Two years as a VC backed startup
Author: Written by Michael Wendland and Ian Glass, co-founders of Intalayer
This is the story of how we founded and ran a VC backed startup and why we decided to close down.
The past two years as startup founders have been the most intense, exciting and emotional learning experience of our lives.
Recently, however, we made the difficult decision to close down Intalayer.
We want to thank our 3rd co-founder, Dain, our early employees, investors, customers and everyone who supported us.
Now, we can reflect on our experience with the clarity of hindsight, recognise what we achieved and crystallise our learnings. We hope that learning from our mistakes will increase our probability of success when we start another company.
This is quite a detailed write up but we believe in transparency and that lessons lie in the detail.
If you’re a former, current or aspiring founder, we hope our story will benefit your journey. Please contact us (Michael & Ian) if you’d like to ask any questions directly.
10 hard lessons we learned
💡 Of the countless lessons we learned, these 10 stand out as shaping our story
Lessons about founding teams
Don't undervalue the energy a co-founder brings to a founding team. When facing months or years of challenges, setbacks and tiredness, founders cannot rely solely on intrinsic motivation. Co-founders must energise each other.
Co-founder vulnerability is a strength. Like any great, long lasting relationship, co-founders have to be emotionally transparent and honest. No-one in your life will understand what you’re going through like your co-founders. The more you share, the more you can support each other.
Lessons about problem spaces
The problem you see or hear is rarely the problem that needs to be solved. Look deeper and ask ‘why’ to uncover root causes. Once the problem is correctly identified and understood, it is much easier to design a valuable solution.
Some painful problems are very difficult to solve. ‘Wicked’ problems can have multiple stakeholders, be tangled with other problems and have roots in cultural challenges or conflicting human behaviours. Aim to deeply understand the ecosystem you’re operating in and seek out ‘contained’ problems instead.
Lessons about solutions
‘Time to value’ is the most important metric startups should design for. As an unknown entity, your target customers will have low confidence in your ability to change their lives. Focus on delivering value to them as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Try to manually solve the problem before coding anything. If you can repeatedly solve a problem manually and prove target customers are willing to pay, you will: understand the problem deeply, reduce risk and build confidence in how to gradually automate and productise a solution.
Lessons about feasibility
Be cautious if veering outside your team’s areas of expertise. Don’t fall victim to the Dunning–Kruger effect and overestimate your ability to succeed in an unfamiliar industry, competitive ecosystem, problem space or task. Engage experts quickly to reveal ‘unknown unknowns’, plan for the ‘known unknowns’ and accelerate work on the ‘known knowns’.
Don’t chase the ‘asymptote of death’, a target you get closer and closer to, but can never reach. Learn quickly how complete or accurate a solution needs to be before a target customer will realise value. If feedback leads your solution to become increasingly complex, before it can be perceived as valuable, consider changing approach or whether the problem is even solvable with your resources.
Lessons about difficult times
Turn previous mistakes into constraints and criteria to guide future decisions. If you compound the knowledge you gain, you’ll continually make better decisions. This will help you evolve or pivot with confidence and avoid making repeat mistakes. A startup is as much about growing yourself as it is the business.
Don’t allow failures to make you feel like a failure. There will be challenges, setbacks and even long periods of grinding without significant wins. Defining yourself by your company’s success will increase your suffering in difficult times. 💡
Continue to our full story below and read how our experience taught us these lessons.
Our Origin in the Antler Startup Program
In January 2020, we joined Antler Australia’s startup generator program. We had never met before. Now, that feels like a lifetime ago.
Antler is an early-stage venture capital firm that also supports new generations of entrepreneurs through a startup generator program. Imagine a combination of Dragon's Den, The Apprentice and Love Island.
80 individuals from a broad range of backgrounds were brought together for a 10 week program in Sydney.
Our cohort was made up of:
Technology Leaders: software engineers, data scientists and machine learning experts
Business Leaders: management consultants, product managers, marketers, sales and operations experts
Domain Leaders: experts in financial services, healthcare, energy, corporate HR as well as Ph.D scientists
Antler also carefully selected a cohort that represented a diversity of cultures, genders and life stages.
Despite this diversity, the three things we all had in common were the drive to; find compatible co-founders, start a technology company and pitch for pre-seed investment from Antler.
This felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Forming our founding team
The 10 week Antler program was was defined by three main goals:
Find co-founders and form a team
Validate a problem and gather early evidence of a business model that could represent a big market opportunity
Pitch as a team for pre-seed investment
Our program started on Monday 13th January 2020. The first two weeks were made up of founder skills training and daily Design Sprints with mini-pitch challenges. In week 1, Antler defined the daily challenge topics and structured the cohort into new cross-functional teams of 5-10 individuals every day. The goal was to help us meet and work with as many potential co-founders as possible, as quickly as possible.
In week 2, we defined our own challenges and picked our own teams. It may sound ruthless, but we needed to mentally eliminate members of the cohort so we could focus the following weeks on working with the most compatible potential co-founders.
One Antler partner likened selecting compatible co-founders to how the military select special forces units, tasked with performing the most complex, classified, and dangerous missions.
We needed to select co-founders with; complimentary skills and experience that overcome individual weaknesses, personality types that energised us and character traits that we could commit to working with for the next 5+ years. Ultimately, we needed to trust relative strangers with our dreams and success.
Weeks 3-8 played out like a reality TV show with; co-founder courtships, tension, jealousy as potential co-founders still 'dated' other teams, the excitement of teams forming and individuals reeling from team break ups.
Antler often reminded us that the pressure was on because in week 8 there was a pre-investment committee pitch. Those without a co-founding team had a very low probability of being invited to pitch for pre-seed investment and teams without a validated problem or compelling solution might also not be invited.
We (Dain, Ian and Michael) were one of the last cohort teams to form, one week before the pre-investment committee pitch.
We had all been through team break ups but came together because of our complimentary skills and our shared experience with a common problem in fast growing software companies. Equally as important, we had compatible personalities and we energised each other.
Becoming a fully remote, global team
Based on our strong team, validated problem and compelling idea (covered in detail below), Antler invited us to pitch to the Investment Committee for pre-seed funding. We'd present to Antler Australia partners, Antler Global partners, Antler VC fund Limited Partners as well as a selection of Partners from other local venture capital funds.
However, only a few days before we pitched to the Antler Investment Committee, Sydney began to enter lockdown as the threat of Covid-19 spread.
Fearing difficulties eventually returning to his home and family in New Zealand, Ian decided to catch a next day flight to Auckland.
We were now a fully remote, globally dispersed team, operating across time zones.
Receiving pre-seed funding
On Tuesday 24th March 2020 we pitched to the Antler Investment Committee.
After an anxious wait, we were ecstatic to hear that Antler decided to invest in us.
It felt like a huge win, even though it was the very start of our journey together.
2. The problem we set out to solve
In our previous Product Management and Software En