Season 2, Episode 2: Raising a Seed Round with Against Gravity CEO Nick Fajt

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2018

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We launch mini-series on Acquired with a subject near & dear to our heroes’ hearts: startup fundraising! This has been one of our most-requested new topics, and we’re excited to kick things off with makers of the popular Rec Room social VR app, Against Gravity, which raised one of Seattle’s hottest venture rounds in recent history: a $4m seed led by Sequoia Capital in 2016. CEO Nick Fajt joins to tell the story from company inception to building and shipping the initial product, fundraising as a first-time CEO, what they’ve been able to accomplish with the capital and their vision for the future. We had a blast touching on many classic Acquired themes for the first time “in-action” with a young, growing company, and hope you all enjoy the discussion as much as we did. Let us know what you think in the Slack!

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Carve Outs:

Ben: Ready Player One
David: Seveneves
Nick: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, I feel naked without my headphones.
0:02.8	Do you want to wear headphones?
0:03.7	I could.
0:04.7	Yeah.
0:05.7	No, I don't want to wear headphones.
0:08.4	Ben's got some earmuffs for you to put on. Welcome to Season 2, episode 2 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and
0:28.3	IPOs.
0:29.3	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:30.3	I'm David Rosenthal.
0:31.5	And we are your hosts.
0:33.0	As we mentioned in December, we're moving to a seasons format where we can do multi-episodes
0:37.6	and mini-series across episodes.
0:40.3	This season's mini-series is on startup fundraising.
0:43.0	So to date, we've exclusively talked about exits on the show,
0:46.5	and we've glossed over plenty of fundraising events
0:48.5	as part of these stories, but we've never really dug in.
0:51.0	How do these rounds come together? What's the process and what do
0:55.0	different types of fundraising rounds allow a company to do? So our first
0:59.1	episode is about the series seed of one of the most prominent VR companies in the market
1:04.2	against gravity the makers of Rec Room and we are super super fortunate to have
1:09.2	with us today the co-founder and CEO of Against Gravity, Nick Fight.
1:14.0	Nick is the co-founder and CEO of Against Gravity, as I mentioned.
	...

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