The Importance of Fundraising

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Fundraising is not the same as revenue. You always want to fundraise when you don't need money, because if you need money, then you have very limited leverage over the terms. In general, it's better to have money than not. If a reasonable firm wants to give you money on good terms, I don't think it's ever failed. It's usually a good idea to take it. Better to have money in the bank and not as proven very true during COVID and now like in his current climate. We do fundraising because you have to do it, but it doesn't occupy as big a percentage of our brands, as you might think.

Today’s conversation is with Jessica McKellar, co-founder and CTO of Pilot, which is the largest accounting firm for startups. She’s been working on Pilot for the last 6 years with her two co-founders, Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold. But what makes this founding trio super unique is that they’ve stuck together in not just one, but three different startups.

As repeat founders, the Pilot team has learned a ton from their first two ventures, K Splice and Zulip, and both netted some positive outcomes. But as Jessica will share today, there were mistakes the team made along the way that prevented both products from becoming an outsized success.

So she unpacks what they did differently with Pilot — particularly when it came to picking an acute problem and a huge market to tackle. Jessica also shares the tedious process for building the early version of the product, which included looking over Waseem and Jeff’s shoulders as they manually did the bookkeeping for early customers, while she wrote code alongside them.

Even going back to the earliest days, Pilot had some really strong product-market fit signals, with customers agreeing to pull out their credit card and pay for the product right away when it was just an idea on paper and eventually pulling the Pilot team into expanding their product suite. Make no mistake about it — being a founder is incredibly difficult — but choosing the right problem to tackle can drastically smooth the path ahead of you.