Announcing our Pre-Seed
And getting down to business
As a couple of news articles are coming out announcing our pre-seed fundraising, it feels like a good time to acknowledge those who have helped us get to this point. We’re at the beginning of our journey and 99.99% of the hard work lies ahead, but we’re off to a good start and a big part of the reason for this is the faith that our early investors have shown in us.
First, it must be said that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the dozens of investors with whom we had serious conversations about our company but who ultimately decided to pass. Each meeting allowed us to refine our pitch, further develop our ideas, and distill the essence of the company. This is work that investors do that doesn’t show up in any financial reports, but it is incredibly valuable to entrepreneurs.
For a bit of context, we decided to raise our pre-seed round using SAFE notes. This allowed us to set terms ahead of time (a price cap and a discount are the two basic variables) and to sign investors serially rather than closing the round all at one time. SAFE notes have the additional benefit of dramatically lower legal costs and are particularly streamlined in Carta.
Even though with this type of round there is no “lead” investor, there is still someone who takes the plunge first. In our case, this person was Adam Besvinick at Looking Glass Capital. Adam found a way to look past some of the holes in our thinking as well as to see the potential of our product. He believed that success within the energy decarbonization market would require the deep domain expertise of our founding team, that our past work demonstrated a capacity to build and scale an impactful organization, and that our passion for solving this problem would inspire others to join us. Adam’s leap of faith opened doors for us that would likely not have opened otherwise. Every young company needs someone like this in their corner.
Former founders are wonderful early-stage investors. Anne Dwane at Village Global understood exactly where we were at and how she could help propel us forward to build the type of company that we aspired to build. She reinforced the value of being open and transparent about the potential challenges facing early-stage companies as well as my own blind spots. Good investors will see vulnerability as an asset rather than a liability.
Just like a team will have different strengths, so will investors. I believe that early-stage companies should optimize for investors who are strong connectors. In addition to Adam and Anne, we were lucky to bring Tommy Leep, Packy McCormick, and Chris Vargas into the round because each has built a personal network based on consistent delivery of value to the startup ecosystem. Starting a company is incredibly challenging in every respect, and having support networks to lean on during difficult moments can make all the difference in the world.
All startups should have at least one investor who is a true believer in the cause. While everyone on the cap table at WattCarbon supports our mission, Dan Lichtenberg at Keiki Capital has made decarbonization a cornerstone of his investment thesis. We need more people like Dan who take the art of investing in climate-positive companies to its highest form.
Finally, no early-stage round would be complete without friends and family. Rick Stratton invested in MeterHero (and lost all of his investment) and I wouldn’t have blamed him for passing on a second chance to throw money at one of my projects. He may have thought twice about it, but he didn’t let on and cheerfully decided to take another swing with me. My brother-in-law Aaron Vermut has helped me in countless ways not the least of which is going along with the idea that this is a perfectly normal thing to do with one’s life. Greg Rudin and Tom Fogarty were introduced to me by good friends and I’m looking forward to learning from them as we move the company forward.
What gets missed in the headlines of a company’s fundraising is the fact that there are individual investors behind the numbers who want to put capital to work, often on behalf of others, to create companies that will change the world. These investors collaborate with founding teams to figure out how to get a set of ideas from a whiteboard to a product offering and ultimately into the hands of customers. We are grateful for the chance to see what we can do together and look forward to the next stage of our journey.