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Michele Romanow

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2019-05-10
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2019-05-10
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  1. “Experts in that space who you've probably heard on this very podcast, and you can read my favorite guide on scaling engineering organizations and many more on stripe.com forward slash 20 VC. That's T-W-E-N-T-Y-V-C. And last but by no means least, to scale unique customers, an Intercom offers a new and better way to acquire, engage, and retain customers. They've built a suite of messaging first products from chatbots to a totally reimbursed”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Any company stage, but there's no playbook for building a great business, but we can certainly learn from people who've done it before. Beyond listening to this podcast and talking to mentors and advisors in your own network, it's important to have resources. You can turn to when you're tackling a new challenge, and Stripe has built those resources for you, whether you'd like to learn how to run a pricing experiment or build a knockout landing page. Stripe gives you the information you need to start, run and scale a technology company, and their guides are often written by or feature people like E.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Cancellations, oversized baggage requests, vegan meal options, whatever you can think of, they have you covered. And the 20 minute BC listeners can score a free lounge past over 1,200 airports for a whole year. I'm quite jealous. I quite like that. All you need to do is go to travelperk.com forward slash 20 VC. That's travelpert.com forward slash 20 vc. Give them the name of the person who runs travel at your company. And if they book a demo, The lounge pass is yours. And if Travel Perk allows me to scale my time, a lot of what we do on the 20-minute VC is discuss scaling businesses, talk to experts, pick the brains of founders and investors who tell us about the trends to watch out for, offer tips on fundraising and teach us how to excel.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Debbings Before we leave you And I was always crap at travel booking. Now use travel perk, the business travel management platform That It's just so super easy to book travel and actually quite Favor Back and forth with travel agents or your finance team, but it gives you the best of both worlds Companies don't just get happy travel. Also, easier management, and as much as 20% in savings with 100% in compliance, got to tick that compliance box these days. And even better, no one is going to chase people for receipts or worry about splurging on Expensive penthouse suites. Finally, I have to The support is just number one rated. So you get 24 7 travel experts ready to deal with forgotten passports. Unexpected”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Recorded From Michelle Shell Romano. Likewise The scen An odd kila tasting session or two at the 20 minute VC. You can do that on Instagram at H.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Know, I think we win when five years from now vendors are going public and they're back to owning half their companies again. And there will be no greater source of pride. I think we can fund tens of thousands of companies over the next five years. And I'm really excited to do that.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know, you stay calm, you have a circle of largely other founders around you that you can kind of figure out a strategy and a plan. And I think your strategy of exercise is an amazing one. We are without question addicted to our phones, so basically glued to our hands. And the brain needs to be outside to reset. And so if I can get a walk outside, run outside, anything, I think that's a huge reset. And so it's having a group of really close people that I can triage with and figure out how we're going to solve the problem. And then the ability to just get outside for a few minutes and reset.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Experiences that inspired me to build better products for founders because the catch-all has just been put a personal guarantee on something and then the bank is covered. But I believe that data tells us way more than that story. And so I think ClearBank was about building the product that I wish I had. And a lot of my early experiences as a founder over the last decade really went into that.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It was so important because I had been a good student at school and I needed that early setback to realize that the world owes me nothing, that I was just going to have to be creative in the way I came out of that. And I remember the embarrassment of seeing all my friends at parties and they're like, how is the business going and not having the heart to be like, oh my gosh, it's a disaster. And I don't know how to say this. And I think that that was really important. I mean, I can remember, you know, another really personal moment early in my career is we had an e-commerce store had a problem with a merchant and we're told by kind of the early payment processors that we had inadvertently signed a personal guarantee when we signed it for payment processing. And I remember the total fear going through my mind when I was like, okay, so we've done a million dollars of processing. I have $10,000 in my bank account. So if these guys are asking me for this money, like I'm going to have to declare bankruptcy, like I'm just not going to make it. And it was a lot of those early.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The moments that make you think are incredible places where you failed. And so it didn't matter if I lost a big deal or a huge hire that I wanted to make. It was those moments that you have to embrace the failure and figure out what you have to learn from there.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think what I would change about Silicon Valley is I would extend the reach of Silicon Valley. The thinking that's been so extraordinary should not just apply to people that are in the Bay Area. It should apply to every corner of America and frankly every corner of the world. And so the more that I can play a tiny part in building solutions to hopefully enable that, I think the better off will be as a society.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Favorite recent book is Little Box Stretchy Pants by the founder of Louman. I was shocked when I read this book. He was on his fifth store, already a wildly successful brand. And the bank made him take a personal guarantee to buy at that store when he was at over $20 million in revenue. And I was just so inspired. I mean, that really means that even if you build the best brand in the world and financial institutions have been so fair, unfair for so long and just inspired me even more to keep going on our mission.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, the only way that we could do this in 20 minutes is we totally had to change the model. And so instead of using smart Stanford MBAs, we had to use data science and technology. And we had to really understand. And the data sources had to be big enough. Major mistake, this company could not have been built three years ago. I mean, the data sources themselves had to be big enough. And then we had to figure out what are the indicators that did matter and how to assess unit economics and return on ad spend and all of that. And so you can give us your data. You can connect us to your online accounts and we can give you how much capital can give you and generally the terms in 20 minutes, which we think is a great alternative option for founders to have, especially to have in their back pocket as they're negotiating.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There's no question that 20 minutes has a ring and I think that was 100% inspired and probably even subliminally inspired by you because I remember we can process data very quickly. So we're actually probably faster than 20 minutes, but it just like 20 minutes had such a good ring. And I always think branding is so funny in this way is once you've heard something a couple of times. And so you guys should take all the credit. It was inspired by you guys.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Story. And that eliminates this question on not all businesses are supposed to grow forever. And it's okay. You know, this guy has a great success story, but I think that that was finding a guy that probably just wasn't in that ecosystem to understand all the options. Because I've seen a VC fundraising and done that process. I mean, this takes three months. It is 100 meetings. It is getting to know people. You are getting into a long-term relationship. Like with equity, you never get to give it back. And so, you know, you have to think really carefully about who you partnered with. And I think that's true for any founders. And you've interviewed so many incredible VCs, but I think that's kind of the way we think about geographic distribution and how do we line the most of the founders. No, I do totally agree with you.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Remember actually one of our very first companies that we funded. And this one, you always remember kind of first customers as a founder yourself. So we find Sky, he's an ex-military veteran out of Baltimore. I mean, I don't think there's a VC within 100 miles of him. And this idea, exactly, right? You're laughing because it's true. And he has this idea to do a murder mystery subscription box. Like every month you get a box that has a handwritten love letter and a bunch of clues and so you can run a murder mystery party. Pretty cute idea. But the cool part of ClearBanks model is it's not my job to evaluate the size of the murder mystery market or if this guy's a good founder. I'm like, look, this pretty good customer acquisition metrics, we should start him out, you know, give him 10 grand of funding. So two years later, this guy has 60,000 subscribers. He has a massive multi-million dollar business that he owns 100% of himself. Clearbank scaled up from 10,000. We've given him out $8 million in funding. And I think that is a huge success.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Massachusetts and Texas. And there was actually nine states in America where there was zero dollars in vetra funding. There was no companies that got venture funding. So the logical conclusion of that is certainly that there was not nine states in America that had no entrepreneur. It's that there was nine states where VCs truly had no reach into that. And so I think that became one of the incredible side effects of Clearbank is that we built everything through data science and AI. You plug into your data to us and we can give you an answer in 20 minutes on the capital that you qualify for. And we've also inadvertently took the bias out of decision making because we're not meeting our founders. We're not doing pitch meetings. And so when I pulled our numbers, we funded eight times more women than industry average. We did nothing to try to make that happen. That's just what happens when we made those decisions just based on the data. We have funded founders from all over America that are totally different.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “About geographic distribution may be of current funding. I'm sure you Points from the time already with Clearbank. So, in terms of the In terms of funding, what's been some of the big learnings on distribution of venture dollars for you having seen that with the process with Clearbank over the last few years? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, the way that, look, I think great founders come from everywhere. It's one of these careers that if you have, you know, the right set of ambition and drive, it shouldn't matter where you come from. And I look at the challenges of the world as something like climate change, where governments have put a trillion dollars to work, if not more, to try and solve these problems. And it's effectively going to be one or two entrepreneurs that are going to build cars and trucks we want to drive that will have the biggest impact on that problem. And so if you take the view that founders are the ones that fundamentally change the world for the better, we have to be able to find them in more places than just Silicon Valley and New York. And so one of the interesting stats that I read recently in Bloomberg was last year 80% of the venture capital dollars led to four states in America, California, New York, Massachusetts.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think there are way better milestones to celebrate, launching new products, getting a critical user traction, hitting your millionth user. That is what the tech press should be celebrating. I think that what this became is it doesn't take a lot of work to verify that a round happened. And so this became a proxy for someone else thought you were successful and therefore you did this. But I think there's a totally other way of looking at it. And for me, like, I mean, I've been a founder for 10 years. Like all I cared about was how do we help and protect from founders and how do we do this at every level of the stack, whether you're building a unicorn or whether you're building a company that's going to make a great impact on your local community. Yeah, no, I totally agree.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's not about celebrating funding rounds. It's actually celebrating founders giving up a piece of their company, often a very large piece, 20 to 30 percent around and giving up control of their companies. And I think that there's been a big difference that not a lot of people are talking about. You know, the founders of Lift from Republic and they own 3.5% of Lyft, an incredible success story by any metric and an incredible service. You know, when Microsoft went public, Bill Gates owned half of that company. And you can see the extraordinary impact that that wealth had on the non-for-profit world and all sorts of things going forward. But I want to live in a world where founders can own more of their company. That's one we know that we've made it. And so that's, I think, why, you know, if you look at where this capital is being spent, it's really, really important. And it doesn't mean no VC. It just means how do we get founders to take less solution? Back to your question. And so I think that what's happened is that we are just celebrating when founders are giving up control or they're giving up pieces of their company.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Like Vine Box, YC has these single serve wines that come to your house. You could try different wines. He took some of our capital last year in Q4, got to raise a Series A that was double the valuation. He still took VC dollars. You still have that incredible advisor. But instead of raising $10 million as a founder, you can raise $5 million in VC, $5 million from Clearbank. We do all the funding for your ad spend, and you still have that. And so I think it's all about what you need as a founder. And looking at how do we create a different asset class around the repeatable parts of scaling your business.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so when you think about VCs, they can be incredibly helpful. And I've certainly seen that in my career and have worked with some extraordinary VCs. They can also be incredibly harmful. And you could probably find founders that could tell you all sorts of stories where companies have been put in really tough positions because of the investors they had. I don't think we're taking an opinion on that. We're saying let's look at how you should use VC. VC is true risk capital. This zero to one risk that we describe. If you are building a crazy piece of AI and need 50 engineers or solving a disease, VC is the perfect fit for you. What I'm saying is Clearbank, we're like, if you know that channels are working, if you know you're putting a dollar into Facebook and getting $5 out, that is by definition repeatable and scalable. It's not true risk capital. And you should be able to use cheaper capital than equity to be able to fund that. And so we've actually seen a lot of our founders doing this. I mean, you know, look at a guy.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I remember how tough it was. And I'm only 33. And so I remember, like we were running by Tobia when early Facebook direct response was coming out and we were like, holy smokes, this is going to change the world. And so I think that some of platforms go through chains, some of that criticism is very real. I just think relative to the options throughout history, this is pretty good.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Such a luxury for brands today and for any company because the world of acquisition before this was so much more difficult. So certainly there's going to be challenges as these platforms get very big. They're going to make changes that are going to have huge effects on swaths of companies. But I still think taking the perspective of what even existed a decade ago, this is a way better world for startups.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I would take a totally different approach to looking at this. I think that the world before Facebook was way harder on startups. You think about buying a billboard. You know, billboard companies would look at you and they'd be like, okay, it's like a minimum of 10 grand if you're in the best discount ever. It's usually 50 to $100,000 to start buying out of home. It's half a million dollars to start buying television ads. Maybe you can place an ad in your local newspaper. And so that had a huge amount of favoritism to big companies who could buy and big media buyers who could negotiate those discounts. I would still argue today the opposite, that you can go on Facebook and you can test for 20 bucks and see if someone buys your product. And yes, you have to get very, very good as you start to scale and very creative, but ultimately you get to tell your end story and you get to control your budget. This idea that you could tell that every mattress you sold or every pair of eyeglasses cost you 10 or 50 or 150 dollars.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “What do you mean by free and open distribution in this sense? You're meaning the fact that so much of this distribution is now based on Facebook and Google today, and those are kind of closed platforms.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, there's no question that our data science team has to be very good. I mean, this is a business where I make 6% when we put out our money. And so we don't have the luxury of a VC fund where you're picking lottery tickets and one company can really carry a bunch of losses. And so we do a lot of work to make sure that your unit economics are profitable. We do a lot of work to understand how saturated your audience sizes are. And we do a lot of monitoring actually even on a daily basis to make sure that if things are changing, quickly to that. Because certainly we've seen big changes. We started in 2015. We've seen big changes in the Facebook and Instagram and all of these platforms. And there's lots of creative ways for founders to solve those problems if they're kind of front and center.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, this works for anyone who has positive unit economics and is spending a lot on customer acquisitions, which I think the first natural vertical is any e-commerce company. I mean, you look at the big e-commerce brands they were spending 70, 80, 90% of their dollars on customer acquisition. You know, the second place this works for is consumer apps where you're acquiring a consumer to get a download and then someone's buying a subscription off that. Subscription boxes fit that. I mean, even the repeatable parts of B2B sense companies really fit that as well. And ultimately that means that founders will be able to keep way more of their companies by the time they go public.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “It doesn't have that same growth trajectory, but these guys really need the $100,000. So for fun, and I think it was maybe it was end of a long day, I said, look, let's throw out a different deal type. I'll give you the $100,000. You pay me back 5% of your revenue. And so you pay me back $106,000, and that's it. I'm not going to take equity, not going to take a personal guarantee because they think that's the nastiest thing to do to founders in the world. But what I do want to see is I need to see your Facebook ad account and I need to make sure that your return on ad spend is exactly what you said it was. And it's hard to believe that that kind of insight into how much money companies were spending on early user acquisition has blossomed. And that kind of became the core of what ClearBank is today. I mean, last year on this same model, these revenue shared.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Asking the investors for help to get them into retail. They were now asking for help to get online. And then I just kept seeing the same story. And I really remember this one father-son team. They were making these wooden iPhone cases. We've all seen these. You know, they're so proud. They've done a million dollars in sales. They're like, look, we have great unit economics. We make each case for $10. It costs us $10 in Facebook ad spend. And we sell it for $50. And we're here on the show today looking for $100,000 for 25% of our company, which was probably in the range of what the show valuations look like. And something after it kind of seemed like 20th pitch that sounded like this, where I just stepped back and I said, you know, equity might not be the best fit for what these founders are doing because these guys are going to take the 100 grand that they get. They're going to dump it right into Facebook ads, which is exactly what they should do. They're going to make $400,000 in revenue. But the wooden iPhone case company is probably not going to go public.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “User acquisition. And then over the next five years bought 10 of our competitors. And the only difference between us and the companies we were buying is that we have been able to control our cost of user acquisition, which kind of became a big theme in building Clearbank. From there, I built another app called SnapSaves that digitized coupons for the consumer package goods space so our customers were Coca-Cola and Procter& Gamble. That company was acquired by Groupon in 2014. And then post Groupon, a couple interesting things happened. I got to join the board of a couple public companies, but most interestingly, I joined the cast of the Canadian version of the Shark Tank Television Show. It's called Dragon's Den in Canada. Same format. I'm one of the investors. The interesting part is the way we film the show is we do 17 days back to back, which means I see 200 pitches back to back. And I was fascinated because the first thing that was changing about the entrepreneurs that were coming on the show was that instead of”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, for sure. So I have a totally different story. I mean, I was engineering, started a little sustainable coffee shop on campus, and started brainstorming with a bunch of friends. By the time I had graduated, I figured out that worldwide supply of sturgeon caviar, of all things, supply was down by 95% because we had overfished the Caspian Sea. So I was crazy enough to move to the East Coast and build a fishery from scratch. This is the most untecked thing. Everything it sounds like, boats, fishermen, my hands need to go fish the whole nine yards. And our thesis was correct. Chefs couldn't get the product, so we had a ton of buyers. But unfortunately, then went to a giant recession in 2008. And I'm 21 years old in the luxury goods space, being like, I'm not going to make it. So from there, I ended up going to become the director of strategy to big retailer. Saw e-commerce flow up. And in 2010, started an e-commerce company called Bitopia. We couldn't or didn't raise any money. It became one of the fastest growing companies in Canada just through low cost.”

    2019-05-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source