The Art of Storytelling When Raising $28M
Having just raised our $28 million Series-B round led by Sherpa Ventures, Tri and I — the co-founders of Munchery—have had to pitch our vision to a good number of angels and VCs.
In the early days, we were extremely naive in our pitches, since neither Tri nor I had any real entrepreneurial experience. We were knowledgeable in building products, but none of it mattered when we were pitching the shabby version 1.0 of our product (Yeah, the one we’re slightly embarrassed by).
Our first pitch was to Paul Graham and the YCombinator partnership. We made it to interview day, and that in itself felt like a huge success. We had attended a handful of talks that Paul held and felt one step closer to getting YC to fund our Munchery idea.
Upon entering the room with the entire YC partnership, Paul gave us the gift of truth up front: “Wow, you guys are wearing the same thing!”
Strike one.
I scanned Tri to confirm: we were both the wearing a drab gray plaid buttoned shirt paired with dark blue jeans. I went pale. We nervously chuckled and moved quickly into our presentation.
After a minute of talking about how our product gathered chefs to cook and deliver food, one of the partners asked, “So, you’re like Meals on Wheels?”
Strike two.
Trying not to sound defensive, I noted that Meals on Wheels was a non-profit that delivered free food to people in need, and that he probably meant Waiter on Wheels, which is a completely different service, delivering food from restaurants. Tri stuck to his guns. “It’s about the chefs. That’s the key difference.” That didn’t seem to advance our position much, and we knew our pitch was going down in flames.
Paul asked, “So, how many customer to do you have?” I said we just existed beta, so we only had two customers.
Strike three.
To this day, I give it to Paul Graham for being professional and not erupting in laughter.
After failing to make it to YC, Tri and I felt like losers. We had some long conversations about the seemingly impossible uphill battle before us.
Often, I’d berate my undeterred co-founder. “Tri, how many young dads do startups? None that I knew personally. We’re not 22 years old anymore.”
We were strikingly normal guys with a grand vision to give a real answer to the question: “What’s for dinner?”
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Press enter or click to view image in full size
Over the next few months of bootstrapping with our savings, we slowly refined our pitch. We’d learn not to take investors into our logistics-heavy, commercial kitchen at the first meeting. We’d learn to talk first about the vision of solving the dinner question before getting into operational details.
But most of all, we’d learned to just be ourselves and pitch our life story. We found that being honest about ourselves produced a powerfully genuine story that many VCs rarely heard in pitches.
Telling our life story was the starting block of all the investor meetings from our tiny $210k seed round all the way to our recent $28M Series B.
Tri and I pitch the same way, whether it’s for one or twenty partners. It’s not slick or overly polished. It goes something like this:
<Slide 1: Munchery logo>
TRI: Hi, my name is Tri and I’m an immigrant. I’m one of those escaping boat people from Vietnam you might have heard about. When I was 11 years old, I escaped with my grandma and older brother in a tiny boat with 100 people packed like sardines. We were in the open sea, under the hot tropical sun, for 5 days.
Despite the scorching heat, I will never forget how much water we had to live off of every day. <Tri would raise the bottle of water, only about one-fifth full> I eventually made it to an Indonesian refugee camp, and was sponsored into the U.S., but my parents never made it to the boat, so I didn’t see them for another 11 years. After that life and death experience, startups don’t seem that hard.
CONRAD: I’ve known Tri for over 10 years now. We first met at a Berkeley startup as early team members, where he ran engineering and I ran UX. When Tri told me about the idea of Munchery, he was trying to solve a problem I knew very well. At the time, I had a 1 month old and a 16 month old and it was really hard to plan for dinner. I didn’t have much savings, and we both had really young kids. With the blessing of our wives, we both took a calculated risk and kissed our comfortable, high-paying day jobs goodbye to start Munchery. Failing wasn’t really an option. Our families were on the line.
<Slide 2: Our Disruption Model>
<Slide 3: Amazing Growth Numbers>
That’s it. For sure, slide 2 and 3 matter as a business. However, Tri and I came to realize that even though we’re normal people, everybody has a compelling and unique story to tell. For us, we pitched our long standing relationship and the genuine sacrifices and risks we took. We present the most cherished quality that Tri and I share: we’re resilient to adversity. This resilience is the DNA that is replicated in every member of our company.
Especially as we get ready to launch in Seattle this early summer, Tri and I are spending more time looking within to fortify our convictions as we prepare to scale out.
It’s been a long three years since we started Munchery, with a lot of lessons along the way—mainly, that the best way to build a business is to be honest and genuine. Tri and I are very grateful for our team and our investors who believed in us and our vision.
If I could give one piece of advice to startup founders, it’s to do what we did: pitch your life.
It will keep you humble, honest, and most of all, refreshing.
The other advice: call your co-founder the night before the pitch to tell him the color of shirt you’re gonna wear.
By Conrad Chu, CTO/Co-founder of Munchery
Check out our blog post on our recent funding announcements