Chapter 19The start of the real hustle
With the redundancies complete, our runway became a little longer. But we had to implement a plan to secure the company beyond the end of our runway. We hired Ohana & Co., an investment bank out of New York, to work with us on raising a new round of funding. Although the raise was ultimately unsuccessful, Laurent and Kara truly were incredible to work with. And the lessons I learned in the process of working with them are priceless.
Laurent is a French New Yorker with a legal background, experience in starting and running his own businesses, a formidable and fast eye for diagnosing companies, an enviable global network and an elegant ability to hustle to make deals happen. He focused on web tech and consumer and had been very successful. (For the record, if you're reading this and thinking it would be a great movie, Laurent would like George Clooney to play him.) (Yes, that's meant to make you laugh.) Sometimes painfully direct, yet thoughtful and never rude, Laurent was someone I loved working with.
We worked with Laurent and Kara to build our pitch and find our targets for it. In doing so he became so immersed in our business that he often became my first phone call when I wanted to bounce an idea or scenario off someone.
As I mentioned in chapter 18, we were attempting to pivot from a ‘design your own shoes' concept to two adjacent areas that leveraged our unique on-demand manufacturing capability:
- serving customers who have small, ...
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