Billions With Zero Knowledge

I wanted to congratulate my Standout Jobs partners Ben and Fred on the recent announcement of the angel round of financing for our project.

I’m also pleased to welcome our new partner Garage Technology Ventures Canada who is joining me in the financing of the project.   As Ben mentions in his post we didn’t originally set out to raise this money when we started the project.

Part of what makes a startup so interesting is how many times it changes, and how quickly. We didn’t start out looking to raise such a large amount of money, but the opportunity to move quickly and change the game in recruiting was too important. And Garage’s interest in working with us as a team, and in our product ideas, means we just added a great partner.

“Go big or go home,” is the philosophy behind Standout Jobs. It’s not the way every startup should be imagined or run but it works for what we’re doing.

What’s critical for any startup is to find your own philosophy and approach. Believe it. Focus on it. Live it. Drive everything towards it.

I couldn’t agree more.  Although I provided the initial financial support for Ben and Fred to get going, we were going forward on a plan that required very little capital.   Both Ben and Fred has made strong financial commitments to the project with their own savings, and we were moving forward with our plans in a bootstrap mode.

As we began to understand the opportunity and got feedback on our early prototypes we saw the opportunity to do something much bigger then we had initially thought.

With the large changes occuring in the online recruiting and job marketplace (this is just a few of the changes) we decided to explore raising some additional financing to allow us to get a core team together faster to build a product that was worthy of the opportunity.

I’ve raised a lot of money for my various companies and unfortunately the angel technology market in Canada isn’t active enough for rounds to come together quickly.  

Tom Sweeney and Louis Desmarais at Garage Canada recognize this fact and are working to develop new programs to help early stage companies like Standout Jobs accelerate raising angel rounds.

The ability to move quickly and work with Garage made our discussions quick, and we ended up not shopping the deal around with other investors.   I’ve done auction sytle fundraising in the past where I’ve maximized valuations by spending months getting competing term sheets to be sure I got the best deal. 

I know the market for this stage of financings and have sat at both sides of the venture capitalists table enough recently to know that there was a good fit and deal with Garage.

The speed at which Standout Jobs is moving made it an easy to decision to work with Garage and not spend the normal time associated with fundraising.  

To put this in context, we took about 3 weeks to sign the term sheet from our first meeting with Garage and Standout Jobs.  My partner at Akoha, Alex and I spent about 5 months working on a smaller sized angel round last fall when we brought outside angel investors into Akoha.

Unfortunately the density of angel investors in the Valley allows these angel rounds to occur quite quickly as syndicate of experienced angel investors can close up to a million dollars in about 2-3 weeks for a qualified deal with the right team attached.

In some markets, speed is critically important and Canadian companies are at a disadvantage if they can’t raise the capital to execute as rapidly.

I’m really excited that Standout Jobs is on this track, and happy to be working with Garage Canada on this project.

Look for more news this Fall when the company launches our offering.   In the meantime if you are interested in how companies are using video and social media to improve their employment brand check out the Standout Jobs blog. 

Here is a video that wasn’t done by us, but is a great example of showing the team and culture of a company.

Michael Arrington (who I had a great time with at Mesh) picked this up and mentioned “…they should use this as one of their primary recruiting tools.”

We wholeheartedly agree.  What a great idea for a company

Side Note

Ben and Fred were both great in the fundraising process. 

I coached them on how to present the company, and assisted in how we describe the offering, especially in planning how to approach to market.  All I really did was coach though, they became experts in financing decks on their own which lead Fred to joke that he can always rent out his newly developed powerpoint skills on eLance if things didn’t work out and we needed to bootstrap

Thankfully things worked out just fine.

On Tue 5 Jun 2007.