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welcome fort collins startup week my name is bill rigler i'm a vice president at mapr agency and this presentation is all about how founders can generate smart public relations around their funding announcements for more than 30 years mapr has been working with startups just like yours to help them raise visibility for announcements like funding announcements new products and everything else that is so necessary to help your business stand out we know that your time is tight and and that you're probably sick of zoom and then some and so we've scheduled this presentation to be less than 15 minutes and it's chock full of information let's get started at mapr we've helped literally hundreds of companies over the years generate smart public relations we get approached all the time by founders saying something like help we have a funding announcement that's coming out in a few weeks and we don't know how to how to put everything together can you help us on the other hand we also get some calls from founders saying will you please help us we filed our form d we didn't know that we needed to have a press release we didn't know that we needed to update our website the story's already gone out is it too late for us to leverage this announcement with some public relations so the during the course of this short presentation today we're going to talk about a few things that every startup needs to know so they can get organized and derive the pr benefits that are going to help you get the visibility that you want we're honored honored to be joined today by two really really good friends nick green hall of denver business journal and colorado inno and seth levine of the foundry group they're both here to help share some insider perspectives and tips that every founder should know again before you file your form d now we've enlisted seth and nick to help provide a perspective that you don't often hear the journalists perspective from the perspective of the people writing the story and on behalf of the investors the people who expect pr but also the right kind of pr so let's let's get to our fantastic uh experts um first up is nick green hall of the denver business journal nick is the technology reporter for dbj and the associate editor at colorado inno he writes stories about the incredible people and companies and products that are driving colorado's startup ecosystem he also puts together colorado inno's daily newsletter the beat which if you haven't signed up for it please do it's free and it will be your best resource for all the comings of startup news in colorado and he's also one of the nicest tech reporters around so please join me in welcoming nick to our panel nick thank you so much for joining us today awesome yeah thanks so much bill and thanks to uh for calling startup week i can't can't wait to get into this so let's get right at it um first of all you are at the denver business journal you're a colorado inno you are getting story ideas and pitches a lot can you talk to us a little bit about how many pitches do you get in a single day great question yeah you don't you probably don't want to see in my inbox right now uh certainly not inbox zero or you know inbox 100 or inbox a thousand there's a there's a lot in there for sure um i would say i get you know anywhere between between 10 and 15 on average pitches a day and you know some days that's five and some days that's 30. uh you know and these are pitches you know covering a variety of things coming covering funding rounds like we're talking about uh product expansions big hires uh all over the place and everything from across the state yeah i mean i can only imagine just uh i mean you know you're you're you know the the publications that you work at are just the biggest names and covering startups and so you must see some really interesting and maybe some not so interesting uh pitches come in um when you think about just over your time at colorado inno and dbj are there any pitches especially around funding announcements that have really stood out to you in terms of you know like wow that was a gold star gold star pitch yeah i mean you know it's it's tough to ignore the ones that have the big splashy numbers at the front right you know when i get something that has the word unicorn in it you know obviously it pops right up to the top of my inbox but i think it's you know also important to say that it's not just the big big funding announcements that catch my eye you know well-crafted ones are great and you know when i say well-crafted it's it's ones that answer all the questions i would have if i did a follow-up you know it's how much it's it's when is it when is this going live it's what are we using this for it's it's all those things and we can get into that more later but yeah you know it's it's important for me that a pitch has all the components to show me like why why should i write about this you know i get 10 to 15 a day what makes this one special versus the other ones and you know i can't think of one in particular because i get so many good ones all the time but to be fair there's also the flip side where i don't get that well so so let's talk about that because i think there's actually something really instructive in looking at examples of what not to do to help frame how we how we should be doing things um without naming names are there any kind of stinker pitches that you've received or anything that you saw in a pitch that you were just silently shaking your head saying no that shouldn't be in there well you know i'll start by saying i appreciate all the pitches i get i'll take the diplomatic approach but um i'll say that there are definitely things that i see or don't see in pitches that catch my eye or you know i wish i did see and the first thing for me is you know location is crucial uh so many people from across the country are pitching stories to me and you know i only write about colorado and in denver so if it doesn't have either colorado or denver somewhere in the first three lines it's probably not gonna i'm probably not gonna catch it and i'll move on to the next one um so that's definitely one where i'm like geez you know missed opportunity there the other thing i would say is you know it's important for you know it's important for me that i sort of understand the perspective of this story and you know i understand that a funding announcement is sometimes the biggest thing in the world for the company that's making it and i totally appreciate that uh but i definitely get a little bit jaded when i get the announcement and it's like you know game changing funding announcement for company x and you know we're raising a million and a half bucks and like hey i totally get it that is game changing for you and that is you know the most important thing of your day your month you know your year whatever i think it's just important for me that i understand that you know one and a half is great and we'll i'll write about that all day long but it's not the you know 250 or 500 or you know whatever so so let's pull down on that thread a little bit more because one of the questions that we often get from founders is you know will this publication write about the size of my announcement or in other words the funding announcement too low or too high bizwest a publication that we work with frequently typically has a threshold of writing about funding announcements on anything over 75 thousand dollars can you talk to us a little bit about what those thresholds at dbj and colorado colorado you know are just so that we have that perspective as well absolutely yeah and i would say we're in a really great spot uh with both publications because we have both of them and they have different focuses you know dbj is here for your larger stories your series b and beyond uh bigger funding rounds and then no comes in for everything on the early stage and you know early stage for us is true early stage you know we i write about two people in a garage all the time or two people and you know we work all the time uh so for inno you know we'll cover if the idea is interesting enough we'll we'll cover a small funding round as you can get and then you know eventually that graduates and a dbj will go as we'll go as high as they get to very cool um i just want to ask a mechanical question as well we know that a lot of business journalists rely heavily on edgar to understand what are some of the announcements that are in the forum d filings that are coming through can you talk to us about how you as a journalist use edgar and kind of how that informs your approach to some of the stories that you work on yeah yeah and you mentioned form d i you know i'm on form d you know once or twice a day first thing when i get in the morning i'm i'm checking on that before i leave i'm checking in on that to see if there's anything i missed uh and you know depending on what i find in there you know in any regulatory filing i'll reach out to the you know company and say hey you know caught this don't know if you guys are preparing an announcement or something's coming up but would love to you know keep in the loop on that there are certainly times where i see something and i'm like you know they're probably not going to announce this quite yet they're you know this is part of something larger and you know i'll file file it away and keep it you know in my notes but yeah i'm on there fairly frequently and and definitely get some good story tips off of that stuff very good um so last question if you could tell one thing to the founders at fort collins startup week watching this today about how to really get some impactful press coverage on their funding announcement what would that be absolutely yeah i would say you know don't force it you know if you're not ready to announce the funding yet and there are you know things you need to to handle on on the back end before you're ready do that come to us when you're ready to go and we'll be ready to go you know i've got a i've got a checklist of questions to ask and i'll be ready to answer those or ask those whenever whenever you're ready so announce when you're ready and when you're ready to go we'll be waiting fantastic nick we really really appreciate your time thank you so much for being here thank you for being a part of fort collins startup week and for everyone watching please support local journalism the work that nick and his colleagues do is so important to to all of your work and so we really hope that uh that not only will you follow them but also subscribe and uh and do it do as much as you can so nick thanks a lot have a great day thanks so much now i'm really pleased to introduce my good buddy seth levine of the foundry group to help give us an investor's perspective on what makes for a really good funding announcement we've got a lot of questions for seth about practical information that founders should keep in mind and how to best work with their uh with their investors and their advisors uh and we're also going to hear a little bit about a new book from seth as well so i'm going to ask him about that all right seth thank you so much for joining us let's get right to it uh thanks again for joining us for fort collins startup week so first of all we just got done hearing from nick green hall at denver business journal about what from a journalist's perspective makes for a really good funding announcement we want to flip the tables a little bit and talk to you as an investor to find out what's really important for you in a funding announcement bill thanks for having me and i'll be interested to hear how nick answered this question we're recording these uh sort of asynchronously so i didn't hear what he said uh even though for people watching this that just happened uh 30 seconds ago um i guess what i would say is that what the advice that we typically give companies is um don't make the funding announcement only about funding um sometimes i think of funding announcements as it's a little bit like uh like a fourth grade moving up ceremony it's important to the people who are very close uh to uh to the company but not necessarily something that's particularly important unless it's a huge financing or something about it as it marks a real milestone for a broader audience and i think the way to make it relevant is to have other things that you talk about so if you're talking about uh an important new set of customers or important partnership or a launch into a new market or a new product launch and your funding that's typically how we suggest companies think about staging an announcement that includes announcement of funding that's awesome and so let me pull down on that thread just a little bit more because what i was hearing in that answer was also some process related issues um a lot of the companies and founders that at fort collins startup week may not yet be at the level of having a very active investor and advisory board in the same way that you perhaps work with some of your companies but can you just share some of the lessons that you've learned over the years with what makes for a really good process in terms of interactions between a founder and an investor yeah and i think a number of the things that comes out a number of things i'm going to say bill um really i think are you know whether or not you have a an investor group that you're working with i think a lot of these uh the things i'm going to talk about sort of make sense for for any process but it starts with planning and planning in advance right so what you don't want to do is sort of get to the last minute realize that um either some reporter is going to pick it up uh the next day right and you're scrambling or that maybe your form d which is a regulatory filing that is typically not always but typically filed uh within a couple weeks of uh of the closing of a transaction you know you don't want that to be the forcing function what you want to do is start well in advance and decide what actually you want to do and then also how you want to target your uh your announcement so a lot of times and this is typically the first question i will actually ask a company um when they start talking about really any kind of release of uh some milestone or a funding announcement and that is who's your target audience right sometimes you're looking to hire and so you want to be targeting an audience of developers or marketing people whoever it is that you're that you're looking to hire other times you still are raising money and you want to target potential investors other times you want to do it for vanity purposes and you want to you know target your mom and dad essentially um and so knowing who it is that you're actually trying to reach is really important because that will change how you think about approaching potential uh stories and and potential uh you know news outlets um and so that's the first thing right so you well first and second thing you start early and you are targeted in terms of what you were trying to get out of the of the release and then you craft a release around that um and a release strategy which might involve and this is where people like you get involved but but you know that release strategy might involve things like going out to uh you know a specific news outlet or a specific reporter early and and uh seeing if you can get an exclusive story um by giving it to them and them alone right it might mean that you want a broader set of reporters that are covering it and you don't do that so you send it out to a much larger group and ask it to be embargoed for a period of time um and then if you do have investors or mentors or board members around the company that have a sort of a platform that is their own oftentimes and we at foundry we have that my venture firm um and so oftentimes our companies will coordinate with us a release and targeted outreach to uh to potential uh news outlets with um foundry or other investors writing about uh whatever it is that they're releasing on our own uh blogs or social media platforms to try to kind of have a concerted effort to get the word out there i think for i i love all of that and i think that some of the companies um that we've seen especially kind of are challenged by knowing what is that line between the right amount of communication with an investor and too much and so for much of the activities that you're talking about in terms of that longer term plan the strategy engaging platforms and voices in other ways what have you found is the best way to kind of work with your companies to to find an appropriate frequency i would say of communications well and i may be i may be an outlier in this i actually tell all my companies when i start working with them you can't send me too many emails like let me deal with that with the problem of too many emails um like don't don't feel like you should censor your communications to me and so and that generally speaking i think that that's um within reason that's that's a good uh rule of thumb for most certainly companies who are working with investors who are either very large investors or board members i'm not talking about every investor on your cap table necessarily so with that as a slight caveat but clear specific communication is what's important especially if there's something that the company needs from from me or from another investor being very clear up front this is what i'm asking for would you review this quote would you i'm looking for an intro to these three uh news outlets whatever whatever it might be like being very clear and concise about what it is that you want and then about clear about the schedule sometimes that can be a little opaque um and i think the more precise and the more clear that communication is the better i love it and you were mentioning some of your companies earlier and i know that foundry group has had some enormously successful exits with fitbit and zynga and others but can you talk a little bit about how foundry over the years has invested in colorado startups and what that colorado portfolio has looked like for foundry yeah historically um something around 25 to 30 percent of our dollars have been invested in colorado and so i haven't looked it up recently but you know we're talking about you know order of magnitude a half a billion dollars that we've put in the ground in colorado um so it's pretty significant and some of those companies are companies that that you know many people listening to this have heard of uh certainly tech stars were the largest investor there and and uh obviously well-known platform that's a global platform but started in boulder colorado uh up until the pandemic was actually across the hall from us and from our offices uh but also companies like cengrid which went public and then was sold to twilio uh and also uh companies like craftsy the pros closet there's a very long list of companies that are colorado based that uh that we're investors in uh i love it and you know sometimes we take for granted just uh with both of us being in boulder and you and i having the chance to connect but i think we take for granted just what people know and understand about boundary and who you are and wondering if maybe you could just give us like a quick 30-second history of kind of how foundry started and where you're going now yeah absolutely it's and it's evolved over time so i think it's i think it's important i'm glad you asked me that bill um so foundry started in 2006 uh we were started by myself and and three other partners um and we raised in 2007 our first fund we have a series of early stage funds that that we raised up until 2016. um and uh and then in 2016 we shifted our focus a little bit really broadened our focus and we started investing in other venture funds as well as in companies um and so that was our 2016 fund and our 2018 fund um which invests in um other really emerging managers generally speaking uh venture capital firms that have below 100 million dollar size funds um we have 30 about 35 funds that we've now invested in um and there's probably i don't know 80 companies or so they're in the active portfolio there's about 120 that have kind of cycled through over over the years and in total we're not quite at but we're nearing uh three billion dollars in capital that we have under management that's a lot of cheddar right on that's a lot of chatter so so so let's switch gears for a second here because you have a new book coming out can you um what can you tell us about it and why did you decide to write it how much time do you have you know i uh i would love to talk about it thank you for giving me the chance to do that you can sort of see behind me it's uh the book is called the new builders um and it's really an exploration about the future of uh of business in the united states and when i say business actually don't really at all mean venture funded businesses because when you think about the continuum of the businesses fewer than one percent of all companies receive uh backing from venture capital um and actually only about 17 access bank financing the large majority of 80 plus uh don't get financed by either banks or uh or venture capital at all um and i was what's interesting to understand about the way that entrepreneurship is shaping in the united states is it's becoming increasingly diverse as is our country um the fastest growing segments of new business owners are women and specifically women of color and the book really talks about these large trends in entrepreneurship and frankly just the ways that we're not keeping up uh with our support structures and with our financing structures um for those changes and really if you think about it all of our support structures all of our financing structures were built for yesterday's entrepreneurs white male oftentimes starting a you know high growth business on one of the coasts that's just not the nature of businesses that are being started right now and the result of not being supportive of these businesses is that actually entrepreneurship in the united states is waning waning in ways that are incredibly alarming when you actually look at the data um and surprising because when i talked to my friends about the data that we found most people just didn't believe it uh didn't didn't realize that entrepreneurship writ large was in so much peril what does that look like so well it looks i mean it looks like any business that you might see as you walk down main street for example um and the book is really structured as a series of vignettes we we actually meet we we call these new group of founders new builders um and we meet a series of new builders throughout the books really each chapter is about one or two new builders we tell their story and then we put their story in the context of a larger trend that's taking place in entrepreneurship whether that's how to access bank financing or whether that's uh the changing nature of the relationship between businesses and their communities um and you know these are the sort of the stories that we tell and the new builders i should add that when we you know we spent we sent a couple of my co-author and i elizabeth mcbride she and i spent the last two years working researching um on the book doing our interviews and then right as we went to start writing it up uh covet hit and it really accelerated all the trends that we started to see and i think makes what we describe in the book which is the urgent need to change these systems of support and finance um that much more critical uh to understand so the book's book's going to be out on may 4th uh if you go to thenewbuilders.com you can get some more information on how to pre-order it and a little bit more uh color on some of the people that we talk about there's lots of pictures on the website of some of the new builders that we profile in the book et cetera fantastic um and you know elizabeth mcbride and mit and the entrepreneurship center there i mean just what a what an incredible co-author um i really want to explore a little bit more about what you learned especially with the impact of cobit because obviously you know that's such an accelerant in issues of racial inequities uh you know economic inequities and so much more did you have a case study that gave you hope or that that could point to to what a future could look like for us yeah i mean interestingly i think all of our case studies gave gave us hope we as we finished writing the book we went and checked in with all of all of the new builders and their new builders in general are incredibly gritty um and frankly incredibly optimistic as a group um and we were i think pleasantly surprised to find um that each of the people that we had talked with was uh was making it work in one way or another now not everyone stayed open as a business we had a couple that remained open but took side jobs there's a the first chocolatier in arkansas as a woman that we profiled really really interesting black woman who um has and has had several incarnations of her business she's still running her business coco bella chocolates but uh but she's also she's an accountant as well so she's also doing some side work um but that that speaks to both her passion about her work as well as her grittiness that she's she's making a go at a go of it and of course one of the uh the main uh new builders that we profile is a woman dinaris mazara who's in lawrence massachusetts who quite literally started her business uh with 37 of food stamps and built that into first a business where she was selling flan to her co-workers at the factory where she worked eventually was able to get enough money and and support from uh from some community members in lawrence to build a bakery and she now has this main street street bakery uh in downtown lawrence massachusetts and she's managed to stay open um and actually keep all of her employees employed perhaps you know maybe too much i mean she's actually had to dip significantly into her personal savings but it's a real story of um of grit and hope um and it's pretty amazing to realize sort of what what you can do with very little and i i think really if there's any lesson from the book it's that a little bit of support goes a long way and of course financial support is really important but in some respects it's the the other types of response of support the mentorship uh the the business knowledge the know-how and just frankly a little bit of just you know someone to talk to when things get get challenging or when you're down um in some respects those are even more important and as we look we talk about a bunch of different uh unique and novel financing solutions that different communities have brought into their markets but the one thing that all of them have in common is that they all pair financing with some form of help and mentorship and i think that's something for us to think about as we think about for example in colorado how do we help broaden uh the umbrella that that is supported by organizations that are working in entrepreneurship um to include those businesses that are in main street or in an office park is how do we bring together more support services and mentorship for them how amazing i can't wait to read it and for for those of you watching um you can both pre-order the book on the on the books website and also go to sethlavine.com for more information as well as to his must read must read blog so seth i really want to thank you for your time we really really appreciate your insights and uh can't wait to see you again soon awesome thanks bill i appreciate you having me thanks very much again to nick and seth for joining us today um so let's just do a quick recap of what we've heard first of all is line up all of your facts do you know the amount who the main investors are how that money is going to be used uh any other pertinent details the more specific you can get the better the likelihood that you're going to have a really really good story secondly is do your homework make sure that you're reaching out to the right person and the right outlet the likelihood of being being of getting a story in the new york times is pretty low but are there local publications that would run your story and can actually drive sales and business lastly make sure that you're connecting with your stakeholders well in advance uh as seth said bring your investors in early find out how you can leverage their networks and let's make sure again that everybody is signed off on any communications before they go out we've included these and a bunch of other really helpful tips uh online at sorry mapr.agencystartupfoco where we've got a bunch of links to helpful resources blog posts as well as other videos including uh information to seth levine's new book which is thenewbuilders.com again as well as some awesome tutorials on how to pitch like a pro so thanks very much for all of your time and we really look forward to seeing you guys soon you