I'm Akhil Reddy, the CEO of Thera — a financial operating system designed for global teams. 

We see ourselves as an ecosystem of apps, with our main offerings being payroll, banking, and “Thera Building”, which includes accounts payable and accounts receivable functionalities.

My background is in engineering. Prior to founding Thera, I worked at Amazon where I played a role in rebuilding several systems including Power Prime and a significant data access management system.

I left Amazon around 2.5 years ago to pursue Thera full-time. 3 months after quitting my job, we were accepted into Y Combinator, and subsequently raised a seed round. 

We recently raised a $3M seed round. We raised in tranches, with the first $2M together and then the last $1M separately. 

This was right around YC’s Demo Day in summer 2022.

We raised funds right after Demo Day, and a lot of the interest was driven by us being in YC. 

I had also reached out to folks that weren't part of Demo Day and said, “hey, we're starting out the round. Let’s have a conversation.” 

In Calendly, you can specify which weeks you’re available to call, I just had people fill that up.

In figuring out how much we wanted to raise, we thought about how much headcount we’d need for what we're building, how much runway we would need, and how much all of that would cost.

We did some napkin math, and then added 20% to that.

We also had a plan A, B and C. We asked ourselves how much money would we need in all scenarios, but most importantly the worst case scenario.

The primary goal was to use the money raised to get to $1M in ARR, while growing at 10-20% month over month.

We definitely optimized for speed. There was an element of that, as well as momentum. 

We also looked at the fund’s credibility, their past investments, their ability to deploy follow on capital, and the fund size.

Especially in the early stages of the round, if someone said, “I'm ready to wire the check now,” they obviously got a lot more attention.

It was a mixture of people in our network, but mostly from YC Demo Day. Demo day is very systematic. 

As an investor you can press a button that says, “I want to invest,” and their platform automatically creates an email thread between you and the investor.

This also includes a standard message saying “Hey, here are quick bullet points about the opportunity and here’s my calendar if you’d like to chat.” 

This made it super easy to fill up my calendar with investor calls.

The things we touched on were the market, the team, and the product. You should make sure to deeply understand which of these 3 is your strongest, and highlight it. 

If you're in AI, talk about the AI opportunity. If your team's from Google or Meta, add that. 

If your product is growing at 20% per month for the last two years, include that.

We had pivoted mid-batch. Some of our peers were further along with good revenue and growth. The pivot surprisingly felt like it worked in our favor. 

It was like saying, "You don't really know what's going to be inside our box, unlike what you know from others." 

Painting the picture that way, against others in the cohort who had already launched, really helped us with the raise.

We built FOMO into the process and it worked. If you don’t have urgency, that’s the biggest mistake you can make.

The number one most important thing is that you have to run a calculated process.

The founders I know who have successfully raised have an entire list of VCs they want in their round, or that invest in their space, and another list of connections that they could leverage to get a warm intro to those desired VCs.

We did an element of that. That strategy paired with Demo Day enabled us to get a ton of meetings booked in a short period of time. 

We then compressed those meetings into as short a period of time as possible. 

I was taking 10 meetings a day for 10 days straight. I can’t imagine things would have worked out similarly if I spread the process over a 2 month period.

The short timeline is just better for the business. Compressing the process meant that I could go back to focusing on building the business even quicker.

If you’re raising, you need to make that your full-time job and get the round done as soon as possible.

We kept people up to date on the round using software that kept our pipelines organized, which was super helpful.

We told investors that we were only raising a certain amount at a certain cap.

We added FOMO into the process by telling investors, if they’d taken a few days to make a decision, that if they weren’t in at that moment, then unfortunately someone else was going to get in.

The other thing I’ll say is that the VC world is very small, it’s really important to never burn bridges. 

After every meeting I told the investors that I really appreciated their time, and would love to stay in touch.

We had a period when we relied heavily on cold emails. In hindsight, I don’t consider cold outreach a viable approach. 

If you're starting with zero network I'd suggest focusing on building connections first rather than relying solely on cold outreach. 

Even with an established network, cold emails can be really challenging. Unless you have exceptional growth with your product, this approach is super tough.

People also often get overly fixated on perfecting their pitch deck. 

I've seen many who are always asking for feedback on their decks, but I always tell them to prioritize their business instead. It can be frustrating when people obsess over the minor details on each slide.

I personally took a less-is-more approach with my deck, and focused on key slides with concise points rather than piling it with information. 

It’s more about crafting a compelling narrative around the deck rather than packing it with content.

The goal should be to leave investors intrigued and wanting to learn more, rather than overwhelming them with too much information.

I’d tell everyone to go read Ryan Breslow’s book on fundraising. It'll take you 2 hours. It has some really good nuggets of wisdom in there.