We Raised $100M - Venture Capital EXPLAINED

1469 words

7 minutes

We Raised $100M - Venture Capital EXPLAINED

2025-06-29

BrianMoranSC

raised

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100m

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venture

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capital

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explained

Rolling Along and Talking Business#

Video Context: This chat is tied to a YouTube video you can find at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2cfhMFaotI
Setting the Scene: We’re bringing back a “car episode” vibe today. Back in the day, these talks used to happen in an old Jeep. Today, it’s a highway drive out towards the lakehouse in the mountains.
Sound Check: Driving a Jeep on the highway with strong winds (like 40-50 mph winds!) can be noisy. Trying out a little mini mic called Hollyland that clips on a hat and says it has noise cancelling. Hopefully, it works, or this might need re-recording!
Topic Origin: Been chatting about what it’s like to have a board in the last couple of newsletter editions, which sparked a bunch of questions, especially after the Monday newsletter went out.

Why You End Up With a Board#

Raising Money: Ever since raising money, quarterly board meetings became a thing.
Traditional Route: When you go the traditional route to get significant investment (especially from big, institutional investors, not usually just angel investors), they typically want some level of control.
The Board Seat: The standard way they get control is by asking for a board seat.
Corporate Structure: To have a board, you usually incorporate and often turn into a C-Corp.
Before Investors: Hypothetically, before raising money, the “board” was just the founder and his partner (Scott). They didn’t actually hold formal board meetings or anything like that.
Adding Seats:
- When the first investor came on, they got a board seat. This made it 3 total board votes: the founder, Scott, and the new investor. The founder and Scott together controlled 2 votes.
- They’ve done three funding rounds so far. Each time they did another round, they added a board seat.
- Actually, they added two seats in subsequent rounds: the investors got one, and they added a second one. This is pretty typical.
- This structure usually helps leave the founders with control of the board votes.

Understanding Control (It’s Not Just About Ownership %)#

Common Concern: Over the years, friends have asked if raising money means losing control of the business and fretted about needing 51% ownership.
Key Entrepreneur Tip: While owning 51% can be important in some cases, you can often own less than 51% of your company and still control it.
Board Level Decisions: The board votes on all the major decisions.
- Raising more money
- Buying businesses
- Selling your business
- Making big hires
Control Point: Control often sits at the board level through voting rights, not necessarily just the percentage of the company you own.
Heads Up: This is a quick heads-up for any entrepreneurs thinking about raising money down the line or joining up with someone who has a board – these are things to consider.

What Board Meetings Are Like#

Consistency: They’ve been pretty much the same since the beginning, back in 2019, when they raised the first round and started quarterly meetings.
Purpose: It’s essentially a check-in on the business.
Roles:
- Operators (The Team/Founders): The folks who work in the business every day.
- Investors: They don’t work in the business. They are there to provide advice, help, strategy, and guidance.
Format: The team puts together a presentation.
Presentation Content:
- What’s working well.
- What’s not working well.
- Any key updates the board needs to know.
- Usually, a section where the team needs the board’s advice on something specific.
- Financials:
  - P&L (Profit & Loss)
  - Balance Sheet
  - Projections for the next quarter
- Highlights on different areas: Marketing, Sales, Product & Engineering, Customer Support.
Presentation Length: Around 15-20, maybe 30 slides total. They used to be shorter.
Why Longer Now: Today they’re longer because they essentially have three companies rolled into one: SamCart, Typeset, and CreatorU.
Overall Feeling: It’s their chance to tell the board how they feel about the business and what they’re doing to prepare for a good year.

The Real Value Investors Bring (It’s Probably Not What You Think)#

Common Mistake: Many people (including the speaker initially) make the mistake of thinking investors will provide detailed, “in-the-weeds” advice on operating the day-to-day business.
Horror Stories: You hear horror stories about founders losing control and companies selling off “for parts,” and sometimes founders blame the investors.
Investor Stereotypes: Investors can get a bad rap – called “empty suits,” or people who are “nothing but a check” and only provide money.
Their Experience: That has NOT been their experience at all, but the value they got was for reasons they didn’t expect.
Value NOT Provided (In-the-Weeds Advice):
- They won’t call and ask them how their Facebook ad copy is.
- They won’t ask them what product they should create next for SamCart customers.
- Why? Because investors aren’t online entrepreneurs. They don’t know the specific market the way the operators do. Knowing the market is the operators’ job.
The Actual Value Provided: Their job has been very different and incredibly valuable in other ways. In their case (and likely most institutional investors), these are:
- Very well-connected people.
- Very wealthy people.
Understanding Wealthy/Connected People: You don’t get very wealthy and connected by being unintelligent.
- Most wealthy people (99%) are self-made. Very few were just handed money and aren’t smart.
- Even those who got money likely hang out with very smart people.
- When you’re that wealthy, you’re in exclusive “clubs” and surrounded by highly intelligent people.
- Even if they made their money in fields like oil and gas (which has nothing to do with online marketing/tech/SaaS), they are still incredibly smart.
What Smart, Wealthy Investors Study: All day, every day, they study:
- How the global market is moving.
- What’s happening with interest rates.
- The stock market.
- The bond market.
- How money is flowing in the economy.
Importance of Macro View: This might not seem important initially, but as a business grows, it becomes extremely important. These are high-level, “30,000-foot view” macroeconomic things that do impact you, even if you don’t realize it.
Extremely Valuable Strategic Input: This macroeconomic perspective has been incredibly valuable.
Connections: On top of that, these are the people who:
- Will know who the business could potentially be sold to someday.
- Will know how to help the company IPO someday.
- Can help make those things happen because the founders didn’t have those connections before.
- Know people at potential buyers/partners like Shopify, Amazon, Stripe (back in the day), or companies they might want to acquire.
Result of Connections: These investors have made a handful of introductions over the last 3-4 years that the speaker guarantees will be worth nine figures plus to the team over the next 5-10 years. They wouldn’t have had those connections or that knowledge otherwise.
Summary of Value: The board didn’t make SamCart better, give better marketing advice, or fix ads. But they provided things that were a hell of a lot more valuable than those things would have been.
Lesson Learned: He’s actually glad the investors weren’t what he initially hoped for (someone with all the in-the-weeds answers) because the value they do provide is far greater.

Navigating the Economy with Investor Insight#

Seeing Ahead: One key example of the value is that they saw the rough economy coming before the speaker was even paying attention.
Economic Impact (2022-2023 and ongoing):
- High interest rates mean money isn’t “free” anymore.
- This impacts companies like theirs because it becomes harder to go raise more money.
Strategic Guidance: For a company that had raised a lot, the investors’ knowledge meant they needed to:
- Get really damn efficient.
- Stop burning money.
- Slim down.
- Make marketing campaigns more effective.
- Become extremely profitable.
Why This Matters: Being profitable allows you to control your own destiny and not have to raise more money in a tough environment.
Risk Without Insight: Without that knowledge and strategic guidance, a company could run right off a cliff by thinking they can just keep burning money and raise more whenever they need it, only to find out too late that they can’t.
Overall: This kind of strategic, high-level macroeconomic value and the connections provided are indispensable. The speaker doesn’t know where the company would be without them, and believes these factors will likely lead to the desired end result (IPO or sale).

The Value of Accountability#

Think of Fitness: It’s like trying to get in shape – the best way is often hiring a personal trainer.
Trainer Benefits:
- Shortcut the learning curve.
- See things you can’t.
- Help you make tweaks you wouldn’t think of.
- But maybe the biggest thing? Accountability.
Board Accountability: For the speaker, the best thing has been the accountability of knowing every quarter they have to:
- Write up a report on the business.
- “Report” to the board (not in a boss/employee way, but as partners who want to know how the business is doing since they aren’t there daily).
Benefits of Quarterly Check-ins:
- Helps ensure they work to have a good quarter every three months to show progress.
- Forces them to document everything by creating the 15-30 slide deck.
- Provides a solid check-in on the state of the business.

Wrapping It Up#

Overall Experience: Having a board and investors has been extremely valuable. The speaker is very glad they did it.
Positive vs. Negative Stories: He doesn’t have a horror story for you.
Untold Story: The positive side of raising money, bringing on investors, and having a board often doesn’t get talked about enough. Everyone focuses on the horror stories and times things went wrong.
Their Reality: That just hasn’t been their experience.