "Our product is not yet good enough to be shared" or "We have a list of 5 good investors in the UK, that should be enough."

 

I always thought that finding an investor was a bit like finding a partner in life. Now that I'm married I can tell you it isn't true, finding an investor can be far more complex; they won't love you for your faults and weaknesses. So waiting quietly for the right investor to find you just won't work, no matter how strong your idea!

But then you have the second style of start up, the clown fish, out there on the reef, talking to everyone with its shiny colors:

 

That tiny fish got it right, darting through his anemone he gets all the divers cheering him. It's by talking to every one, and sharing your projects with investors, industry experts or other entrepreneurs that you will optimize your chances to meet the right partner. During that journey, you are also likely to grab some great advice, fine tune your strategy, and maybe find future business partners.

 

Don't be the Moray, be the Clown fish

 

To prove my point, I'll share how we found investors for Kukunu, only a few know that story.

We started looking for funding in January, with a first prototype ready. Later that month we were heading to New York then the west coast with Seedcamp. We spent a week presenting Kukunu across the valley, at Facebook, Google, Yahoo... It was at the Googleplex that it happened; we presented Kukunu and then broke into small groups with mentors; getting feedback, advice and precious contacts. It was starting to be late and my third mentoring group was missing, so I introduced myself to the first guy I saw and it happened to be Phlippe Jeudy. Philippe was partly listening to me, partly typing on his laptop, and I would discover few hours later that he was tweeting:

Thanks to that tweet I spoke with Jeremie Berrebi a few days later over the phone, and a few weeks later Jeremie would fly from Israel and we would meet in Paris the very first day he announced he would manage Kima Ventures, a seed fund launched by Xavier Niel. A few weeks later Jeremie would contact me with an offer and Jaina Capital (Marc Simoncini) was part of that offer. A few weeks after that Seedcamp was joining the band: the lawyer party could start, we were getting funded.

So it all comes down to a random chat in Mountain View, with a French guy I had never met. That random chat lead to a random tweet to another French guy, in Israel this time, that I had never met. It led to a phone call, which led to a meeting which led to one investor, then two and finally three.

Be the clown fish!

This worked for me in my first round for my first start up. Next round I might want to be the Manta Ray:

 

But that's another story...

So here we are, first blog entry post-launch and I managed to insert three of the videos I shot during my last dive (that means Gerald owes me a pint); that Manta Ray was awesome!