It's not about women or potential women need to take a page from men and own their own success is to enable the others. Hello, you're listening to the first podcast to go for women and take in all those who want to be able to Smart gender equity for take 10 minutes really actionable advice at 50 in Tech. We give you the keys to unlock the tech industry and move it. For real today. We welcome Mariotti. She's the co-founder and CEO of Aden dot AI my name is Marie and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Aden dot AI We're in a I start up. We started in 2017. We're based out of London. I have one co-founder. Who is the CTO of our company. His name is PJ and he works at Apple before he started Aidan. I worked in my work marketing for eight years. So we went from two people in 2017 and a low-quality minimum viable products or MVP to team of 12 people two years later in terms of the product. We built a software We're called Aiden that is used by mobile app marketing teams to get better results from their paid acquisition campaigns. The product is in fact an AI system that relies on machine learning to analyze Facebook Google ads Snapchat Twitter. Apple search ads campaigns automatically and it produces recommendations that marketers can then just approve and implements in all those different channels in a single click to fund the development of this product. There were now commercializing after 18 months of development. And many failures or some would actually call them learnings. So he raised two rounds of funding to fund the the company. I proceed Angel round of $750,000 joined by strategic Angel Investors such as the head of deep learning at Athol Nicholas pinto and Alexander Wang, who's a Serial a I slash n LP entrepreneur is now the founder of nabla, which is an exciting day. I started based in Paris. Check it out. The second round was particularly interesting. So we closed then as he drowned 18 months after the precede round of 1.6 million. I was six months pregnant when we started the process and my daughter was four months old when we closed that round and it's the one obviously there are going to talk about bit more today and hopefully my narrative will give other women. His path forward or just at least some kind of like illustration of what it can be like when you are when you're fundraising and I wanted to share with you a couple of tips things. You need to watch out for what if you are in the same situation as me so precisely, where do you start you start by being very pragmatic and identifying all of the VCS that could potentially invest at your stage in our case when we started talking to investors to fund raise. We had already raised a fair. First round and Angel round of 750,000 dollars and we were still pre-revenue and we're in a I start up which means our machine learning models need to be trained which means it's cash intensive which means risk. So if you just like take a hard look at yourself and just be like is my business attractive right now, you know, if you've got revenue of course will be more attractive if you've got over 50k of Revenue. Start to be very attractive anything below that is kind of still early stage. So you don't like waste time meeting with people who will just see the sake of it because VCS will always take a meeting with you. So then when you have that list of people that you want to engage with set a deadline for yourself decide exactly when it is you want to close around and tell the investors that the second thing is, make sure to take all of the VC meetings within a period of two to three. Weeks and tell them tell the VCS that this is what you're doing if you're going to raise in different cities, if you can go into Paris, for example, you want to make sure you're just doing one trip and you're just saying hey this week. I'm just meeting all the VCS and set a deadline again. Just tell them we need to have a decision on whether we're going to the next step next stage by you know, the end of November for example, how does that look for you? So essentially you explain what the context is and you ask the VC put it to them basically put the ball in their Court ask them whether or not with your timelines they are able to make a decision fast enough because actually what VCS don't tell you sometimes unless you ask them is that there may be in the middle of raising a fund. Maybe they haven't closed it. Maybe they have restrictions on how many investment they can make so the second question you want to ask Is essentially when was the last investment if you ask them that it's more likely that you'll get a better picture of how active that BC is now, of course, you can look it up on crunchbase before you go into the meeting and you should do that. But sometimes it's just not up to date. There's good to know and gives you an indication of How likely is VC is likely to make a decision fast. So the third point is you have to become a pro assessing whether there's a fit and again, those are Our advice is that you can use as well even if you're not pregnant, but when you're pregnant it becomes a lot more crucial to do that because you don't want to waste your time every minute is precious. So before you jump into pitch mode just make sure that you know is the right fit perhaps check whether or not that VC has already made Prime business in the same verticals you so that you know how technical you can get and then go into pitch mode and never leave the meeting without Knowing what the next up its so yes is better than no, but there is nothing worse than a maybe so the other piece of advice is it's not because you're pregnant that you need to rush things also, which is kind of the opposite word you said but what I mean by this is of course you have a deadline but if people and I mean VCS and investors just ask you for things you're not willing to give don't do that in the hope. They will accelerate the decision-making. Well, I'm specifically referring To is due diligence calls for your clients. This is her last has to talk to our clients, which was a B&B. So obviously everybody wanted to talk to a B&B before they even gave us a timesheet and we refused of course when you refuse, you know that you're delaying the process and you know, it's not in your interest to delay the process because you're pregnant, but you have to hold, you know, your grounds stick to your guns here because this is not going to do you any favor, especially if your clients have to take ten calls from you? Half interested these who are just like looking to educate themselves on the market. So don't give up anything that you don't want to give up just because you're pregnant now to this point. Do you bring this up when you're in a Visa meeting most of the time you don't have to because it's quite visible. You're literally the elephant in the room, but I never ever mention this because I don't apologize for being pregnant. And all should you if people ask you which to be honest I have to say in my experience. No one ever mentioned anything and I don't know if this is because I never let the door open or because you know the UK and the us where we were speaking to investors are very politically correct. Perhaps they wouldn't even dare even if they think about it, but if people want to just, you know, ask how your how you're going to be handling. A maternity leave let them ask just don't anticipate it and don't start making it a point of discussion. Now. The other thing I want to say is that is easier to fundraise when you're pregnant. If you have a co-founder doesn't have to be a male co-founder can be a female co-founder, but honestly, you have to be quite you know, sort of objective Investing For VC's in startups. This is high risk. So you cannot deny that whether they tell you or not. They just look at you as being a risk. So if your sole female founder and you're pregnant, to be honest, this is you know, it's very unlikely going to raise anything. Now a lot of these will say that's not true. Of course, we would just depends of the products great if there's enough traction, but proof is in the pudding. And as as of today, there's no VC that I ever came across they're actually has said, yep. We invested in a sort of humor founder who was pregnant with a pre-revenue AI company that had only raised 700 before they came to see us is that does exist. Please reach out to 50 and text. I think they'd love to hear from you. So now Now don't forget that you're pregnant. And the most important thing is you and your baby what I mean by this is listen to yourself. Of course, you want to close the round before you give birth if you can this was definitely our goal and we didn't manage to do this. We've got we had a lead investor three days before I had my baby. So we had 70% of the commitment from the entire round. We were not going to close around in several stages. The only going to wait until we've got everyone involved. So hypothetically it would have been easy for my co-founder to just finish the rounds because we only went missing a small piece of the pie. Now. What happened is I oversee was off for at least a couple of weeks and then my co-founder just told me look I've been taking meetings but the investors want to see it's not that they were insensitive. It's not that they Lord that I had a baby but it is kind of you know hard for them to justify that there are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars in a co-founding team where they're very seen half of the team. So first of all understand that this is a legit ask, but try to you know, see if you can actually go around it because if you can if they just want to talk to you over a call that's possible. I made some investors come to me so we had coffee. Close to where I live in Hampstead when I had to go I went but I took my baby with me. You don't have to just like, you know, you just gave birth. So you have to make sure that you're not kind of putting pressure on yourself more than you already have just to get meetings with investors. I took between the the time I be was three weeks old in five weeks. I thought that it was in my best interest to take those meetings. So I did it. That's what my gut feeling told me. I took seven in-person meetings during that time. And today I have to say there were useless. None of the meetings that I had in that period ended up in anybody investing the company but it did put a lot of pressure on me. I thought it was the right thing to do now. I would really encourage you to think about this twice. So what I ended up doing is clawing off all the meetings that I was supposed to have after that because obviously I was supposed to have maternity. Him and I just called some of them versus that had already committed who already trusted us and I just told them look invest more so we can close that round because I'm not I'm not just doing that anymore and they did it. They invested more and we close the round now, no one is a superhuman and no one is a superwoman and there's often that sort of projection on Startup Founders like me. That we're just you know made of a different type of metal that we can just go through everything without feeling any pain. That's not true at all. You cannot know in advance. What's going to happen when you have a baby you may have complications you may have a C-section you may have lots of different things that people don't want to hear about but that you know, physically don't allow you to just show up to meetings, like nothing ever happened and having a baby is just not having you know, Walk in the park, so don't make it look like it is this is why again, if you're breastfeeding take your baby with you and just ask for room to breastfeed. You shouldn't hide what your your day-to-day is just because it makes people feel uncomfortable. So I said earlier that all the meetings I took between the time my baby was three weeks old and my biggest why weak Souls were useless that's not entirely true after I met with investors who, you know said no or just Just didn't give an answer. I reached out to one of them here. I really liked and who passed on the opportunity because it wasn't the right fit and just told him that we really want it to have at least one female investor because at that point we had nine investors in the company and they were a hundred percent male was very important to me to have diversity in my investors just to reflect the diversity that we've got, you know in our DNA as a company and its a guy called Spencer Crawley. She works at first minute Capital who introduced me to several angel investors who were very relevant for what we're doing. So specifically are to have people who are either had an expertise and AI or MARSOC which didn't make things any easier and this is how I got introduced to Sofia Ben's who's the CMO of spotify and one of the first 10 employees or Spotify. So that was like definitely, you know, huge huge. Positive outcome from just asking that question. So I guess one last piece of advice is you know, even if the investors pass on the opportunity see if you can get something out of that relationship and in my case again if it wasn't for Spencer and I had pitched other female angel investors before but I don't think I would have found the perfect fit because I had no access to Sofia in that case and she's specifically Song to what we do as a business. So why did I join the 50 and tap platform? Because I'm a strong Advocate that women helping other women leads to better outcomes. When you are thunder you often feel quite alone and just listening to other narratives very much helps the entire ecosystem helps investors see that there's previous historical models of people like me who have been running. Raising whether were pregnant and then who you know made it happen. It helps other aspiring female Founders. So people who are perhaps working in a corporate world and thinking entrepreneurship maybe for me but they don't have examples and I think this is what 50 and tag brings is just voices of many different people who can say, yeah, I've done it and you can do it too. If you like this podcast subscribe comment and share. And give us a five stars note on your preferred platform should be iTunes Google or some cloud and if you want to empower women at scale Sharon advice on 15 Tech.com.
My name is Marie. I am the CEO and co-founder of Aiden.ai. We are an AI startup. We started in 2017. I have one co-founder who is the CTO of the company,PJ, and he worked at Apple before he started Aiden. I worked in mobile app marketing for 8 years. We went from 2 people in 2017 and a low quality minimum viable product or MVP to a team of 12 people, 2 years later. We built a software called Aiden, that is used by mobile app marketing teams to get better results from their paid acquisition campaigns. It is an AI assistant that relies on machine learning to analyze facebook, google adds, snapchat, twitter... campaigns automatically and it produces recommandations that marketers can implement in all those different channels in a single click. (...) we raised two rounds of funding to fund the company. A pre-seed Angel round of $750,000 joined by strategic Angel Investors such as the head of deep learning at Apple, Nicolas Pinto, and Alexandre Legrand who is a serial AI/NLP entrepreneur, who’s now the founder of Nabla The second round was particularly interesting. We closed then a seed round, 18 months after the pre-seed round, of  1.6 million. I was 6 months pregnant when we started the process. And my daughter was four months old when we closed that round. And it’s the one obviously that I’m going to talk about more today. (...)Start by being very pragmatic and identifying all of the VCs that could potentially invest at your stage. (…)Do not waste time with people who are just going to see you for the sake of it. Because VCs will always take a meeting with you. (…)  set a deadline for yourself, decide exactly when it is you want to close the round and tell the investors that. No time to waste. Start early. Fundraising can take ages, The second thing is, make sure to take all the VC meetings within a period of two to three weeks and tell the VCs that this is what you’re doing. Tell them “We need to have a decision on whether we’re going to the next step, next stage by the end of november for example. How does that look for you?”. Essentially you explain what the context is and you ask the VC. Put it to them basically. Put the ball in their court, basically. Ask them whether or not with your timelines they are able to make a decision fast enough. What VC's don't tell you, unless you ask them, is that they may be in the middle of raising a fund, maybe they haven't closed it yet, maybe they have restrictions about how many investments they can make. Never leave the meeting without knowing what the next step is. “Yes” is better than “No” but there is nothing worse than a “Maybe” It's not because you are pregnant that you need to rush things. Don't give up anything that you don't want to give up just because you are pregnant. (...) do you bring this up when you are in a VC  meeting? Most of the time you don't have to because it's quite visible. You are literally the elephant in the room. But I never, ever, mention this because I don't apologize for being pregnant. If people want to just ask how you are going to be handling the maternity leave, let them ask but don't anticipate it. it's easier to fundraise when you're pregnant if you have a co-founder. You have to be quite objective. Investing for VCs in startups is high risk. So you cannot deny that, whether they tell you or not, they just look at you as being a risk. (...) Do not forget that you are pregnant, the most important thing is you and your baby : listen to yourself. 