Brian Bell (00:01.813)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we are delighted to have Uzman Gul on the mic. He is the founder and CEO of Metal, the AI operating system for founders raising venture rounds, backed by A16Z and YYC by Combinator. Before Metal, he built Airlift in Lahore into one of Pakistan's most ambitious startups after early roles at MasterCard, Marquetta, and DoorDash. Today he's turning six rounds of fundraising experience into software that hundreds of founders already pay for. Including many on Team Ignite. So thanks for that. Thanks for coming on, Goul.
Gul (00:32.802)
Brian, excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me on the show. excited to talk about business, life, and all things fundraising.
Brian Bell (00:39.433)
Yeah. I'd love to start. yeah, this is a episode we've been wanting to do for a while. I'd love to start with your origin story. What's your background?
Gul (00:48.108)
Yeah, I mean, born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, left the country for the first time when I was eighteen, went to college in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, went to Denison, did my undergrad there, moved to New York City as my first job at MasterCards headquarters in New York, did that for about a couple of years, and then very quickly realized all the, smart, ambitious people I knew were moving into tech and I jumped on that bandwagon and started cold emailing a lot of fanners and looking for roles and in you ended up taking a job at a company called Marquetta when it was fewer than 20 people in a warehouse in Oakland. and so that was my first sort of tech role. Absolutely loved it, right? Got a chance to work with some incredible people and then did that for about close to two years and then moved into DoorDash, which at the time was taking off in a big way. I wanted to be, more in sort of the center of gravity of Silicon Valley at that time. And Doodash was an absolute transformational experience. I learned so much about leadership and culture and product and, building culture and a fast moving startup. and then did that for about two and a half years and ended up, wanting to go to business school. Again, site bicep everyone I knew, did that, dropped out after four months, and started my yeah, dropped out after four months, started my first startup in 2019.
Brian Bell (02:07.573)
wow, you b you dropped out. Wow.
Gul (02:13.803)
raised a hundred and twenty million in venture financing over the next three and a half years, learn a lot about fundraising and some of the inefficiencies in that process, and then use that to, start metal, which is going to be my life's work over the next ten years.
Brian Bell (02:28.085)
Yeah, I love that. yeah, it's funny. Anybody who's gone to business school would probably tell you not to go. and I got my MBA and I get all kinds of people reach out, like, Hey, should I get my MBA? I'm like, no, I think you should probably go start a startup instead. And it's just so funny that you got that advice. You got into the program. You're like, what, I'll just drop out and do my own startup.
Gul (02:50.293)
Yeah. I mean, the founder server at Doodash, Tony Shu, right, he was an angel in my first startup. And we got a chance to work together on a bunch of things at Doodash, and he said, Look, go, like, I don't think business school is for you, right? Like, well, you should just go start a startup. And I was like, No, you went to business school and like I know all these other people that went to business school, and like I want to go through that experience and it's the right next step. And I was, stubborn and I wanted to do it, and two months in I realized. that I was wrong and everyone was right and it's time to move on. And so, I mean it was a great school. I went to NCR for four months. It was just incredible experience and incredible people and great school. But it was just like where, I wanted to go, that was not the path.
Brian Bell (03:31.891)
Yeah. So you mentioned at DoorDash an internal email titled The Day We Broke Salesforce. What's what's that story?
Gul (03:39.255)
Yeah, so I mean, for the fur my first so it's it's interesting how I ended up getting a job at Dodash, right? I applied for a BISDAP role and I got rejected. I, first got accelerated through the process and they pushed me straight into final rounds, did a case study, did the final round interview, just did a really bad job at that final round interview. It was a case study discussion and ended up not getting the job. And I loved Doodash. I was a huge fan of the people I had met, the culture and just the general sort of caliber of people I'd met through my interviews. And so I decided to go at it again. And so I applied for another role in a different team. and I ended up getting a door-to-door sales role that was appropriate for fresh grads. And I was, three to four years into my career, right? And so I got the role and they were like, Look, you're a bit overqualified. I was like, it doesn't matter. I want to learn something new. This is actually a terrific learning experience. Like I'm I'm game for. Right. and so I took the role. And one of the things I realized was that, in the whole sort of sales apparatus for DoorDash, it was my first time taking a sales role, right? I did that for three months, and in three months I realized that the whole sales apparatus at DoorDash, it wasn't really built on deep insights on the PL of a restaurant, right? And we were going in and selling to restaurants, an economic value proposition, right, without really, knowing their PL in great detail. So I studied the PL, I downloaded, 10Ks of restaurant chains and, sort of understood their gross margins and net margins and everything in between. And ended up, re-restructuring the economics, right? So Dodash was a culture where you could really take autonomy, you could t run experiments, you could do things. And so I ran some experiments, right? Because I had that autonomy. And we started getting merchants that were offering us twice the commission of what we were getting at the time. And so the question was, how is this even possible? Right. Because until then, it was always sort of a sales teammates at DoorDash butting heads with restaurant owners, right? Restaurant owners are like, we want 10%. And the salesperson is like, I want 20%, and they battle it out and they settle on something, right? This was the first time where restaurants went to DoorDash and said, Hey, no, we don't want to pay 10%. We want to pay 32% in commission, right?
Gul (05:59.479)
And so everyone was like, How is this possible? And so that broke the sales scoring mechanism and the mechanism that the incentive model was built around broke down, right? Because it was not designed to sort of manage those types of deals because we never thought we'd get those types of deals, right? and so that was that's where that email was about the day we broke Salesforce. this was from my manager at the time, who was who's a great manager.
Brian Bell (06:25.641)
That's amazing. What was the what was the incentive that all of a sudden the restaurant owners are like, Hey, I want to pay you thirty two percent instead of, negotiating between that ten and twenty?
Gul (06:35.884)
Yeah, so I mean our default approach, Brian, was we would go to restaurants and we'd be like, Hey, you'll get some sales. You should give us a commission so we can bring you sales. that was the value proposition. what we started doing with some of my experience was we, took a restaurant, we predicted how much revenue we can bring to that restaurant by mathematically, statistically modeling out our customer based in the geography of the in the radius of the restaurant. Right, our customer density, by predicting how much business we would generate. I mean Exactly, right? How much spend is in this
Brian Bell (07:06.069)
Yeah. Their category and things like that. Yeah. You say, Hey, how's this marginal revenue sound to you? Does that sound like would you pay me thirty percent if I could bring you X revenue?
Gul (07:16.564)
Ri exactly, right? And then the conversation shifted. They're like, Hey, you're gonna bring, us eighty thousand dollars and analyze revenue that we don't have today. right, and on the back of that you want, what do you want? Well, we're like, the more percentage you can give us, like, you're we're we can just, not charge a delivery fee to customers and that's good for your business. They're like, this is great and let us run some numbers and then they come back and say, Hey, we wanna pay you thirty two percent. if we can hit sort of news benchmarks, right? and by the way, this is how Dodash works today with restaurants. That was sort of the, foundational sort of structure for how Dodash thought about merchant partnerships and in I was just lucky to be around really smart people that, allowed me to experiment and try out new things.
Brian Bell (08:05.257)
Yeah, and I think there's like two really great lessons here. One in management, right? Let your people explore ideas and options and run experiments. I think that's a really great practice. And then two, I love the story of, you started at the bottom at this company, right? You already had three or four years' experience. A door to door sales job. I mean, that's something they'd give like an eighteen year old, probably. Or maybe a yeah, like you said, a fresh college grad. But I have a similar story. When I came to San Francisco, I took a sales job at a startup because I really wanted to work in the industry. I wanted to work in solar. So I took, I started at the bottom sales job, and then to work my way up and the rest is history. But I you have to start somewhere. What made it? What was it about DoorDash? Were you just really attracted to that company and working for that company at that particular juncture in time that you were willing to start at the bottom?
Gul (08:52.502)
Yeah, I think it was two things. One was, this sort of internal clarity and conviction I had that, you your career is not linear, right? Your career growth is not linear. It's it's actually nonlinear, right? So you don't have to move up in financial compensation every two years. And the real barometer of, moving ahead is skills development, right? Are you learning new skills? And what is the pace of growth? What is the pace of your learning curve? So I think that is one. I think the other thing was just the people I'd met during my interviews for the first role where I got rejected, right? it was just like very thoughtful, interviews and a really thoughtful team and environment, right, where they were really pressing on the fundamentals on things that really mattered, right? And what are the things that matter? Well, what motivates you, right? Like, why do you want to do this? Right? Why do you want to work 12 hours a day at a startup, that has a lot of uncertainty, right? and in so I think I just really enjoyed a lot of my interviews and walked away with a very high sort of view of the team and the people at Doodash. And so that's what, it was not about the business model. or the business or the brand or anything of that nature.
Brian Bell (10:05.129)
Yeah. I love the story. And I love how you sort of you're it's almost like being self made in a way, right? Like you're that's like a future founder right there. that story, like if VCs are listening, founders are listening, pull that story out. and if you're fundraising, right? Tell that story how you started at the bottom and how you added value up the chain and kind of moved up the ranks. That's I think that's an amazing story. So tell us about the origin story for airlift. This is your first company. So you're you're in business school. You're like, I got an idea.
Gul (10:37.858)
Well, I when I moved to Lahore, from San Francisco, one of my biggest frustrations was n having to buy a car, right? That made no sense to me, right? Like I never owned a car when I was in the US. I got a car when I needed one, right? And my preferred, way of getting from one place to another was the subway or hopping on a bus or taking public transit.
Brian Bell (10:58.793)
Yeah. Which San Francisco famously doesn't have very good public transit, but yeah.
Gul (11:04.13)
That's very true. That's very true. New York was a lot better. it was relatively a lot better, right? but w with even in SF, right, like it was all like sort of the Caltrain and in Ubers and when I got to Lahore.
Brian Bell (11:07.398)
New York's amazing, yeah.
Gul (11:21.376)
it was like, you gotta buy a car. Well, why do you have to buy a car? Because there is no mass transit. As you've got an entire city, right, and there's no mass transit network, right? and I was like, How is that possible? Well, there is a mass transit, but it's super limited in coverage. It's run by the government and it's in shambles, right? There's no mass transit for, the middle class or, people who can pay a dollar for a ride, right? who don't necessarily, have to travel for free. and so that is a big gap. And I was like, well, why is that? And what can we do about it? And, the obvious sort of insight that I landed on was, all these cars going in the same direction at the same time, right? Like what if you, organized an efficient system that had, large capacity vehicles or higher capacity vehicles move from point A to point B and make stops along the way and then just allowed people to book a seat on the on the on the bus. Right. And then I did some research and that's exactly how mass transit works across the globe. And this idea was not sort of it was not an outlandish idea by any means. This is exactly how things work in London and New York and so many other parts of the world. And so we decided to bring that model too.
Brian Bell (12:36.661)
Yeah, you figure out where people need to move around and yeah, you build transit routes for it. Yeah.
Gul (12:41.516)
Yeah, exactly. So I was solving my own problem and that's been a patent, Brian. I, this is metal is my third product that I'm building. And so the first product was tech enabled master onset. The second product was quick 30-minute grocery delivery during COVID. And then the third one, metal, is all three of these, they share one common denominator, which is I'm solving a problem that I experienced that I have thought a lot about and decided to solve.
Brian Bell (13:09.321)
Yeah, I love that. any other takeaways from airlift? like what was kind of the outcome there? You g you guys raised a record setting Series B there. and somehow you transitioned to metal, but I'd love to kinda put a bow on the airlift story before we move on to metal.
Gul (13:25.58)
Absolutely. I think there was just so in terms of where we ended up, we were unable to raise our series C round of financing and so un unfortunately had to shut down. But I think there were there were a few things we did really well that drove our success and enabled us to find success in a geography where, this was this had never happened before, right? and then there's some things that, in with hindsight to aid my thinking, I see that we could have done differently. so the things we did well were, hiring. And a maniacal emphasis on hiring really, high caliber people that had a very certain specific type of drive and ambition and what they wanted to achieve in life. and then building your culture, in a way that is similar to how you build your product, right? Very intentionally, piece by piece, right? And so we spent a lot of time on culture and hiring and the environment we build and that paid off in spades. And we also had to do that because it's very ops-heavy business. And the in these ops IV businesses, in the early stages, you really lean on culture and people to fill the gaps, for systems when you're just getting started, right? the i think with the with hindsight to aid my thinking, one of the things, I think we could have I could have done better was just like taking a more fiercely independent view into where things are headed. in the height of 2021, everyone wanted to know when are you launching the next five countries? And why do you have to go from one country to two to three? why can you not go into five new countries at the same time? It was just a very different era, the ZERP era. And so it was, as founder CEO, it was my responsibility ultimately to sort of balance things out and to have an independent perspective on how we thought about some of those things, right? And so I think we moved very quickly, which is great. But then we were also expanding the surface area, and we were in many ways a mile wide and an inch deep. there was too much focus, too much surface area that we were trying to cover. and that was one big learning. And the other big learning was just the value of having a fiercely independent view into things. As I look back, right, like all the QCommerce companies that were doing what we were doing, they all went down when the market crashed in 2022. And all the companies that had a more independent view into how they were.
Gul (15:41.464)
thinking about expansion of surface area and going into new geographies and expanding, and growing, they came out, they did really well, right? and so that actually thinking directly informs metal in sort of the space we have chosen and the path we're on.
Brian Bell (15:57.814)
So you describe metal as the infrastructure layer you wish existed when you were raising. when did that idea click in for you?
Gul (16:05.87)
Well, right after, I moved on from airlift and I was thinking what I want to do next, right? the question for me was what are problems I experience on a daily basis that, I think are like problems that make me cringe, that I think are just like really, fundamental things that need to exist but don't exist. And one of such one such thing, Brian, that was top of point for me was, my own experience of fundraising. So let's talk a little bit about that experience, right? And this is a problem. This is a problem we're super passionate about. This is a problem that thousands of founders across the globe are experiencing right now, today.
Brian Bell (16:41.663)
Tens of thousands. I mean, there's like twenty thousand new fundings every year, twenty or thirty thousand, depending on the data set. So this is a huge problem.
Gul (16:48.238)
Huge problem. And what is that problem? Let's break it down, right? So the first problem is you are running a very specific type of company in a specific geography at a specific stage, and you want to do a very specific type of round, right? Let's say you want to do a bridge financing as a B2B SaaS company that's built in New York and you have absolutely incredible growth, right? That's scenario one. Let's talk about a different scenario, right? Let's say you are a consumer company based out of Germany that's building for building for the European market, and you want to raise a 3Z round. That's an let's call that scenario two, right? So the right investors for each of those two companies are very different types of investors, right? One company is looking for small checks, filler checks into a seed bridge or seed plus financing or a pre-A round, right? They don't want to raise a lot of capital. and then the other company is raising for a lead investor for Series A and Consumer in Europe, right? And so, there's founders, that are fundraising, for very specific scenarios, and they have absolutely no way to figure out what are the right investors for this particular scenario that I'm in right now, right? For this particular business model, for this particular company, this particular stage, this particular geography, this particular sort of spatial. space, that I'm occupying right now for this specific scenario. Right. And there's 10,000 activities that are writing checks. And how are finders going about this right now? Well, they're going to people they know and they're ask messaging them on iMessage or WhatsApp or email saying, Hey, who do you think I should speak with? Right. And then the other person says, well, I think
Brian Bell (18:30.911)
Don't text your VCs on WhatsApp, by the way. That's very annoying. Don't do that. Don't do it. Yeah. You'll get blocked. You will get blocked.
Gul (18:34.07)
Right. There you go. There you go. Email them. They'll like you. Right. and so that's really the problem statement that I zoomed in on, right? And that was something I struggled a lot with. And I felt like, this whole idea of like relying on word of mouth to sort of figure out which investors to pursue was massively outdated. It felt like, you're in nineteen eighty five. Right, where salespeople used to have a register on which they used to write names and phone numbers of their leads. Right. it felt exactly as archaic and outdated as that, right? And so that was the problem we wanted to solve.
Brian Bell (19:10.793)
No, I love that. So now it's it's serving hundreds of founders. you've partnered with, Techstars, obviously A sixteen Z Speedrun. You're actually one of the few founders I know that's actually gone through both YC and Speedrun. Tell us about that decision.
Gul (19:25.418)
YC is awesome. we did YC when we had no idea what would what we wanted to do. and I did YC because I felt like after that first experience, I wanted to be in a particular ecosystem. And YC was that ecosystem, right? And it was a phenomenal experience, right? I was out there, met some a lot of the partners, met a lot of the founders in our batch. It was an absolutely incredible experience. And then we found product market fit. and we were building a business with
Brian Bell (20:00.105)
Wait. Let's let's tug on that. Like what is what is product how do you feel it as a founder when you have product market fit? How do you define it? How do you have it?
Gul (20:09.75)
Yeah. So for us, Brian, that was really, a combination of rapid experimentation and being very perceptive and playing, paying close attention, right? So let me, decompose both of those ideas. So we started YC. We didn't know what we wanted to do, we were very open about it. We're like, look, like we don't know what we want to do, well, I want to do a startup and this is my background, and they're like, great, join the program. And then we ran experiments, right? So we set up like six websites and landing pages. And we try to get customers for these six, right? And one of them was this idea of like a fundraising operating system that provided intelligence on investors and helped founders identify the most likely investors and so on, right? and so the other five, we got some customers, but as we served those customers for those businesses, we were just I was not a fan of the business, of the customer profile, right? it was all over the place. These ideas were really all over the place, right? They were from emerging markets to BW SaaS to consumer,. and so with metal, what we saw was custom the customer pain, right? one, this problem was very close to my heart and I felt it and I, had a lot of proximity to the problem, and because of that, I had a sharp sense of intuition on where the problem was. And B, we are we put together like sort of a very quick, platform system, some filters and basic stuff like that. And then we got emails from customers that were really long saying you guys need to add these. 12 things, right? we got, customers spending, hours with us on call saying, hey, these are the things you want to fix, right? We had customers willing to pay real money. And then, we had strangers paying money for the product, right? And so that was sort of the clear signal that, we have strangers who are paying money, they're busy founders, CEOs of companies, and they're writing long emails with a lot of feedback. on where the product should improve. and so that was the clear sort of evidence of product market fit. Now, the interesting thing was that this was actually a very, a widely an idea that was, people would look at this and be like, this is actually a terrible idea, right? Because you've got no retention and you can't really scale
Brian Bell (22:29.461)
Well yeah, founders only raise every two years, roughly. And so that would be my objection as an investor looking at the business. And I probably asked that question when we originally met is Doc, how do you handle like the inevitable churn? but I'm guessing you're you're measuring retention not month over month, but it's almost probably raise over raise, right? Like year over year. Yeah.
Gul (22:47.522)
Yeah, well, we do we do measure retention on a on a on a quarterly basis. But you I think the key insight there, Brian, is that, for me as a founder, right, when my intuition was saying, hey, I think this can actually be a really exciting business. And part of the reason why this can be really exciting business is because no one else sees, part of the reason is like no one else sees what we're seeing, right? And so what were we seeing, right? We were seeing extreme customer pain, we were seeing, extremely strong product market fit. We were seeing something that every single founder across the globe, millions of founders that are fundraising, they need it, right? That's what we were seeing, right? We didn't know which way this would go over time. And we took a bet and we were like, look, we're gonna figure that out over time. And that turned out to be one of the best decisions because as we went deeper and deeper into the product, we realized that it's not just fundraising, it's investor relations, right? It's data rooms, right? It's meeting intelligence, right? It's like all these subproducts in and around fundraising. And then over time, we developed this vision for a compound product in and around fundraising that is now being used before founders raise, during the race, and after the race as well. And then, my thesis here, Brian, is that if you look at the underlying process that we're bringing efficiency to, it's basically the company investor relationship lifecycle, right? How do they meet? How do they how does the company discover investors? How does it access investors? How does it use its network and LinkedIn relationships and all of that to figure out who can induce me to which investors, right? All of that, right? And so, if you just map out that relationship, right, it starts off with investor round preparation, investor discovery, right? And then you close around, right? And then you need to update your investors. And then over time, you need to offer them some sort of visibility into the capital and share price through a capital solution, right? And so fundraising, investor relations, and capital management, these three things are point solutions of the same underlying process, the investor company lifecycle, right? And that lifecycle, by the way, is an ongoing thing, right? Like, if you're if you're a capital company, maybe you start off, in the in the post-race part of that lifecycle.
Gul (24:57.506)
Right. If you're a fundraising product, maybe you start off in the pre-raise part or the during the raise part of the lifecycle, right? But that life cycle is ongoing. And it goes on from the time your company has gone in to the time that you, either shut down or UIPO even after UIPO continues, right? And so there's definitely a path here for us on lifecycle retention. We've seen profound movements on retention over the years. And that's something we couldn't have predicted. are known on the front end when we were just getting started, right? But again, going back to airlift, right? One of the big lessons there was the value of sort of this fiercely independent view into things. And no one had thought about this problem as deeply as I had, right? And I'm really glad I followed my intuition on that and, did not end up not pursuing this because of, what I was seeing and hearing from other people around.
Brian Bell (25:49.142)
So how d how does it work? so there might be founders and maybe VCs for that matter listening and saying, okay, like this sounds interesting. Fundraising's hard. Like how does metal help me do this?
Gul (26:01.782)
Yeah, so when you, first book a demo call with us, our sales team sort of shows you how the platform works and all the different subproducts within the compound product. And then, we set you up on an onboarding call. As part of the onboarding call, we teach Metal, the platform, what your company does. And as part of the onboarding, we integrate your data sources and we build your user memory layer, right? and then, we over the years we built on Millions of data points across many different sources of public and off market data. We have built this really powerful and rich investor memory layer. So when you come into the platform, we immediately show you what are the most likely investors that are the top 5% picks for your specific company, and what are the top 10% fits, and what are the top 25% fits, right? And then we give you a ton of intelligence and visibility into why we categorize and rank a given investor the way we do. Right? Is it because of portfolio similarities? Because is it because they've funded, similar companies before? Is it because they are a really good fit for the type of round you want to put together? Is it because they're doing a lot of work in your specific country or geography?
Brian Bell (27:09.557)
Interesting. So you have your own matching algorithm internally that matches the round and the founder and the stage sector Geo to a V C to an investor to an angel even. And you say, Okay, this the here's the match score internal. Here's the metal match score.
Gul (27:24.94)
Right. And not just that, we give you visibility on the rationale for why that score is what it is, right? And we take into account everything, right? So for example, right, like I was checking out Metal today, and Metal, for me, when I go out to fundraise, right, Metal tells me that you should talk to foundation capital, right? And so I hovered over the Fitrank, right? and it showed me that look, you're a repeat fanner who's raised, 120 million for his first company, and foundation capital explicitly Looks for founders that have seen prior startup success. And so for that reason, this is actually a really good fit for you, what you're doing, metal and your founder background is a really good fit for foundation capital, right? And so I think it's the reasoning layer, it's the rationale that we surface to founders that's really interesting and powerful for founders. And that's actually why, more than 25% of all sales con calls that we're getting are driven by. Referrals from founders and investors and word of mouth, right? We're speaking with like more than 5,000 startups a year on an analyzed basis right now as of October 2026. And a lot of that is driven by a lot of that traffic is driven by word of mouth. And in this is all driven by sort of a strong product experience, right? So it starts off, right? You said, where does it start? It starts with investor discovery and then it moves into investor insights, right? We give you some really sharp intelligence on each venture, each firm and investor, right? And then it goes into relationship intelligence, right? We integrate with your network data and we show you who that's raised capital from a given investor before, right? and then I like customers that are using metal, if they're connected with me on LinkedIn, right? They can see that Goal, when they go to Team Ignite Ventures profile, they can see that we know goal who raised from Team Ignite Ventures, right? And so and then they reach out to saying, Hey, can you introduce us to Team Ignite? Right, and then I forward that along. So that's the sort of relationship intelligence piece. And then, on top of that, there's a very sophisticated data room product, and then there's communications, and then there's an investor CRM or a pipel investor pipeline, which is integrated with your calendar and email. Then there's meeting intelligence, right? And then there's investor updates and follow on intelligence on your cap table that gives you visibility to, follow on inclinations and patterns of your existing investors.
Gul (29:40.17)
And there's a lot in between that I'm not covering, but it's a full sort of end to end product that starts off in investor discovery and then continues beyond the fundraising process as you need to, manage your investors and publish your investor updates and so on.
Brian Bell (29:53.398)
Amazing. So you guys have been growing quite well. What do you think you're doing differently as a second time founder around growth?
Gul (30:03.09)
well, I think, one of the things is, thinking a bit differently about growth, right? So with my first startup, right, the goal was to grow as fast as possible. Right. I think with Metal, the growth the goal is not to grow as fast as possible, right? Instead, the goal is to is to position yourself where you can go from two million to ten million in a given year, right? Like that is the sort of what you're building toward, right? And that requires real value creation. That requires, real sort of customer engagement and retention and in really sort of having a sticky customer relationship, and then also the right monetization strategy, right? And so I think for Metal, we've never really tried to grow like we never really tried to grow 100%, quarter over quarter, right? That hasn't been the goal. Instead, the goal has been, hey, let's just keep growing at a really nice pace, right? Whether that's 30% a quarter. Whether that's 80% or quarter, that's besides the point, right? And the focus is less on how much we're growing this quarter, right? That is something we care about, that is something we track, that is something we manage to win. But that is secondary in order of priority. The bigger priority is how do you position yourself to go from two million to ten million in a given year? And then how do you position yourself to go from ten to thirty in a given year, right? And so I think it's a fundamentally different way of looking at growth. It's a fundamentally different way of growing the company. with my previous startup, it was a bit more about like the next two quarters or next four quarters. And I think with metal, it's a bit more about the next sort of three years, in where we end up over a three to five year time horizon as opposed to the next two quarters or next four quarters. so if we have a big quarter, we don't, sort of jump up in excitement. If we have a bad quarter, we grow by, let's say 20% quarter over quarter. we care a lot less about that. We do care about that, we care a lot less about that relative to the real value, which is like how do you position the company to really scale up in a in a in a brief time period, as you as you go from. And so as a result of that, right, like if you look at like the time it took us to go from zero to one million, and then if you look at the time it's taking us to go from one to two million, if you took at the time it's taking us to go from two to three million, like it's a very clear and it's
Gul (32:27.246)
extremely compelling, picture of and so I think having that foresight is something that I have this time around that maybe, I didn't have as much of in with my first star.
Brian Bell (32:37.961)
Yeah, and one thing you wrote about is you now see the urgency as a function of a few things rather d than just a bias for action. Walk us through how kind of your view changed there.
Gul (32:48.844)
Yeah, so bias to action is great, right? Like I think if you're a successful planner, you have some level of bias to action, right? I think it's critical. I view that as a prerequisite, right? if you if you want to build a startup and if you want to grow fast and those sort of things, right? I think urgency is a bit more complex, right? I think one of the things that I've learned with experience over the years is there's things that are super urgent on a on a monthly time horizon right and then there's things that are super urgent on a quarterly or a yearly time horizon right and i think being able to distinguish the two is really important right and so with my as a tactical example of that right if you're building the platform right our product right i look at our product not so much in terms of like what can we deploy this month and i worry a lot less about That. we do encourage and support bias to action. We want to have deployments every week, we want to sometimes we do deployments every day, and that's all great, right? But I think the true strategic sort of angle there is like where do you see the platform in six months, right? What fundamental outcomes can the platform achieve in six months that it cannot achieve today, right? And I think that's the sort of urgency to avoid, advancing the product in a way that helps you grow from two million to ten million to thirty million in a in a couple of years. and so I think urgency and bias to action, these are two fundamentally different concepts, at least in my view. bias to action is like, hey, like do you move fast on things? If something needs to get done, do you do that in the next few minutes or do you mull over that for days, right? Like that's bias to action. Absolutely critical, prerequisite if you want to succeed as a founder, right? Or even as an operator, right? I biased action is critical. You have to move fast on things, right? But with that said, the real strategic sort of thing here is urgency, on larger time horizons, right? And I think that is complex because it requires effective prioritization, right? And it requires, saying no to a lot of things, right? It requires sort of really thinking deeply on what are the one or two real needle movers here that will really, sort of move things and change the game.
Gul (35:13.974)
over six to twelve point time horizon.
Brian Bell (35:17.469)
After running six rounds yourself and, probably hundreds more, maybe thousands more through metal, what's a common piece of ad fundraising advice that you advise to handle differently?
Gul (35:29.292)
Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of things. Brian, but w the preparation goes into a round is where the magic happens, right? and a lot of, founders, even at pre seed, even at seed, even at series A, series B, right, like the preparation going into the round is really where the round gets made, right? and so I think this one piece of advice the other piece of advice just like understanding, the nature of venture investments, right? So VCs are not looking to invest in businesses, That have a high probability of working out, right? That's not the model, right? The model is like, look, we'll invest in a hundred companies and we know 90 of them are gonna be unsuccessful and that's fine. what we care deeply about is the potential for outlier returns, right? And so I think having a bit of, if you're for pre-seed founders, seed stage founders, right? I think it's more about like demonstrating that potential for outlier returns for investors as opposed to showing why the business will work, right? and then I for later stage founders, right, it's more like, what is the most ambitious story of your company that you can tell, right? And how do you bring that forward is saying in materials and your intro blurbs and your pitch tags and all of that, right? A lot of times, Brian, when I get, intro blurbs and pitch tags, right, for founders saying, Hey, can you introduce us to investors? it's actually very rare for me to come across materials that are really world class. And when I see that, like I forward immediately, right? in And the reason that's rare is because founders are viewing, not because founders are intellectually not capable of like, sort of all doing all those things and thinking about those things critically. I think it's because founders are looking at fundraising as just another process in their company. Just like you gotta hire people and you gotta build a product and you gotta, get an office space, you gotta raise a round. And so, okay, let's go and raise rounds, right? I think what's different about this process is that success rate is like seven to twenty percent, right? of all the founders that go out who raise capital. across and I speak, based on large data sets across thousands of funders and processes on the platform, right? The success rate is, closer to twenty percent or series, it's closer to seven percent.
Brian Bell (37:36.469)
Wow, so one only one in five rounds on the platform actually close. Wow.
Gul (37:40.824)
Correct. And that's actually very much in line with industry data. and in I think that percentage is about seven percent for pre seed, right? Of all the founders that are going out to raise the pre-seed round is about seven to ten percent that will actually be successful. And then seed is somewhere between the pre-seed and series of benchmarks. And so that's the nature of venture rounds, right? Like only it's only the top decile or the top quotile of companies and founders that are that are succeeding in these in this process, right? And so Given that context, your materials, your round materials, your narrative, it's either top quartile or it's working against you, right? And so either you come up with like a really incredible sort of preparation and blurb and pishtack and all of those, or it's working against you, right? It's binary, it's black and white, right? And so I think that's something that a lot of founders don't have as much perspective on. It's partly because of media, right? Like you look at Tecron and you're like, there's all these like people that are raising rounds, right? It must be this is just sort of a milestone. You just sort of do this and you raise a round, and that's sort of the natural order of things. and then you start fundraising, and then you realize, there's actually, stuff here that maybe I could have better prepared, right? And then I think for founders that already have like world class investors on the cap table. right. I think extreme thoughtfulness in how you manage the cap table, in how you work with the cap table, how you update your investors, you're right. And it's not just about like these 20 bullet point updates, right? It's about like, what are you doing that's different, right? The median founder is unsuccessful, right? That's one of the best things at YCTGSR portfolio, right? The median founder is going to fail, they're going to be unsuccessful. So this is actually a game or a sport in which the median Is the median player ends up not being alive, right? The median startup ends up dying, right? And so if you're just gonna if you're just gonna follow the playbook, if you're just gonna follow what everyone else is doing, right, like you die, right? And so you've got to think critically and creatively about all these things, like investor updates and how do you wanna manage your capital. And ultimately, and this, Brian, like when VCs talk among themselves, they're they're talking about like the two or three portfolio companies that they're really excited about.
Gul (40:02.924)
Right. And you're either one of those two or three companies or you're not. Right. And in, the way VCs get to know you is through your investor updates and through your communications. Right. And so it's important and valuable to not just like plug numbers in a template and hit send. instead really bring forward, sort of the thoughtfulness with which you're thinking about the business. so those are just some off the shelf, insights and partners.
Brian Bell (40:27.167)
and I would say anecdotally, I and I don't have data to back this up, but anecdotally, I think in my our portfolio, I would agree the founders who tend to send the most robust, detailed updates tend to be successful. Right. like they lead, there's there's there's a chart, here's how the revenue looks, here's all the problems in the business that right now that we're working on. Here are the asks. And yeah, if you're not if you're not over communicating in a very diligent way. then you're probably just you're not running the business in a very diligent way either. so I think that I think that's really important. And then that's something that Metal does. Do you guys help founders button up those communications?
Gul (41:12.222)
yeah, no, this is exactly right. so within master upgrades, right, we've got an AI native solution that helps find so the way it works is think of you're you're a founder CEO and you're working with a world-class analyst, right? And you're like, hey, here's a data dump of all my materials, my tech, my email, whatever the data package looks like, and you drop that in. And then our AI evaluates all of that and comes back to you and says, Hey, these are the things I want to understand about your financials, these are the things I want to understand about your growth. If you're growing really fast, we understand like what are the reasons for that? If you're not growing that fast, like what are the reasons for that? And it asks you all these questions to understand your business, and then boom, it just gives you your investor update. And then it also analyzes that and tells you, hey, these are areas where you want to add a benchmark, or your update as it stands right now is a 7.2 on a 10.0 scale, and so on and so forth. Right. And so it's designed to sort of make it easier. for founders to punch well punch well above their weight and really bring out the thoughtfulness of their of their thinking without spending hours on
Brian Bell (42:12.243)
Yeah. So founders are often told warm intros are everything. Where do you think that is true? And where do you think it's overrated?
Gul (42:20.066)
I think it's absolutely true given the topography of the venture industry today, right? how that evolves, if and when that evolves, right? Like that's a different sort of philosophical discussion for another day. But I think today, if you can get a warm interview between masters, I think that is, everything. And if you rely on like cold emails, Right. Like you're in some ways you're working against yourself. it's not that so cold emails were let's talk about cold emails, right? Cold emails, are a really bad, really inefficient use of time, right? If you spend three hours setting out cold emails and putting together personalized cold emails or whatever, how whatever software you use, whatever tools you use, right? Like those three hours are much better spent in terms of like digging out warm intros and making that work. Right. Calling up people figuring out who knows who and making those intros right now. There are exceptions to that, right? What are the exceptions? if you there's something out there about your company, right? Like you raised a hundred million for your previous startup, or you sold your previous company for fifty million dollars, right? Or you, have grown from zero to ten million in ARR in six months, right? Something of that nature, then cold emails are great and they're actually very efficient.
Brian Bell (43:36.339)
Will probably work. Yeah. Yeah. If I see that in the in the subject line, we just grew from zero to five million and we're bootstrapped and now we're raising. okay. That'll probably catch my attention.
Gul (43:37.634)
They work really well, right?
Gul (43:45.314)
Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And so I think in the absence of, something that's truly outlier about your company, right? I think the right thing to do is to go about go in through networks now. the key thing there is that it seems dawning, because you look, you think through all the people and you're like, no one comes to mine. I don't I don't think I know anyone who can introduce me to investors. I have a very limited network, right? But the moment people integrate their network data into metal, they're like, wow, like I've got all these like this college roommate who I haven't spoken with in nine years, they raised from Coast Labures. I didn't know that. This is great, right? And that's actually why, we convert, a little less than half of the customers to demo the product, right? because the insights that we are making available to founders are really powerful. And so I think it's not the absence of a network that's more problematic for founders. It's actually not knowing who within their network can introduce them to which investors. That's the really problematic thing for founders. and so, that's but I would strongly recommend, working your networks, calling up people as opposed to, sort of trying to cold email investors. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with cold emailing. If you're a pre-seed founder, I think it's fine. but I think the more efficient use of time is definitely networks, right? Go to events, meet people,.
Brian Bell (45:14.163)
It's one of the things we do for founders too is we, if you're on the cap table and you probably know this, we have fundraising capabilities internally. One is metal, right? That's our external fundraising capability, obviously. But internally, I tell founders like we're an unlimited intro machine for you. Like as many intros as you want for fundraising, we will give them to you. And like, here's our three thousand VCs that we know, go for it. And then, by the way, are there any VCs that we don't know that you want to talk to? Cause we can try to go it go get intros to them as well. And it works, right? And warm intros work.
Gul (45:46.124)
Right. No, absolutely. That's exactly right. And I think that's that's great.
Brian Bell (45:51.424)
So your data spans lots of rounds. besides the, seven twenty percent thing we talked about earlier. Is there any other surprising things that showed up in the data?
Gul (46:02.02)
a lot of surprising things, right? So I'll I'll share a couple just in the interest of time. one of the most surprising things, Brian, is we asked a question within the team. We said, look, we're sitting on like large pools of data. We want to understand what is the most predictable driver of fundraising success, right? And we thought it would be traction and growth and who's on your cap table, and we thought it would be Founders' prior background and experience and all of those things, right? And it turns out that, it's none of those things, it's something else. It's process velocity, right? And so founders that are, the number one pr predictor of success. It's not your capital, it's not your traction, it's none of those things, is actually your process velocity, right? How fast
Brian Bell (46:50.387)
momentum in the round.
Gul (46:52.352)
In the round in and how fast are investors moving through your fundraising pipeline, right? there's some founders that will, if they don't hear back from an investor, they'll mull that over, they'll think about it, and it stays sort of they'll mull that over for weeks and sometimes months, right? And then there's founders that, if they don't hear back from an investor in two days, they move that investor out of their pipeline and add new investors and sort of fill up their top of the funnel and keep going, right? And they're moving at such a high velocity. that they end up right like closing the round, fairly quickly. And so I think those philosophy
Brian Bell (47:25.363)
Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like if you're not getting if you're not getting momentum with an investor after a few days, they're not leaning in and asking for more info or saying no or yes or hey, send me more info, like it's probably dead and just move on, right? Is that kind of the advice?
Gul (47:40.674)
That's exactly right. Right. And in and I think if you have there, if you if you want to rekindle conversation with investors, right, like sure you can do that. You can publish, a meaningful update on the round or the company, whatever it might be. But, I don't think
Brian Bell (47:58.058)
And th those work by the way, these little round updates. Hey, a week later, I haven't we haven't talked in a week. Hey, I just wanted to let we're we're fifty percent filled on the round now. So if you w if you have any questions or any data you need, let me know to make a decision. Let me know. Like that's a really great email to send to anybody in the pipeline.
Gul (48:14.208)
Absolutely. No questions about it. This is exactly right? but
Brian Bell (48:17.385)
and by the way, we're ninety-five percent full. And I know your check size is roughly that last five percent. that's even that's even a better email.
Gul (48:26.87)
Couldn't agree more. That's exactly right.
Brian Bell (48:30.145)
man, that's amazing. anything else you wanna I know we're running short on time. Anything else you want to say about metal, where to find it online? Any other last thoughts? Gul (49:26.07)
Awesome, cool. No, this sounds great. no, Brian, I think that's all from my end,. I think we covered some really good ground and I'm excited about the podcast. And this is actually my first like one hour podcast and I think it's great, right? Like it creates space for asking the more, foundational and philosophical questions and so
Brian Bell (49:41.514)
most podcasts are doing like what 20, 30 minutes, something like that. I find that too short. I used to do 90 minutes could because I find the conversation really gets going at about now, about 50 minutes. Like 40 to 50 minutes. That's where you're starting to really get into kind of the meat of the of the content. What if you if you build everything that you want to build, what does capital formation look like in the next, five or 10 years? What's your vi big grand vision for the future? Yeah.
Gul (50:29.666)
Yeah, no, that'd be great. We can stop. Thanks so much, Brian. This is a great show. love being here. And hopefully some of these ideas and narratives are useful for the founders out there. If anyone wants to reach me, please reach out and goal at metal.so.
Brian Bell (50:45.578)
Thanks so much.
