SaaS Fundraising: How a No-Name Founder Got Funded

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to Vishal Sunak, the co founder and CEO of Link Squares, a contract management solution for in house legal teams to draft, store, search and analyze agreements.
In 2015, Vishal was working at Backupify, which was about to get acquired.
The acquiring company wanted to know what was in their customer agreements, but backupify had thousands of different customer agreements.
No one knew what was in them and there was no easy way to get that information.
That first hand experience of contract management and the pains that in house legal teams face planted a seed in Vishal's mind of a potential SaaS solution.
Eventually, Vishal and his two co founders took the leap and launched their startup to revolutionize contract management.
They built a Ruby on Rails MVP with no backend.
In other words, it was good enough to use for demos, but the product didn't actually do anything so customers couldn't use it.
The founders then spent nine months interviewing or trying to interview nearly 100 general counsels and it took them over a year to land their first few customers.
Vishal told me that he was worried about building the wrong product and wasting their money, so they wanted to be sure they were solving the right problem.
Today, Link squares does over $10 million in annual recurring revenue, has a team of 70 people, and has raised over $21 million in funding.
Hope you enjoy it.
Vishal, welcome to the show.

Vishal Sunak (02:02.300)
Hey Omer, how are you?

Omer (02:04.060)
I'm great.
Good to get this set up and have this conversation.
So let's start by my icebreaker.
Do you have a favorite quote or something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Vishal Sunak (02:16.970)
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm a huge New England Patriots fan.
I don't know if that's a good or bad thing these days, but yeah.
So I remember watching this documentary about Bill Belichick, the coach and he's got hanging outside his office prove it every week and resonate really well with me obviously because I'm a Patriots fan, but just kind of the concept that like good week, bad week, next week, you got to keep at it.
And I've always felt strongly about that quote.
The other one is Marines.
Improvise, adapt, overcome.
Really kind of valuable for the entrepreneurial journey.

Omer (02:56.380)
So tell us about Link Squares.
What does the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?

Vishal Sunak (03:05.420)
Yeah, we're a contract management suite of products that has two main focuses.
One is pre signature, so technology software that enables companies to draft agreements, collaborate on them, get them to the point of signing and then after a contract has been executed, either by hand or electronic signature, we have a post signature product that we call Analyze.
And it's essentially like a purpose built repository for, for legal teams to have a single source of truth of all their executed agreements, both historical and the new ones that are being executed every day.
And there's an AI component there.
We built our own AI to essentially save people a lot of time collecting metadata like does the contract automatically renew, does it have termination for convenience?
What's the limitation of liability clause say and actually create that kind of structured data which is really super hard to collect.
And that's a product that we actually started with and our pre signature product finalizes is newer as the last year.
So yeah, suite of products helping in house legal teams first and foremost and then finance, sales, success, account management, you know, everyone kind of thereafter.

Omer (04:27.890)
Great.
And then the company was founded in 2015.
You've raised about 22 million so far.
And whereabouts are you in terms of revenue?

Vishal Sunak (04:42.100)
Yeah, we're around 10 million of recurring revenue.

Omer (04:45.060)
Okay, awesome.
So how did you come up with the idea for this business?

Vishal Sunak (04:49.140)
Yeah, my co founder and I, Chris, worked at a great tech company here in Boston where we're based called backupify.
And I had an awesome job.
I was in the operation.
So I got to touch basically everything in the company and how it operated, sales and marketing and data analysis and SaaS metrics and finance ops.
And I love that job buying technology, implementing it.
And so the journey of backupify kind of pushed to the end and there was an acquirer.
So this acquirer had strong interest in buying the company.
And I remember in one of the kind of first conversations where we met the acquiring company, they asked us what was inside our customer agreements.
And I think we had six or seven thousand customers now, some of them very small, but kind of maybe a third or more than a third were pretty meaningful, significant ARR.
So what does that mean?
Well, we had a subscription agreement with all of our customers that got redlined and got modified.
So deviated from kind of the base template.
This wasn't like a heavy click through business when you're talking about like you know, negotiating bigger deal sizes.
Also we had huge logos that used our technology like Logitech and Yahoo and Financial Times, Waitrose, John Lewis, all these great brands, Netflix.
And we were forced into using like third party paper which is like a thing that big companies do to small companies is they put you into a subscription services agreement that they try to standardize with all the vendors and it's nothing like yours.
And you spend a lot of time and money trying to negotiate back to a place of back to center.
And so we didn't track metadata about what we agreed to.
And the acquiring company had a really specific use case in mind.
They were a backup company, they had their own cloud.
We had built the whole business on aws.
We were backing up hundreds of billions of files like Google Drive and Gmail accounts like every day and using aws.
And so they said well I don't want to pay your AWS bill because it's crazy.
We have our own cloud.
Can we move your customers data without telling them and do it fast so we can start reducing our costs.
And the answer was I had no idea.
Not one single person had ever thought of the day where we wouldn't use aws.
And well they were like okay great, so customer agreements have the answers.
Why don't you tell us which ones have free control, we can move the data anytime for any reason without notifying them and anything else that scenarios were agreed to like you need to ask permission or you need to give us notice.
So I stared down the barrel of this project just trying to help out, doing whatever I can like what my job was.
And we were pretty disorganized as like a series B company in hyper growth mode.
We didn't have one single source of the truth.
Contracts were everywhere.
They were all mostly scanned PDFs so they're completely locked, not searchable by control f or anything like that.
I started breaking down this problem like okay, if we went and found all the contracts somehow and we compared that against RERP so we knew who was active, what could we do with it?
Could we figure out what's inside them?
Could we run text searches?
Or could we, could we run something else that could give us insights?
Or could someone read the contract somehow with technology?
And the light bulb moment for us was that a there wasn't anything out there like this that was solving this pain in contracts post signature like fully executed ones.
We were completely unprepared to deliver the answer without a really painful manual review.
Try to read 6,000 contracts which just felt impossible.
And so that was a real trigger moment.
Chris, my co founder was working like account management, customer success.
And I kind of had this director ops type role.
And we said to ourselves, this is interesting.
I mean, we're not that crazy.
We're not that different.
We're a VC backed SaaS company.
Maybe other people have felt the same pain.
Like, do you know what's inside these contracts?
Like, how do you keep track of them after they've been redlined?
How do you keep track of third party paper?
And that was really the inspiration to go out and see if there was something there.

Omer (09:22.490)
Okay, great.
So I want to talk about how you started to build that product and sort of validate it.
But what did you guys end up doing with backupify?
Like, did somebody actually have to sit down and go through all of these agreements?

Vishal Sunak (09:35.930)
Given the timeline of the acquisition and given kind of other constraints that we had, we ended up deciding that we should email all the customers and tell them that we're gonna move them off aws.
And that was ultimately like one of the moments where I said to Chris, like, this is not the way, there's gotta be a better way.
And he agreed and that's how we got started.

Omer (10:00.930)
Okay, great.
So how long did it take from the point that you went through that experience with this acquirer to the point where you guys decided that you were going to build a solution for this?

Vishal Sunak (10:15.670)
Yeah, great, great question.
So 2014, all of this was happening in the fall of 2014.
And then that's when kind of the discovery of like, oh, maybe there's something here.
And we were both working, and we were both working at the acquirer company after the deal went through, like into 2015.
And then we started thinking like, well, we got to have more kind of conversations.
And first off, like, who is the buyer?
Like, who manages contracts?
We didn't have a lot of knowledge because of the way that backupify was operating.
Right.
We didn't have a lot of knowledge, like, what do bigger companies do?
And so through kind of enough of enough kind of subject matter experts in and around building companies, they pointed us to the fact that like at real big companies, or even companies that were like two times the size of backupify, which is like in a couple hundred employees, they have this role, a general counsel.
And it was like, oh, the general counsel, that's great.
Chris, how many general counsels do you know?
I don't know any.
I don't know any either.
Well, now what?
So 2015, I had actually left Datto, the company that bought Backupify.
I worked at Inside Squared Revenue analytics platform here in Boston doing sales analysis, sales analytics.
And I saw a strong appreciation there, you know, strong as I've ever seen it for this kind of thinking that, like, we're just going to cold email anyone who could potentially be part of this target market.
And I said to Chris, I said, yeah, I mean, I think maybe we should run some cold email.
I think cold email would be great.
This would be a great strategy.
Like, we can go out to market this way.
And so ultimately, it took us from 2014 to November 2015 when we incorporated.
And then I kind of decided that I wanted to put all my free time into this company, which was people responding to the cold emails.
And I wanted to start getting on the calls to kind of hear what was going on.
And so then I went.
Chris had already gone full time before that, and I kind of went full time shortly thereafter, like in the start of 2016.
And then we never looked back.

Omer (12:32.080)
So when you started cold emailing general counsels, did you guys already have a product or an MVP at that point or you were just still trying to validate the idea?

Vishal Sunak (12:42.000)
Yeah, we.
We built a clickable prototype which was actually a Rails app.
It was a Rails app that really didn't have a backend that was actually like writing and editing and deleting database records.
It was mostly just a UI that felt really real.
You can demo it in browser.
It's all fake behind the scenes.
And that gave us enough demo like experience and to communicate how we were thinking about features and get a lot of feedback.
We had something.
It became a lot more real towards the end of 2015 and then into 2016, where we actually started validating what the real product needed to do and actually then started building it.

Omer (13:30.000)
So how much time did you spend building that first version, the one without the backend?

Vishal Sunak (13:34.640)
We had that up and running in about maybe 100 days, kind of early in 2015.
And it's just like hire a UI designer, kind of think about pages.
And I'm an engineering, kind of classically trained engineer by my education, so I love software.
And I kind of raised my hand to say, chris, I got this part and you can do more of the sales and kind of sales interactions and discovery and feedback sessions with potential people who were.
I mean, we weren't even thinking about revenue back then.
We were just thinking about feedback.
Like, could we get to 100, can we talk to 100 general councils?
And maybe after 100 general counsels, we able to hear some of the themes that came out of it.
And it worked.
And so, yeah, that's kind of how we divided things up.

Omer (14:25.830)
So I'm curious Like, why did you decide to build that in Rails instead of just using kind of like a prototyping tool like InVision or something like that?

Vishal Sunak (14:37.590)
Yeah, I guess that's the nerd in me.
I wanted it to look very real and there's nothing more real than an actual Rails app with actual front end.

Omer (14:50.560)
Right?
Right.
I mean, yeah, it doesn't have a database, but hey, it's real code, right?

Vishal Sunak (14:55.280)
It's real.
It's buttons and dropdowns and tables and you can click different pages and it loads.
And I mean, that was important kind of to make people feel like this thing was real and they could have it.
Would you pay for it?
I thought that that was an important thing in the early days.
And we've used that same sort of strategy and kind of other products and initiatives that we've done inside the company.
Just kind of create like a minimum demo, able experience and be able to communicate what it is you're doing and what it is this thing does and how it can add value and how it can change your life.
If you start using it now, there are moments where people would be like, can you click that button?
Like, what does that button do?
It's like, ah, you don't want to see that.
That's fine.
No, no, moving on.
That button is a button to now.

Omer (15:43.900)
All right, so let's talk about the cold email.
And you know, I think we've, at least on this show we've talked about cold email from time to time in the, I don't even know which episodes it was, but there's obviously, you know, kind of a science and art to doing cold email and a lot of persistence required to sort of make it work, what was the experience like for you guys?
So when you sort of said, okay, we don't know any general counsels, we're going to start cold emailing them, what was the initial response like?

Vishal Sunak (16:22.210)
Yeah, so we use a four email sequence and Chris and I would kind of go interchangeably on sending it.
And we use Toutapp, the only company in the sales enablement space that would sell us one license.
So hat tip to TK at ToutApp, founder there, who was nice enough to sell us one.
And so, yeah, the email sequence was pretty straightforward.
First email was like, hi, I'm Vishal, I'm CEO of this company in Boston and I used to work at a company that looks and feels just like yours, a venture backed SaaS company.
And here's a struggle that I had which was like, we didn't know what was inside our executed agreements, like, does this look like you?
Does it sound like you.
Would you be interested in chatting for 20 minutes?
And so I mean again, we weren't even really looking for revenue.
Right on kind of the early side of, you know, early 2016.
And in late 2015 we weren't even really looking for revenue.
It was more like can we hit this internal milestone of like talking to 100 general councils and validating that they have this pain so we can then put our foot down on building the real product?
And so that was our strategy and it worked amazingly well.
I mean in the first week, like I think five or six general councils of like unicorn tech startups, like name brands all replied.
And I remember like high fiving Chris and be like, we made it bro, that's it.
Like it's working, it's amazing.
And we didn't close a single one of them and still have it to this day.
But they're on my most wanted list to get them back.
Yeah, it was like the feedback just popped so instantaneously.
Like we get so many replies off the first email and people were interested in hearing more and saying yeah, no I agree with you and then say, oh great, can we set up a time to just chat and just kind of learning.
So a lot of learning.

Omer (18:27.580)
And what did you learn from those conversations that helped you?
Because the thing was this was driven by a situation where a company is in conversations about a potential acquisition.
But it sounds like that's not the only use case for the product.
Right?
So you discovered something else from these conversations.

Vishal Sunak (18:51.260)
Yeah.
And so when we were getting on these calls with these general counsels, what we were learning was that they didn't have a purpose built system that was feeding them insights into executed agreements, making their life easier.
That was a real light bulb moment because that's a niche that you can go and own.
And we learned that most people are storing their contracts on prem share network drive, something cloud based like Box Dropbox, Google Drive that provide the repository though doesn't add any other extra value.
That was awesome.
That was just amazing learning.
We saw it super clearly and then we started telling them about what happens if you could have a single source of truth and you could have analytics and full text searching and I'll take care of your scan PDFs and get you great digitized files.
Could this help you when you needed to go and review them?
And kind of.
We also learned why people review their contracts.
Like there's a change to a law or standard, like a new Privacy, a new privacy law comes out like GDPR or something like that.
And that then creates a trigger point inside the company where they have to go and read all their contracts and see if they're compliant to this new law, issue amendments or redo the contracts.
And so it was awesome.
I mean those early days just kind of validating what the pain was.
Kind of what they were using seemed like complete greenfield space.
The other thing is that we learned that there was an applied AI artificial intelligence use case where people were kind of suggesting like, well, can you just tell me what the effective date is?
Can you just tell me when it renews?
And can you just tell me if it has automatic renewal?
Or can you just tell me if it has termination for convenience?
And can you just tell me kind of reading between the lines translated into like a machine learning type of technology which then became the analyzed product that we had.

Omer (21:05.680)
So were there any, any sort of competitors out there around that time?
I'm trying to figure out, did you get such a response from people from the cold email?
Because this was something they would just.
There was no other solution out there or they were sort of, they were, but they were kind of struggling with sort of half baked solutions which didn't solve the problem very well.
Like why do you think they, they seem to respond so well to your cold emails even though you weren't able to convert a lot of them.

Vishal Sunak (21:43.330)
Because contract management is not a new topic category.
It's probably 20 years old, 25 years old, and kind of the legacy kind of generation one players, they focus their entire software offering pre signature.
So it's like the workflow around getting a document to the point where it can be signed.
We said to ourselves, we're going to start with the use case that we know and we felt the pain on which is post signature.
And so because they had heard of contract management software, some of them have even tried the pre signature piece.
We're able to validate that.
Hey, did the pre signature piece help you ultimately with the pain that I think you have?
And they were like no it didn't.
It actually did something that was adjacent to it which was help us quote unquote work more efficiently to get a deal to the point that it can be signed.
But it didn't help with the like can you help me understand what I've already agreed to and like what's in the 25,000 contracts we've already executed in the lifespan of the entire company and what's inside all of those, which that wasn't the point of those kind of pre signature tools was to help you make a better future, help you make a more efficient future, but not looking into the past.
And that's really where we found the gold.

Omer (23:05.790)
So I think some people, many people, if they had an idea, they built this prototype and sent out cold emails and got this sort of response back that people were interested, they wanted to talk.
It kind of feels like you did, right?
You were like, yes, Steve.
Hey, high five.
We've made it.
It kind of would make sense to just say, let's, let's build the product as quickly as possible and see if people will pay for it.
What was it like?
Why did you guys decide that you were going to take longer?
Why did you, how did you come up with a number?
We want to talk to 100 general counselors before we sort of go to the next step.

Vishal Sunak (23:48.780)
It was the fear of spending capital that we didn't have, basically running the early days off of our own savings about building the wrong product and sinking all this time and all this money into the wrong product and just being really hypersensitive around the fact that one person isn't enough, five people aren't enough, 10 people aren't enough, 50 people aren't enough, like 100 people.
You'll be able to see trends.
And the trends are the things that we want to bet on.
And the trends in aggregate with sample size of greater than 75 or equal to 100 can help us validate that we're not in a big competitive pressure cooker.
Build this product or I get deported from the country.
It was more like we wanted to be smart about it, we wanted to go slow and we wanted to validate.
We were headed in the right direction.
Now a million things have changed in a good way since that journey first started, but we at least knew the line of bearing approximately to where we needed to head to.
And we're still relatively on that line of bearing.
And I think people rush into wanting to build something and that's.
And that's cool, right?
Like, hey, instead of clickable prototype, if you got the time and got the resources and you got the cash, you can build a whole full blown web app.
But if you get it wrong, it's pretty defeating.
It takes work.
You got to rework it, you got to go back from scratch.
And that's why tools like Envision and the other prototyping tools exist, so you don't have to make that big of a commitment.
But we were feeling like the feedback was coming, starting to come Pretty fast, towards the end of 2015, and we were starting to kind of assemble that critical knowledge that we needed because now, like, it's, it's 2021 and we got 70 people at the company.
Like, we can go, we can go fast.
Like, like going fast now is easy.
Like, we got cash in the bank and people here.
We can go fast on anything now.
But we, we wanted to set ourselves up in the right way to do that.

Omer (26:07.340)
So did you hit your goal of doing a hundred interviews or having conversations with a hundred general councils?

Vishal Sunak (26:13.660)
Pretty darn close, I'd say.

Omer (26:15.260)
How long did that take?

Vishal Sunak (26:16.380)
It probably took from, I'd say the summertime of 2015 kind of summertime, 2015, like into the fall of 2015 until like March, April 2016.
So just under a year, maybe nine months.
I mean, we did it for like nine months.
And that's a long time when you're sitting around like basically hearing people give you feedback.
I mean, hats off to my co founder, Chris, who actually has a ton more patience than I do, just personality wise.
We hung in there, we stuck around.
Right.
And there's a big story there about sticking around and learning and making a good bet when the time is ready to make it.

Omer (27:00.200)
And were you guys, during those nine months, were you going in and kind of refining the Rails app, the prototype, or were you just kind of saying, let's just keep testing this thing and we'll just focus on the conversations instead?

Vishal Sunak (27:16.760)
Yeah.
I spent my time building the prototype and then ultimately the first web application that now is still in production, and that's the foundation kind of nights and weekends, while Chris spent time during the day gathering feedback, writing these summaries.
Hey, this is what I'm hearing.
Take a look at this.
What do you think about that?
How could we capture this and encapsulate this feedback into the product?
Then there was a little bit of crossover point where the real web application was starting to be built and the prototype was starting to age itself out.
And then eventually we just kind of switched over.
Like in 2016, we just kind of switched over to using the real demo able experience.
And so the prototype served itself well.
Probably six months, seven months.
I mean, we used it for a while.

Omer (28:06.700)
So let's talk about how did you get your first 10 customers?
Where did they come from?

Vishal Sunak (28:10.940)
Cold email and one referral.
Our first customer, I knew the CEO, the former CEO, she had sold the company here in Boston.
And I emailed her and said, I think your company would be a great fit.
Who can I talk to she wasn't operating anymore, she wasn't CEO.
So she sent us over to the cfo, who when we walked in there, it said, I have this exact pain.
Like, we just have to do this big contract review exercise.
It was so painful.
He asked me if we were reading his emails, like in a jokingly way.
And Chris and I looked at each other and we're like, yeah, this is great.
And then he asked us how much it costs and we just said, it's $1,000 a month.
It's $12,000.
That was it.
It was $12,000.
$12,000.
I remember that moment.
Yeah.
And so kind of one to two, cold email.
And like the first 10 were all cold email.
And we really wanted to prove it.
Like the first one, hey, that was cool.
That was like an inside thing.
We had to go prove it with the company, but we got kind of a referral.
Can we get 10 people we don't know, didn't do us a favor, didn't write us an email.
We talked to them, we worked them, we closed them and kind of validated.
And Once we had 10, kind of early in 2017, early in 2017, we're able to then really think that we could get to 100 or more and then those.

Omer (29:40.880)
So one was a referral and then the other nine from cold email.
Were they all people that you'd had some kind of conversation with before?

Vishal Sunak (29:49.200)
Never completely net new complete strangers.
No friend of mine or friend of mine's dad.
It was a general counsel, nothing.
Complete strangers in the first 10.
That's what really what we wanted.
There's a great article Jason Lemkin posted about initial traction as 10 unaffiliated customers.
And I had read that and said, okay, well, Jason's pretty smart.
He knows what he's doing.
Let's try to go for 10 this way.

Omer (30:16.350)
That's awesome.
And then like ballpark, like how many customers do you have today?

Vishal Sunak (30:21.550)
Over 300.

Omer (30:23.470)
And have the majority of them come through cold email?
Because I know like these days you're doing a bunch of other things or an acquisition.

Vishal Sunak (30:34.590)
But yeah, we're trying to balance out the kind of the lead sources.
But Outbound is still really effective.
Outbound is super effective with our buyer in its role.
I mean, people listening to this should be unafraid of using Outbound.
It has great cost of customer acquisition benefits.
And also you get a lot of real time feedback in the market, like what's going on.
So, yeah, we still use that and now we get a strong customer referral.
Network as kind of the word gets out and kind of the review platforms and SEO and if it wasn't a pandemic, I mean, we love a good trade show.
The general counsels are a fun bunch.
We love sponsoring at trade shows with a fun theme and engaging with them.
And those all been kind of amazing channels for us.

Omer (31:26.740)
Yeah, I mean, cold email is great if you're getting the kind of response that you guys got.
It's not so much fun if you're getting no response.
It's just you're hearing crickets or people are telling you to get lost.
But yeah, I think there's definitely some lessons here in terms of if you are not getting an enthusiastic response from people.
One, maybe it isn't the right problem.
Maybe you're not articulating that problem the right way or maybe you're not talking to the right person and it's kind of figuring out, I think a combination of those three.
And it sounds like you guys kind of had some luck with that when you started out.

Vishal Sunak (32:09.770)
Yeah, the journey to product market fit requires a little bit of luck.
It's not all like the spreadsheet.
And you can't make a spreadsheet of product market fit and say, I'm going to do this and do this in this order, I'm going to make a Gantt chart and then we're going to have product market fold fit.
I mean it takes a lot of like iteration, a lot of, lot of bobbing and weaving, a lot of like listening to what you're saying, what they're saying, what their challenges are, how they buy, what tools do they have, like kind of.
And keep, keep working on it.
Right.
It's a continuous work in progress.
I mean even the company today is just a continuous work in progress as we continue to expand our knowledge into our ideal buyer.
Right.
And that's just the curiosity, the intellectual curiosity to keep learning and never kind of feel like, you know it all.
That's been extremely valuable for us.

Omer (33:00.470)
So let's talk about some of the struggles that you guys had along the way.
You know, you were a first time CEO with this business and I want to kind of understand, you know, what that experience has been like.
And then also maybe let's start talking about raising money first.
Like when you guys sort of decide you want to go and raise money and you know, you've got some, you've got some traction here and your target market seems to be pretty excited.
It seems like a slam dunk that raising money isn't going to Be that hard.
What was that experience like?

Vishal Sunak (33:35.150)
Yeah, we did three rounds of financing.
So pre seed seed and then series A most recently last year.
And so the first time we raised as part of our pre seed financing is start with angels.
I'd start with smaller checks like try to raise half a million dollars and just kind of start out on the journey.
I had to also build my own knowledge of venture capital and what it is and how do you get it and how do you talk to people and what's the whole point?
And I had to kind of round out that knowledge.
And so I used a really strong network here in Boston of some amazing multiple time founders and serial entrepreneurs and sold their businesses that came in and really I call them my senseis.
Like you know, they were able to teach me the game and like also teach me like okay, this is what this means.
Like when, when they say this they actually mean that.
And like here's the, here's kind of the insider's insight about raising capital.
And so when I, when I was first starting out I thought maybe venture capitalists do like 5050 like first time founders and kind of repeat founders or people who are our name brands or worked at Google or whatever.
It's probably like 982 or something like that or 991 skewed towards people they know.
Multiple time around though I think it's changing these days.
That's kind of what I saw and felt and it was really around.
How do I tell my story?
I'm a no name.
Yeah, I worked at a great tech company in Boston.
Sweet.
I wasn't the founder, I was like employee 30.
How am I going to walk into a meeting and tell them that this is the bet that they should place and you should bet on me.
And so I thought to myself, I didn't go to any Ivy League schools though I went to a great undergrad in Northeastern.
I had some experience working in SaaS companies.
I definitely knew the operation of a SaaS company and knew the metrics really well because that was my job.
But how am I going to tell an undeniable story?
So like you can hate legal technology and you can hate contract management and you can think it's dumb and you don't want to sell it to the general counsel.
You don't want to be involved with a company like that.
But you're going to have to take the meeting because I have a sweet looking ARR line and I'm going to prove it every single day that this thing is real with customers with revenue with traction.
And I'm going to run a great business.
And so the second order matrix, cac, CAC payback, sales efficiency, lifetime value, all that stuff, gross margin cogs, all that stuff is going to look so good to prove to you that I'm the CEO you should bet on.
This is a company that's growing really fast.
We found something, we're onto something, come help me grow it.
And that was always the kind of strategy that I took.
And every founder has to tell their story.
Like why is it you, like, why are you starting a like Figma?
Like why did you start figma?
Well, like I was a designer and I have this subject matter knowledge or I know something about this space that other people don't.
And we kind of said to ourselves we know something about this space that other people don't.
And I'm going to prove it to you with people signing order forms and paying us.
That's how I'm going to prove that this thing is real.
This is not an idea, this is a real business.

Omer (36:59.770)
So what kind of pushback did you get when you started talking to investors?

Vishal Sunak (37:06.730)
100 different reasons.
And still to this day.
100 different reasons.
Some of the ones I mentioned.
I don't like legal technology.
I think it's got too many competitors in it.
I don't think it's as big of a market size as you do.
I don't like this part of your story or back in the day.
Yeah.
How you compose the team.
I wish you were selling six figure deals.
I wish you were selling $20 deals.
I wish you were up market, down market.
I wish you didn't have to sell to the general.
I mean all these reasons, right.
Like we're just not interested.
I have, I mean the most blanket answer is we have no interest in this space, this product.
You AI this stuff this way.
I just have no interest in it.
I don't have a, I don't have a hypothesis.
Omer, that's the line.
Like we don't have a thesis on this space.
All right man, cool.
See you later.
On to the next one.

Omer (38:01.050)
And then how long did it take before you were able to raise the money?

Vishal Sunak (38:07.290)
Yeah, Pre Seed found a great family office person that rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange twice in their life.
Companies that they started from scratch and so on a chance meeting, that was how we did kind of our first million dollars into the business to capitalize it which you know, still, still stay in touch with him.
And such an amazing operator.
A lot to learn from I got my first institutional money, my seed round in 2018 and running I went out to raise $3 million.
We ended up raising like $4.8 million.
And that was fun and really kind of felt like the company was arriving and you know, we were almost at a million ARR then and feeling like we knew kind of some of the components were in place and I was able to hire more on the management team, kind of round out the skill set, bring on cto, bring on VP of product, bring on CRO, continue to help round out the management team.
And then going out for a series A, we had gone like 1 to 4 million ARR in one year.
It was the wildest year of my life.
Gone like 1 to 4 million AR.
And I used that growth basically a quarter ahead of when the pandemic hit to go and kind of like raise our series A.
And fortunate to find a great partner who believed in the vision and jump capital, lead our series A.
And so took a lot of stone turning, took a lot of pitches, took a lot of at bats.
And that's like a big secret to this thing is you got to run it like a sales process, like top of funnel, you know, deal stages.
I actually use HubSpot CRM when I'm raising money to just give me a holistic kind of kanban list view of like where all these conversations at, like am I past the first call?
Am I in initial diligence?
Like, like are they at the end, are they at late stage diligence?
Like where are they?
Like keep on adding more, more people in and keep a big list of of investors just updated, you know, twice a year.
Like hey, here's the update about the company going great.
This, that and the other thing.
We built this, we hit this target, we're here, we're there.
And then next time when you're raising capital, it's not like starting from hello, I'm Vishal, nice to meet you.
I've never met you a day in my life.
It can be more like, hey, we've been talking and I'm raising capital now, let's chat.

Omer (40:27.560)
So you also said earlier that you know, you're a self confessed nerd and love the coding aspects of this and now you've sort of transitioned and seem pretty comfortable in the CEO role.
What have been some of the difficulties or struggles you've experienced in sort of growing into that first time CEO role?

Vishal Sunak (40:51.900)
Yeah, one of the things you got to learn is that it's my job to hire the best person to work for Me, the best head of sales, the best engineer, the best head of success, the best head of product, Right?
And it's my job to, like, tell them what's important.
Like, these are our goals.
Like, this is what our board want.
It has feedback on for us.
Like, the things that we should be thinking about.
Here's our plan, here's our goals.
This is what I care about.
These are the things at the end of the year, what we need to achieve, and all the reasons why, right?
And then for me to not tell them how to do it, like, even though I might have opinions, I might have thoughts, I may.
I'm an engineer.
Like, I have thoughts about our product build, I have thoughts about the way things look like.
But try as much as I can to never talk about how they do it.
If they're an expert and I've hired the right person, they're an expert.
They're going to know how to do it because that's their job, right?
And it's mostly my job to prescribe the what and get out of the way and be there to cheerlead them and coach them and push them along and help them when they're stuck, if they need help.
But that's been like the ultimate thing.
It's like, as CEO, you're doing a great job in a jokingly way, like, you got nothing to do every day.
I mean, there's so much to do.
But if you're doing the job right and you've kind of achieved this, the point where you have seven or eight direct reports in the C levels or VP levels, they're just going to go crush it, then, you know it's working.
Yeah, you know it's working.
I mean, that's been such a valuable thing, like being able to be like, you guys got it, you got it.
I'll be here.
I'll be here if you need me.
I probably don't, but I'm here if you need me.

Omer (42:41.200)
But that's not always that easy to do, especially if you're the guy, you know, who, it's your baby.
You built the thing.
It can be challenging to let go and step back.

Vishal Sunak (42:51.640)
It can.
It takes a lot of trust.
And I'm so fortunate that my CTO and I worked at backupify with my co founder, Chris, and I, my CRO, backupify, my CMO backupify, my VP of Customer success at Insight Squared with me.
And I just know these folks.
I just know them for so long.
And though we may have lost track of each other and kind of, they've gone out in other ways, but I've seen them grow from when we were all kind of director level, manager level and see them grow into these amazing, amazing leaders and being able to say, I trust my CMO Juliet with our brand, our product marketing, our content, everything.
Because she's an expert.
She's an expert.
I'm always there to help.
I'm always there to send her ideas.
But it's that trust, right?
And seeing the results and feeling like we all won together.
Right.
I've unified the whole company around that.
Like when the AR line goes up into the right.
It's every single person in this company helped.
Whether you're a key engineer or a UX designer or obviously you work in the sales team, you're the one closing these things.
Or you work in finance and you never mess up payroll, ever.
You get everyone's commission calculation done perfectly paid on time and stuff like that.
We're all responsible for it, every single one of us.
Help that line grow.
It's not just sales.
You need a great product to do it.
You need great infrastructure, you need great strategic thinking.
Competitive, competitive landscape.
We're all working on it together and you just go out and win.
Go out and win.
Have a lot of fun.

Omer (44:29.710)
Yeah.
Love it.
All right, let's wrap up.
We're going to go into the lightning round.
Going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Yep.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Vishal Sunak (44:42.190)
Customers want to work with people they know like and trust.

Omer (44:45.470)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Vishal Sunak (44:48.350)
Predictable revenue.
Aaron Ross.
It's the foundation of Inside Sales.
If you're in Inside Sales kind of business book.
Starfish and the Spider kind of decentralized leadership.
I like that book a lot.

Omer (45:01.100)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Vishal Sunak (45:05.580)
Grit.
Determination.
Right.
Grit.
Don't give up.
Can't give up.

Omer (45:10.860)
Yeah.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Vishal Sunak (45:15.820)
I like to use Google Calendar in my personal life and block out things because I have the memory of like a sieve now running the company and being a dad.
Also.

Omer (45:26.600)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Vishal Sunak (45:31.080)
I'd love to get into engineering, infrastructure, tech.
I'm kind of like a snowflake computing fanboy and also software for product managers.
I think there's a big market there.

Omer (45:45.880)
What's interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know.

Vishal Sunak (45:52.550)
I can play three instruments.
Piano, guitar, and tenor saxophone.

Omer (45:57.190)
Wow.
I've got a guitar that's been sitting next to me for 10 years and I'm still trying to learn the second chord.
So I get some tips from you.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Vishal Sunak (46:08.710)
Being a dad.
Being a dad to a beautiful two year old little girl.
And being a husband, too.
And so spending time with my family and watching sports and hanging out and grilling.
Definitely grilling.
I love grilling.

Omer (46:24.970)
Awesome.
Yeah, it must have been a little hard with the Patriots not even making the playoffs this year.

Vishal Sunak (46:29.530)
Yeah, you know, I've gone through a series of emotions, but overall, happy.
Overall, happy.
Happy for Tom.

Omer (46:36.410)
Cool.

Vishal Sunak (46:36.970)
Happy for my buddy Tom.

Omer (46:38.650)
All right, if people want to find out more about link squares, they can go to linksquares.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Vishal Sunak (46:49.340)
I'm on Twitter.
I'm on LinkedIn.
You can surely email me vishalinksquares.com awesome.

Omer (46:57.820)
We'll include a link to your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles in the show notes.

Vishal Sunak (47:05.100)
Great.

Omer (47:05.380)
Well, Vishal, thank you so much for joining me.
It's been fun chatting and kind of hearing the story of just how this opportunity or the situation at backupify turned into a business idea and how you've grown that.
So thanks for sharing the story and for some of the lessons and things that you've learned along the way.
I appreciate that.
Then I wish you and the team all the best of success.

Vishal Sunak (47:32.190)
Thank you so much.
Omar, thank you for having me on.

Omer (47:34.310)
My pleasure.
Cheers.