fulfill orders. That was the company for about a year. At the end of that first year, it was doing well, and I decided I needed to take the plunge and quit my day job and go full time at Little Pim. That’s when I went out and raised my first real money, which was about a million dollars, in what’s called a Series A round. That is an investment round with angel investors who each put money into the company. I think I had ten or fifteen of them in the first round. That’s how I got the company off the ground. Because of my background as a fundraiser, I was comfortable going out and raising the money. This wasn’t the kind of company where you could do it on your savings– at least not on my savings–because I was competing with Disney and Nickelodeon and Fisher Price–really big companies that had multimillion dollar marketing budgets. I had to at least have the money to make a high quality product and to really market it. As time went on, I needed greater and greater coffers in order to keep growing the company, and so I raised more and more money. About four years in, I hit kind of a wall, where I had been working so hard, and I was so tired, and I didn’t see the growth that I wanted. It was growing, but it wasn’t growing at the rate that I wanted. I got very exhausted and burned out. I had two little kids at home, I was a working mom, and I just didn’t know what to do next with the company. Right around then, one of my advisors suggested that I go raise venture capital and be able to scale up the company. At the time, I found that proposition terrifying. I was like, “I do not want to go raise venture capital.” Raising the angel money was pretty informal, but venture capital, what little I knew of it, was going to be
a room of guys in suits, speaking really complicated financial language that I don’t speak. I did not want to do it. I basically said no but after a couple of weeks, I realized that he was right, and this was my moment of, ‘Go big or go home.’ I decided that I wanted to grow my company more than I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. Even though I had raised a couple of million already, and had been a professional nonprofit fundraiser, raising venture capital was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. What was so hard about it? It was hard learning the whole financial language, putting together the spreadsheets, finding out how to pitch… it took about nine months to figure out how to even approach a VC. Then I pitched about thirty times. At the end of nine months, I figured out how to go about it. I learned what I now call the “fundraising dance,” and I went out and raised 2.1 million for my company. That allowed us to scale up.
We converted our whole product line from DVDs to digital, we hired a senior professional team, we increased our marketing budget, and within the first year, we had practically doubled our sales. It really paid off, but it was so hard. I also found out along the way that only 4% of all venture capital is invested in women-run companies. Women get a very tiny sliver of the big money in the investment world. When I got through the eye of the needle, I looked back and said, ‘That was just way harder than it had to be.’ I think that’s where my women’s studies background kicked in, and I felt like, I may not be able to solve world hunger, but this is a problem that I can help with. I know why only 4% of women raise venture capital. We’re not learning that dance, that fundraising dance, and then it just seems too intimidating to go into that world and pitch. I wanted to make it easier for other women to raise money. I started a boot camp in my conference room called Double Digit Academy, where I started teaching ten women at a time to raise angel and venture capital. Over the course of three years,
I’ve trained about fifty women, and they’ve raised about ten million dollars collectively. I’m super proud of them. A lot of them have become friends. They inspired me to write the book, because I realized it just takes three things to raise money and take your business big. You need the right mindset, you need the right skill set, and you need the right network. I always say the hardest of those three is the mindset, because you have to believe that you can be the CEO of a multimillion dollar company. You have to be able to picture your company running at scale, meaning, not where you are today with two people, but what’s this going to look like when it’s twenty people and it’s throwing off five million in revenues three years from now? You have to be able to picture all that–that’s the mindset. Believe me, you can do it. I think as women, we sometimes struggle with self-limiting beliefs, and that’s part of what I work on in my workshop, is for us to address the self-limiting beliefs. I talk about mine in 9