I’m Jason and my company is Helios. 

Helios is the first real-time marketplace for residential solar in the United States. 

People hear a lot about solar, but what they don't know is that it's actually twice as expensive in the United States as in every other industrialized country. 

We found a way to quote installers — digitally and in real time — versus needing someone to come to your house and run you through an arduous process. 

We can take somebody from the interest stage to permits in less than a week.

The idea is to get more solar adoption in the United States at a lower cost because solar really is the deepest form of electricity in the history of humanity.

We ended up raising a convertible note at around $10M — rather than a priced round — because the noise in the space was so high that nobody knew what was what.

We knew it was a venture opportunity because of the complexity of what we were building and the problem that we were trying to solve.

When you look in the United States there's 66M solar viable homes. We knew that the Inflation Reduction Act would put wind in the sails of putting more solar on roofs. 

But yet the adoption in the United States is half to a quarter of what it is in other industrialized nations like Germany, Australia, France or Spain. 

We knew that there was something that wasn’t adding up. If you put solar on the 66M viable homes in the US — that's a $2T opportunity. 

We knew that it was a huge opportunity after everybody that we had spoken with. Once we figured out how to accomplish it — we knew we didn’t have enough resources. 

We could either bootstrap this and risk falling behind, or raise capital to amplify the business.

You have to understand if an investor is somebody that leads rounds or follows on. 

A lot of first time founders waste 25% to 50% of their time talking to every VC that will talk to them.

If they're not going to lead the round you really shouldn’t speak to them at all until you find your lead investor.

Once you get your lead they'll help you get everything else to fall into place — because they’re incentivized to do so. 

They'll bring people onto the cap table to reduce their risk and make sure that they've got other capital around the table.

Our round was divided between institutional investors and high net worth angel investors. 

The angels were people in my network that were either mentors or people that I'd known for a while.

We took probably 100 to 125 calls with investors and eventually got a term sheet from a fantastic investor — literally the day before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.

We told people we knew how to make the company a success — we made it clear that this was an obvious opportunity, and we had the technology resources to be able to do it.

We put a good team together of seasoned people that know what they're doing in business — we knew where we were driving to — that was the investable thesis.

We knew it was a big deal. Everyone that we talked to knew what we were trying to do and understood the gravity of it.

Timing was the most difficult challenge; given that the Silicon Valley bank collapsed the day after we got our term sheet. 

Every VC that we had been working with canceled every meeting that we had scheduled.

Separately the introductory process with VCs is a very broken process. Most of the time you're talking to an associate who may or may not have a ton of experience at the firm.

You're essentially trying to tell that person something that they're going to go tell something else to — that part is a bit challenging. 

The person you're speaking with usually doesn't have a ton of real world experience. They likely just got an MBA — they might be 1 or 2 years out of school. 

You’re trying to describe how to solve complex problems to somebody that doesn’t have experience or necessarily understand how to build a mental model off of it quickly.

I think this actually hurts a lot of senior VCs — they're likely passing on a lot of opportunities due to things getting lost in a game of telephone.

There's a guy that I've known for probably 5 years now. 

We see each other at events and I went to him and he said that this wasn’t something in their wheelhouse of things to invest in — but he said he’d introduce me to some people.

One person I spoke to was so squarely in our wheelhouse, but they started at $8M checks — we were too early for them from a mathematical perspective.

Using your network to get introductions from other VCs is the single fastest way to find your lead because cold outreach alone is very hard.

Unless you have some big names on your team that have been around or are nationally known advisors that will help you — cold is really hard.

You need to leverage those relationships that you have for introductions.

You just have to go with things unless you're a hyper-scaling company and your round is really hot — otherwise you have to grind it out.

I also didn’t fully grasp the whole idea around some of the mental health stuff. 

I would encourage any founder that is going through the process to not neglect including exercise in your schedule.

Endorphins are the single biggest drug to help you through this process.

I'll give a shout out to Rick Zulo with Equal Ventures — probably one of the smartest guys I’ve come across — a lot of people know him in climate. 

We had three or four calls and ultimately they passed — but Rick's thoughtfulness and willingness to be around was something that we need to see more. He's an incredible individual.

If you’re a first-time founder trying to understand where to start, NFX’s Signal is a great resource. 

It gives you access to a database of people who invest in your area. It's a free resource that provides you with companies and people with whom you can build a list.

Also make sure you have a really good attorney. 

Under no circumstances should you ever delay your paperwork — you have no idea when you're going to need to have that piece of paper done.

If you take 100 meetings, you need to prepare for an hour before that meeting, and then have an hour’s worth of follow-up — plus the hour that the actual meeting consumes.

If investors then ask you any questions, you're in another hour. That's four hours spent on a single meeting. 

If you take those 100 meetings — that's 400 hours you're taking on introductory meetings. 

What's really funny is VCs say that the business needs to be your only focus in life.

If you think about that amount of hours, it's almost 1/12 of an entire year that would be spent fundraising as a CEO — and not focusing on the business.

This is at odds with what a VC wants you to actually be doing.