I am Daniel Liebeskind. I'm the founder and CEO of Topia. 

Topia is a platform for spatial communication and spatial navigation of content. We have topia.io which is our consumer SaaS and we have schoolspace.io, which is our education SaaS. 

We also deploy the entire application suite as white label deployments. They run on our customers' domains so they can control the branding and customize everything.

The first version of Topia was actually a VR platform in 2018 called Everyspace. 

When the pandemic hit in 2020, everybody suddenly needed a better way to connect with each other online. 

There were some big events that were happening in 2020 that prompted a big scramble to bring those online. 1 of those was Burning Man. 

We were the official virtual Burning Man platform in 2020 and 2021. We had 20,000 people come to that. It was a huge success.

On the tail of that, we had a lot of people who were blown away with what we’d built and wanted to put money in. So we did a $600k friends and family round in October 2020.

Burning Man’s success led to a series of deals with enterprise companies like Asana and Autodesk, Okta, Yale and Princeton and a whole slew of folks that were growing events.

And after we held a bunch of these successful events, we then raised a $5.2M seed round led by Alexis Ohanian and Katelin Holloway from Seven Seven Six. 

Bonfire was our main follow-on with participation from 35 Ventures and other investors as well. We closed that round in May of 2021 and we haven't raised since then.

We then got inbounded by Ubisoft. They made us realize that enterprise companies weren’t going to want to bring all of their users into topia.io.  

They’d instead want to be able to run their own platform, use our technology, build their own products and customize everything. This was the beginning of vast product and vision changes.

We then got inbounded again by a company called Stride. They are a public company that runs virtual schools. At the time that they inbounded us, they had ~120k students.

They came to us because one of the challenges with being a homeschool kid is lack of community, socialization and connecting with other kids.

They had conviction that a spatial communication platform would be the right solution for them, and they went and they evaluated all of the options and ultimately went with us. 

We are unique in the market in being able to deliver single tenancy, white label deployments of our technology.  

Our platform also scales without adding servers, so it’s fixed cost infrastructure with low devOps.

While running those events for companies like Asana and Autodesk, we found that a lot of times kids would be looking over their parents' shoulder as the parents were working from home during the pandemic.

We were very careful about adding under 18 users, but we did a pilot with Stride, which we’ve since expanded upon. 

We are now hitting all-time high usage on a weekly basis. We've expanded to other virtual schools outside of the Stride network, and are also expanding into higher education. 

We are now pretty firmly in education. We've realized that is a massive market for us; especially for our technology and our capabilities. 

We also have use cases across virtual offices, B2B2C, learning & development, and events.

When we were primarily focused on our B2C platform, the funding was used to go after this B2C social platform. 

It became pretty clear to me that we needed to evolve what we were doing. When we did the Seed raise, Alexis Ohanian from Seven Seven Six was fired up about social use cases.

The funding was going to be used for funding growth before we pivoted to education.

How did you decide which investors would be a good fit?

My goal in the fundraise was to find really smart VCs that know what they're talking about, that I would want to work with, and that would not be overly controlling with the product. 

Enabling me to work autonomously while being great sounding boards was really important to me too.

I also wanted somebody who was a master of community. I found that in Alexis Ohanian.

And I wanted somebody that was on the B2B side because we were already doing deals with Asana and Autodesk and figuring out how to navigate enterprise deals.

That was challenging, as it was something I hadn’t really done before. So it was really important for me to get someone on board who had experience there too. 

I knew some VCs already because I came from the VC world when I lived in San Francisco. I reached out to those that I knew, and I would ask for advice. I would also ask for connections to other VCs. 

I generally find that cold outbound is just not that effective. You can get warm intros from VCs, from angels, from other founders. Some VCs gave me referrals. 

We spoke with 36 people in total. About half of those turned into second meetings. From there, about 10 were interested in investing.

Because our platform is a communication platform, we were able to bring people into the world itself; it was like we were doing a demo during the pitch. 

We were trying to get investors to have an epiphany where they realized what the possibilities were and what was happening here.

That can be a combination of technology or use cases or experiences that we have that we either construct or that happen organically. 

When you see that light bulb moment happen, they start getting excited and they start pitching you things.

I never used a deck in my pitches. I'd send the teaser deck ahead of time, but I’d never walk through a deck during the pitch. 

The pitch was more so about our product and vision. It helped that the conversation took place in the product.

The key with VCs is to build momentum, and to have a tight timeline and to try to get them all excited at the exact same moment. 

Part of the reason for that is that there is a confirmation bias. There is a somewhat of a herd mentality when it comes to VCs.

They all want to be in the same deals and they want to confirm with each other. If one VC is really into it, then a whole bunch of VCs are going to be in. 

But until you can find that lead, it can be very challenging to get anybody interested. Having a tight timeline is the recommendation I give to most founders, because what you don't want is a whole string of no's.

You don't want an open-ended fundraising where everybody's waiting for somebody to say yes, and then you start getting some no's. 

You want to instead manufacture a tight timeline and say the date that you’re going to close.

It takes a lot of time and energy away from focusing on building the business. You have a limited amount of resources so it can be distracting. 

We were doing our pitches using our product. This was 6 months after writing the first line of code in a pretty complicated platform. So it didn't always work perfectly every time (at the time).

You know somebody that can make introductions. Find that person because the key to successful fundraising is warm intros.

Networking with founders that are a stage ahead of you is the best. You will learn from people who most recently successfully navigated the stage that you’re currently at.

When you're having those first conversations with VCs, you're not actually fundraising yet. 

You're asking for advice on what metrics are important and telling them that you're planning to fundraise in the future. And then you let them all know at once when you start it. 

I would also say that you should have two versions of your deck. One should be a short teaser deck. VCs are going to spend 20 seconds looking at your deck. 

If you send them a 30 page teaser, they're not even going to look at it. 

You can send a teaser beforehand and then after you meet with them, you can then send the longer, more detailed version.

Also don't necessarily talk to your number one target VC. You're probably going to have no idea what you're talking about in the first couple calls.

You're not going to say the right things. It takes around 6 of these before you start actually realizing what they're digging in on and the things that they're going to ask. 

By the 10th or 15th conversation, you're anticipating everything they're going to say. 

Based on their first question, you realize which thread they're going down because you've seen the patterns.

Anyone who can raise from Brett or Bonfire is lucky. Brett was an early Salesforce guy, just savage in B2B. And when I was talking to him, he also was kind of no BS. 

He was very straightforward. I liked that a lot. The partners there are really incredible and they're just a really standout firm. 

They’re extremely founder friendly and very helpful. They go out of their way to give you coaching and advice.

What I found with Alexis Ohanian was, when I showed him the platform, he pitched me on the vision I already had, which blew my mind. I'm like, okay, we are like kindred spirits. He gets it.

There's a series called Acquired that talks about the rise of different companies. I've found it to be extremely interesting.

You realize that everybody's journeys are different, but often the companies that wind up being Microsoft or Facebook do similar things.

They're masters of being really determined and playing a few different games at once where no matter what happens, they win. 

There’s another book called The Great CEO Within. It’s been pretty useful for CEOs.

I’ve also found that talking to founders that are 1 stage ahead of you is extremely helpful.  

There are great founder groups and roundtables where you can talk openly with other founders at a similar stage to you as you go through your journey.  

Please reach out if you want recommendations.

Founders that are 2 or 3 stages ahead can be helpful too, but it's going to be usually anecdotal advice rather than real advice that will help with what you’re currently going through or what you may deal with over the next year.

Rather than telling somebody what your vision is, if you can get them to have a lightbulb moment and get excited about what’s possible with your product, that can be really effective.  

It’s a great way to gauge that they understand your product and market well enough to be helpful to you on your journey.