Alex Salazar on Taking Arcade from Zero to a $12M Round (Alex Salazar / Arcade - Ep 56)
Alex Salazar didn’t need to prove he could build a company. He’d already done that and sold it, then spent time as a VC, and had the kind of background that usually makes raising money the easy part. But when he started Arcade, he decided to do things differently. In this episode, we talk about what it means to go back to zero even when you don’t have to. Alex shares why he and his co-founder stayed in stealth, how they tested product ideas without writing a single line of code, and what it took to get real traction in a category moving as fast as AI. We get into opportunity selection, investor conviction, and what it actually looks like when someone gets preempted before they’re even out fundraising. Arcade eventually closed a $12M round... but the process behind that raise had very little to do with pattern-matching or momentum. It was all about building something that hit a nerve.
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Down by 20? Down But Not Out... (Curastory)
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<p id="">This is a fantastic episode covering one of the most important insights around fundraising</p>
Becoming the Pepsi to Indeed's Coke (Talent.com)
It's becoming more and more common for people to get through college and realize they still have no idea what they want out of life. On top of that, majority of the time we're too scared to do anything about it. Next thing we know time has passed and we feel suffocated in a job we don't even like. We put our dreams on the back burner, sacrificing creativity for stability. For today's guest Lucas Martinez - Co-founder and CEO of Talent.com - he knew right away that the corporate world wasn't for him. Because of this, he knew he had to act on it - fast. This decision let him to start his company with two of his closest friends. It was a messy start, but once they got the ball rolling they were able to land around $1M CAD from angel investors alone. Because of that raise they were able to become pretty profitable. Great, right? But after some time the investors were ready to pull out, and it was time to run a process. In this episode, Lucas talks about what it was like trying to create a business of quality while at the same time scaling it. He talks about mindset, the benefits of working with VC's, the ups and downs of raising, learning to plan, and how passion was the key to Talent.com's success. If you're a founder looking to understand all that goes into scaling and raising for your company, give this episode a listen
TBC: The Role of Emotions in Pitching
<p id="">This is a fantastic episode covering one of the most important insights around fundraising</p>
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<p id="">This is a fantastic episode covering one of the most important insights around fundraising</p><p id=""></p>
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