Please briefly introduce yourself and your startup.

I’m Zayd — CEO and founder of Valley.

I previously built and exited 2 bootstrapped appointment setting agencies. 

I knew intimately well what was required to go and set up appointments. 

The first company was started in 2017. We bootstrapped it to about 25 employees — it was acquired in 2021. 

That company helped financial advisors connect with potential clients. We worked with Morgan Stanley, RBC, Intercoastal Mutual, and pretty much every major wire house.

I then started a company called FISH which helped emerging funds raise capital from LPs.

It was pretty much the exact same model as the first company. We bootstrapped that to 45 employees — it was acquired in 2023.

I then decided to go kick off Valley — an AI appointment setter. 

We’re essentially doing everything I did with humans outsourced in the Philippines and Vietnam and all over East Asia — but with AI this time. 

We work with companies like Front, Miro, and Cardlytics. We're about to start working with Deel and Rippling as well.

Please share what you can about the fundraising journey for the company so far.

I initially started fundraising for Fish App. We had no checks until joining Antler — just some Figma mock-ups.

Antler is a 6-week residency. They bring in 100 people and fund 3 or 4 out of every batch at the end of that 6 weeks.

We made a ton of progress in residency and they decided to be our first check — they did $150k for 7% at a $5M cap.

Right after that check came in, Jason Calacanis put his first $25k check in.

We felt like we were off to the races — we started trying to acquire users. 

We acquired a bunch of the Antler batch and started to do social media campaigns, but nothing was really going anywhere. 

At that point we had about $200k in the bank. We spent another 3 months pivoting on the same idea. 

We got a bunch of $10-$20k angel checks — brining us to $400k total.

My co-founder was pretty burnt out and said that this wasn't going to be for him — he decided to leave. 

A big part of me knew I wanted to pivot 3 or 4 months prior, but I thought to myself — I’m just a 19-year-old squirt.

I have all these amazing people on board — Jason Calacanis, Antler, the CEO of Ticketmaster, the CEO of Evite, the CEO of Match — very smart people. 

I thought that meant that there had to be something with this idea. It was their conviction in the idea that kept me going. 

I ultimately realized there really wasn’t anything in that business.

I decided to start exploring some pivots and let the investors know that I was doing so — come mid-January, I told them that we were moving to an AI SDR product. 

I told investors the reasons why I wanted to do this and if they wanted their money back, I’d wire it within the hour. 

2 investors ended up doubling down — we kicked off in March of 2023 with $500k in the bank — aiming to get $1M.

We eventually received that second $500k. It came in from Transform VC, a couple other angels, and a small fund called COACT Capital.

General Catalyst Venture Fellows did a small check and O'Shaughnessy Ventures put in $1M.

In a year’s time we ended up closing a $3.2M pre-seed at a $20M cap.

Fundraising Strategy

What did you plan ahead of time to use the money for?

I knew that I needed $2M-$3M in the bank to make this company work and hire who I wanted to hire.

Investor Strategy

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

For the first few checks the only thing I vetted for was finding investors who would write checks quickly, believed in me, but would then leave me alone.

I didn't want anybody who was going to be a nuisance to deal with or constantly asking for updates every week.

The first few checks received were with investors who met those desires — they wanted to equip me with capital to run with my plan. All they asked for was a quarterly update — that was great.

Once we had cash in the bank along with the momentum from 50% of the round being filled, I could start showing progress. Fundraising then became much easier.

How did you get in touch with investors?

I kept my list very broad, targeting anyone in New York investing in pre-seed B2B SaaS.

I would then approach our current investors to see if they could provide any warm introductions.

If they couldn't, I'd ask them to send a brief email on our behalf, and then I would follow up with a cold email.

The most effective structure for my cold emails looked like this:

This simple approach generated a lot of excitement.

Fundraising Process

Roughly how many investors did you reach out to?

Top of the funnel is everything — I sent between 400 and 420 cold emails. All of them were personalized and all of them were as relevant as possible. 

I got 136 first meetings to raise the second $500k of that first $1M.

What did you emphasize in your pitch?

I decided to create really short decks around the main objections that I would face. 

In the follow-up emails I would send Looms that walked through the quick decks.

Anytime my champion faced one of those objections, he or she was equipped with whatever resource they needed to effectively communicate my energy, commitment, and objection-handling I would have done myself.

It was night and day when I started equipping the champion with those resources — my success from first to second meeting turned to almost 100%.

There's another atypical thing that went well — I never pitched with a deck. 

I would send a pre-read deck that contained nothing but words — it told the story really well. When we got on the phone, it was just us talking rather than running through a static presentation.

We conversed about where we started, where we were in that moment, and the opportunity that was in front of us.

I wove that into a story of the problems that I previously faced along with my founder/market fit. 

It contained three things: how the world looked, where the world was going, and how Valley brought everybody along for that ride.

What did you do to drive urgency among investors and close the round?

Everybody talks about creating FOMO and trying to use artificial deadlines to close investors — I tried all of that.

That worked really well in the heyday of 2021-2022. Investors can now see right through that — especially if you're a first-time founder. 

That FOMO strategy only worked when I had half the round closed.

Investors back channel, they're going to ask you for the SAFEs. They're going to ask you to prove that your round is 50% committed. 

At the time we were going out to raise, there was a 74% contraction in pre-seed and seed funding.

If you want to create urgency, stop thinking about these artificial deadlines.

We created urgency by actually getting revenue — we showed that we had the ability to create momentum. 

The urgency came from the fact that we were actually growing the business — it was clear that there was a propensity for customers to pay.

At the end of the day there's no true way to create urgency other than to sell something — if you're struggling to fundraise, go sell something.

What was the biggest challenge that came up during fundraising?

I realized that I could get any analyst or associate insanely excited about Valley. 

The issue was when they needed to translate their excitement to the partners and their investor committees.

Every single time I would miss out on getting that second meeting.

Another difficult aspect was when investors asked about how we would build defensibility — at the time everybody thought anything built on top of Open AI would eventually be built by OpenAI itself.

Any unique or interesting fundraising stories you haven’t mentioned yet?

The first check I got offered was $500k. They were asking for non-dilution clauses — they also said that I needed to bring in a business-minded co-founder. 

I told them about my previous exit and the guy went off mute and said “big whoop, that was my wife's credit card bill last week.” 

Reflection

What’s one piece of fundraising advice you’d give other founders?

Never take an introduction from an investor who said no but says something like ‘my friend may be interested’ — those introductions hurt you so much more than they could ever help you.

Who’s an investor you’d recommend other founders work with?

Jeff Becker at Antler. The first thing that Jeff said when he wrote his check into Valley was — “I'm now your employee — you are my boss. Anything that you need me to do, I will do it.” 

Our 3 biggest customers came from Jeff and our entire advisory network of 20 sales leaders from him as well. He's also sourced and interviewed candidates for me.

When Valley sells for $1B, Jeff and Antler will get 9% of my next company upon inception for everything they did to get me here.

Are there any resources you’d recommend to other founders?

Houck’s investor lists are incredibly helpful.

I really love Ryan Breslow's book on fundraising — It's a FOMO-creation & urgency playbook. I thought it was a phenomenal run through of how to fundraise with many great nuggets.

I also listened to at least 200-300 hours of 20VC episodes. 

It taught me how partners think, the language they use, what questions you should ask, and how you should present yourself in those conversations. 

I also created this for new hire onboarding at Valley — it’s especially helpful for folks who haven’t worked at a startup before.