How do you systematically map warm intros to raise $8M?

Episode 84 - David Connors Transcript Jason Kirby (00:00.398) Everyone, welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. Today, I have David Connors with us, founder and CEO of theswarm.com. Probably one of the easiest ways to figure out if you know someone that you need to get an intro to. David Connors (01:48.361) Yeah, sure. Jason Kirby (02:10.36) customer. And I'm excited to have you on the show, David. You raised about 8 million for the company. You've also previously sold the company to Sequoia. So I think you're just gonna have a really fun conversation today. But welcome to the show. David Connors (02:24.565) Thanks, Jason. Yeah, great to be here. Jason Kirby (02:27.17) So for the audience that isn't familiar with your product, just kind of give the quick elevator pitch on what the swarm is. David Connors (02:33.491) Yeah, so we built a platform that helps companies to map and leverage their network. And we also have a couple of products that power other platforms with people and relationship data. Jason Kirby (02:46.478) Yeah, you just recently announced your partnership with Clay for people to leverage their existing tool that they're using Clay to kind of map warm intros and shameless, know, unsponsored plug here. I'm a user of this warm and we use it for mapping warm intros to investors. we find like with Thunder, for those that don't know about Thunder, you can generate an AI generated list of relevant investors for your startup. You can then take that list, export it to something like the swarm and then you find out, okay, who do you actually know that can get you introduced to those investors? So pretty cool, convenient tool for fundraising. So I kind of want to ask, did you guys use your own product to raise your own round? David Connors (03:32.437) Yeah, 100%. So maybe I can give you just a bit of like a background on where the swarm came from and then how we then use it. we, you know, sort of kicked off in 21. I was previously at Sequoia, as you mentioned, I built them almost like a proof of concept for the swarm where working with their internal product and data teams, we had mapped Sequoia's network and we're then leveraging those relationships for the portfolio. Right. So founders were intros to Wells Fargo to try and close an account or to this rock star VP of engineering, right? Who does Sequoia know? How can we help? So when I left Sequoia, I was then looking at the market and I was like, you know, we have LinkedIn as individuals. Where's the LinkedIn for companies? There's no platform that helps you to look at the collective network of an organization. So that's why I was really interested in excited about like, can we really leverage these relationships that exist and all this trust that you can tap into as a company, but often it's, you know, either trapped in spreadsheets or in people's heads or, you know, on LinkedIn, but it's buried amongst all this noise because everyone's connected to thousands of people on LinkedIn. Um, so I like, all how can we combine everyone's relationships into one platform? Um, so when I first started, didn't. have this form, obviously. So I was like hacking this together, which is what all of the other founders I talked to, probably some founders listening to this now, they've tried before, right? Downloading LinkedIn as a CSV, asking a few of my close friends and other founders to do that, pushing that into this like centralized database, you know, which is basically a big air table and then searching through it for people who are investors and then asking those people who have relationships for interest. And that's kind of how I kicked off. was like, built this first database of potential investors. And then started to expand that out by talking to primarily other founders, investors, but basically saying, Hey, raising the first round, pre-seed, who do know that invests at that stage? And trying to then generate more and more of these lists of folks who were really focused at that very early stage. David Connors (05:58.985) had a few conversations with folks who were a little bit later and always found that just to be very distracting. And there was just a big mismatch. So I think one of the key learnings I had early on was filtering it down to all of those people who write the very first checks, you know, because it's such a different game than someone who comes in at the seed stage when there's traction, when there's revenue versus just like an idea or a napkin. So Yeah, from my own network, from some of my friends, some close friends networks, was able to then put together that initial pre-seed round in 2021. Jason Kirby (06:36.202) So that kind of you had to do it the hard way and then you realize there's got to be a bet you basically raise the money to make that job of raising money easier For other people No, think that's a Noble effort just because I think any founder that's listed as podcast. Let's raise money. It's everyone knows warm intros of the holy grail but it can be just like exhausting to kind of map spreadsheets together and David Connors (06:37.109) Yeah. David Connors (06:44.789) He's out there. Jason Kirby (07:04.33) and try to bring all that stuff together. Now, that was how you raise your pre-seed. How much is your raise in your pre-seed? David Connors (07:12.917) So that was a two mile pre-sale. Jason Kirby (07:15.412) Kind of like walk us through like why 2 million? And was it like just a safe, or the capped, uncapped? Like how did you guys structure it? David Connors (07:21.173) Yep. So it was a safe and we had a, we had a cap on it. It's a post-money cap. And, know, this was to set the context as well. This was, you know, late 21 boom time, uh, in, you know, BC land. Um, I had just left Sequoia and sort of had that experience under my belt. So the, um, the ability for me as a founder with a previous exit to raise money, like I could have raised much more than that, but wanted to try and be a bit more disciplined and kind of keep it. to just what we needed. The thinking for that amount was what do need to be able to get to our seed round, right? To be able to build a product that's in market, that's at revenue. What size of the team do we need? What sort of runway do we need? And that's always backed into with a little bit of a buffer, you know, that two mil amount. And yeah, that's, you know, we closed that I think in about three, three, four months, but it was just me at the time. And those just me. then actually from that point, then I went to go build the team after that. So I said, I had the idea, you know, in a Google doc, sort of wrote out my own investment memo that I would then give to the investors. I go, I was an investor trying to write a memo internally for how I would convince the, uh, the IC investment committee is going to wrap a stamp this. Here's how I put it, right. And he's like the market size. Here's the opportunity. Um, I even did a little Sequoia like, um, pre-parade pre pre-mortem at the end, which we were able to say if this was wildly successful, what would it look like if this was going to fail? What would it look like? And so did some of those and very loose financial milestones, which is always very hand wavy up there, you know, at that point. Yeah. But, know, as you know, at the very earliest stage, it's more like, is this team credible? Is this a market size big enough? There can be outsized returns for BC and Jason Kirby (09:05.662) Loose. You're the win. David Connors (09:18.005) you know, does this make sense in the macro environment and competitive landscape? Jason Kirby (09:22.794) So other than being probably wildly useful for you to go through that exercise and you having the background, working at a tier one VC to kind of know what that process is, it's kind of getting out into the ethos with founders that that's something to try to do. And it's even something that at Thunder, we have a button that generates kind of a template for founders that use their data to kind of generate an investment mode they can kind of tweak and then send out to investors once they kind of secure that first meeting or second meeting. What are you kind of seeing? Like how useful was that in your discussions? Did you see that kind of get across the finish line and, or did people just be like, okay, thanks. But didn't actually use it. David Connors (10:02.453) In terms of the, the, the event, yeah, I mean, I think I, you never really know. Okay. It was kind of like, all right, thanks. You know, from, from my subsequent rounds of, of fundraising, found that once you have a really strong investor come on board, who, even if they're not leading the round, but just a very well respected, if you can ask. Jason Kirby (10:06.792) investment memo. David Connors (10:32.104) to get their memo and then circulate that with other investors, that works really well. So it's like, I've sort of often provided some material that goes into that memo, but then it's wrapped up. Typically this was like, especially for folks who have an angel-less syndicate, this works really well, where they have to provide this memo that's then publicly shared with all their hundreds of thousands of LPs. And then you say, all right, here's the memo that this investor just circulated for this round. and it's, you know, the, the kind of, line by line that obviously works better than if you just write yourself. But either way, with this, you know, with anything to do with the fundraising, making the investors life easier and providing them with as much, you know, collateral to persuade the other internal folks is always a good, good idea. It's the same with your running an enterprise sales process, right? The more you can be. arming your internal champion with what they need and making their life easier, then it's just going to be lot easier for you as the founder to raise. Jason Kirby (11:39.558) Yeah, I completely agree. think it's whether it's like copied and pasted by an associate to go to IC probably unlikely, but it does reduce a lot of the back and forth and DD. So it's like, okay, they got a lot of the answer. The deck is nice. That's more of like, you know, the appetite get me interested. And then like the investment memo is showing your homework and showing all the work that got to the deck and being able to provide that I think is valuable to. streamline the DD process so that if you've got the opportunity to go to IC, but like IC might be a week or two weeks or a month, you you don't know exactly what it is. So, you know, if it's going to be a month long wait and it's next week, you at least have everything that needs to be ready and doesn't have to take a lot of back and forth. So you can a little bit quicker and not lose momentum. I think it's worth as a founder to go through the exercise, have it ready, despite it maybe not being as meaningful as say the lead investor doing it. David Connors (12:25.546) Yeah. David Connors (12:35.101) I think there's a benefit to that long form approach as well. So for each round of, always done a long form memo, even if I haven't necessarily shared it, which is sort of your distilled thinking at that point in time of what's going on in the market. Why do we have this opportunity? And then, you know, here's our strategy for what we're doing. It's also interesting to kind of reflect back on that. And we've wildly changed since that first memo of the product, but the... and the opportunities, you know, remain largely the same. Jason Kirby (13:08.34) Can I put you on the spot and I'm just, you you could say no, but would you be willing to share the, that pre-seed memo that you drafted with the audience? All right. David Connors (13:15.312) sure. Yeah, it's very different. But yeah, happy to. Jason Kirby (13:20.852) Yeah, I I guess I figured it's slightly inspirational but irrelevant to maybe what exactly the business is today or to maybe not giving away any secrets. But I think for founders at a similar stage that precede Angel around, it could be helpful for them to understand what a solo founder did at the time of creating that document that went on to go raise $8 million. So, all right, we'll include that in the show notes below. Don't miss out. So... Yeah, I think that, it was an interesting transition point to be like, okay, so you raised 2 million pre-seed. You went through that process. You've since raised an additional six and a couple of different tranches. I guess kind of walk us through the decision to go out and raise more money and kind what your, your go-to-market strategy now was after you kind of built the product and got some momentum. David Connors (14:10.837) Yeah. So we had the initial two mil. Um, so we started then building out a team. I spent probably the next four to six months looking for the perfect technical co-founder and wanting to bring on someone who was really experienced as a building out an engineering team underneath him. So CTO co-founder found someone after a lot of searching through my network through what we chose. Um, from one of our investors who was fantastic and is now, you know, been with us the whole time that could be how, and that it was its own sort of journey. It was a true grinch in kind of going from the solo founder to then bringing on, the co-founder, you know, the next few months as we're doing that, also doing a lot of discovery. So I was then talking to our customers, probably did about a hundred discovery interviews, you know, so gathering a lot of the. initial user research and understanding of the requirements and what everything looked like. I had some of my own understanding about it, but I wanted to go deep. So then once we had the engineering resources internally, we started building up that team, a good designer on board, giving out more of the product mockups and started getting some design partners to give us our feedback. We then launched the first product that was focused on recruiting. And that was the, in my previous experience, building this recruiting automation startup. I was at Sequoia, my official title was the director of recruiting operations. And I was pretty deep within the talent world. So I knew that space and you was kind of low hanging fruit. We then launched it in 22 when the macro totally shifted, you know, and all of our design partners turned around and said, we're actually now doing mass layoffs. We don't, we're not hiring anyone. We're definitely not spending anymore on recruiting HR tech. So that was a interesting moment where we then had to pivot. to sales use case. So we had a lot of customers saying we're not recruiting but we're trying to land more customers, especially trying to get warm interest from our network. Can we use the product for that? So absolutely. Few things we need to do, adding company profiles and filters and things like that. So that was the first pivot where we definitely lost a little bit of capital and time, you know, instead of that transition. But then launched for sales. David Connors (16:38.453) Very promising initial feedback from customers and started to scale up within the startup community. And that's where we then raised the Seagrond. So that was in 23 and that was the full male Seagrond. Jason Kirby (16:53.333) And I guess how did you decide who to go to, to raise for a million, kind of walk us through that decision. David Connors (16:58.931) Yeah, so some similar processes before looking at what we needed to do to get to the series A and what runway would be required for that. The process was a little bit different this time when we were looking at the full network, obviously, all our existing investors, and then also all of the sort of target seed investors we want to. So it's kind of, I'd say two approaches. both which I suggest fans do one is casting the net call it where you're going to all of your investors, close founder friends, very like core group of people who want to help you and ask them Do you have a list just like on hand of investors at the same age you can draw us to and oftentimes they will have like a list of 1050 100 investors at the seed stage and say, here's my list. You know, I've been true to these people. Maybe not all of them are strong, I can list forward an intro request along. And then the other side is then, all right, our more outbound, spearfishing who's on our wish list that we want to include. And then looking through that list, then find warm intros. And that's when we're then using this warm to say, we've mapped all of our key stakeholders, investors, advisors. team, other friends, networks, the LinkedIn, email calendar, previous work colleagues, all combined into a single database. And then we search for Greylock, you know, who do we know at Greylock? And then that sort of determines the engagement strategy to then who we should go to within each request and kind of go from there. So sort of both approaches, I think yielded good results. I don't know the exact breakdown of how much capital came from each, but it was definitely a significant amount. from both sources. One hand, the casting the net, I think is really great because you can sort of scale up your intro requests, but it's a very hit and miss. Like a lot of times people are coming back and maybe that's not the strongest relationship. So maybe it wasn't the best path in, or they say, back and avoid to look at something like this or different other. David Connors (19:22.245) rejection reasons. But then for the the outbound, that's going to take a lot more time, have a lot more researched and sort of looking at the firm and individual at the firm, the previous investments they've Oftentimes, I'd look at the founders that invested in and see if I can get intro through those founders. Those are often the best ones to get access to investors, things like that. But it takes a lot of time. That was a full time job for good chunk of time, you know, I had my fundraising CRM, just in a, in a spreadsheet where I'm sort of looking at all the different things, know, having data to flow into it. And I've got about a thousand, uh, BCs that are in there that have had some interaction with, right? Either that I've like requested interest to or chatted to, or, um, have had, uh, yeah, you know, some, interaction with over the, over the last, um, handful of years. Each time would be at least a couple hundred firms, I'd say, for each round that have on that short list. And then the amount you actually talk to maybe is in the 70 to 80 and then kind of gets down to that 10 to 20 that will actually invest. Jason Kirby (20:39.754) Yeah, that's the thing. It's like it, you know, starting with a thousand and then getting, you know, responses from a few, maybe a hundred, a couple hundred, and then actual meetings. And then those meetings actually, you know, called the bank to an investment, you know, just kind of going back to its numbers game where a sub deals, it's like, we did a deal where, you know, it literally like 20 people and five invested and I was 3 million and off to the races. Um, you know, so it's just depends, but I think in You know, of the software game, which B2B sales enablement or, know, kind of HR tech kind of thing and recruiting these kinds of outbound things. It's could be pretty competitive. So you got to really have a deep network to tap into to kind of get as many shots on goal because you can be the flavor of the week. And, you know, maybe not depending on, you know, certain investment theses and whatnot. And honestly, just, just for, for fun here. Maybe we'll throw it into the recording or maybe we won't. But I want to show how easy it is. I know this is like total shameless plug, but since we use it all the time, I figured I'd just show it. I'm actually going to share my screen. I'm going share my entire screen here and just show you how easy this is. So Thunder is our platform. You come in, you can actually generate your list based on, you fill out your company profile, give us all your data. It populates your investor list. If you're a premium, you can just click download your matches. It populates all your matches that you match with, all their contact information, all that kind of information. So you can throw them in your serum right away, or you can select the firm name. You can go into the swarm and go into companies, add a filter, list of companies. boom, you can add all those firm names in there and apply. And you have to add people in your network and there's other things like, you know, who it's connected to, and that strength of connection. But it basically shows like, you know, how many people I'm connected to, to open up doors to these different firms. There's also the people list that gives you the specific people. But it literally just took me a few minutes that kind of happened, not even a few minutes. How long is this recording? couple seconds. Jason Kirby (23:00.362) to go through. And then you can click on the people that you know to map those, make that intro request like, hey, David, you know Bob at A16Z, can you pass this stack onto them or send a referral request, that kind of thing. So just like to show how quick and simple the process is, especially if know who you need to be reaching out to. So kind of a double-families plug for both of us. David Connors (23:00.957) under it. David Connors (23:28.177) That's I think as part of the battle is knowing out of the, you know, is it 3000 BC firms? mean, you probably have better numbers in this than I do these days. Yeah. There's so many different types of firms that you can just waste your time and spin your wheels talking to you when it's, you know, clearly not a fit. Definitely shouldn't even be reaching out to try and talk to them. Jason Kirby (23:29.383) You David Connors (23:55.187) So it's great that you can kind of help to, again, like reduce the noise of that. And then that's your target account list you should be going after. And then hopefully what we can help with is then the channel of how you actually get in touch with them and getting access to those phones. Because again, from my experience, no one has invested that I approached cold. I know there's stories of it and people can do it, you know, every now and then, but you're just, when you get way harder on yourself, like you're to have five to 10 X higher conversion. If you just. try and get a warm intro because I'm sure you've talked about Spunf before, but as an investor, you get inundated with lots of founders hitting you up, trying to get access to your inbox, to your attention, trying to have a meeting with you. As a forcing function, you just have to filter out a lot of that noise. You can't review every single one. So most people just blanket, I'm not even gonna respond if someone hits me up cold. And you just have to get an intro from someone that I know, even if it's not particularly strong, least you're in the door. And then obviously there's different levels of intro's. know, the best is a founder they've already invested in that they like, you know, the, you know, below is some co-investors and other folks that they know and their friends, you know, then there's, other people generally in the ecosystem, service providers, folks that interact with, you know, there's different levels of trust. and obviously we'll shoot for the top, but just getting at least on that ladder of trust versus you just being in the pool of, you know, cold, undifferentiated inbound they receive is going to rapidly improve your chances. So it's just worth putting the effort. It's unfortunate. It's just the reality. You have to put in effort. It's going to take you time. Don't be lazy with it. And don't like burn your one chance with an investor because you write some sloppy email that gets sent out to 100 people at once. Jason Kirby (25:47.658) Well, and the trick there is a lot of investors don't like shop deals. They want to know that they got the, that their, their network is how they got access to a deal. That's why LPs invest in VCs is, you know, access. And if they feel everyone has access, then well, what makes the deal special to them? And it's kind of dumb. You know, when you think about it, it's like, it a good deal or is it not a good deal? It's not always what matters. It's about being able to go back to their LPs and say like, well, I'm awesome and I have this exclusive network that I get access to these deals. And that's kind of like the big pitch that a lot of these VCs have. And so like a mass marketed deal or like a deal that's like published like for the whole world to see can often deter the interest in a particular deal as much as founders might say, creates competitions. That's not usually how they think because everyone else thinks like they do. David Connors (26:41.897) Yeah. Yeah. Jason Kirby (26:44.136) So that's why getting like a new feature, which I didn't show here, but of like whatever you match with 100 investors, we have this thing where we'll show you that they have like, each of them have a hundred PortCo founders or whatever. We'll actually give you that whole list of PortCo founders that you can then import into something like this form and say, okay, you might not know the VC, but do you know one of their PortCo founders? Yeah. It's a lot easier to start a conversation with another founder. David Connors (27:06.793) Yeah, perfect. Jason Kirby (27:13.542) and build a relationship with another founder that you build a trust, then they can be like, yeah, David's a cool guy. I'll introduce you to my investor. And it's like social cloud, it's social cred for, they'll be appreciative if they end up doing the deal. So that's another way to kind of think about your warm intro is you might not know that founder, but you might be able to give an intro to that founder that can then get you the intro to the VC. Not gonna happen in a week, but. David Connors (27:21.695) Yeah. David Connors (27:37.897) Yeah. Knowing how the founders is such a superpower and such a act. Cause and it compounds over time as well. gotta remember it's like every time you got to raise funding, can leverage that founders network again and again. And it's a two way street, right? They can leverage your network. and exactly. Jason Kirby (27:55.37) a Japanese museum. can't be like, introduce me to your investors. It's like, what? Who? Why? What's the pitch? So don't be lazy. Be kind with the ass that you have and make sure to make it as easy as possible. Give them everything they need to feel comfortable opening up their network for you. So I guess from here, you guys close that seed round in 2023. David Connors (27:59.987) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. David Connors (28:15.786) you Jason Kirby (28:24.842) and you have kind of this extension round that's maybe it'll be announced by the time this comes out. kind of walk us through why you did this extension round and kind of how did this come about and what was that kind of strategy? David Connors (28:38.419) Yeah. Yeah. So we, we raised that, that seed round. started to onboard bigger and bigger companies. We reached this, this inflection point where we saw that the size of a company was about, about a hundred employees where the friction involved with the onboarding to the product was too high. basically, that they wouldn't complete it. So you kind of think about this kind of makes sense. Actually, if you're trying to get 1000 people to accept an invite to a new platform, that then asks them to download a Chrome extension to import their LinkedIn connections or to hook up their email and calendar. 1000 people aren't going to do it. Right. So instead, we sort of had to really like, hit pause and take a step back and think about what we're doing. And it like, we're trying to leverage the company's network. What we were doing was effectively aggregating the private individuals network. And there's actually a lot of the company level network that's accessible and available without necessarily needing to tap into those private individuals networks, right? You don't need to start with email and calendar and LinkedIn data. You can actually start with other sort of affiliations and associations. So that's where we then started to invest more and more time and focus. What I mean by that is without asking anyone to do anything, we can pull all the employees of this company and then we can find their investors using crunchbase, pitch book type data. And then as you're saying, we can find the portcodes of those investors and all of the execs at those portcodes. And that's sort of this core group of connectors that are at the heart of this company. Do you all the employees, the investors and the other. folks in the portfolio. And then from there, we can then map all of their former colleagues, for example. So we can say, who have they worked with at the past companies together? And then sign a score and rank these people say, the VP of engineering at this company, wherever they previously worked, and what was the size of those companies? And were they the 10 person startup, or were they at a Google together? And within the same location within the same function, did they overlap for a month? Or was it for three years? David Connors (31:06.269) All these different weights and inputs can go in to then start to assess the strength of that connection. So we started to go deeper and deeper into this fully passive network mapper. And we've now launched that on clay for all the client users to use. We'll be rolling it out to other platforms as well. And it's an API that is a fully passive network mapping of the company. Jason Kirby (31:26.25) So, yeah. David Connors (31:36.339) And then if you want, as a user, can layer my LinkedIn connections on top of it. And then I can connect my email calendar. can invite other people in. And then we can build out the private networks on top of what the mapped networks are that the swarm has already provided. So that was sort of the shift. And that took us some time. That took us some capital. That's then when we made that shift about six months after we then 10x'd our revenue. From that momentum, we then decided to raise this additional seed plus round. I'm happy to share as well that HubSpot Ventures has invested in that. And we've got some other great, fantastic investors and saw the inflection point and the pull from the market for us to be this data products company versus just a pure SaaS software company. And now we now make a nine. 5 % of our revenue on the data products versus the SaaS products. Jason Kirby (32:39.42) Is it 95 % of revenue is now coming from the data? David Connors (32:43.477) Yeah, data products and partnerships with Clay and these other platforms like, know, soon to be HubSpot and their 240,000 customers. Jason Kirby (32:52.682) That's a much bigger concentration of revenue than I thought it was. That's impressive on the data front. I guess, you know, kind of speaking to that, because everyone talks about SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, looking at a similar situation, especially in the world of AI and our business models are changing expectations. Is it a token-based system? Is it a SaaS-based system? What's your advice to founders out there dealing with that? David Connors (33:28.297) Mm-mm. David Connors (33:32.585) I think if you have any proprietary data that you can make accessible by an API for others to build on top of and to integrate into their own products, then it makes a ton of sense to do that. think the demand and the appetite now for other tools, agents in particular, who are looking for these data sets, and especially if you can make it easy by an API for them to tap into. Um, again, to your point, making it usage-based and credits-based, make it really easy for folks to get started and then they could scale up usage. Um, is, is a great idea. I think especially seeing the general trajectory of the industry where you have more and more agents who are tapping into these underlying databases and creating their own interfaces. I think the number of interfaces can. Um, scale up rapidly. The ease of building products is getting easier and easier, you know, with Reptile and Cursor and these, and these other fantastic tools that you can spin up these new, um, uh, products that are just, overnight, but they still require this underlying data to tap into. So if you can position yourself as one of those data sources that folks can tap into, then you can see a lot of, uh, a lot of growth and success. And then also start coming at that defensible mode because it's really hard. to imitate that underlying data, especially if it's proprietary data that has some network effects and some flywheels from your users using it. Jason Kirby (35:07.858) And with you guys, the proprietary data is basically just the, I guess, the contacts and the mapping of those contacts in terms of who created it. David Connors (35:15.369) Yeah, so the network mapping engine is a proprietary part. And then we also have the underlying database that we license to other platforms. And that gets better the more users we have. As we're crowdsourcing a lot of that fresh data from all of our users. Jason Kirby (35:33.128) Okay, that's interesting. I guess, yeah, for fun, like, are you using any, know, vibe coding or AI coding tools for your tech team? Or is that a question for your CTO? David Connors (35:46.227) Yeah, I mean, we're definitely using all of the classic, you know, on the engineering side, like co-pilot and stuff. think one more interesting one is our, our chief growth officer, Olivier, who is non-technical over the weekend, was using Replet. And I think it took him 10 hours to spin up this new app that was very similar to, another, I want you to say who it is, but an AI first, network management tool. that is very, very cool and sexy that you can search, like semantic search and say, like show me founders that have had an exit before, different things, know. And it was all powered by our data and our API, right? But he's spun out that interface in 10 hours over a weekend, just hacking together and sort of live coding. So I think that's really cool. And you kind of see how powerful it is for, especially for non-technical folks to be able to start building out these full, you end-to-end apps. overnight and we're actually running some experiments to start monetizing that and so it's interesting for different people for different other use cases and yeah, know lots of different other experiments things like that happening behind the scenes. Jason Kirby (37:02.728) No, that's fascinating. I think I know exactly what you're talking about as I spoke to earlier about that this week. David Connors (37:07.541) Right. You know more than most people, you actually know Olivier. Yeah, he's one of the best people in the world. Olivier and Luke DeVos all of them. He shares a lot of that stuff, his journey with it. Jason Kirby (37:19.786) Perfect. We'll table that once we're off the record. But yeah, so I think from what you shared in terms of adopting your own technology to go out and raise your own money, demonstrate the power of it, I think it's fascinating for founders. When it comes to what you're seeing in the market today, where we were just talking about AI is everything, you guys are tapping into that. You're a layer into that piece. especially in today's market where proprietary data matters so much. What would be generally some advice for founders that we maybe haven't covered around being able to build a network? So it's not just about accessing more metros, but what's the human element that founders can implement that you've seen work for yourself? David Connors (38:09.493) Yeah, I think there's a few like timeless pieces of advice that that are times for a reason. think one is meeting in person, you know, and that kind of, uh, you know, IRL like there's no replacement for the in-person face to face relationship building, whether that's at a small event or meetup or larger conference, whatever it is, sort of investing the time to do that. Again, I think it's really easy to sit behind your desk and not get out there. Um, but meeting with founders, meeting with your customers, especially if you have, you know, even early stage design partners meeting face to face, you'd be so surprised at how much patience and leeway some of those early design partners give you. Thank you to all of our design partners who've been with us on this journey. That's certainly one big one is just being face to face. Even if it's no, you don't have any particular like agenda in mind, especially meeting other founders, I think is just always a good idea, meeting up face to face. as you said before, like meeting other founders or a similar stage to you. one thing I found helpful was, having like a monthly session with other founders or the similar stage. I'm not sure if you, you know, host that through thunder or like having recommendations for that, but I highly suggest, all early stage founders to have that cohort of peers that they can lean on and, to, you know, not just for network, but obviously for all the points of company building and being a founder is often a very lonely, isolating journey. So having others to lean on is really important for resilience. And yeah, just in terms of getting the message out there, I think what I found really helpful is posting more on LinkedIn. And if you use Twitter, then do that, but sort of building in public, so to speak, kind of making... the awareness of what you're doing. More not just like, yeah, again, like hiding behind your desk and kind of building away so quietly. think being out there is just going to increase your iteration cycles and kind of getting that feedback live from the market. then, you know, there's no way for people to find you if they can't learn about what you're doing. So you'll just have people organically reach out and like, love this mission, this idea. I think it's really serendipitous, but you have to David Connors (40:34.035) and put yourself out there. So it's a bit uncomfortable often, but just getting out there, putting yourself out there, and you'll find, I think pretty quickly, that there's a lot of like-minded people who want to support you. Jason Kirby (40:47.208) Yeah, I can brutally agree with that sentiment. Like building a personal brand is so powerful for founders in today's... I think personal brands in general, whether you're an influencer or someone that is building a company, whatever it is, just having a personal brand to differentiate in the world of fake AI, kind of like avatars where there's so much noise and it's so easy to just... David Connors (41:09.556) Yeah. Jason Kirby (41:15.434) create generic content and spam it all to hell. think having a personable brand or personal identity associated to your company is what separates companies. Like at Facebook, you look at Tesla and SpaceX with Elon, like these just super prominent founders that everyone knows the name of. Obviously that's on the top .001 % scale, but. You can still be a master of your own niche and your own community in both for sales efforts or fundraising efforts. David, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. What's the best way for people to learn more about you or the Swarm? David Connors (41:59.103) Yeah, I think on LinkedIn is try and post there pretty regularly and feel free to follow connect with me on there and then otherwise our website, theswarm.com. Jason Kirby (42:11.722) Beautiful. Thanks for coming on the show, David. David Connors (42:13.365) Thanks again, Jason. Enjoyed it.