Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re not going to become a billion-dollar revenue company in two years.

Lori Steele Contorer: No, the next presidential cycle is beyond 2016. The next one will be the 2020 election.

Sramana Mitra: You said you originally raised some angel money and then acquired the Australian company for stock. Given that you had all these complexities in your business where you had to go through this flat adoption cycle for many years, how did those investors respond to the market dynamics?

Lori Steele Contorer: That has been an interesting journey. My first angel round was $500,000. Since the company began, we’ve raised $20 million, which is all angel funded.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find that?

Lori Steele Contorer: Through incessant searching.

Sramana Mitra: That sounds dreadful.

Lori Steele Contorer: I’m with you. I’m not recommending it to anyone. I’m just saying it’s what I did.

Sramana Mitra: This was all happening in the 2007 to 2010 phase?

Lori Steele Contorer: This was happening between 2006 and 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Before you found the inflection point in 2010, how much of this money came into the company? My question is very specific to that phase where you’ve haven’t yet found the inflection point. This is a very tough period for entrepreneurs to navigate.

Lori Steele Contorer: There was probably $8 million between the beginning and the 2010 period.

Sramana Mitra: Then in 2010, you found the inflection point. Things started to look up. You started doubling revenues. That’s when you raised more money?

Lori Steele Contorer: We didn’t start doubling revenue until probably 2012 but we found the customers were interested in what we were trying to do. We continued to raise money from 2012 to 2015. The revenue began to grow quite rapidly.

Sramana Mitra: Once you found the inflection point in 2012, why did you not switch to venture? Why did you keep doing angel?

Lori Steele Contorer: It was not by choice. We started pitching VCs in that period. Often, they would say, “You’re a little early. We don’t see the inflection point yet.” While I say we had started to hit the inflection point in 2010, that was really the inflection point from the customer’s perspective, but their equipment had not yet reached end of life. Now, we’re hitting a real inflection point where major multi-million procurements are happening continuously.

When we would pitch to venture capitalists, I would either hear, “I don’t know the voting space.” There’s not a lot of research on the voting space even though it’s a $31 billion industry. They’d also say, “What a great idea. I love it except I hate selling to government.” I think that’s changing now. I’m actually raising a venture capital round now. I think we’ve now brought all the components together that demonstrate what VCs are looking for.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer
1 2 3 4 5 6 7