On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2014. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Arian ↗
In their words
Your job as a CEO, and whoever is in charge of doing the fundraising, is to work with the investors to de-risk every single one of these throughout your fundraising process.
One piece of advice — it's actually the last advice, but I'm going to mention it first: never, ever, ever cold call or cold email investors. It just doesn't work.
Around the web ×1
Quick answers
Who is Arian Rahbari?
Co-founder and CEO of Singspiel, the Toronto music-education startup he built with Ivan Cheung out of a fourth-year systems design engineering project at the University of Waterloo. He took the TechTO stage in December 2014, a year after the company graduated from MaRS's JOLT accelerator, to talk about raising money as a first-time founder.
What did Singspiel do?
Its app listened through a tablet or phone microphone while a student played, pulled the musical features out of the sound and returned real-time feedback in standard notation. Rahbari's own comparison on stage was Duolingo or Rosetta Stone, for music. The company raised a $350,000 seed round led by the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, reported by BetaKit in January 2015. It is no longer active and its site no longer resolves.
What was his advice on reaching investors?
Never cold-call or cold-email them — he told the room the odds there are close to zero, and that a founder who cannot find a warm path through other entrepreneurs or their own network is probably not the right person to run the business. Singspiel's own route was the JOLT demo day. He also told founders to check a fund's size before pitching it: a half-million-dollar seed round is not a conversation for a firm that writes Series B cheques.
How did he frame fundraising?
As de-risking. He walked through the risks an investor assumes about a first-time founder — the founding team, the product, technology, go-to-market and revenue model — and said the founder's job through the process is to retire each one in turn. In Singspiel's case the open questions were whether a founder twelve months out of school could run a business, and whether the machine-learning work was buildable at all.