How A Startup Landed $6 Million From The Founders Of Dropbox, Yelp, Box, Yammer, And Gmail (And How You Can Too)
Reeves is also an angel investor himself.
Reeves new company is called ZenPayroll, a cloud-based payments tool that makes it easier for small businesses to pay employees. We asked him how he got such a rockstar lineup to invest in ZenPayroll.
Reeves says it took him two weeks to raise the $6 million round. Each day was packed with eight or nine meetings. He started the process by reaching out to people he knew. It helped that he was going through Y Combinator, a notable startup accelerator program that has a strong alumni network. Reeves also had connections from Stanford, where he got his electrical engineering degree, and from Zazzle, a startup he joined as the 9th employee that now has hundreds of people.
Aaron Levie, for example, was a prior contact. Box's office used to be right next door to Zazzle's. Levie invested in a company called Karma; now Karma's CEO is one of Reeves' investors. Reeves also met Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman through Levie.
Once Reeves found potential investors, he still had to sell them. Reeves and his co-founders have attractive backgrounds; they've each started companies before and Reeves' last company was acquired. Reeves also used a compelling pitch deck to help share his mission with investors.
Click here to jump straight to pitch deck that helped Reeves raise the money >
"I'm a big fan of having a deck," says Reeves. "Especially at the seed stage. It's how you present your story. You want to have a logical connection between different pieces of information."
Reeves also asked investors a lot of questions during the meetings. He says he interviewed them as much as they interviewed him to make sure they'd be a good fit for his company.
Finally, it's important to have a product that solves a pain point investors can relate to. ZenPayroll is a cloud-based payroll solution that's cheap for small businesses to use and easier to navigate than ADP or Paychex.
"The people we raised money from invested because they want to vicariously fix this industry," says Reeves. "You could tell which of them had experienced the payroll pain themselves. That's the heart of why angels invest even when they are still doing their own startups."
So, how can other startups have the similar success nabbing star angel investors?
Reeves offers the following pitch deck to other entrepreneurs when they're raising their first round of financing. It's the template ZenPayroll used to raise $6 million.
"Each meeting is an opportunity to describe your vision, paint a picture of the future, share your progress so far and the quality of your team," he says.