Q Our vision is to use- In her new pitch, there was no mention of Slack apps or EAPs. Stigma was a social mental health app once again, which made me wonder if Mac, who was particularly excited about the Slack piece, was still interested in investing. So Mac and I got on a call with Ariana, and my first question to her was, what made you pivot back?
A I was listening to a lot of voices in the Techstars ecosystem and also, um, among investors from, from East Coast to West Coast and what people thought were opportunities. There is a lot of appetite in the Midwest for B to B kind of stuff. So people loved the HR angle. I went to San Francisco and met with Sequoia and they were like, this is a bad path. Don't go down it. And so I had to take all of these inputs and say, what is the company I want to build? So I have a piece of paper that is in my kitchen that says, this is the company I want to build. I wrote it nine months ago. I go back to it constantly. And remember that I only want this to work if it's the company that's going to help people. The problem and the sort of bad news for today's call is that it takes time to earn trust, and the moment we take on a big amount of capital, we understand that you all as venture capitalists have returns to make and growth targets to hit, and I won't trade on the trust that we've earned too early, um, to end up losing this audience because what they feel like is all they, all this was, was a funnel to get them to a sale. And so, I actually believe that now is not the right time for us to fundraise.
AI assessment note: “I went to San Francisco and met with Sequoia and they were like, this is a bad path.”