I'm Bill Kerr, a two-time founder with a rather atypical background. I didn't come from a startup or corporate environment.

When I was younger, I bought and sold real estate, traveled the world, and then started my first startup.

My first startup had an incredible product, but we didn't make much money. However, I gained a lot of valuable skills along the way.

About five years ago I founded Athyna, a global talent platform. We match talent with opportunity: when someone comes to us, we provide incredible talent, matched with AI precision, at lightning speed.

Whether they need sales and marketing professionals or creative and product experts, we source talent tailored to the client's needs within five days.

The idea is to keep the business model as it is but reduce that five-day timeframe to five hours. Thanks to AI, we expect this to be possible within the next 12 months.

Recently, we went for a friends and family angel round, which began back in September 2021. We had conversations with VCs in both Australia and the U.S.

Initially, we were targeting a $45M valuation, which seemed reasonable to the VCs we were speaking with. By March or April 2022, things took a turn.

On the very day we opened our round, Netflix announced mass layoffs.

Given the challenging market conditions, we decided to aim for $5M at a $25M valuation.

We came very close to raising at a $25M cap from a mid-sized fund in Austin, but it fell through at the final stages due to a conflict with one of their portfolio companies.

We had some promising conversations with big players, but as the market continued to worsen, the entire fundraising process became an uphill battle.

We ultimately decided to kill our product roadmap and focus on becoming profitable as quickly as possible, reducing our reliance on fundraising.

However, we still needed to raise a bit of money.

We spoke with a few angels and funds in Europe and raised from one fund in Australia that participated in the friends and family round.

We also raised from several different angels and did a small community round. This included about $300k from one fund and multiple angels contributing checks of $5-25k each.

Additionally, we raised another $200k through a WeFunder round, which consisted of small checks ranging from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

We didn't set out to fundraise initially; we were focused on growth for a while. But as the market went wild in 2021, it felt like the right time to consider raising funds.

Everyone was talking about these insane valuations, and I realized that if we didn't seize the opportunity, we might miss out. Still, I was skeptical about chasing extremely high multiples.

The idea of going after a 100x valuation was tempting, but I knew the risks involved. Trying to grow into such valuations could easily have sunk us.

Looking back, I'm relieved we didn't give in to the hype and raise too much too soon. It could have resulted in an inflated and unsustainable business.

While we were focused on growth and product, raising funds felt like the right move at that moment. Plus, I had a gut feeling that the market wouldn't stay hot forever, so we decided to take our chances while it lasted.

When it came to valuation, we took what we could get at the time. Initially, we tried raising at a $45M valuation, but the funds weren't very receptive; $45M was seen as a joke in that market environment.

The market was so frothy that we were perceived as not taking things seriously. We had to adjust our numbers and adapt our expectations accordingly.

We built our 'Dream 100' based on who were the most active investors, those with the best reputation, and those that were thematically in line with who we are and what we do. 

We had a highly successful outbound strategy. We built our lists entirely on our own, using information we scraped or found in public databases and websites with VC data.

We started with 3 main lists. The first was our 'Dream 100' which were the top funds we wanted to target.

We then created a 'Next Best' list of 200 funds that had a fund size, activity level, and previous investments aligned with Athyna.

We also put together a third list of 100-150 funds.

We ended with about 500 funds on our email lists. We began our outreach with consistent outbound efforts, starting with the third-best list — funds ranked from 301 to 500. This allowed us to refine our pitch, emails, and meetings without risking our highest-value targets.

I had one person helping with outreach and another reviewing the recorded calls to provide feedback.

For the first 2 weeks of our fundraising, we focused on the lower-tier funds. Starting in week 3, we moved on to higher-value prospects, primarily the top 50 funds.

During these conversations, I would candidly ask for extra feedback on our deck and presentation.

By the time we began reaching out to our highest-value contacts, we had built much better rapport because we had already polished our approach with the lower-tier funds.

~5k VC firms, syndicates and family offices. 

We had around 200 calls including multiple calls with firms like Sequoia, GGV, TCV, and K1, and Insight Partners. 0of those calls came from introductions; all were from outbound email. 

The main selling point was the macro trend of global hiring. We had always had a successful talent product, and it was growing quite fast. 

When we started raising we had achieved an average month-on-month growth of 22% for 3 years in a row. But the market was absolutely going crazy for EOR.

We actually had a unique value proposition that went insane; we could solve the two biggest pain points in global hiring: finding talent and compliantly hiring.

We wanted to be the first global team-building mechanism. That what we pitched — and it was quite evocative.

We had a date that we gave investors to invest by, but the market was crashing down all around us — so it didn’t really hold any sway in the eyes of the investors. 

The ball had been firmly shifted into their court.

The biggest challenge was that we had an insane amount of traction, revenue, and growth on the lower-margin talent platform — but no growth or revenue on the higher-margin EOR side (the new product).

It was really stressful. The further the round went on, the more pressure I felt because we weren't actually getting traction.

Pitching something that was really groundbreaking, and that the world wanted, was what we aimed for — but we just couldn't actually nail it. 

It was really an enterprise product. Most of our sales at the time were SMB to Series B. It was a mismatch that we didn't really think about.

I have a pretty crazy story of this one investor who gave me advice for determining a valuation to raise at.

Early on in the raise, I had a call with a guy from GGV. They’re one of the biggest funds in the world. He said, “you should be raising at 100x multiple of your revenue.”

He said “anything from 70x to 100x is fine, but if you try and raise at a 60x multiple, people won't take you seriously.” In Australia it was quite different. 

In Australia investors were still throwing around 20x multiples at the time — that was an inflated Australian market. 

When the market's normal, multiples are the same as the US as they are in Australia. But when the market's inflated and crazy, Australia's a lot more conservative.

I’d really stress the power of cold outbound. Everybody knows that warm intros are the best, but the reality for most founders is that you can’t get them every time.

Outbound works because if you look at it through an investor’s eyes, you might grab 10 seconds of their time on your deck — A VC’s job is to read their emails and look at pitch decks. 

If your deck is well presented, or you have a value proposition that’s well presented, the deck doesn't have to be fancy

We did really well on the outbound — we just kept building lists after that.

We built strategic angels when we pivoted to the angel round — this included people in HR, tech, talent, marketplaces. We just kept adding them to more lists. 

Using lists for outbound was basically our whole strategy, and it worked super well — I’d recommend that to any founders kicking off a raise.

Blackbird — they are the premiere fund in Asia Pacific and have the highest founder rating in ANZ by a long way. 

They didn't fund Athyna, but I recommend them higher than any other fund.

Our data room was a standout aspect of our fundraising process. 

We actually designed it using Notion, and I even have a template available on Gumroad. Several investors mentioned that it was the best data room they'd ever seen.

Most people just throw documents into a Google Drive folder and call it a day. 

We wanted to make sure our data room reflected the same user-friendly, polished vibe as the rest of Athyna's platform. I believe how you do one thing is how you do everything.

We organized everything in Notion — making it visually appealing and easy to navigate. 

When investors saw our data room it wasn’t just about providing information — it was about making a lasting impression.

Even though we didn't end up raising the full amount we wanted to, having that level of polish in our data room definitely set us apart from others.