Rand Fishkin, the CEO & co-founder of SEOmoz, has an long, thorough, and incredibly detailed blog post up about The $24 Million Moz Almost Raised. Rand does an awesome job of providing extensive details while maintaining confidentiality of the participants.
The story covers the full lifecycle of the VC fundraising process, beginning with Rand and his teams’ discussion about whether or not to raise money. He documents the fundraising dance, including providing lots of juicy email correspondence to underscore his points. He lays out the numbers for his company, the terms for the deal, and his view of when he was negotiating effectively vs. stumbling around.
Ultimately he gets to a signed LOI and that’s where the fun begins (in the section titled “Then Things Got a Little Weird”.) The deal ultimately falls apart and Rand does a nice postmortem where he speculates on what happened. He then wraps it up with how his team responded and what’s next for SEOMoz.
If you are an entrepreneur, go read this post now. It’s probably the best and most detailed description of the VC fundraising process that I’ve read. Well done Rand – on many levels. Even though this particular deal didn’t close, I love your statement at the end:
“What I can say is that this experience makes me and the rest of the Moz team even more inspired and motivated to build an amazing company. We can’t help but feel passion for proving doubters and naysayers wrong. The greatest revenge is to execute like hell, bootstrap all the way, and do what we said we’d do – become Seattle’s next billion-dollar startup, and make the world of marketing a better place.
I know we can do it.”
Entrepreneurs – if there is one post you read today, read this one. And Rand, email me anytime if I can be helpful. Even though you are too late stage for us to invest in, you just earned a bunch of karma points in my book by sharing this experience with all the entrepreneurs in the world.
