From point A to point B

Investors that we’ve talked to can be divided into two categories: those who understand what we’re doing, and those who are chasing a hot deal. The groups can appear similar, but the difference will become painful when things don’t go well. When times get tough, people who understand the vision will stick by you, while those who are just following the excitement will jet off to the next exciting thing.

After meeting Viviana, Tobi, Aydin, and Michelle from Felicis, I realized there is another group; those who understand “how” you’re building your company, not just “what” your building. At MotherDuck we believe that “how” can be a competitive advantage.?

For example, one of the earliest decisions that we made was to give the creators of DuckDB, the open source project we’re building on top of, a co-founder share of the company. We did this because it is the right thing to do. But it is also one of the most strategically important things that we did, because we secured a unique distribution channel and exclusivity in the business we’re operating in. Doing well and doing good can be aligned.

The folks at Felicis clearly got this; we’ve been in discussions with them since our series A, when they visited us in Seattle. They brought Michelle Delcambre, who was an expert in helping teams develop their culture authentically. We were also impressed with Aydin’s experience, Viviana’s marketing savvy, and Tobi’s hustle.?

?We reconnected when MotherDuck had our team offsite in San Diego, where Viviana is based. We had had a team bike ride to Coronado island, and I ditched my rental bike and jumped in an Uber so I could meet up with the Felicis folks. Luckily we had an Amsterdam resident on our team who was comfortable riding two bikes at once so he could get the bike back on the ferry.

We hadn’t planned on doing a raise until at least next year. For months I had been telling investors “no, we still have an embarrassing amount of runway, we’re not raising any time soon”. When talking to the VCs I liked, I added “but I promise to tell you when we are”. Those kinds of promises get tricky when someone slips you a term sheet at a dinner party; you have to decide whether to reward the conviction of the preemptive first term sheet or follow through on your commitments.

We chose the latter, but decided to run a highly abbreviated process; just three days of conversations with potential investors. When motivated, VCs can move very quickly. To make things more complicated, this coincided with our launch, so the day of our launch party I was doing laps around South Park trying to make sure to give folks a chance at the round.

The Felicis team had the simple pitch: “tell us what you want”, and they wrote a term sheet matching what I had described. Sometimes you have to be careful what you ask for, since the precise wording made it harder to calculate pro-rata shares from existing investors. Luckily, most of these folks wanted to increase their stake anyway, so it didn’t matter.?

The facile answer to why we raised with Felicis is that Viviana brought key experience in marketing and GTM that was lacking on our board. Already she’s helped us navigate PR and build a plan to reach the right audiences. The deeper answer is we’re working with Felicis because we like how they work, and want to align ourselves with them for as long as it takes for MotherDuck to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us. Combined with the existing investors we have around the table and the extraordinary team at MotherDuck, I think our future looks just ducky.