neon vest is a platform connecting startups and entrepreneurs with
experts in the VC space startups saying it's in the
progress of raising a seed round of about 2.5 million
from a mix of both angel and institutional investors.
So joining me now is the co founder of neon
vest, Akasha Akasha, thank you so much for
coming on. I bet a lot of people I
would want to tap these resources. I know you're
still raising money. How does this work? Yeah
, I'm happy, happy to be here. And
thanks Kristen um it's an Excel expert network for entrepreneurs
. Uh so what we do is we connect our
early stage founders to experts in D. C.
And successful operators for 30 to 60 minute 1 to
1 conversations between um users and experts. And it's
primarily for mentorship and feedback on a variety of aspects
of their business and as an underlying premise to help
them scale in multiple different ways outside of just capital
. Is it live? Are people using it now
? Yeah, no, most definitely. We have
about 300 or so experts on board. Uh most
of its senior individuals at VC funds and corporate VCS
, some of the leading VCS and and on the
user side as well, We have a number of
users and repeat customers too. So it's it's been
great so far. What are the kind of questions
people can ask or the wisdom that users can gather
from some of these professionals. Yeah, definitely.
I mean uh honestly it ranges uh we have early
stage founders to um to series B founders and everything
is different because it's so circumstantial and this is one
of the core value props that we offer real time
feedback is far more useful than kind of content that's
produced that, that just remains online for a certain
period of time. And so early stage founders,
we've seen it typically a little more generic. It's
around kind of strategy, business model roadmap. What
product makes sense? What's the market opportunity for later
stage guys? I mean, we've had people come
on who are saying, look, either I can
raise it back or I can raise a$50 million
private capital round, Which one should I go for
? You typically see it more targeted and strategic for
the later stage guys, So when do you expect
from this seed round to close akash? And how
are you gonna use that money to expand the business
? Yeah, definitely. And I think especially in
um, in today's ecosystem, it's really about things
outside of just capital. And so we brought a
really interesting set of people on board. Its,
um, early stage venture capital funds. Its syndicates
and syndicates are really valuable for us because this is
all about networks led growth. And so, uh
, syndicates have a bunch of LPS and people that
commit to these syndicates that have their own diverse networks
and so tapping into those is critical for us.
And, um, and leveraging that to kind of
scale this up in terms of where we're going from
here. Um one of the biggest insights we've realized
is it's not just sort of entrepreneurs but sort of
the larger expert networks that exist today. Um The
G. L. G. S of the world
have kind of overlooked certain massive generations of new experts
coming on board, um People in digital health,
enterprise staff, sustainability Blockchain. There's entire cohorts of
experts that that people haven't aggregated into a certain platform
and so that's kind of what we're trying to build
from here. Okay, here's a question for you
. How do you ensure that some of the people
paying for your services are protected? Of course,
they've got this new great idea either trying to get
their own funding and they wouldn't want anyone else to
take that idea. So how does the business model
work and how do you make sure that some of
these startup founders and young entrepreneurs are protected? Yeah
, it's a great question. Um I think first
off we don't participate on any calls. Um Recently
we've started asking people if they want to record the
sessions for other people to gain value from it,
then they can choose to do that. But we
don't attend any of these calls. In addition they
can they only have to kind of disclose what they
want to on a particular call and sometimes they get
an N. D. A. In place with
the investor and then ask for a repeat call through
the platform. Um I mean honestly most of the
time they're fairly open I think um one of the
parts these types of conversations and what we've heard,
experts say is they view the neon vest conversations very
differently to what they do on a normal day to
day basis. Which is sort of diligent startups from
an investment perspective. And so by having a more
open dialogue in an environment that's uh both confidential as
well as sort of friendly, they're able to disclose
far more than they usually would in an investor style
conversation. So um we've seen that they they've either
gotten very detailed or in some cases have kind of
um stayed away from disclosing certain key parts of their
I. P. For instance. Alright Akasha,
co founder of neon vest. We appreciate taking the
time and keep us posted. Thank you.