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Hello, welcome to Stack Genius, the podcast for data-driven investment professionals. My name is Silvan. I'm greeting you wherever you are in the world right now. And I'm also greeting Nathan, who I think is in San Fran or somewhere near. Is that right? Yes, sir. How are you? Good to see you. Good having you. Yeah, thanks for investing time with us. And you know, actually, you have two cool products that we can speak about. So I would love to hear everything about funding stack, and also about founders suite. I mean, despite the name, I mean, those are products geared towards investment professionals. How would you describe those two products? Yeah, so Foundersuite is our legacy product. It's been around over seven years, and it is aimed at startups raising capital. That's something we put out there, and it's been used by about 50, 000 startups all over the globe to raise $15 billion in angel VC capital. And we started to get some VCs and funding advisors and investment bankers using it. And they said, hey, I like this product. I'm using it with my client or my portfolio company, but I've got five other portfolio companies. How do I work with them? And so we launched FundingStack as a way to do that. And now FundingStack is its own platform. It was kind of nested underneath Founders Rate. FundingStack is now its own platform. And its two main use cases are it's used by VCs and emerging managers to raise a fund because we have a lot of LPs in our database. And it's used by VCs, investment bankers, funding advisors to help their portfolio companies and clients raise capital. Interesting. Yeah. I like that. I mean, nothing beats some visual aid. So can you show me a little bit, or us for that matter, how it looks and how it feels like? Absolutely. Let me jump into this. Yeah. Here we are. Now we're on stage. Are you able to see my screen? Yes, we can. So this is what FundingStack looks like. And we have six different products. What you're looking at here is the investor CRM. So this is what you would use to manage pipeline of investors and if you can read the columns I mean this is all very customizable but as an example we've got a research column sent intro email sent deck view deck responded pitch diligence committed said no so this is an example of an investor pipeline and And what's unique about this and one of the things I am really keen on is you can set up multiple sub accounts. So for example, let's say you're a venture capitalist on your first fund. Maybe you're thinking about raising your second fund. You can set up one pipeline to manage your LP pipeline. of the people you're talking to to raise a fund. And then you can set up sub accounts for all of your portfolio companies. And under those several accounts, you can then help them populate their pipeline with investors and assist them with their fundraise. Do you have visibility of that then? So if you're the fund that has given this access to your team or to your investment team? yes absolutely you would be able to see their pipeline let's uh like here's pretend this is a client account carnegie steel maybe this is one of your portfolio companies you'd be able to see their pipeline maybe they're in the series a um and and you'd be able to see all their data and you'd be able to come in and really work with your companies if that's something you do like one thing i I love it when VCs might come in and actually set up a pipeline for their portfolio companies and then invite the CEO of that portfolio company in So the CEO has a ready-made pipeline of target investors. And then, of course, the CEO could come in, search our database for more investors. That VC or that investor could look at their research list. Maybe they know someone at LDV Ventures. They could come down and tag themselves as the connector, the person that's going to be making the intro. could add more investors to the pipeline they can see the pitch decks going out they can see uh all the good stuff and when you um just spoke about that i was asking myself so which things does it not do does it have like would you do workflow engine like robotic process automation automated messages and these type of things inside this tool or outside so we do some of that we don't have sequences yet but what we do have we have investor database so let me actually rewind the clock typically when you first come in here This is going to be empty, of course, right? The empty CRM. So the first step is usually populating that CRM. And that's either by bringing in your own list of investors or by searching our database. I was just doing a call with an emerging manager venture fund in Amsterdam. And we looked at LPs based in the Netherlands. And this is the list we have here. So step one would typically be finding investor targets doing a little research on them adding them to the crm but then really to your question once i've built a list of target investors we've got what i call our marketing tools so like i said we don't have automated sequences but what you can do is you know choose your pipeline let's see i'm sending out to my lps um i can pick a bunch of investors from that pipeline. I can create customized personalized emails. We have various email templates that you can choose from. You can also create your own email templates. Most people have, you know, a handful of emails they use over and over again. and then add your footer, attach a deck, whatever you wanna do, and then send it out. So this is going to send out to 50 investors at once. Each one's gonna get a personalized, customized email that is sent individually from your email account. This isn't like a MailChimp or something that's going out as a blast. It's going to look and feel like you hand wrote 50 individual emails. to these investors. And it's great for like doing follow up, follow up emails, right? I sent you our deck last week. Can we schedule a time to look at that? And then, you know, kind of pick, pinging off that a bit is our other marketing tools which is really the pitch deck hosting investor updates and so this is where you would use to you know upload your deck create a online version of that deck send it out through the system you can go in it's like doc send light yeah it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of ducks and but it's similar to that in that you can You can track views of who's viewing it, how much time they're spending. Yeah. And one more question, if I may double click what you showed earlier, the investor database. So that's built in, right? So you don't need to have a separate, I don't know, pitch book account in order to get all these investors here. Yeah, it's built in. We've got about 216, 000 investors in here and we've got them. categorized by type of investor. Angels, VCs, family offices, trusts, fund of funds, even up to private equity lenders. I think we have about 16, 000 LPs of various types. And so, yes, you're absolutely right. Excuse me, the database is built in. And in many ways, I don't really like to say we are X plus Y, but people come to us and say, oh, you're kind of like a pitch book plus a HubSpot plus a DocSend. Plus a Merrill data site, you know, cause we have a data room as well. So we are in many ways replacing five or six other tools that people might be using into one integrated platform. Very interesting. Very interesting. Okay. What else should people know about funding stack? Why are we moving to founder suite already? Yeah. So the other things I'll mention real quick is the investor update tool. You know, this is part of the marketing process. collection here. And this is just a nice, simple way to build an update to investors. So I often tell folks, start off building your target list of investors, of course. And then in our email tool, perhaps start with the permission email and then get into sending them a regular update about your progress, about your traction, how the fundraise is going. And then just to put the Final touches on it. We have a data room that is what you would use to send out the confidential information, right? So you come in here, you create a set of folders, you populate those folders with your documents, your financials, your corporate docs, all that good stuff. And then you can invite investors in. either to the entire data room or just to a specific folder or even just to a specific file. And you can designate what they can do, whether it's download, view, print, et cetera. So that's basically, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got all the, you know, core features of data room, watermarking, analytics, permission, but it's, it's pretty simple, pretty easy to get going. And that's what you would use to do your due diligence and get the deal done. Very cool. Okay. So that's VDR is a part of Founders Suite. What else does Founders Suite do? So this is, the VDR is part of both Funding Stack and Founders Suite. So Founders Suite, let me open that up. Actually, I didn't have that opened. Foundersuite is going to be similar to FundingStack. It's a bit of a slightly older UI. This is our legacy platform. Now we are completely rebuilding this, rewriting all the code from the ground up and we are targeting late January, early February for a release, Foundersuite 2.0. So Foundersuite does much of the same things. It has an investor database. It has the pitch deck hosting, it has a CRM. What is different, obviously the UI is different, but what is, you know, one of the main things that's different is Foundersuite only in one company. So this would be for one single startup. you know, to run a pipeline, whereas FundingStack, like I mentioned, you can have multiple sub accounts, each with different deal teams, each with different pipelines. And those deal teams, like if you invited a portfolio company into one sub account, they would not be able to view the other sub accounts. FundingStack also has some analytics so you can see all your deals, all your companies on one screen, how they're doing on fundraising. But Founderspeed has much of that same functionality that I talked about, ability to search a database of investors, build an investor pipeline. Of course, you're moving these investors around the card. You're keeping track of notes, tasks, activities, all the email threads going on. It pulls those emails in automatically. So it has a lot of pretty rich functionality as well. But again, um okay if i'm if i'm trying to put that into perspective so if i'm a vc i would use funding stack i might give access to the portfolio companies so that they can use it too i do have crm functionalities i have the functionalities i need to run everything up until portfolio management, there would be separate somewhere else, right? The LP reporting and those type of things. Yeah, we do have, we do have some VCs using founder suite just to confuse matters a little bit. Because like I said, I mean, we built funding stack as a version of founder suite and then we spun it off and it haven't even publicly launched it yet. It's still in private beta, but yeah, that is the biggest difference ability to run multiple accounts under one. The other main differences are we're adding a lot more LPs to the funding stack database. So we have a variety of, you know, pretty high value custom lists of investors, such as wealth management, multifamily offices, another list that is family offices and NLPs that invest in venture funds. So we're putting a lot of time and resources into building out an LP database, which will be in funding stack. So that's another very large differentiator. Interesting. okay yeah what else should people remember or know about either product is there a feature that everybody loves most it's funny i mean we have so many features right investor database crm pitch hosting investor updates data room email tools documents um i'd say what people love the most is almost It's probably 50 50 either the database of investors. You want to find a high quality database of investors. You don't want to pay thirty thousand to fifty thousand per year that many of the incumbents charge. We've got that at a very affordable price point. The other thing people love is the investor CRM. We've really built the CRM with a lot of thought and functionality specifically around how fundraising works in the real world. you know, a lot of little nuances and details. And, you know, both startups and VCs love it a lot because it's really geared towards that purpose of raising capital, either from VCs or LPs. And it's really collaborative. So you can come in and work with uh advisors existing investors if you have some existing investors going to work with you you know we call it fundraising as a team sport it's very much built around that so um investor database and crm are kind of the workhorse products uh the rest is you know helpful on the marketing and due diligence side That's cool. Yeah, you touched on the topic of price a little bit there. So how does pricing work in general? So is it seat based? Or you know, what do you want people to know about that? Pricing for FundingStack is seat-based. It is 250 US per seat per month. And that includes access to the product, the platform, the database, the CRM. The data room is an upsell or an add-on. That's gonna be $150 a month per data room. So it's $250 per seat, $150 add-on for the data room. And that's it. There are no other fees or charges. And that gets your access. Now, if you are, it's a month to month contract, no contract, sorry, month to month subscription, no contract. So you can come in for a month, cancel if it's not for you. If you are willing to go to an annual plan, then we have a lot of these premium investor data sets that we will drop into your account the things like the wealth management multi-family offices we have lists of celebrity musician athlete investors we have early employees at a dozen companies that have gone public so some pretty interesting you know investor sets that we are willing to drop into people's who do an annual plan That sounds great because I have a man crush on Tom Hardy. So if you can get me his email, I would appreciate it. Well, we probably do. If it's findable, we probably have it. Right. All right. I will not test him, so he should make good movies. Anyway, so maybe then just in closing, because a conversation with you is always fun, just to pick your brain a little bit on the state of the industry maybe. So I feel there's so much software out there, both for the for investors, but also SaaS in general. So do you think there's a consolidation happening? Why is there not wider adoption by VCs of a lot of cool tech? What are your thoughts? It's a really interesting question. I mean, I think we're at a kind of an interesting junction or turning point. VCs have In many cases, gone one of two ways. In the past, they've either... written a very large check to Salesforce or sometimes HubSpot and and used those tools to do their processes. You know, there are some other VC focused CRMs out there that have come on the last few years. But I've talked to a lot of VCs who have built their own products because they didn't really find anything they like. Right. So there's a lot of VCs who either paid sales force or they've built their own uh things i think a lot of those are you know gradually weaning themselves off their own products it's actually pretty hard to build these products and it's hard to maintain them and all that stuff so i think vcs are like all right i think we actually need to buy something off the shelf um so i think that's that's one thing I think a lot of the emerging manager VCs are looking for more off the shelf things versus trying to build it right. They're more cost conscious. And, you know, we see a pretty big opportunity in in tapping those emerging managers, especially because with our product, you get all of these tools, the CRM, the database for a pretty low price point that you can't really match buying, you know, individual products for each one. What was the other part of that question? I think I missed part of it. No, the consolidation, I think indirectly you spoke about it, right? That the demand is coming up now. So yeah, I appreciate that thought. No, superb, Nathan. So thanks for spending time with us and showing us the goods. So I wish you a very pleasant day. And when I'm next in the Bay Area, I will let you know. And until then, greetings go out to you. Great. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. All right. Take care.

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