#13 — 28th January: Show me the Money!

@Conference Call

3 min readSep 7, 2022

I finally had the revenue projections ready to show the world, so our next pit stop was with the real deals in finance.

One friend had spent his life at companies like UBS, and the other had worked with investment capital and hedge funds. If our financials and projections passed muster with this crowd, Dave and I knew we would were in business!

Also, both these gentleman are brutally honest and do not mince words with us. Make sure you tell your friends that honesty is really important, or they risk setting you up for failure if they try to be nice and not hurt your feelings.

Into the finance lion’s den we went.

We got critiques on our presentation style, passion and substance; some of it was harsh and some complimentary but the most important thing for us was that all of it passed the smell test — particularly, our financials.

Both these financial wizards admitted they were not experts at operating expenses, more on the revenue projections side, which they said was solid.

They gave us one more very important piece of advice, which Dave and I brushed aside at the time because we were so focused and getting an A-grade on our numbers. They told us that dozens of people had shown up knocking on their door with ideas, beautiful slick pitches and detailed financials but the one thing that mattered the most to investors was not the idea or pitch, but the people behind them — the team.

The people, they told us are more valuable than everything else in our arsenal — and that is what investors look to put their money behind; not earth shattering ideas or products.

This was lost on us that day and would take little while yet to sink in because we were so busy worrying about polishing everything and coming across like we had all the answers and everything well-thought through.

P.S. Here’s an index of all the articles in this series:

#13 — 28th January: Show me the Money!

@Conference Call

Written by Nikhil Vaish