YouSaid · the spoken record

Kurt Rathmann

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34
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2020-01-10
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2020-01-10
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  1. “You know, we feel like we're just getting started. For me personally, it's about finding leverage in everything I do to increase my impact, both personally and professional, and continuing to scale with the business. My gifts at this point are seeing the future and driving a lot of humans towards that common goal. So the next five years for Scale Factor, we want to become a de facto solution that you run your small business on. And we want to start to feel like we're making an impact on the entire small business ecosystem. And I think five years is a long time in startup plans. But, you know, it could take longer than five years for us to really complete the goals that we want to.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You know, it's becoming less and less now, but in 2014 when it was the space that we're pioneering. And now as we see the world coming together and the space evolve, I think that's changing. But a large part of my journey, it was just convincing people that what we're doing is the way the world's going to move. You know, the narrative of what you've heard me say in 2014 to vastly what I say today has not changed. And so I think when you're in a category creation type business, you just go through this disbelief. And for me, you've got to figure out a way to turn that and kind of throw that log of disbelief onto the fire and let it keep powering you.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The first investor is a close friend of mine, Aaron Amar. I grew up with Aaron. I went to high school with Aaron. It was a close friend that had the trust in my execution. Irregardless of the vision and the mission that I had at that time, he saw early on that he would invest in this person that would do everything it took to make a return on that investment. And so it came down to that personal relationship.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “No, no, there's 29 million small businesses just here in the US. I think that it's a variety of key players looking to evolve. And if anything, this is going to be a strong partnership market before it would ever be a winner-take-all market. There's quite a bit of work to be done to get to where we need to go before I think you could consider any type of winner take all.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “My biggest strength, and this is the way I view myself, right? So maybe other people would disagree, but the biggest strength is just connecting with people. Maybe my comments about getting on a plane are suggestive of that. The biggest weakness is kind of the other flip side of that, is I can spend a lot of time creating the connection and creating the relationship with folks. And it tends to displace other things I'm working on or other perceived important things that I'm working on. And so the time management side of things could be a weakness.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “My current favorite book is The Empowered Challenger Playbook by a local entrepreneur here in Austin called Printus Howe. It's about how brands change the game and can really challenge the incumbent brand.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Because you're setting the foundation for relationship that can be 10 plus years through multiple life events and circumstances and think of that you're just going to do it via Zoom or a phone call. I don't necessarily think you're setting the proper foundation for what's required. So I would go back to be willing to go to where they're at. That makes a lot of difference in the world.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You know, I think that there's a couple things that are happening. Number one is the entire landscape is changing. You're seeing where maybe 10 years ago investors would not want to invest out of their jurisdiction, their location, because it was too far away and they wanted to be able to meet and go down the streets and so forth and so on. I think the world's changed where there's more collaborative ways to communicate and have that touch that no longer require the physical element of that, right? But on the other side of that is you got to get on a plane. You know, Byron would tell you, and I think Thomas from Kotu as well is, you know, as we were going through the partner meeting process, it was, you know, they're sending a Zoom link over and saying, hey, just zoom in at this time, and that'll be that. And I said, no, that's not how I'm going to do it. Would you have me in person? Because if you'd have me in person, I would gladly be there in person. And so it comes down to at the end of the day, remove all the technology, remove all the things. You got to be face to face with people. You got to look eyeballs to eyeballs. You got to shake their hand. You got to have that inner.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Maybe aren't in the coasts and the quote unquote Bay Area, you just got to put in the work and you got to put in the hustle. And I think if you do that, you can be rather successful.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And by virtue of that, there's not as many people available. And what I mean is specifically VC backed high growth companies. And so there's not as many of those folks available to come in and do the things they've done before. And while that is true, I don't let it stop me at all. There's plenty of ways where you can engage the most talented people to help solve your problems and location is just an attribute of the problem solving process. I think the secret weapon is one that I would apply everywhere in this landscape, but the idea as a CEO, if you're really going to recruit, you got to get on a plane. You got to be willing to get on a plane for almost everything. I'm actually headed out to Los Angeles here in a couple weeks because I'm actively focused on recruiting somebody and I'm very intent on it and I'm going to go see them. I'm going to spend a day with them where I'm going to convince them that this is the place for the next part of their career. And so I think you got to use all the tools in the toolbox. But the thing is you can't recruit if you're really going to recruit top tier talent to cities like Austin and beyond that.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Know, I would say that perspective and experience is everything, you know, and more so, you're going to get a little bit the determination out of me. It's the CEO's job to ultimately recruit talent to the business. And that can take several years. There's folks that have joined Skill Factor that have been recruiting for upwards of four years. And you can uproot anybody from whatever location if you're willing to put in that work, right? If you can expose them to the company over time, if you can employ them where you're really utilizing their expertise and putting it into play as maybe even an advisor to the business before they might be on full time, the fascination of when you find that right match location doesn't really matter. Now there's logistics of how do you move and how do you move a family and all that stuff and that might be annoying to people, but we've got a really great process to work through that as well. And so I would agree to some extent that you've got the idea that a place like Austin or a place like Denver doesn't have as many companies.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “You know, it's something that we are testing every day, specifically right now, a little bit into the weeds, but it's relevant for this answer is multiple offices. We have offices in Denver and Vancouver, BC, and people operating really all over the country to some degree for various specific items. But here in Austin, we're operating out of three separate offices. And you might say, hey, Kurt, why are you operating out of three separate offices in Austin? And I would answer because our space that houses everybody is not done yet. And while you go into the commercial real estate aspect of Austin, but we were not able to time hypergrowth specifically with the space requirements that we needed. And so we sent our product and engineering team to a location. We had our customer success and support teams in a location and sales and marketing location. And that has tested us tremendously as a culture. And the things that we have reverted back to our core pillars of”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Show the data which you're operating off of. And then you can bring in the human empathy and relational component. And if you can keep those separate, it does wonders for how people will self-correct and they'll realize whether they themselves are successful or not.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You know, I take it through a process and it starts with what I call the LFF conversation. And that is the let's face the facts conversation. And we can do that very objectively. We can try to remove as much emotion as possible. And if we could just tie that back to data of why we're here, then we can go on a process of how we're going to solve for that in the next repetition of time. And so really kind of focusing on let's face the facts and maybe even writing those down so you can come back and look and seeing if you're successful. It's ultimately the thing I revert back to if we're facing the facts over and over again around the same things. And when you can demonstrate that, it starts to become a really objective conversation whether we're being successful or not. And I try to approach the problem that way instead of bringing a lot of emotion to the problem because that's where things start to go off the rails with performance management and ultimately your ability to dust somebody off versus just leave them on the floor, right? And so it's important that you”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Go down a different direction and really questioning what you're doing and why you're doing it and all those things. And a lot of times as leaders in any business, and specifically in a fast-paced startup, our job is to pick people up and dust them off and to put them back in the seat and say, hey, you're doing a good job. You just had a bad week here. And I think that you would feel that in the building throughout, and it's something that we're very protective of as well. That is the way we're going to operate. And that's kind of our cultural norm.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “To do that, but one of the things is a Friday at 4:30 p.m. We get together as now teams within the company. We were at one point just the entire company, but now it takes too long and it may not be as relevant for some team members. But we get together in a circle and you call out the wind that you had. And it can be personal. It could be professional. It could be relative to you. And what that does is not only give you a pulse of what other people are working on and what other people are struggling with and what other people are overcoming, but it also lets you as a team member or even as an executive, there's weeks where you just don't have a good week. There's days where you just didn't have a good day. And to be around people that have had a good week and have had a good day and to see that more people have had a good week and a good day than people that have not allows you to kind of get back in the seat and continue going forth where we found if we don't have those moments in our culture, it's really easy to.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “You know, it's awesome to hear Michael say that and to hear investors resonate about that. I think it's very intentional. I believe that when you walk into the building, we've got to do a number of things to make it a safe place for you to be the most creative and ultimately do the best work of your entire life and your career. And so that comes into even the scent in the building to the music playing to who greets you and how people treat each other is very, very important. There's also a lot of things that we do to control density inside of the space. If you have too much space, the energy level is not there. Obviously, if you don't have enough space, the energy level is there. It's just not the right type of energy you're wanting. So we constantly are monitoring the density of the space that we interact in, and that controls a lot of the energy flow. But one of the things that we've done since the very beginning of scale factor, maybe a couple months in, is really celebrate our wins as a team. There's a variety of reasons that we”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You know, it's a constant learning journey and it's a constant reevaluation of where we're at today and where we're heading. But the side of it is it's my boardroom. It's a founder's boardroom. It's the CEO's boardroom. And so you've got to take control and you've got to build a team around that. And so ultimately, if you said, hey, Kurt, list out your responsibility as a CEO. I would list one of those that says my job is to build healthy teams. At the end of the day, I'm a professional team builder at the end of the day. And so the board is just like you're launching a new team internally. It's the same thing. You've got a new team member coming on board. How do you meld them together? How do you make sure that you go through the quote unquote kind of forming storming norming stages? How do you do all that? And so it hasn't got anywhere I've kind of been knocking my head against the wall. It's more so is how do I engage everybody? How do I make sure that we're spending the right amount of time where we're getting to know each other, but we're also spending the right amount of time where we're in front of a whiteboard and solving problems. And I think that if you're not in the driver's seat is kind of where you can get yourself.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “A lot of times it could be the overvaluing the brand name of either the firm or the investor. I think that you have to get past that. And it could be the other way around too. Maybe somebody that is investing in you isn't somebody that you would also.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “To an expert that's seen this movie 20 times before, and you're getting best practices from somebody that's obviously seen success for the particular problem you're trying to solve”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Is not going to answer your question directly, but I think it's a little bit of everything. The investor updates are important because you need to provide folks that are not in the business every day enough context where they could even be helpful in the first place. But from there, I guess the one thing I would say, it's FaceTime. It's spending time together and then these things come out and organically start to come out. But you have to lock interest. You have to lock on problems. You have to let people into the company to the point where they can really help solve. And so it is opening the kimono, right? And it is being vulnerable and saying here is exactly where I'm struggling today. And typically every time I've done that, there is somebody right around the corner, right, in the inbox within an hour if I can tail down to the specific problem I'm having and provide the context around that, there is somebody that that investor knows or at least somebody to talk to somebody that can help solve that. And then you just start on that journey and all of a sudden you're talking to.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That as a founder, you have to know that all those things are available. It's really your job to extract it. I think folks get into trouble when they think that a lot of these things or these kind of marketing elements of particular VC or particular firm are going to be handed to them. And to some extent, yes, the email, the intros will show up in the inbox. But I think it's also quite a misconception that the moment you decide to work with somebody, it just kind of comes to you. It's totally, that's not been my experience and not my philosophy behind it. My philosophy is I've got to go mine these things. I've got to go work, create, you know, the relationships and ultimately mine out what's beyond just the capital to answer your question just directly. There's a lot of things, but it's not handed to you in any way.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The biggest value add is the experience and the pattern matching from seeing this before. I have a philosophy and a thought and there's many other folks that have taken a stab at this, but if you boil it down, I think VCs in general can do about five things for a company and varying levels and varying levels of expertise and execution. But the first would be they can write checks. The second is they can make intros to talent. The third is they can make intros to the ecosystem that you're in and partners of that ecosystem and those players that can help you along the way. Fourth, varying firms have different platforms that they provide, whether that be a recruiting element or a partnership element or corp dev side of things. And those are kind of platform plays that differentiate BCs. And then the fifth is really the wisdom through osmosis of being around one another and just getting kind of some of the phone time and desktop time and whiteboard time and whatnot. And so the biggest thing I have employed since the day in TechRars is”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Forced to prioritize and focus on the things that are really gaining success and kill the things that aren't. And so that's a good thing. When you now go to the side of to really be strategically successful here, I need to have a longer runway, then you have to force that inorganically. And so that's what we do. We change the culture, we change the business where we've got a land of abundance and creativity. And then we start to say, okay, what are all the things we're working on? Let's go on an endeavor to really, really hone in focus in the business and see our traction. And then we'll revert back to the other side. And so I think you have to be really good at the muscle building. And that's the way we've approached it today.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You know, it is, and it constantly is today. I think that what I've worked on and what's instilled in the team and what we're still coming better at is really gaining that muscle between throttling these elements of growing and running a VC-backed startup. You know, this is not a normal game. Most of the businesses out in the world do not have VC dollars to power them to basically do inorganic things. And so what I look at, you know, I have a couple things here. The first is a great team, I have a saying and a philosophy that a great team is always throttled at between 80 to 130%. You can't run at 130% forever because you really start to break things. You can't run at 80% forever because then you become complacent and you might lose some speed of play. I have that same saying here with context switching between quote unquote the land of abundance and the land of scarcity and inherently fun raising kind of does that organically for a business as the cash on your balance sheet is reducing your”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Have a longer horizon that actually strategically plays in here because now we're at the point where I need a longer horizon to solve some of the problems and to see that pay off. And that's ultimately why we decided to do A, B, and C in 13 months. But a lot of that was really premeditated by the Series A selection and joining forces with Michael Gilroy at Canon.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So, I took a lot of time doing the initial kind of series A process from Seed Round. And then from there, you know, a lot of it fell into place, our B and C rounds were preempted. That allowed us to make the decisions possible to expand our timeframe and the problem that we were solving. And in some way, I've got, there's the aspect out here of do you take money if it's available or do you wait for this perfect circumstance? And I have generally a saying that's drink when you're fed. And so maybe more saying you take money when it's available, but it really comes into the circumstance. It comes into the problem you're trying to solve. What is the runway you really need to do that? And in our case, this will take some time to do what we're doing. And in the category we're helping creating with many of other great companies on this race to intelligent finance. And so what I went after is saying, hey, up to this point, we have forced ourselves to have a pretty short-term timeframe on problem solving and items we could deploy to do that.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, so from there we went into TechSars here in Austin and during TechSars, that was the first time to really validate the investor poll and resonance to our idea and ultimately the problem we're trying to solve. So we took note at that point in time and we really set out to raise a million dollars. We ended up oversubscribing that round to three and a half and then took our time from there to really do the things that we needed to do in the business to get off the ground. And that was bringing her engineering team in-house, creating the foundation for sales and marketing and those scalable processes and then really focusing on the Series A partner. I took five months to raise the Series A and it wasn't because I didn't have the opportunity to find a partner before that. It was much more my focus on finding the partner that I felt like I was going to take my idea and take the traction that we had had and really evolve that and help me evolve that into something much greater.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Did I try not particularly, it was much more of analyzing the scene, figuring out what we were doing as a company. We really spent a lot of time incubating the idea and getting boots on the ground trying to figure out who our customer was and how they preferred to interact with us and what did they value and how do we acquire them, how much are they going to pay, how do we keep them, all these types of things really set on a path to answer and validate and then answer again before we took any venture dollars and really started focusing on scale.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, you know, the thing that's not in that story is we've been around for six years. And so you could say that it actually took a long, long time to fundraise venture back dollars. It took three years to do that before we were operating for three years before I ever took any type of venture money.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “You know, there's so many different ways to get to success. And I think connecting the dots in history would validate one form or the other. I ultimately think you have to be an expert and you can become an expert really fast or you might say more naturally the path of least resistance is to come into the problem you're solving being an expert. So you either have to learn on the fly and get the quote unquote 10,000 hours under your belt or you have to do that prior. For what we're doing here at scale factor, I'm not sure you could be successful not being an expert. This is a very technical problem we were solving from an accounting standpoint and financial standpoint. And then you add in the human emotion of a small business owner and somebody risking everything they've got to wake up every day and be an entrepreneur. And you add those two things together. I would lean more towards the side of being a founder that's mission driven and finding really living the problem first is least the path of least resistance to success.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “We got here today, kind of in that with I became absolutely obsessed with solving this problem. And for those that spend a lot of time with me, they would probably tell you I'm still absolutely obsessed with solving the problem. So I think listening to the obsession and connecting the dots throughout time ultimately are responsible for us talking today.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “To the University of Texas here in Austin, and I took a more traditional path at that point in time and became an accountant, became a CPA, and ultimately went to work for KPMG in Big Four Public Accounting. And KPMG in that whole entire firm experience was very valuable, but I started to find myself really questing towards how a business operates and how I could affect change there. And so that led me to a small business in Denver, Colorado, where I ultimately had the breeding ground for this idea. And the way I would frame that is I had a big problem to solve. I had a really constrained budget to do that. And so that invoked this kind of fight-or-flight response where, you know, how do you do this with a minimum amount of resources? And then, you know, I added on, you know, inherent was just a sheer determination to find a better solution. This is something what we do at Skill Factor is something I've seen clearly for many years and really have been solving the problem in some way or another for a good portion of my life at this point. So that's.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah, you know, there's really looking back, there's a number of things that have happened really over my life to get here. And I think that's the first one is I'm a born and raised entrepreneur as very early on that I realized that I thought this way. I was interacting on some avenue to create value. And so accepting that early on was key. And ultimately, the problem that we're solving at scale factor really started when I was 18 years old. And I had a company in high school as a landscape lighting company. And so at that company, while not a tech company, what I was trying to do is solve a real-time inventory environment. So I had a garage full of inventory and I had a QuickBooks desktop computer and I was trying to get this accessible remotely. And so hooking a QuickBooks desktop computer to a palm pilot with a very expensive at the time 3G cell signal to try to make it remote and work that way was really the beginning of saying, hey, there's an operational problem to solve here and applying it to a business. From there, I went to college.”

    2020-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source