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2.4 Great Operating Experience in Carter Griffin
Fund: Updata Partners
Posted by Aaron Houghton on 2009-08-10
Updata has been a great financial partner of ours for a few years now. Raising our A round was pretty easy all things considered so I won't act like we were up against a market anything like it is today. We bootstrapped the company to $1M in annual sales before taking a seed round of $500 convertible debt and then 12 months later after it converted we raised an A round. We picked Updata over three other firms that came to the table with term sheets because they brought previous business operators to our deal (and the standard VC number focus as well, but it wasn't their first priority). For over two years now we've worked with Carter (former software company CEO) and Connor (financial/numbers guys) from Updata at quarterly board meetings and about 5-10 additional interactions per year, mostly at our request. They have been a sounding board for some of our executive hires (actually getting on the phone and interviewing our finalists alongside our exec team) and have also taught us a lot about the software-as-a-service model from a business and financial perspective. I know this may be hard to believe but they have never gotten in our way and I've just been blown away to see how different this experience has been than many of the VC nightmares I always hear about. This is my first VC funded company. Maybe we got lucky or maybe this is the sort of experience you can get when you work with a VC firm with a good balance of former entrepreneurs. I probably won't know until I do this again some day with another startup. If you're going to talk to Updata I certainly recommend Carter.
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