Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Danielle Morrill

When I heard that Derek Johnson, CEO of Tatango, was headed to Vancouver and the Bay Area to pitch to various funding sources, I asked him if he’d be interested in journalling the experience.  Having never raised capital myself, the process seems to be steeped in a certain degree of mystery.  Derek has captured it all, from the grit of travel to the glamour of industry parties. 
 
Please make sure to check out Derek’s blog, where he covers topics such as pitching to angel investors and what not to do with investor money.
 
Are you a founder hitting the road to raise capital for your company?  Seattle 2.0 would love to feature your story, please contact us!
 

Derek Johnson – CEO of Tatango – Hits the Road

TUESDAY

11:00 PM – Tomorrow morning I have an investment presentation to the screening committee for the Vancouver Angel Network for Technology Companies at 9AM. As I’m finishing up work at our office in Bellingham, I make the last minute decision after getting news of more snow coming overnight, to drive up to Vancouver. I decide to stay overnight in a hotel to make sure there will be no problems making the trip to the presentation in the morning. Being on a startup budget, it’s very rare that I get the luxury of staying at a hotel, so I’m going to enjoy it.


WEDNESDAY

8:00 AM – I catch a cab to my investment presentation, and thankfully I made the decision to stay overnight in the city, as the roads are horrible due to last nights snow fall.

8:50 AM – The company presenting before me turns out to be Tagga who is also in the mobile space, with more of a focus on the commercial aspect of text messaging. I introduce myself to their CEO and we discuss a few strategic ways that we may be able to help each other in the coming year.

9:00 AM – The screening committee for the Vancouver Angel Network for Technology Companies has 6 members, and I present our 10 minute PowerPoint investment deck. After the presentation, a few of their members say that our deck was one of the best they had seen all year. I owe most of the credit to the screening committees of the various Seattle Angel Groups who have been such a great help in refining our deck. I actually wrote a blog post about all of the things I’ve learned in regards to doing Angel presentations, be sure to check it out here.

9:30 AM – The investment presentation is over and I head back to the hotel to catch the shuttle bus to the Vancouver Airport, for my flight to San Francisco.

5:00 PM – After touching down in San Francisco, I take the BART, which is a subway that runs from the airport into the city. The BART only costs $5.50 compared to the other option of a much more expensive cab ride into the city.

6:00 PM – I meet Ian, one of my Delta Upsilon Fraternity brothers from UW at his office. He works for McKesson, one of the largest health care services company in the US. We grab a cab back to his apartment, where I will be crashing on his couch for the remainder of the trip. Welcome to the glamorous life of a startup CEO. When we get back to his apartment I get my first wake up call into the realities of the cost to live in the San Francisco. He has a 2 bedroom, 1200 sq. apartment and pays $2,500 a month.

9:00 PM – We venture out into downtown San Francisco to grab a bite to eat. It’s amazing how many different restaurants there are, we pick a Thai restaurant with the assistance of Yelp, which from what Ian tells me is one of the hottest apps in the city.

11:00 PM – We get back to Ian’s apartment and he graciously lends me a pillow and a blanket to crash on his couch, calling it a night.

 

THURSDAY                                                                                    

11:00 AM – Today I need to be in Palo Alto, so I get ready and walk to the Hertz Rent-A-Car location a few blocks away from Ian’s apartment. If you’ve ever rented a car being under 25, you know it’s not very easy on the wallet. I take the cheapest car they have for a 24 year-old Male. This turns out to be a brand new, red, Ford Mustang, which makes no sense to me, but I start to make my way to Palo Alto. Thankfully I brought my TomTom GPS unit, as I am horrible with directions.

4:30 PM – I have my first meeting with Sean Flynn from Shasta Ventures, a venture capital group that is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology-enabled businesses serving consumers and enterprises. They are also investors in SayNow, a company similar to ours that has focused on musicians and bands, where our company focuses on groups and organizations. I spent a half hour with Sean showing him our investment deck and demonstrating the website, which from my take, he was thoroughly impressed with.

8:00 PM – I have my investment pitch to the Sand Hill Angel Group at the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati offices. I have never seen such a large law office; it looked more like a small mall. I enter to a room of ten members on the screening committeeto present our ten-minute PowerPoint presentation. They then follow up with questions and I’m in and out in less than 15 minutes.

9:00 PM – I then head over to the Qik holiday party, where they were celebrating their one-year anniversary. If you don’t know, Qik is a great application that allows you to stream video live from over 40 different handsets. There I met up with Daniel Brusilovsky who is the 16-year-old evangelist for Qik, podcaster of Apple Universe and the organizer of the Teens in Tech Conference, which I will be speaking at on January 31st. While touring their office Daniel introduces me to one of the co-founders of Qik, Bhaskar Roy and some of their team. I also get introduced to Ryan Wilke from Zurb a design company that has helped companies like Ebay and Photobucket. They have also helped employees of Outcast PR who have clients such as Facebook, Amazon, Mozilla and a slew of other popular web 2.0 companies. Also, at the party I got to see a sneak peak of some of the proposed concept designs for the new Qik website, which was pretty cool to give my input on.

12:00 AM – Got back into San Francisco, dropped off my rental car, as there is hardly anywhere to park within the city. After dropping off my rental car, I headed to a local club called Vertigo to meet my buddy Ian, and his friends for a few drinks and some dancing. I felt a little out of place in this hip, college type hangout while I was in the suit I wore during the investment pitch, but hey, what can you do?

 

FRIDAY

10:00 AM– This morning I grabbed a cab to the offices of Kwiry, which is a free website that turns text messages into reminders you retrieve online. There I met with the CEO of Kwiry, Ron Feldman. We talked shop, discussed some of the new projects both companies were working on and Ron was kind enough to make some recommendations of investors to speak with next time I’m in the city. Again, in their office I got another wake up call of how expensive working in the city was, as their rent in a much smaller office was a lot more expensive than ours.

3:00 PM – Took a cab back to Ian’s apartment where I did a live video interview with LuckyStartups, on the same couch that I was calling my bed during the trip. You can check out the interview here.

5:00 PM – I make a call to my VP of Marketing, Andrew Dumont, who is in Las Vegas meeting with potential clients and following up with some current clients. He tells me the weather isn’t as good as he expected so I’m excited to be in San Francisco with the sunny weather they are having right now.

9:00 PM  – Went into the city to grab sushi, and there was definitely a good amount of sushi places to pick from. We again settled on one place with the help of Yelp.

 

SATURDAY

9:00 AM – I wake up earlyto take a call with one of our advisors regarding the progress of our current funding round.

11:00 AM – Ian wakes up, I forget he lives the weekday 9-5 life, where you get to sleep in on the weekend. We head to a great crepe place right around the corner from his apartment.

12:30 PM – After stuffing our face with amazing tasting crepes, we walked down to Pier 39 to take in some of the tourist attractions. I’m a little distracted as I speak to our engineers back at the office about our proposed iPhone application and the new engineer we are bringing on in the New Year.

1:30 PM – We get halfway to Lumbard Street (the really crooked street), but can’t make it as we are both exhausted from the night before and all the walking we had been doing during the day. We retire to a pub and have a beer as we share some of the cool apps we have downloaded on our iPhones.

4:00 PM – I meet again with Daniel Brusilovsky to discuss what I will be speaking about at the Teens In Tech Conference. We discuss a few potential topics and settle on me speaking about what led me to drop out of college and run Tatango. I’ll also be touching on the advice I would give other young entrepreneurs in the same situation.

6:00 PM – Ian and I meet up with an old friend from a sorority at the University of Washington, she now works for AOL. We have a couple of drinks and some appetizers and talk about some of the things she is doing at AOL.

 

SUNDAY

6:00 AM – I’m awake and Ian is nice enough to give me a ride to the airport. Now it’s back to battle the snow in the NW. 

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