Intralinks

So it was kind of born out of a lot of that pain of the true LPs, their advisors, their accountants, the need to collect K-1s to manage capital calls and to report on these assets.

Fraser, have you been into any of the like private equity type of portals like an Intralinks or a SunGuard data exchange? Have you been into those portals?

The sad truth is yes, up to a point.

And then I kind of shake my head and get the younger people to do it.

Yeah, I mean, I, I sort of started a career in finance, ended up in software, uh, ended up on the finance side of software, then ended up in sales.

I grew up at a company called Intralinks from sort of 2004 to 2012.

That was a fascinating business to be able to be a part of and grow up within tech sales.

Individual contributor, manager, living internationally, running North America businesses.

right, there you have it, money miners.

Thank you to Sandvik Ground Support, Titan Recruitment, who we had in the show there, Intralinks, Focus, the platform by Marketech, and last but not least, Seed Capital.

Go Australia.

Go to it.

So these are companies...

Well, these are hosted by companies like Data Sites, Deal Room, or Intralinks, which I think is the one that we used back in the day.

This is where you're gonna put all of the information that's eventually going to be seen by the prospective buyers.

At the same time as you're starting to get all that material together, you are drafting a teaser.

It was even more of a nightmare if you were on the sell side because you're fielding multiple questions coming from multiple different bidders, many of which overlap with one another, et cetera, et cetera.

So the initial idea was that the entry point into this market was gonna be through a virtual data room solution that was a better, faster, cheaper solution than, than the legacy offerings out there, kind of the Intralinks and Merrills of the world.

And we, we started, um, and this was, you know, 2018, 2019, you know, trying to sell that vision and, and ultimately sell a solution that was priced at around $1,000 a month.

And what we found was there was no market for something like this because inevitably, if you're an early-stage startup, you're gonna need to go pretty far down market, uh, in order to find somebody willing to be an early adopter for a brand-new solution like this.

But at the lower end of the market, w- we weren't competing against Intralinks.

We were competing against Google Drive.

And what we were seeing was that, and what we were hearing from bankers were like, "Look, this is great, interesting tooling, but let's face it, for, for this Series C capital raise, Google Drive, it works reasonably well." It was one of my early lessons in entrepreneurship in recognizing that, you know, you can have a clear identification of a pain point that you wanna resolve, but you need to marry that insight with a winnable go-to-market strategy, and we did not have a winnable go-to-market strategy.

Uh, and number two, it taught us about this regulatory affiliation pain point, where there were these legacy players, uh, that were in place where there was con- universally accepted lack of s- user satisfaction as it related to the quality of those experiences, uh, and the opportunity that we had to reinvent that old model in a way that was fully cloud-enabled to deliver the scale.