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The deck we used to raise our seed funding
- AnthonyDGs 6y agoCongrats!
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks!
- mtricot 6y agoDon't hesitate if you have questions :) It was 13 days but it was INTENSE!
- tstegart 6y agoHow did you get in contact with investors? I went to the accel website but I can't tell what role they play.
- pm90 6y agoThey were incubated by YC, presumably that's how the connections were made.
- jeanlaf 6y agoThere are 3 ways we got connections: 1) We did have some intros thanks to being a YC company. That definitely helped. 2) For some funds for which we really wanted intros, we asked our investors. 3) We timed these 2 weeks of fundraising to happen 2 weeks after some important product release for us (0.2.0). And we did get some inbound from investors (them reaching out to us). Also being at the crossroads of data infrastructure and open-source helped a lot, as both are important topics for investors right now. We tried to keep the meetings with the funds that we liked most at the end. For instance, Accel was the 42nd investor we met with.
- tstegart 6y agoThanks!
- jariel 6y agoHow sophisticated are investors in general with niche or arcane technology segments that might not be widely understood? Do they know enough to tell if your product solves specific problems, or are they trusting your market validation? If it was an 'intense 2 weeks' what compromised the back and forth intensity? Negotiation, waiting/anxiety? Were there any big surprises during raising or do they 'like it or not'?
- jeanlaf 6y agoSo within 2 weeks, we met with 45 investors (76 calls in 7 days, that's our record ;) ). Our goal was to identify the 10 VCs that understood the best our vision and industry and that could bring the most value. On those investors, you could see that 50% didn't know much about data infrastructure, or that it was a fresh topic for them. But for the 10 funds we liked best, they knew A LOT, invested in it, brought a lot of insight and value, just by interacting with them. So for the next round, we will mostly focus on those 10 funds, keep them posted on our progress, so that the next round is just a question of when and how. In terms of negotiation, I would say we had a lot of interest, so we could have negotiated the valuation higher, but for us, it was more a question of who we wanted to work with. But will try to write a blog post on the process for more details, if you think that could be useful.
- jariel 6y agoI think that would be incredibly helpful to the community, but I wouldn't ever press an 'extremely busy person' to do such a thing. I honestly which YC had an 'after action report' section for founders just to quickly write up some materially experiential things. Congrats on your raise, your pitch to me has basically all of the attributes - some people see it as some kind of arcane magic, but for B2B generally I don't think it is, it seems you've nailed the issues quite squarely. It's a good benchmark well done.
- jeanlaf 6y agoWill try to find some time for that. Will post it on HN, if I do
- gumby 6y agoSince the deal was hot did you issue a term sheet rather than having the prospective investors come up with terms? The latter can lead to anchoring.
- curiousDog 6y agoVery well explained! Would love to know if you folks are hiring SWEs
- jeanlaf 6y agoWe are :)! Don't hesitate to apply: https://docs.airbyte.io/career-and-open-positions/senior-software-engineer https://docs.airbyte.io/career-and-open-positions/senior-sof...
- rich-cartwright 6y agogreat work
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks!
- LukeEF 6y agoGreat post. After just going through a 6 month, pain-filled fund raise for an open source database (big on integration), this is probably the most upsetting thing I have ever read in my life. Far away from Silicon Valley with no flashy credentials, 13 days is an impossible dream. That said, massive kudos to the team for such clear storytelling & delivery.
- jeanlaf 6y agoSorry about that. Hope your fundraise was still successful. Don't hesitate to reach out to john [at] airbyte.io, if we can help.
- qorrect 6y agoCan you tell us more ? How is it going, what's the future look like, anything we might be able to use ? Good luck keep trying!
- LukeEF 6y agoThanks! My reply looks a little bleak, but it was a successful seed round raise (TerminusDB). We are doing fine and the future is bright, it just took months of blood, sweat, and tears to close. Struggle is good (sometimes)...
- cj 6y ago> Far away from Silicon Valley This could end up helping much more than hurting long-term. Engineering salaries in the Bay Area are insane. Salaries for engineers in the US overall are very high. If you’re in Europe, you can likely afford 2-3x more engineers than your competitors for the same amount of $ raised.
- laddng 6y agoInteresting to see the competitive analysis with Fivetran in the article but then see almost identical copies of infographics used between their site and Fivetran's. Airbyte: https://airbyte.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Airbyte-Seed-Deck-3-1024x576.jpg https://airbyte.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Airbyte-Seed-D... Fivetran: https://images.cms.fivetran.com/mgtdf72hs0mx/6qYtmEEotXqScarsRwIFpA/ecc04ffe740592accbe5b87b00a015eb/schematic-image.gif?fm=webp&q=80&w=1500&h=844 https://images.cms.fivetran.com/mgtdf72hs0mx/6qYtmEEotXqScar...
- jeanlaf 6y agoAh ah! We liked this diagram, because it explained how the product works. Also, we already used our own infographic on the cover page (https://airbyte.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Airbyte-Seed-Deck-0-1024x576.jpg https://airbyte.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Airbyte-Seed-D...), so we needed something different. Regarding the differences between Airbyte and Fivetran, here's an article about it: https://docs.airbyte.io/faq/differences-with/fivetran-vs-airbyte https://docs.airbyte.io/faq/differences-with/fivetran-vs-air... But essentially, open-source enables us to: - address the long tail of integrations (our goal is 200+ by end of 2021) - we're working on a low-code/no-code framework to make it easier to build and maintain connectors - give you flexibility/customizability to adapt pre-built connectors to your needs - debugging autonomy (we're standardizing how connectors are being built, so maintenance can be done by us and the community) - No more security and privacy compliance, as self-hosted and open-sourced (MIT) - No more super high prices (volume-based) that don't make sense for big data companies.
- nickpinkston 6y agoFirst, congrats to the Airbyte team! Second, I would say though that often having a team from the industry with previous exits, etc. is usually a winning formula, so YMMV if your team doesn't look like that, even if you have a great deck, etc.
- jeanlaf 6y agoSure, it does help. I think timeboxing the fundraise gives some FOMO to investors, if they know that you're meeting with a lot of other ones. There are many things to it. But the team does help for sure!
- inthewoods 6y agoCool project and story! FYI - Just tried to view your demo at http://demo.airbyte.io http://demo.airbyte.io - got a blank screen across multiple browsers (Safari, Edge).
- CTmystery 6y agoI looked at the deck. How will you make money?
- jeanlaf 6y agoWe're a pretty transparent company, so we published our strategy and future business model. You can find it here: https://docs.airbyte.io/company-handbook/business-model https://docs.airbyte.io/company-handbook/business-model Let me know if you have any questions on it!
- CTmystery 6y agoNice, thanks! Looks like you are working on growing mind share for the foreseeable future and layering in enterprise-specific features to close big deals. Do you foresee a sales team for this? Or do you think independent devs will self-serve their way into larger orgs? Approaches one and two make sense to me. I'm a bit lost on approach three though.
- atwebb 6y agoThe Confluent/Kafka or DataBricks / Spark model seems to be working out well (Redhat / Linux?). A bit more on the connectors and capabilities and some observability / governance and AirByte would be a killer application.
- jeanlaf 6y agoWe like their model indeed!
- jeanlaf 6y agoSo if I understand well, approach 1 is mindshare. Approach 2 is sales team, and approach 3 is bottom-up but self-serve. So definitely approach 1. Will be focusing on the open-source edition for the next year or more. Doing that will help us being deployed in a lot of companies. And we hope this will help the sales team close the deals. So it would be a mix of 2 and 3. Makes sense? Anyways, that's what we have in mind. And we'll learn by doing!
- dang 6y agoIf curious, past threads: Launch HN: Airbyte (YC W20) – Open-Source ELT (Fivetran/Stitch Alternative) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25917403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25917403 - Jan 2021 (87 comments) Airbyte: Simple and extensible open-source EL(T) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25800766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25800766 - Jan 2021 (24 comments)
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks for putting these links!
- yllus 6y agoNice deck! And terrific market positioning; in doing my own research of trying to get all organizational data in a single place in an otherwise non-technical organization, I've done demos of Fivetran and a few of your other competitors and your analysis of their weaknesses are spot on. I'll be giving your product a try.
- jeanlaf 6y agoAwesome, thanks! Don't hesitate to join our Slack - https://slack.airbyte.io https://slack.airbyte.io - (800+ members). We only have this public Slack workspace for the team, so the whole team is there and is pretty responsive!
- JoblessWonder 6y agoYou need a graph of Slack channel adoption... lol. (The Github stars graph made me think of it! Congrats on the funding/product. Looks great!)
- jeanlaf 6y agoIndeed. We'll add it for the next round ;)
- starpilot 6y agoI thought this was going to be about gardening.
- psing 6y agoHow is Airbyte optimized for building new integrations? Can you explain or point to article on that, i'm curious :)
- mtricot 6y agowe keep on improving the experience (priority #1 :) ). Would love to get your feedback there! Here are some articles: https://docs.airbyte.io/tutorials/building-a-python-source https://docs.airbyte.io/tutorials/building-a-python-source https://docs.airbyte.io/tutorials/toy-connector https://docs.airbyte.io/tutorials/toy-connector https://docs.airbyte.io/integrations/custom-connectors https://docs.airbyte.io/integrations/custom-connectors
- fireeyed 6y agoOne thing that’s not clear to me is why is there so much competition and crowding in “data massage” space. There is Snowflake, there are all kinds of ETL tools. The customer lists these startup posts have overlaps. Is it just Marketing departments inside these companies playing around with these tools or the CIOs cycling through the hottest startup on TechCrunch list ?
- lmeyerov 6y agoin my experience, most ai projects die before the ai part people hate hiring data engineering (plumbing people feels like cost), and data eng like tools that work but most are.too niche/happypath-oriented, so even w trifacta etc, a lot of open territory. SW can solve a lot of that, in theory, so everyone wins. And I agree that until there is an oss winner, the proprietary stuff will keep getting churned through. So ultimately whatever your data platform does (aws, databrick, whatever) or oss you're bringing. A lot of room for vendors to carve out niches b/c of connectors x use cases, until platforms/oss eats them all. VC's will see some ARR and name brands and thus be happy to fund: a lot of gaps any startup can fill. (I am impressed by airbyte for a few non-technical reasons even without having used it, so not a knock on them, so just some clues for the continuing froth in their market.)
- ABeeSea 6y agoThey all promise to reduce your data engineering budget. The problem is that building a data connector is a one-time platform problem per data source. Once it’s solved; it’s solved. None of them solve the problem of ETL design and data warehousing design.
- edmundsauto 6y agoIt sounds like you don't think solving for data connectors + necessary maintenance has a lot of value. I would agree, not FTE levels of value, but most companies I've seen in the SMB space would do well to pay $1-3k per month to have their data all housed in one spot. That lets their 1-2 DS/DE/SWE spend their time actually analyzing the data. Maintaining connectors is also a good way to demotivate high achievers - better to have them further down the value funnel.
- Jiger104 6y agoHaving worked with Fivetran, Segment and Singer in the past I am really excited for an opensource solution like what you guys have developed. The long tail of connectors has been a real hassle when you work with mostly small companies who use very specific SaaS products. Wish you guys best of luck
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks!
- francoisp 6y agocongrats on the raise!
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks!
- jacquesm 6y agoStep one: join YC. Step two raise seed. Seriously, this deck would likely not have flown without the YC backing and implicit stamp of approval, once you are in YC you'd have to do pretty bad not to raise seed funding.
- codegeek 6y agoI wonder if there is any YC company that failed to even raise Seed Round.
- ahstilde 6y agoAbout a third of the batch is unable to complete their round every demo day season.
- kenneth 6y agoMaybe it would help if they weren't all trying to raise at a 10-30M valuation when they're barely getting started. There's a lot of YC businesses I'd love to fund but where the economics are totally out of whack.
- jeanlaf 6y agoIt's actually a good question. They say 1/3 of the batch should raise easily, 1/3 less easily, 1/3 will struggle. It's also with which fund you are raising. There are many funds for sure, but raising with the top tier VCs is definitely not 1/3 or even 1/10 of the batch. Anyways, hopefully, this article was useful to you :).
- gnicholas 6y ago> It's also with which fund you are raising. There are many funds for sure, but raising with the top tier VCs is definitely not 1/3 or even 1/10 of the batch. Do most top-tier VCs even do seed rounds? Surely some do, but there are many VCs (I think including some that are considered top-tier, at least in certain verticals) that focus on A and later.
- ahstilde 6y agoLittle confused, you raised 1.8M in preseed, and then 5M in seed?
- jacquesm 6y agoThis isn't entirely in jest but here in Europe that would be a series 'A', sadly. Valuations here are on an entirely different scale than in the US.
- cj 6y agoI was a bit baffled to hear valuations in the latest batches are reaching $15mm+. For seed. Right of of an accelerator. If they were able to raise on a cap in that ballpark, the $ amount makes sense. I have a feeling these high valuations and giant rounds will end up doing a disservice to founders of moderately (but not massively) successful startups who are left with $7mm of notes (or safes) to pay back on acquisition with 1x liquidation preference
- tangjeff0 6y agoAlso confused here. Slide 7 [0] says seed funding of $1.8M, but Airbyte is also calling the most recent round a $5M seed. Implies they will call the first round Pre-Seed retroactively, rather than calling the second round Seed+. It's all grey at this stage either way! [0]: https://airbyte.io/articles/our-story/the-deck-we-used-to-raise-our-seed-with-accel-in-13-days/#menu-1-7eb0fc7:~:text=7.%20Our%20Velocity https://airbyte.io/articles/our-story/the-deck-we-used-to-ra...
- jeanlaf 6y agoThis round was the first priced round and consolidated all previous fund raising (which were in SAFE).
- krm01 6y agoThe deck is really not that important. Things that help you raise: - good product - good connections (accelerators do help) - many many meetings
- obayesshelton 6y agoMore importantly the team. Products can pivot Founders are crucial
- jeanlaf 6y agoAirbyte was a pivot from a 1st product. And we had a hard time raising with the 1st product. So vision / product / market opportunity are also really important.
- jeanlaf 6y agoIf you want to have a look at our GitHub repo, here it is: https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte
- texasbigdata 6y agoThanks! Will try on weeekend
- jeanlaf 6y agoAwesome, thanks!
- PureParadigm 6y agoI notice they use GitHub stars as a metric in the Appendix, supposedly to "insist that we hadn’t done a hard launch yet." I wonder how meaningful this metric is. Is 350 a lot of stars? A little? What am I supposed to take away from this?
- jeanlaf 6y agoIt was more about showing the growth rate which was higher than all the other open-source projects related to data integration :)
- rahimnathwani 6y agoLooking at your GitHub repo, it seems your data sources are Singer/Pipelinewise taps. Is AirByte an orchestration layer for Singer taps/targets, like Meltano or Pipelinewise?
- jrhizor 6y agoSome of our sources are written from scratch, some are wrappers directly over Singer, and others are wrappers over forks of Singer taps that we've updated/improved. All of our destinations right now do not depend on Singer. The high level strategy of orchestrating sources/destinations is similar although configuration, state management, source/destination installation/isolation, normalizing data, etc. are quite different.
- mjgs 6y agoGreat deck! :)
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks!
- graiz 6y agoIf I see a team that is 100% guys, as an investor I'm asking what's up with that?
- jeanlaf 6y agoYup. Diversity is a big focus for us now. Unfortunately, you tend to look for your first employees in your own network, so people you know. Most of our team is also composed of backend/data engineers, and diversity is not easy there. But this is definitely top of mind for us now.
- Stratoscope 6y agoIn the deck and on the website, I see ETL, ELT, and EL(T) but nothing that says what they mean. Maybe I am behind the times, but I wonder: are these something that a typical technically savvy person would be expected to know, like CPU or GPU?
- jeanlaf 6y agoETL = Extract - Transform - Load ELT = Extract - Load - Transform (so data normalization happens mostly at the destination). Here's an article that explains the differences and why it's important: https://airbyte.io/articles/data-engineering-thoughts/why-the-future-of-etl-is-not-elt-but-el/ https://airbyte.io/articles/data-engineering-thoughts/why-th...
- Stratoscope 6y agoThanks! Interestingly, that page doesn't define the terms either, but your cheat sheet helped me understand it. I might suggest giving short definitions whenever possibly unfamiliar terms like these are used.
- jimnotgym 6y agoFor those of us not in the the SV area... when I do stuff like this I have some slides (not nearly as pretty), but really they are a small part of the presentation. I would also have supplied a prospectus with a business plan etc. Is that the case with YC too, or is it really slide_deck>$$$$?
- jeanlaf 6y agoHonestly, it depends on your stage. But seed stage, only a slide deck.
- yc-kraln 6y ago* after getting funded by YC. This deck without the YC stamp would probably not be sufficient for serious investors for a variety of reasons: Missing market size, addressable market, and market growth, doesn't answer the question of "why now"? (whereas why this and why you is answered). It isn't a bad deck but let's be honest here.
- Pyramus 6y agoNo, that's not how VCs work. The pitch deck first and foremost tells a story with the objective to get a VC interested - or not. This is a necessary but not a sufficient step in the process. Think of it as a marketing prospectus or a 'door opener' type of thing. If a VC is indeed interested they will conduct intensive due diligence and leave no stone unturned.
- jeanlaf 6y agoIn our case, we're disrupting a well-known industry. So only a non-educated investor would ask for the total addressable market, and the "why now". Both are pretty obvious if you know the industry. Having investors ask us about those was a strong signal that those VCs didn't know enough about our market, so they wouldn't be great partners for you. However, in a standard pitch, I would agree those slides need to be there, especially if you're creating a new category. On our side, we're disrupting a well-known one, so not the same.
- hodgesrm 6y agoThat's completely my experience as well. At this stage you need investors who understand the market. (Congrats by the way on getting Accel to pony up!)
- okprod 6y ago> Think of it as a marketing prospectus or a 'door opener' type of thing. YC and other accelerators help to get in the door though. My first deck was worse than this but we ended up with USV at seed (thanks to the accelerator, in my opinion), which opened the doors through B/C and out.
- dagorenouf 6y agoWe used this before the pivot, when it was just a data unblocker tool. The product was flawless and high quality, although too expensive for our needs in the end. Good luck Airbyte!
- jeanlaf 6y agoThanks for the support!
- bhairavmehta95 6y agoCongrats on the raise! Did you guys use any particular software / resource to make this look pretty, or was it built internally by your design teams?