Welcome to Startup Grind's Founder Series, where our VP of Sales + Startups Alex Gordon-Furse educates our global community on highly relevant early-stage topics through interviews with founders of top startups from our Startup Program.

In this episode, Alex interviews Eric Crane, co-founder and COO of Flatfile, whose mission is to remove barriers between humans and their data. Hundreds of enterprises use Flatfile products to aggregate, import, and normalize data from disparate and variant sources. Previously, Eric was the first product lead at Envoy, whose workplace products help thousands of companies create delightful and welcoming office experiences.

The subject of this interview is 'Designing a fundraise: lessons from Flatfile's first two investment rounds'. Expect to learn how Eric and his co-founder David Boskovic designed a fundraising strategy that enabled them to raise a $7.6M seed round in less than a month.

0:00 Start
0:10 Quick intro from Alex Gordon-Furse, VP of Sales & Startups at Startup Grind HQ
2:20 Meet Eric Crane, Co-founder and COO at Flatfile
3:20 Where did the idea for Flatfile come from? What is the problem Flatfile is solving? Why now?
6:55 Using SAFE notes to recruit talent
9:43 Your pre-seed round was pretty big. What were the main reasons for raising so much so early?
12:10 How did you come up with the figure of $2.1M so early on?
13:53 What was the timeline of your raise process?
14:29 Different funding routes Flatfile could have gone down.
15:27 Where's the best place to start with fundraising?
18:45 Would you say pitches are organic or more practiced?
19:28 A lot of times startups get too fixated on the pitch deck. Make it good. But don't be too focused on it
20:08 How did you go about choosing investors?
21:00 What you should look for in different investors
24:33 How did you allocate pre-seed money and what length of runway did you give yourself?
26:17 How did you track what your KPIs were? How did you track your progress between pre-seed & seed?
28:08 How did you prepare for your seed round?
30:13 Do you feel like the initial feedback you received from earlier investors helped you prepare?
31:23 The best preparation for pitching: have a solid business
31:45 You raised your seed round in record time. Let's talk about that.
33:22 What mechanisms did you use to decide on the $7.6M number at that stage?
37:12 How much was it down to your planning and organization that helped close that round before what happened in the world?
38:24 What is the planning for your A-raise looking like? How do you think your experience will inform your strategy?
41:15 Are there three words you can leave us with on how they can also raise a seed round in 30 days?

Watch more of the Founder Series:    • Founder Series  
Read more from Eric:   / designing-a-fundraise-lessons-learned-from...  

Alex's twitter - @giomate
Eric's twitter - @bigcountrycrane
Flatfile's website - https://www.flatfile.io/

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