Deck the halls with drones and robots!
Your yearly selection of awesome robot gifts
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We're back in person.... robot! Demos from: Micropsi with UR, more TBA
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Good afternoon! In today's edition, we asked five founders to tell us what no one told them about the fundraising process for their companies. Questions or comments? Send us a note at braintrust@protocol.com
Zeb EvansClickUp
Founder and CEO at ClickUp
Don't expect VCs to tell you how to run your business. That's up to you. That will always be up to you.
VCs will certainly help you with many functions. They'll ensure that you get your house in order when it comes to finance, hiring, and certainly recruiting, but they won't come in and make your business better overnight.
It's really important for founders not to overvalue a VC in that regard. You must understand what their role is — and where your responsibility lies! A VC can be a great resource, but you should still be the one with the vision.
Edith HarbaughLaunchDarkly
CEO and co-founder at LaunchDarkly
I have been a product manager and an engineering manager, and I had never raised capital prior to starting LaunchDarkly. Now I’ve raised more than $300M, and I’ve learned no one tells you raising money should be thought of like building up a muscle.
Initially, my co-founder and I put in $10K each of our own money to buy laptops and domain names. We then turned to our friends and family, convincing past coworkers to put in anywhere from $5K to $50K. It was not easy to ask for their money, but it helped me start to build that muscle and get used to pitching LaunchDarkly. I still remember a coworker saying “I have no idea what your new company does, but I know that you’re the best product manager I worked with. You were relentless when it came to iterating on product, and I know you’ll iterate and improve your pitch.” Building the pitching muscle did not happen overnight. I recall how our pitch at our accelerator Demo Day for our seed round was, in hindsight, grandiose. I talked about how LaunchDarkly would help software companies all over the world launch, measure and control their own software. While we are seeing that vision come to fruition today, at the time it did not land. We only had one new investor from that audience invest in our seed round, as the majority didn’t understand what LaunchDarkly would offer. With every subsequent round, we improved how we told the LaunchDarkly story and honed in on what we heard from our customers: we were making software development faster while decreasing risk. As our customer numbers grew from 100 to 1,000 to now more than 3,000, we shared those in investor pitches. As I improved the pitch and built that muscle, our customers served as proof points simultaneously.
Francesco SimoneschiTrueLayer
Co-founder and CEO at TrueLayer
The amount of funding a company raises sets its ambition and expected trajectory. I’m not sure first-time founders all understand that. When fundraising it’s crucial to work out the math and detail of what the numbers mean for you as the founder and for your investors, particularly when it comes to growth rate and forecasting future valuations. The key to unlocking this process is being able to find alignment between founders and investors. In my experience building TrueLayer, fundraising has been a very organic process and we always tried to put ourselves in a position of strength and partner with investors with a long term view and incredible ambition. But it requires you to think in decades and ultimately commit to build a long-lasting business. This is not common or easy. In the current funding environment, founders need to give greater consideration to the finer details of terms and conditions, too. Board seats, voting majorities, and liquidation preferences can play a bigger role as investors’ approach to funding rounds has adapted to reflect the current economic environment.
David HsuRetool
Founder and CEO at Retool
Raising capital comes after building a great business. You need surprisingly little capital to get started. And once you have a great business, raising capital is so, so, so much easier.
Think about all stakeholders when you raise capital: your employees, your shareholders, and your customers. Your employees and shareholders will prefer lower dilution. Your employees and customers will prefer a lower valuation (such that you're more likely to be able to raise your next round).
If you have a truly incredible business (think, the chance to be the Google/Facebook of your decade) with an enormously large TAM, most metrics aren't important anymore. Investors invest because they think you have a 10% chance of being a $100 billion company, not because of how you beat last quarter by 20% or because your multiple is "cheap."
Tracy YoungTigerEye
Co-founder and CEO at TigerEye
Time kills all deals, so timebox your fundraising. If you hear a no from investors, move on. If you hear a yes, know that the deal is not done until the money is in the bank. After you set a predetermined amount of time to fundraise, go back to real work even if there is no term sheet in hand. Fundraising is not an indication of success or failure. It signals externally that you now own less of your company. Remember that raising capital is just a financing event, so don’t fall in love with it, and don’t go into a pit of depression over it.
See who's who in the Protocol Braintrust and browse every previous edition by category here (Updated Nov. 3, 2022).
Hidalgo came to office in 2014 with a vision of pivoting Paris away from reliance on private vehicles. In the years since, she has closed major roads to cars, opened new bike lanes, and brought the “15-minute city” — where a person’s needs can all be met within 15 minutes of home — into the zeitgeist. This is great for the people of Paris, of course, but Hidalgo’s work can also serve as a model for others. She has proved that car culture can be walked back even in one of the world’s major cities, if only leaders have the political will.
Linda ZhangFord
Chief engineer on F-150 Lightning team at Ford
It’s a tall order electrifying America’s bestselling pickup truck, but that’s what Linda Zhang did for Ford. A 26-year veteran of the company, Zhang started her career in the Ford College Graduate program and eventually became chief engineer for the automaker’s flagship electric truck. Auto insiders consider what she did to be an almost impossibly daunting task: turning the country’s most popular car completely electric while keeping it affordable and convincing skeptics that it could be just as powerful a vehicle as its gas-guzzling predecessor. The electric pickup launched in April, with deliveries beginning in May, and over 4,400 sold to date.
Giovanni PalazzoElectrify America
President and CEO of Electrify America
Scaling EV adoption also requires scaling charging networks, and that’s where Electrify America comes in. The company emerged from a Dieselgate settlement in 2017 and now runs nearly 3,500 public fast chargers, with plans to expand to 10,000 chargers by 2025. But its impact stretches beyond its growing charging footprint: Electrify America, helmed by Palazzo since 2018, also disrupted the proprietary network patchwork, from Tesla’s automaker-specific network to EVgo’s clublike third-party network. That shift toward public charging access is huge, making charging less complicated for drivers getting used to how the electric future differs from their gasoline-dependent past.
Paris MarxTech critic and author
Tech critic and author of “Road to Nowhere”
A vocal critic of the tech industry’s vision of mobility, Marx argues that doubling down on personal vehicles — be they autonomous, electric, or even shared — is bad for communities. Leaving transportation in the hands of automakers or tech companies only makes everyday people more car-reliant, and lines those companies’ pockets in the process, they said in a recent interview. Marx instead pushes communities to embrace options like public transit and cycling, as well as a more democratic and equitable approach to how we plan our societies, one that they think is necessary if we want a mobility future that works for everyone.
JB StraubelRedwood Materials
Founder and CEO of Redwood Materials
Tesla co-founder and former CTO Straubel’s second act, battery recycling, is perhaps more critical than his first. Straubel has raised over $790 million for Redwood Materials, and the startup is currently building a $3.5-billion Nevada facility with the aim of recycling enough batteries to power 1 million EVs by 2025. Redwood Materials’ goal is to offset looming shortages for batteries and the critical minerals needed to produce them as EV demand is set to skyrocket. Although the Inflation Reduction Act has spurred a new wave of investment, the U.S. is still lagging behind other countries in battery production.
Budi Karya SumadiMinistry of Transportation of Indonesia
Indonesia’s minister of transportation
Indonesia is expected to be among the fastest-growing economies over the next eight years, along with China, Vietnam, Uganda, and India. That makes the stakes particularly high for Budi Karya Sumadi to get things right in his role as Indonesia’s minister of transportation. Luckily, Sumadi has spearheaded innovative transportation initiatives in his role, including a push to electrify many of the country’s 133 million gas-powered motorcycles. By 2025, Indonesia aims to have 2 million electric motorcycles in use. Sumadi also wants Indonesia to become an exporter of those vehicles. To that end, he green-lit a government testing site that’s specifically designed to ensure prototyped three-wheeled vehicles and motorcycles meet international safety standards.
Liane RandolphCalifornia Air Resources Board
Chair of the California Air Resources Board
California is about to surpass Germany as the world’s fourth-largest economy. As chair of the California Air Resources Board, Liane Randolph has been granted a broad mandate to reduce the state’s emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. Randolph hasn’t been afraid to wade into controversial territory — for instance, CARB has taken more aggressive (and unpopular) steps such as banning new diesel truck sales by 2024 and requiring a full transition to electric heavy-duty trucks by 2040.
Marco PavoneStanford University
Stanford professor and machine learning researcher
We’ve missed deadline after self-imposed deadline on the arrival of fully self-driving vehicles (and no, Tesla’s Full Self Driving feature, despite the name, definitely doesn’t count). When it finally arrives, full autonomy promises to remake our cityscapes, our relationships with cars, our relationship to work, and even our daily schedules. As the director of autonomous vehicle research at Nvidia, Marco Pavone is on the forefront of that push, especially as it pertains to advancing machine learning capabilities through research. Pavone is also an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Center for Automotive Research. His research spans the AV landscape, with some focused on the higher-level implications such as how the introduction of fully self-driving technology will affect city congestion.
Jennifer GranholmDepartment of Energy
U.S. secretary of energy
As secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm is attempting to deliver on the Biden administration’s lofty climate goals, including a target to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Luckily, Granholm has $62 billion in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help get the job done. The Department of Energy plans to launch 60 new programs, addressing needs such as clean hydrogen manufacturing, the battery supply chain, and modernization of the electric grid. But she’s also been tasked with addressing the ongoing energy crunch that has contributed to inflation, and has had to strike a difficult balance on messaging. Recently, for example, Granholm boasted about the Biden administration outpacing the Trump administration on oil and gas well approvals, while still “also making historic investments in a clean energy transition.”
He LifengNational Development and Reform Commission
Head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission
Since 2017, He Lifeng has served as chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, which oversees China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI stands a good chance of being the single-most-ambitious infrastructure project of the early 21st century. Under Lifeng, the NDRC issued guidance for “greening” the BRI in an attempt to limit environmental risks and bolster green energy projects. At the Communist Party’s National Congress in October, Lifeng was selected to serve on the 24-member Politburo, reflecting his growing influence in the party and his close ties to President Xi Jinping.
Honorable mention:Juliet Eldred and the New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens
New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens
“New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens,” a Facebook group boasting more than 227,000 members, is a place for discussion and, yes, memes about what car-free societies could look like. Then-undergrad student Juliet Eldred created the group in 2017 as a place for niche jokes about, for instance, dueling urban planning giants Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. But it has since grown to include planners, GIS professionals, and public transit wonks from around the world. The NUMTOTs’ passionate, good-humored corner of the internet demonstrates real demand for a mobility approach that prioritizes community and climate action over car ownership.