Scott Orn, CFA
Scott Orn, CFA
Posted on: 04/14/2021
Brian Parks of Bigfoot Capital - Podcast Summary
Brian Parks, co-founder and managing partner of Bigfoot Capital stops by to talk about how his company helps provide Growth-oriented loans for B2B SaaS companies and fuels their growth, and saves their equity.
Brian Parks of Bigfoot Capital - Podcast Transcript
| Scott: | Hey, it’s Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting and welcome to another episode of Founders and Friends. And before we start the podcast, let’s give a quick shout out to Rippling. Rippling is the new cool payroll tool that we see a lot of startups using. Rippling is great for your traditional HR and payroll. They integrate very nicely, but guess what? They did another thing, they integrate into your IT infrastructure. They make it really easy for when you hire someone to spin up all the web services in their computer, which sounds not a huge deal. But actually, we did the study at Kruze, we spent $420 on average just getting a new employee’s computer up and running and their web servers up and running. It’s actually a really big deal. It saves a lot of money and the dogs are in the Dogwood. We see a lot of startups coming in to Kruze now using Rippling. So please check out Rippling great service. We love it. I think we have a podcast of Parker Conrad you can hear it from his own words. But we’re seeing them take market share so shout-out to Rippling. And now to another awesome podcast at Kruze Consulting’s Founders and Friends. |
| Singer: | (singing) It’s Kruze Consulting. Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty Orn. |
| Scott: | Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. And today my very special guest is Brian Parks of BigFoot Capital. Welcome, Brian. |
| Brian: | Thank you, Scott. Happy to be here. |
| Scott: | Yeah. We’re excited to record this podcast. You are in the debt world for startups, which is a world that I know really well and that’s why I was excited to have you. But maybe you could just kind of start off by saying a little bit about your background and retrace your career and how you had the idea to start BigFoot Capital. |
| Brian: | Yeah, sure. Thanks. So, BigFoot, we’re four years old now. So still, I don’t know, an infant? Not an infant, a toddler, I guess, toddling our way along throughout this world. Really kind of the Genesis for BigFoot… Quick once over on me, graduated college in 2004 and since then 60% of my career has been as an operator, 40% prior to that was in pretty traditional financial services, really investment banking. I did M&A, lower middle market M&A advisory. And as part of that I helped sell a lot of companies, helped buy some companies. There was always in those transactions via with say private equity firms or strategic buyers, the concept of the capital stack, right? Maybe at banks in there, maybe mezzanine financings in there, equities in there, a stack of capital. Then moving into kind of early stage… I got tired of doing that so I didn’t want to do that with my life. I wanted to actually build some stuff, moved into startups in 2010. This has all been out in Denver where I still am and where our team is, as employee one in an online travel market distribution marketplace company. It was sitting in a basement, founder’s basement first, into an office basement, building that thing alongside the founders, which was great as a whatever I was at the time, 28-year-old. And that was my cut my teeth of, “Hey, this is no longer theoretical as a service provider doing this.” And that was great, right? That was my first foray into that. Over the next seven years, I started a company, a B2B enterprise SaaS business called Brandfolder, which ended up being very successful. No longer there, but great learnings there as a first time CEO and building a team and getting that product to market and raising capital, equity capital, had also raised equity capital at the previous business as well. And then did a couple of other roles prior to BigFoot, BigFoot germinated in 2015, 2016, bringing that concept of, “Hey, everybody’s equity. I know a bunch of people that raise equity. It’s super hard. It’s not always great. Are you going after angels? Are you going after venture blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And a lot of people, myself included, taking lumps along the way of doing that. So that experience along with a knowledge, understanding of SaaS and that it as a business model of its own, and specifically scoped to this early stage, which I call initial scale at this time… These early stage companies, these aren’t very far along in their growth stage where I don’t have any direct experience as an operator. And pairing that with that concept that I mentioned earlier of a capital stack, like okay, why can’t we get a different form of capital into these companies that may or may not be venture backed, may not be true viable venture debt candidates, may not be looking to be venture equity or venture capital funded companies? And that’s it, right? And it was a very simple concept and remains a very simple concept is if you can look at these companies in a certain way, you can provide a capital instrument, a growth capital instrument that can help them along the path in conjunction with equity in substitute for equity, what have you. |
| Scott: | I love it. There’s a couple of things you said there that are really great. First of all, the realization that you’re actually doing this, you’re actually starting a company or running a company. I know Vanessa and I have had that same thing where you’re like there’s so much little responsibility that really adds up. It is like a total mind shift from being a service provider or being an investor so that’s cool that you’ve had that experience. And then you talked about getting some lumps along the way [crosstalk] and it’s hard, it’s hard to raise money and then sometimes you’re so thrilled working at a startup or starting a startup that people actually want to invest. You take too much money or you’re hyper-focused on dilution. You don’t take as much as you really need. There are a lot of learnings there, so we can unpack that. But the final thing that you talked about, which I think is super interesting, which is where you fit in the debt world. Because I feel over last five years, entrepreneurs have gotten a lot smarter about how debt works for them and maybe some non-traditional applications of debt. So maybe talk about, can you scope out the traditional venture debt and then how you guys fit into the world? |
| Brian: | Yeah, sure. So, I would agree that entrepreneurs, founders, execs in SaaS companies continue to come up the curve in terms of where we solve things four years ago and when starting this. We still like to educate, we still need to educate in a lot of instances, but I think that education hurdle has decreased, right? These days I tend to think as we’re marketing and writing content and things like that. We’re approaching the already educated to a degree, which may mean they have borrowed money before, maybe they haven’t, maybe they’ve been studying up on it, right? The narrative is shifted. In the venture debt… And venture debt is thrown around as a moniker and it’s a thing and I’ve written about it and you’ve written about it and you’ve been venture [crosstalk] writer yourself… |
| Scott: | A catch-all [crosstalk]. |
| Brian: | Catch-all word, right. Which is cool, which is fine. But to me, it’s back to my thinking of, “Hey, there’s a whole lot. If there’s a hundred SaaS companies and five of them are going to be venture capital funded, what about the other 95, right?” Some subset of those should be financeable in some format. Venture debt doesn’t really solve for that, traditional venture debt, right? It’s still looking to that 5% that’s raised venture equity, because that’s what it is. Venture debt lender is looking, to a heavy degree to the sponsors, the venture capitalists that are backing that company with equity, right? And if that’s not in the picture, it’s not viable, right, via the bank venture debt lender, or a non-bank venture debt lender. I think that’s where people get a little bit hung up or confused is, “Oh, okay. I like venture debt. Yeah. I can get venture debt.” While you venture, or do you institutionally venture capital backed and who is the actual venture capitalist, because they’re not all the same, right? And that capital is not accessible to them and then in turn to you, equally, if that makes sense, right. |
| Scott: | Yeah. But you’re right that 95% is underserved or not served at all right now. The 95% that don’t have the Sand Hill Road VC or the premium Boston or New York VC firm in them. Certainly, five years ago, there was no capital available, no debt capital available for those companies and now folks like you, BigFoot are actually bringing capital to that market and making…I guess, probably a lot of times before they ever raised venture capital or even… Are you seeing companies that don’t even have angel money who are just bootstrapped? [crosstalk] advantage of your… |
| Brian: | Yeah. Yeah. It spans the gamut, for sure. We’ve worked with fully bootstrapped companies that have bootstrapped themselves to outcomes. We think in terms of outcomes, right, and that’s generally speaking, a future equity round. When you’re in a better position of strength, you’ve proven out the growth metrics to a large degree, but have you actually known how you’re going to deploy 3 to 5 million bucks, which is important if you’re going to raise that money. Bootstrapping to an exit, right? We’ve been a part of those situations where… A company may be 10 years old and at that point, and if you’ve bootstrapped a business to $5 million in revenue, you’re not all that interested oftentimes in selling equity, right, or selling it in a venture capital format. We can be a nice fit there. We’ve helped companies that bootstrapped to a bank, right? So, they’re there more so optimizing for cash flow, but you got to have 12 to 24 months of cashflow to get to a bank so it’s all sorts of different situations. |
| Scott: | There’s a bunch of different outcomes, you’re right. You made a great point about being ready to deploy that capital. That’s a mistake I see founders make is they maybe don’t have a financial model and really thought through it. They’re raising money because they just think they need it. But what are you seeing? My suspicion is, especially if the non-VC backed startups that are raising a debt capital from you, I think maybe we can learn something from how they’re deploying the capital. Where are they putting this money, what functions and where are they using it to grow faster? |
| Brian: | Yeah. So, I’m actually writing a series on this type of stuff right now. That’s on our blog, bigfootcap.com/blog, give it a shout out. And it’s really the worst practices around raising capital. The first one is what I call the casual capital raise, right? If you’re going to go raise capital, don’t be casual about it. You just can’t be, and part of not being casual is actually knowing what the hell you’re going to do with it, right, and being able to put that forth to a potential and investing partner. So generally speaking in our world, what is primarily being funded, you think about the P&L of a company, right, in a software company. Three high level categories. There’s G&A, you got to pay your execs. Let’s just say an office and all that good stuff. Not really a growth… It’s a cost center for the most part. Sales and marketing, and then R&D and ongoing product development. Generally speaking, we’re looking at that middle slice of sales and marketing, right? Okay, do you have some… And that’s where it gets kind of mathy, right? It’s like look, if you have your unit economics figured out to a degree, right, for certain channels for instance, or you can launch certain channels, then it becomes kind of mathy. Like okay, you’re going to pay us back 1.5X over three years, whatever it is, and you can generate 3X, it’s obviously accretive, right? So, we’re looking for opportunities like that, founders that understand that and are able to measure that success within their sales and marketing spend. Because then I’m on the mindset like, and you should kind of just do that all day, right? Why sell a bunch of equity unless you need to run extremely fast from competitive market pressures or dump $1 million a month in a year funnel, something like that. So, it’s primarily sales and marketing spend which includes team growth and discretionary sales and marketing spend. And to a little bit lesser degree, ongoing product development, right? So important to note that if you’re really still doing pure R&D on your product, your core product, you haven’t gone to market, you haven’t acquired a significant amount of customers that you’ve been able to renew and shown that in the data, you’re generally speaking going to be too early for us. That’s really equity capital. |
| Scott: | And probably too early for any debt provider. You said something about just looking at sales and marketing as… I think, to paraphrase, you’re looking at that as an asset. In the old days of lending, especially in startups, people want to finance equipment or even kind of started doing senior loans that were designed to extend runway. But what I hear you saying is like, “Hey, we love companies that we’ve uncovered this hidden asset that doesn’t necessarily appear on the balance sheet, but it’s basically the math equation between customer acquisition and long-term value of the customer. And if you have that multiple arbitrage,” you mentioned 1.5X per acquisition, and 3X, 5X for lifetime value, “then that’s a great asset that you should be financing more and more of every single day.” |
| Brian: | Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to boil it down to that, it’s a great way to put it. Yes, is basically the answer, right, so why have lenders typically not lend to companies that look like that because they don’t have traditional assets. You don’t have real estate or fixed assets or equipment or whatever, even though venture debt did start off in financing hardware really, as did Silicon Valley. Equity, that’s changed, right? So, these asset light businesses… So then venture debt arises of, “Oh, maybe we can look at the equity backing as an asset.” The evolution of venture debt from, say hardware, to actually looking at the equity. For us, again, not pure play venture debt, who else is in this situation? Capital standpoint matters, but for us, yeah, the primary asset beyond the IP is the quality of the revenue and the customer cases. And then it’s, okay, how efficiently can you acquire and grow that revenue, which then gets to the sales and marketing metrics, right, and all those fairly well codified at this point, definitely well codified and market understood and accepted. You’re an economics or a SaaS business. |
| Scott: | Yeah. And you mentioned SaaS, what was it about SaaS that drew you to that? And have you looked at other categories or are you just sticking with SaaS? (and learn about our SaaS accounting practice here). |
| Brian: | Yeah. It’s kind of operate where right you know, right? I think within BigFoot, as a business, a lender, is in financial services and we utilize other people’s money, of course it’s not all my own, right, to put into companies, so I think it’s super important. I learned this in my investment banking days, right, the firms I worked at. First firm was very generalist, right, “Hey, we buy and sell companies and we know how to do that.” Great. But I think it’s much more compelling if you’re facing a company to actually have relevant domain experience and focus. Given where I’ve operated, that just made sense. A certain type of company at a certain stage, right? Not to say that we’ll never go beyond that, but today… And it’s a fairly broad mandate underneath that, right? It could be verticalized SNB SaaS, could be enterprise SaaS. It could be all sorts of different end markets, customers. It could be bootstrapped. It could be venture backed. A lot there under, but we’ve looked at some B2C subscription stuff. We do B2B marketplaces so SaaS is a little bit of misleading. B2B software, primarily with a SaaS subscription business model. That said, we’ll do marketplace, we’ll do anything that can kind of wrap our head around that has data that indicates that it’s recurring in nature. Yeah. |
| Scott: | And so it’s that recurring nature and the fact that the customers in SaaS, I’m generalizing here, but if you’re running a good SaaS business, you’re going to retain your customers every year or a very high percentage of those customers. When you guys are doing your underwriting, what are you looking at? Like customer churn and customer average selling price and things like that? |
| Brian: | Yeah, definitely. We’re looking at three high-level buckets. For us, again, back to the revenue and the quality of that revenue. So, in companies in the public markets, for instance, for companies that generate earnings, which is a whole other conversation, oftentimes the companies we’re lending to are not meaningfully or consistently generating positive earnings or EBITDA, right? We’re all get that within the ecosystem [crosstalk] we operate in. Yeah, Right. So rather than say, quality of earnings, which is a thing for companies that have significant earnings, quality of revenue really matters to us, right, and the metrics related to that. So that’s number one, number two is back to the gross efficiency type things. It’s really the unit economics around sales and marketing primarily, and then cash and capital management, right? We don’t expect the companies are going to come to us with some war chest of cash, right? However, you do want to understand, this is where the use of proceeds comes into play. How are you going to use this cash? This may be more cash than you’ve ever taken into your company in certain… That’s kind of a step change in and of itself. Are you going to be a good steward? How are you going to use it? Are you getting on some crazy burns plan that we can’t even fund? Are we going to be aligned, right? And the next thing’s runway, for instance, and cash burn as a percentage of top line. |
| Scott: | Alignment is such a great concept. You’re totally right. Hey, it’s Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting and before we get back to the podcast, quick shout out to ChartHop. ChartHop is one of my favorite new SaaS tools on the market. And basically, what ChartHop does is it puts your org chart in the cloud. And I always like to say, it brings transparency to your organization. Everyone in your organization can see who they report to. They can see the full org chart of the company and how their group relates to other groups. It also has a lot of information on the individuals in the company. You can click on the ChartHop profile and just get where people live, their experience, Slack handles, all those kinds of stuff, and it’s just a really great tool. The other thing is ChartHop has started doing some cool stuff around compensation and budgeting planning. You can actually start seeing what the cost structure of the company will look like in certain scenarios. I’m loving ChartHop, check it out, ChartHop.com. We use it at Kruze, really like it and I can’t recommend enough. All right. Back to the podcast. Is there a shorthand, is it 12 months of cash or… I always tell startups to raise, when they’re raising equity, raise 18 months of cash basically, or more. How do you guys think about that? Because you want to give them enough cash that they can accomplish those milestones that allows them to either have that event, get bought, get refined or maybe do an equity round. How do you think about the timeline? |
| Brian: | Yeah, it’s a great question. And I don’t think I’ve written… Should write on this or maybe something will come out of what I’m about to say, even better. I’ll start with for us, it’s not that 12 to 18-month concept. Again, that becomes for us a little bit not feasible. When a company comes to us, it does vary, but let’s just say, we’re not expecting when we lend money to a company for them to keep on an ongoing basis, 12 to 18 months of runway, right? It is common for us to provide subsequent capital, right? So, we’re going to say, “Hey, don’t go below this. If that’s three, four months or some minimum amount of cash in the bank balance.” We’re not the group that you’re going to come to and say, “Hey, Brian, we need to fund our next payroll.” That shouldn’t happen, right? You should be planning better than that. We’ll have insight into that anyway so that wouldn’t happen. But that shouldn’t be the expectation, right? And there are forms of capital out there that do satisfy that need, via a credit card, via selling your receivables, via something short-term in nature. So that’s number one, we’re sensitive to companies running out of cash, of course, in cash management’s important and learning how to manage cash. The 18-month runway equity mandate that you mentioned is kind of well known. It’s not our expectation and the way I think about that is like, okay, VCs are really good at marketing and putting forth mandates, which is I think, props to them. And this whole 18-month thing is like, yes, it’s beneficial in that it gives you enough time to put that money to work and create value. Generally speaking in that format, I think you tend to be on the hamster wheel of, okay, you’re trying to get to your next raise, right? 12 months of execution, six months of doing that from raising to B if you raised an A, and when you get to the VCs, likewise, the opportunity will do, it’s really good market, is realize a markup in their portfolio. It takes them probably generally speaking, 18 months, unless you’re hypergrowth series C, D, whatever to realize that market. So anyways… |
| Scott: | But for you guys, since you’re not doing a lot of the VC backed ones, it’s going to be a shorter cash runway- |
| Brian: | It’ll be a shorter time frame, yeah. |
| Scott: | But it should pay itself back quickly so that the cash runway doesn’t get worn down as fast as like a VC firm that’s just spending a lot of money in building or whatever they’re doing with the money. |
| Brian: | Yeah. Again, it’s just kind of situational. So, it’s where are you, do you have projections? What do your projections look like? Where are you trying to get? And are you reasonable with what the potential outcome can be, right? Do you say you’re raising a series A? Is that where we’re trying to get? What are your growth rates, right? If they’re 15%, that’s going to be pretty tough, not 2% month over month, maybe, but let’s just be reasonable here and figure it out. Can we provide enough capital in a way that makes sense for us and for you, we don’t want to over lever you and suck all the cash out of your company, that can help you get to where you think you’re trying to get while understanding that you’re not going to hit your plan a hundred percent, generally speaking? In our world, these are million plus dollar financings, generally speaking, and they’re three-year type money, right? It may stay out that long, it may not. It’s growth capital, right? That’s the way we think about it. |
| Scott: | Those terms are super helpful though. Maybe you can walk through like a typical instrument? Is it interest only period or is it amortizing over three years or how is it structured? |
| Brian: | Yeah, I mean, we try to keep it simple. It’s common for us to put out three-year term loan that’s maybe got 6 to 12 months of interest only, provide some initial cashflow relief, right? Reinvest that cash to the greatest degree possible then start paying down a facility, let’s say month 12, right? And also, so $1.5 million commitment, maybe you’re a $300,000 MRR company when we come in. Maybe we say, “Okay, great. Here’s 900K, something like that. Over the next six, 12 months, you can access this remaining 600K as you grow.” Right? And so, there’s this one concept of a commitment of capital. Great. As a founder, I should care about that. I know it’s there with some prescription around it. I can go take it, go heads down and create value and then prove that value and take more, or not take though. We’re not going to force it on you. |
| Scott: | Yeah. Yeah. The entrepreneur has the option. Are you guys looking at it as a multiple, the commitment as a multiple of reoccurring revenue or how do you think about that? |
| Brian: | Yeah, generally speaking, right? So, concept of a multiple of MRR. Occasionally this comes back to, “Hey, not everything SaaS, not everything needs to be SaaS subscription.” Right? So, there could be other revenue streams in there. There could be some services. It could be some hardware. There could be some marketplace, transactional, all these things. Sometimes we’ll look beyond just that pure subscription line item on the P&L and do a more holistic revenue, multiple. But that’s the easiest way to think about it as a multiple of your MRR. |
| Scott: | Cool. And how do you guys think about the pricing? Not going to hold you to anything, but like the broad pricing of the debt. |
| Brian: | Yeah. Two ways. We provide both term loans and revenue-based financing structures, more so term loans than RBFs. We can get into that if it’s interesting, but I’ll speak in terms of a term loan, right? Term loans have an interest rate and they may have some fee structure. They may have warrants if it’s venture debt. We’ve never taken a warrant so we’re more so yield focused. For us, that’s in a mid to high teens type interest rate which a lot of people see and go, “Oh my God.” and freak out about, right? It’s like, okay… |
| Scott: | Well, I have those conversations with founders sometimes but when you’re a really early stage company, you don’t have an equity sponsor. That interest rate is, I don’t think actually is that bad because you’re trading off basically a lot of dilution that you’d give up if you raised an equity round. And yes, you’re paying a high interest rate, but if you’re truly hitting your milestones, you’re raising the value of your company significantly more than that on an annual basis. It works for everybody but you have to be able to make the money work and have it actually been productive for you. [crosstalk] If you’re just paying a high interest rate and not going anywhere, that’s a bad deal. [crosstalk] Paying a high interest rate… |
| Brian: | If you can’t believe that and show it and we can’t see it, neither of us should do it, right? It has to be accretive. And of course, things will happen along the way but that’s how it should work and that’s where the math problem is. It’s like okay, if that is the case, you should do it as much as possible within reason. Of course, I’m biased there because I’m a lender, but that’s the way I think about it. So, yeah. The other way to think about it is the cash on cash return, that’s the 1.5 that I mentioned earlier. If we are, through a mix of interest rate and fee structure, what have you, saying, “Hey, here it is,” And I’m super transparent about all of this, it’s 1.46, right, over three years if it goes full term. If it doesn’t go that long, it’s not that much, right? So, can you do better than that on spending it? |
| Scott: | You have to. |
| Brian: | … [crosstalk] materially better than that on spending it, right? I think a lot of people, and so there’s… The interest rate and some sticker shock there maybe, there’s the cash on cash and wrap your head around that. And then ultimately what you really should care about is what does the monthly payment look like? |
| Scott: | Yeah. |
| Brian: | Right? |
| Scott: | That’s why I asked about the amortization period because I think you mentioned the 6 to 12 months of interest only. That allows you to really put that money to work. And a lot of times when you’re doing marketing spend, you should have a below one-year return on investment. Ideally, it’s three months or six months but you should be able to get that money back pretty quickly and recycle it a couple times before you’re making payments, so that is important to look at too. |
| Brian: | Yeah. Totally. And I think it is worth noting that some of those, back to the use of proceeds, some of that money may be going into efforts that don’t generate revenue for a period of time, more of those R&D efforts. But I do think at the stage of companies we’re working with, generally speaking, a million five plus ARR, those efforts are quite different from say, a pre-seed type company that’s just building their product. To put equity into that, that may take three, four years to generate revenue. The R&D efforts we’re doing that are incremental, generally speaking, to an already market accepted and revenue generating product, they may take more than a year, right? That flywheel is not necessarily working there generating revenue, day one. That makes sense [crosstalk] so you got to think about those things. |
| Scott: | It makes perfect sense. You’re not doing baseline research development, you’re doing product add-ons that generate more cash or get you over the [crosstalk] |
| Brian: | Generate more cash. Right. Make it stickier, you get expansion, open up adjacencies, chase markets, whatever. |
| Scott: | Cool. What’s the capital base of BigFoot, is it equity capital? Is it hedge fund stuff? Where have you guys sourced your capital from? |
| Brian: | Yeah. I guess I’m greedy with my equity. We bootstrapped it 100% until last year where we did bring on a little bit of outside capital from folks we’ve known for a long time that had been lending us money along the way. So yeah. I mean, that’s kind of our thing, we’re value your equity. And ultimately, hopefully reap the upside of that value creation, which aligns with what we do with founders. We eat our own dog food there, I guess. Along the way, as I mentioned we’re four years into this, we had some convincing to do, not only to ourselves but to people that have places to put money holistically, public markets, real estate, what have you, that it wasn’t absolutely crazy to lend money to cash burning software companies that don’t have traditional assets. I think we’ve done a decent job there over the past few years. But prior to say, at the end of last year, it was retail money, high net worth accredited types. [crosstalk]. |
| Scott: | Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| Brian: | That’s what it was. We kind of cut our teeth on that and did a good enough job to then graduate really to institutional money. We’ve got an institutional partner and we still retain some of those say, retail-oriented folks that have been along the way the journey. [crosstalk] That’s where we are now. |
| Scott: | I’m sure you’re generating a really good deal for them, which is really cool. |
| Brian: | Yeah, they charge us too much. |
| Scott: | Everyone says that. |
| Brian: | Says the guy… Yeah. I can relate. [crosstalk] So yeah, I’m getting charged too much. |
| Scott: | Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. Maybe you can tell everyone, just reiterate where to find you, your target type of company, and the dollar sizes you’d like to play in. The fact that you’re so SaaS oriented and you’re working with… You’re not just the typical venture debt that I used to do, you’re more opportunistic and more flexible. I think it’s a really good selling point for entrepreneurs out there. |
| Brian: | Yeah. Cool. I think we’re pretty easy to find, bigfootcap.com. You won’t find me hanging out on Twitter all the time, but yeah, just go to bigfootcap.com and you can get to my calendar pretty easily. If anyone wants to connect, bparks@bigfootcap.com as well. Yeah. We’re generally most aligned with probably Scott or folks looking clearly to execute on a growth plan that requires at least $1 million in capital, maybe as low as $500,000, right? But what we’re really playing ourselves these days are relationships that look or can grow into, in 6, 12 months, kind of $1 million to $2 million type financing partnerships. That’s where we are. Those tend to be companies that are 2.5 to 7 in top line. We’ll go, as communicated on our website, it really is $1.5 million [crosstalk] right along with the growth plan. |
| Scott: | That’s great. And those companies that bootstrap to that size, they’ve really put in the work and they’ve got a lot to show for it. And so they’re a good credit for you, but also they’re probably pretty savvy if they built the company up that much without a lot of outside funding so that’s great. It’s a good match there. |
| Brian: | Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah. Cool. |
| Scott: | Well, Brian, thank you so much. Congrats on starting to… And proving it out, really, you proved it out over the last four years, so congrats and we’ll be sure to send you some Kruze clients. |
| Brian: | Awesome. Yeah. I like you guys’ content. Thanks for having me on, Scott. |
| Scott: | Amen. |
| Brian: | Take care. |
| Singer: | (singing) It’s Kruze Consulting. Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty Orn. |
Find out why Kruze Consulting is one of the leading accounting firms in San Francisco and the US, serving funded, early-stage companies. Kruze clients have raised over $15 billion in venture capital and seed financing, and our research and development tax credit work has saved clients millions of dollars in burn rate and payroll taxes. Contact Kruze to learn more.
