Deconstructing the Raise | EP3

DECONSTRUCTING THE RAISE WITH DAVID JARVIS​

DECONSTRUCTING THE RAISE WITH DAVID JARVIS​​

Welcome to Season 1 Episode 3 of Deconstructing the Raise – a show powered by Ventroduce.

David Jarvis is the CEO of Griffin, an API-first Banking as a Service provider focused on simplifying the complexity of banking infrastructure and compliance operations.

In November 2020, Griffin raised $6.5m in Seed – Series A Bridge round led EQT, a multi-stage VC based out of Stockholm.

.I think it’s not new that at this stage, all the assumptions are very vague, and it’s quite difficult to predict accurately the growth..

David Jarvis, CEO Griffin

During this episode of DTR, Alex Theuma asks David about raising in a heavily regulated market like Banking, meeting EQT’s Tom Mendoza, and choosing the right legal counsel.

You should listen to the full episode for better context, but here are 2 key takeaways.

EXPERIENCE COMFORTABILITY WITH REGULATORY REDTAPE

When you have has strong regulatory restrictions, like in the banking sector, working with the right investors becomes even more important.

David chose EQT to lead the round as they have strong experience with open banking and have previously backed companies working in the space. This meant they were expecting the restrictions placed on their positions in the company.

As with raising any round, it’s important to work with investors that deeply understand your space.

“..EQT has a very, very close relationship with Banking Circle and is a, I believe, majority stakeholder in Banking Circle, which is a very, very well-established compared to us…”

Pick the right lawyer

Whether you’re facing extensive redtape or raising funding in a fairly unregulated market. The advice is you should seek to work with legal counsel that specialises in your area.

David’s Investors advised him not to work with a PE firm but a company that had extensive venture capital financing experience and they’ve also advised challenger banks on their fundraising before.

“..we had originally been planning on using a private equity lawyer.. the investor who led (the previous round), was like, “I’m not comfortable with that. I don’t care who you use but it has to be someone who really understands venture capital..”

Bridge rounds are very difficult to navigate. They often rely heavily on the conditions of the market, how ‘hot’ the sector is, and which investors are willing to participate.

But, here are some learnings from a founder that did it successfully.

Thanks for listening to Deconstructing the Raise! A show powered by Ventroduce – a European fundraising and investment platform built for SaaS Founders and Funders.

Ventroduce helps early stage companies increase their exposure to the right funding and connects with their best-fit Investors. If you’re looking to raise your first, or next round. You can join in less than 5 minutes..

 

Transcript

Alex Theuma:
Okay, we are live. Welcome to the second … Oh no, sorry. The third episode of Deconstructing the Raise, which is a weekly show where we debunk early stage fundraising to help those raising seed or Series A, get more success. I’m Alex Theuma, CEO of SaaStock, which is an events and media company, helps SAS companies get traction, grow and scale. Each week, I’ll be joined by SAS founders that have recently raised a seed or Series A round. I hit them with the questions to break down their success, to help you the listener, get an advantage as you go through the process. Today, I am delighted to be joined by David Jarvis, who is the CEO of Griffin, a UK based SAS company that’s recently raised a seed round. Welcome, David.

David Jarvis:
Thank you, Alex. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Alex Theuma:
Good to have you on the show. Thanks for giving up your time. And David, so I understand relatively recently, Griffin raised a seed round but before we do that, maybe can you just introduce yourself, who you are and what Griffin is, what it does and why you founded the business?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. Hi, David Jarvis, founder CEO at Griffin. My background is in west coast startups, so Silicon Valley, San Francisco. Griffin is banking as a service play here in the UK. And one of the things that makes us rather novel within that space, is that we’re also going after our own banking license here with EPRA and FCA. My background in the west coast involved working for a bank as a service company back in 2014, 2015, called [Senator Treasury 00:01:56], which ran up against some of the issues that firms have in the space where they try to partner with banks. And so we came to the conclusion that launching our own bank was going to be the right thing to do but the US wasn’t necessarily the right place to do that. And that led to me relocating to the UK in 2017, to set up the business here.

Alex Theuma:
Awesome. And yeah, banking as a service, a hot space. I think one that’s that Stripe entered into recently, so I can understand the excitement from there. Let’s start from the top, tell us how much you raised, from whom and I think we mentioned that it was seed, so yeah, let’s learn just a little bit more about the size of that seed round and who invested.

David Jarvis:
Yeah. Our most recent round is a six and a half million pound round that was led by EQT Ventures. And we work with Tom Mendoza there, who’s an absolute delight to work with. It falls into a weird space in so far as challenger banks have very peculiar fundraising profiles that fall outside of the normal model. We had actually raised a 3 million pound seed round the year before but we didn’t feel that this was quite appropriate to call a Series A either. It’s more of a seed two round.

Alex Theuma:
Awesome. And EQT, why particularly those guys, why Tom? What was it about them? Were there other options?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. Sorry, I should also mention before I forget all of our other lovely investors, that there were a bunch of other people as part of the round. We also worked with people like Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, who until recently, was at GoCardless and I was just trying to index. Matt Robinson, who’s also ex GoCardless, now runs Nested, [Goffin 00:03:53]. And Mark over from Double Prime. A bunch of other really sophisticated and smart FinTech folks.

David Jarvis:
As far as EQT … Well, before I get into the story, why them, I think there were really two big things. One, they had backed Cytora and we know Richard there and have a lot of respect for him in the business. And so already that put them in the good books but then the more relevant one is that EQT has a very, very close relationship with Banking Circle and is a, I believe, majority stakeholder in Banking Circle, which is a very, very well-established compared to us, API driven banking as a service company, although I think they don’t necessarily brand themselves as such today but so their experience dealing with … Sorry, a fully regulated EU based bank in an API driven B2B landscape said like, “Okay, there’s a huge amount of complexity in getting close to one of these businesses. And so the fact that you not only have done that but have taken such a large position in that firm, means you probably have a much more intimate understanding of the regulatory environment here.”

David Jarvis:
… which is otherwise a big threshold for investors to get over.

Alex Theuma:
Where did you meet Tom? Where did you meet EQT, first off?

David Jarvis:
I actually feel terrible for this but I’m not totally confident that I know what the answer is. I think we were introduced by [Seed Campbell 00:05:31] but I’m not super sure. If it’s one of our other investors listening to this and you’re like, “Dammit Dave, we were the ones who introduced you.”

David Jarvis:
I’m sorry.

Alex Theuma:
Okay. Well, that’s fair. And from when you were introduced, whenever that moment was, how long has it been since that moment past to actually then closing that round?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. It was not quick at all but that’s not a negative in any way because at the time we met, we weren’t raising. We were in this really weird and interesting place where our original seed round, the one that we had done in 2019, had been incredibly hard and grueling to pull off. And we ended up with some truly incredible investors who really believe in us and who have made everything that’s happened since then possible but then what had happened at the start of 2020, was that banking as a service and our model had gone from this deeply unpopular thing to suddenly incredibly hot. And so we were looking around and thinking to ourselves, “Okay. Well, maybe we should raise this year. The market seems really receptive.”

David Jarvis:
And then COVID hit. And we were like, “Okay. Well, now we don’t know what to do with this because now everyone’s saying that they’re not writing any checks.”

David Jarvis:
And so it was around that time I think, that we were first introduced to Tom. And so just a really, really weird and interesting time. When we first met with him, he was like, “We’re not writing checks right now. We’re figuring out what we need to do in order for us to be able to write a check in this really remote, no in person meeting type environment.”

David Jarvis:
And so we spent … In total, I think it took us about four or five months to go from first meeting to round closed but we spent several months just learning about each other with fairly low expectations on both sides, just because they weren’t necessarily sure what they were going to do. And then as it became obvious that the venture market was definitely going to continue to operate and that COVID was actually, if anything, going to be a good thing for a lot of tech companies, I think at the same time that he was coming to this realization … The whole market was realizing actually, there are a lot of deals to be done here and that ended up with its own kind of evolution. We had started and we can talk more about this but we’d started on the footing of, “Hey, this is a really rough environment. Maybe you guys should just take a little bit of capital, top up your last round. You don’t know how things are going to play out here.”

David Jarvis:
And then over the course of our conversations with them, it went from that to like, “Actually, this could be really good for you. And maybe we don’t need to top up our last round. Maybe we are talking about a really, new round that we’re bringing forward relative to when we might otherwise have done it.”

David Jarvis:
And that ultimately what was the round that we did with them

Alex Theuma:
And given that it was 2020 and we talk about … Obviously 2020, it’s synonymous with COVID and quite a forgettable year in some instances but obviously, if you’re in SAS, it’s been quite a good year in many respects but given that the round started during that process, was it in any case that you actually didn’t meet Tom in person and everything was done over Zoom? How did that look like?

David Jarvis:
I think we were still at a point where there was a sensation that one in-person meeting was going to need to happen. And so I think it was at some point in May … I coincidentally had been exposed to COVID extremely early in the pandemic for the UK. And so I suppose there was less danger in Tom and I meeting in person, given that one of us had definitely had it.

Alex Theuma:
Yeah.

David Jarvis:
And so we went for a 90 minute walk in Hyde Park and just talked through the business, talked about how we might put a round together. At that time, that wasn’t the final partner pitch or anything like it. That was still at a very creative point when we were talking about what might be possible, what sort of terms would both of us be willing to accept? And at the end of that, we actually were like, “Okay. Well, it actually doesn’t sound like there’s a round to be done here but you guys seem really sophisticated. It’s a pleasure spending time with you. When we start to more officially raise and actually run a process, we’d love to work with you maybe then, when we’ve had whatever milestones we need to hit then.”

David Jarvis:
And then about a month after that, Tom came back and was like, “Hey. Actually, I’ve been talking to my partners. And I think we do have the appetite to do the round that we’ve talked about later in the year now, if you want to do that.”

David Jarvis:
And I was like, “That sounds great.”

Alex Theuma:
Just on the walking meeting in Hyde park, how was the pace of that walk because … It’s a strange question perhaps but a few years ago, when I was looking at raising a little bit of money for SaaStock, I met with a VC in a park. It wasn’t Tom, I have to say. And we went for a walk, which was incredibly fast paced and it was quite hot and I was sweating. I was a bit out of breath, I was probably out of shape at the time. And I was struggling to keep up on the walk and then also, let’s say multitask and answer the questions. And needless to say, nothing came of it. And I think it was because of my inability to keep up with the investor on his pace. Just curious, was it reasonably paced? He didn’t push you on the speed?

David Jarvis:
No, no, no. That wasn’t an issue but what was an issue, was because it was COVID, all of the toilets were closed. And so by the 90 minute mark … It was quite hot and so we’d both gotten a bottle of water and drank it. And by the end I was like, “I have to leave immediately.”

Alex Theuma:
Abrupt endings, very good. And so obviously, the deal got done with EQT, took a few months to get done. Did you meet any other investors? How many in total and did you get many nos to the one yes?

David Jarvis:
Again, I think it’s worth contextualizing. When we had done the 2019 seed, we had pitched everybody who had a wallet in London and some people outside of London. And so we had already talked to a lot of people and many, many, many people had said no. And then in this case because we weren’t really actively fundraising, we were just like, “Oh. Well, we should keep our pulse on the market and take the odd meeting and think about who might be a good partner for the next round.”

David Jarvis:
We simply didn’t get to the point where anyone said no because we just weren’t pitching people really. Actually, that’s not true. We had pitched Foundation Capital. While we were talking to Tom, at some point we had pitched Foundation and they had passed but that was basically it. That was just the one other firm. And then as we entered term sheet and closing process, a bunch of people really came out of the woodwork and were like, “We would like to participate in this round.”

David Jarvis:
And it’s like, “Well, too bad. We had a terrible round last time. EQT has done us a huge favor by making this round a real easy, pleasant experience for us. You had all the time in the world to show up and give us money but we’re going to make sure that EQT gets an ownership stake that makes them really happy. And frankly, that’s not going to leave a ton of room for anyone else.”

Alex Theuma:
Yeah, fair enough. And why do you think EQT … I’m sure they probably told you but why they chose to invest in you and in Griffin?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. I think it goes back to two things. One, is their experience with Banking Circle, which is really a very … I think it’s probably safe to say that without Banking Circle, they would not have been as interested as they were. And their experience working with Banking Circle has been incredibly pleasant and has left them with a deep expertise in the space and a deep level of confidence in the amount of opportunity that still remains in the space. I think that was one really big thing.

David Jarvis:
And then of course, the second thing, which I think everyone was getting [inaudible 00:14:28] to at the same time, which has really been kicked off by Angela Strange’s and Andreessen Horowitz’s aggressive content marketing around embedded finance and embedded FinTech. Obviously, there were others who were coming to this awareness at the same time but I think that kicked off a general frenzy within the venture capital ecosystem that’s largely continued and if anything, just gotten hotter in the last year.

David Jarvis:
And so I see it as the two things, right. It’s a general awareness that there is a big opportunity here and that suddenly this market is going to start growing really, really quickly. And then EQT has specific expertise and not only expertise within the API banking space but their specific level of comfort and confidence dealing with fully regulated banks as players in that space that really gave them, I think, the level of confidence that they needed in order to go ahead with us.

Alex Theuma:
Any metrics that you can share, that perhaps helped clinch the deal?

David Jarvis:
Honestly, no. I think because we are building a bank, we don’t have a lot of pre-authorization traction points to point to. The big traction points that are relevant for us are regulatory in nature. They relate to the state of our conversations with the PRA and FCA and for probably reasonably obvious reasons, I can’t go into an incredible level of detail about that.

Alex Theuma:
Fair. And obviously, you mentioned about Andreessen Horowitz content marketing about banking as a service or embedded banking and certainly, I think a lot of people … And then Stripe moving into the space, et cetera, making it that hot space. Was there much of a story that you had to tell to get them hooked or given their previous experience and what was going on in the market perhaps, that wasn’t as necessary?

David Jarvis:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. We have a unique product thesis, which is that if you’re looking to offer a financial services product, you need these three core pillars of accounting infrastructure, a banking partner and compliance infrastructure. And most firms historically have built or bought these separately as components and then have to deal with a lot of overhead and keeping them in sync. And the core thesis of Griffin is that we offer these as a vertically integrated product suite. And so all of the overhead of keeping them in sync has gone and there are some unique benefits that you get, right.

David Jarvis:
If we’re doing your financial crime management for you, then we can probably onboard you much faster because we don’t have to pour through all of your policies and procedures. Similarly, if you’re running our ledger alongside the payments and clearing infrastructure, that should make your bookkeeping and reconciliation process vastly streamlined. I do think that there was a little bit of convincing that had to be done, that that product approach was the right approach and that the specific demographics, customer profiles that we wanted to go after, were the right ones to go after as a new business but I think they were fairly convinced that the market existed and that they could see there are a couple of other players out there already, who are doing a decent job at penetrating that market. And so it was just like, “What strategy do we think makes the most sense for winning in this market?”

Alex Theuma:
And were there aside from COVID, any unforeseen hurdles that you had to overcome?

David Jarvis:
Not as part of the raise, to be honest. One of the things that is very challenging about being … Not to ha, ha, be clever, challenging about being a challenger bank, is that you do have some very peculiar restrictions in terms of how your capital raises work. For instance, in order for your capital to count towards your regulatory requirements, it has to be ordinary shares, right but while you’re a pre-authorization bank, obviously there’s risk that you don’t get authorized or you pivot to something else. And so investors want preferred shares. And so you have to design a mechanism that says, “Yeah, these shares are preferred now but once we become a bank, they convert to ordinary.”

David Jarvis:
And you obviously have to get everyone happy with that. And you have to convince people that, “Yes. In fact, there is no way to work around that.”

David Jarvis:
There are some unique legal and capital hurdles that you do have to work through but again, with EQT, they knew all of this. The legal mechanisms had to be designed but they already knew that they were going to have to … That these were going to have to get built. It was just a matter of figuring out what language was the right language.

Alex Theuma:
Which is a nice segue in terms of from … On the legal side, what support did you get? What did that look like in terms of the final agreement? We recently, not that perhaps there’s anything wrong with it but to my surprise, we recently had founders on the show that actually didn’t get any legal support when they were going through the seed round and just got a simple agreement off the web and got it done but perhaps in this case, just curious to know as this wasn’t a seed, it was pre Series A. Yeah, what did that look like?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. We used Orrick for this. Orrick has the benefit obviously, of a pretty extensive venture capital financing experience and they’ve also advised one or two challenger banks on their races before. The stuff that we were going to ask them to do was not super surprising to them. We did still work very closely with our … We have our own external regulatory counsel who we work with, who worked with Orrick on just making sure that the key regulatory items were being covered off. It’s interesting that you say that though because when we did our 2019 raise, we used Orrick again. And again, we were very happy with them but we had originally been planning on using a private equity lawyer that had been recommended to us and Paul Forster, who’s the investor who led that round, was like, “I’m not comfortable with that. I don’t care who you use but it has to be someone who really understands venture capital. Just go and talk to your … “

David Jarvis:
We had already raised … We had done a pre-seed round with seed camp. He was just like, “Go and talk to seek camp, find a venture capital lawyer and have them do the deal. I don’t want a private equity guy setting the wrong tenor of terms for this business, given what you actually want to do with it.”

David Jarvis:
And that was in retrospect, absolutely the right call. It’s funny, my co-founder Mark’s like, “Is it it really the right thing for the investor to be telling us which lawyer to use?”

David Jarvis:
… but absolutely the right thing for Paul to push us to do. And Orrick is a little bit pricey but we’ve always felt that the service is fantastic and we get great value for it.

Alex Theuma:
Yeah. That’s a good shout there. And actually similar story in my case. It was post not succeeding with the VC that made me walk really fast and we didn’t actually take VC money but we took some angel money back in … I want to say early 2017, just a few hundred thousand. And it was less about the money but more about the people that were wanting to invest and the value that it would bring me as a solo preneur. And I asked my accountants for a lawyer, an intro to a lawyer and they gave me an intro to a lawyer. We worked with this lawyer and then I had the angel investors, couple of them really not liking my choice of lawyer and really pulling the agreement apart. And I was maybe in my own experience being defensive of this particular lawyer and say, “No, it was fine. And I’m very happy with him.”

Alex Theuma:
… but I think they had a point and I didn’t really take the advice. And I know one of them got quite heated, pulled over his car to have a conversation with me. In the end, we stuck with my lawyer but when I look at it back in hindsight, I look at the agreement that we got done. I was like, “Well, that was just way too much work, too complicated. He didn’t really understand, he wasn’t really right for that situation.”

Alex Theuma:
Good advice there on perhaps listening to your investors about getting a lawyer that really understands these agreements. For sure. In terms of the fundraise itself, often the CEO is the lead person fundraising within the business. Was it the case here? Did you have anybody else from your team involved or was it just you?

David Jarvis:
Yeah, it was mostly me but we are at a stage where the team is basically what investors are investing in. Tom did spend quite a bit of time with other members of the team. I think in particular, he spent a bunch of time with our CFO, trying to understand what our regulatory capital requirements were going to be in and what the major drivers of those was. As well obviously as my co-founder Allen, trying to get a sense for where the tech and the product was at the time of their investment. I think these things are never … Yeah, as the CEO, you own the relationship and you are the storyteller in chief but it’s really impossible to do these things as a one man band, I think.

Alex Theuma:
Yeah, for sure. And did you have a data room for this, that you were building, maybe prior to your seed round and what does that look like? What sort of things do you have within that, if you have this?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. We did build … Obviously because we had done the round in 2019, we actually had a lot of stuff already pulled together that was fairly recent and fairly up to date. And then I can’t remember … I think it was DLA Piper, was the lawyers that EQT used. They had a quite thorough DD questionnaire. And so we ended up coming up with a far more detailed data room that covered absolutely everything. And I don’t know. These exercises can be a little frustrating sometimes but on the other hand, you really get your house in order. As a forcing function, to make sure that you have everything that you should have, it can be helpful.

Alex Theuma:
And yeah. For sure, I recommend that listeners do create a data rooms or read up about how they do that and see some examples and I guess, the deck for this round as well, how long did you spend creating the pitch deck? Did you put a lot of design resource into it? Any additional investment, a bit of detail. what it looked like, some of the key [inaudible 00:26:41].

David Jarvis:
Yeah. A, we already had … We’d invested quite a bit of time and money in building a very blah, blah, blah, froofy, lovely looking deck for the round before. Then again, we reused a lot of the resources for that. When it came to building the deck for EQT, we didn’t really invest. We basically took the existing design resources, we added a couple of slides on where we were and a bit of detail on the team that we’ve put in place since that round but it was not I would say, a huge investment process.

David Jarvis:
I mentioned, right, also that we had pitched foundation. And so we had a partner pitch deck that we had done for them that we also were able to update a little bit but I wouldn’t say it was a huge investment in time and resource because really, the pitch deck is just … It’s just an artifact, the conversations and the relationships and the story and all the Q and A and all the due diligence. That’s the actual investment process. The pitch deck is just a thing that people look at on their phones. They want to get a quick sense of where you are and they’re not up to speed. I will say there was an article that we did with business insider that actually shares a fairly redacted form of the deck. If you are curious about it, you can probably Google that and find a clean ish version of the deck on the internet.

Alex Theuma:
Awesome, awesome. I love the fact that you shared that. And if you go back to the beginning of this particular raise and what you know now, is there anything that you would do differently?

David Jarvis:
I don’t know. Hold out longer for an even better evaluation. No, honestly, I don’t think so. I’m really happy that we were able to get EQT into the company. Great outcome, great partner, great terms, great process. Not stressful, very fun, easy pleasant to work with. I don’t know that there’s much I would change at all.

Alex Theuma:
Why not? And yeah, I guess once the deal was done or the round was closed, money is wired over into the bank. Did you celebrate? And if so, how?

David Jarvis:
Did I celebrate? Yeah. I did celebrate actually, although I think I probably celebrated a little bit prematurely but that’s okay. My co-founder Allen had been in Texas for the first two years of the business, almost three years of the business, really and this unnerved the initial seed round investors. And so they had said like, “Look, we’re putting a clause in the investment contract that says Alan needs to move over in the next year. Otherwise, his shares will forfeit.”

David Jarvis:
And so poor Allen … Allen has a bunch of kids, he’s got two dogs, had to move over with his wife and family in the middle of the pandemic. Extremely, extremely stressful time obviously. And I was just feeling terrible, right. I was like, “Oh, my God. This last raise was so bad. You’ve just completely uprooted your entire life to come here. And what if we’re not able to raise again?”

David Jarvis:
And so we ended up doing … I think we did it July the fourth because we’re both American. We did a July the fourth barbecue at his house. And at that point, it was very clear that the deal was happening and we were just like, “Yes, it’s awesome to have you here finally. It’s awesome to be able to go and have a meal together. And I don’t have to feel guilty that I’ve just ripped you out of your life and that this is all going to disappear in a year. We now have enough funds that this is clearly on a great trajectory. And I don’t have to feel terrible about this.”

Alex Theuma:
Yeah, you’re fortunate with the timing of I guess, July the fourth, I think must have been out of lockdown at that time. And I think there’s obviously, a lot of people that have either recently raised or raised during 2020 but during a stricter version of the lockdown, where I guess any celebrations would have been over Zoom, which is not quite the same but I’m sure that those folks will be holding out for the time when we are fully back together in person again. And in terms of successfully raising, the money’s in the bank, have you been spending it or what is the plan to spend it and grow Griffin?

David Jarvis:
Yeah. Well, it may not come as a surprise that it is very expensive to build a bank. And I think that’s particularly the case when you make the strategic decision to invest in your own core banking system. The money is going, I would say, primarily to growing the engineering team but then also just to absolutely making sure that we have enough capital to get through the authorization process. When we had done our initial seed round, we had thought like, “Okay, we’re going to have to be pretty lean but we think this is doable.”

David Jarvis:
And then COVID head and things started to look a little bit like things were maybe moving a bit slower at the bank of England and being able to have a fresh six and a half million in the bank was just like, “Okay, great. Well, at our burn rate, this removes all risk that we don’t have the lasting power to go through this. At this point now, it’s just a question of when. And it also gives us the firepower to place some interesting bets.”

David Jarvis:
One of the things that we have really identified as an opportunity, is the ability to bring … Mention that our core product thesis is these three pillars, right but the accounting and the ledger part of that, you don’t need to be regulated to offer a ledger to people. And so one of the things that we’re doing even now, is starting to get users into a sandbox where they can test out the ledger capabilities. They can give us product feedback. For some people, that probably will turn into a proper commercial engagement, where we will become their ledger provider. And that will allow us to get a lot more product feedback to start that critical … Flex that critical muscle of market research to product development, to customer feedback, to sales. And that’s going to be great for us because the thought otherwise of having to wait until we’re authorized and then turn the key and have everything happen at once, there’s a lot of risk. There’s a lot of execution risk in that. Being able to actually potentially start working with customers sooner, is one of the other big opportunities for us.

Alex Theuma:
Have you already … Are you taking a break or a short break from fundraising or is it a case of always be fundraising and you’re already working on the Series A?

David Jarvis:
Oh, gosh. Got to be careful what I say here. Well, we’re not fundraising but also, if you’re the CEO of a startup that’s doing well, you’re never not fundraising. You’re never not open to fundraising. I think that the answer is we don’t need any money from anybody anytime soon but also, we are in the hottest sub-sector of the hottest technology market that I have ever lived through in my life. We’re also not clueless about the fact that capital is available on very, very good terms for us. And that may not be the case forever, so we will keep an open mind about it.

Alex Theuma:
It’s a good position to take. And on that note, David Jarvis, CEO of Griffin, I want to thank you for being a guest today on Deconstructing the Raise and sharing with the audience your fairly recent success in raising that round. Thanks so much, David. Where can people find you online?

David Jarvis:
I can be found probably most easily on Twitter. My Twitter handle is a little bit arcane, that’s @Venantius, V-E-N-A-N-T-I-U-S. Or perhaps more easily, you can find us at @griffinplatform or on our website at Griffin.sh.

Alex Theuma:
And on that note, final anecdote of my EA when she tweeted out the promo, the show added @davidjarvis on Twitter. And when I saw this, I investigated and it’s like, “They haven’t been on Twitter since 2010.”

Alex Theuma:
And I was like, “I don’t think this is the same David Jarvis.”

Alex Theuma:
And so we had to get that changed but yeah, @Venantius.

David Jarvis:
Yeah. I’m not sure my Twitter handle is doing me any favors but it’s the handle I’ve had on the internet for 15 years and it’s tied to a lot of my identities. I don’t know that it’s going to change anytime soon. And frankly, David Jarvis is not that good for SEO.

Alex Theuma:
It’s true. It’s true. Good stuff. Well David, really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much for your time. For those that are listening, if you enjoyed this episode of Deconstructing the Raise, please share, please subscribe. This will help more founders that are in the raising process of seed and Series A, come across the show and get valuable lessons from people like David. Thanks so much and we’ll see you next time.

David Jarvis:
Thank you. It’s been a huge pleasure.

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