The Joys of Fundraising

Sure. I grew up on a hog farm in Nebraska — right in the middle of the US, a hog-farming family — and then went to university outside Chicago at Northwestern, where I did a chemical engineering degree. I worked very briefly as a chemical engineer and then retrained myself into software engineering. I was at Sun Microsystems for a number of years in the Java group, and then moved more into the business side of engineering. I spent a number of years at ThoughtWorks, a global software services business — now several hundred million dollars in size. I ran ThoughtWorks here in the UK, and I also built and ran their global software division.

That's how I got into the world of tech and software. About six years ago, one of my mentees at ThoughtWorks approached me with an idea for a business. She'd been living with type 1 diabetes for twenty-some years at that point, and she's a brilliant engineer. Her idea was to use modern consumer technology to offload some of the cognitive and psychological load around self-managing diabetes. I didn't know anything about diabetes at the time — I didn't have much experience at all — but she's brilliant, and the more I looked into it, the more fascinating I found it: how much is known, how little is known, and what a huge opportunity there is for technology to make a massive difference to people's lives. So we set up the business together, myself and Isabella. She's no longer with the business, but we got going from there.

The first couple of years were just a lot of user research and a lot of learning. We sat in the British Library, had coffees with people living with diabetes, met them in coffee shops. There were already thousands of apps out there for people with diabetes, most of them rarely if ever used — so it was really about learning why that is, and what people actually would use. As we developed the vision for what we wanted to create, we realized it was a medical device — so we had to work out the regulatory and development pathways for that. It was a couple of years of heads-down, two-girls-in-a-garage-style punching through it, and then we raised our first round of financing and went from there. So that's how I got here — and it's been quite a ride.

When you work in diabetes, it's just such an incredibly complex condition, and there's so little known. Diabetes affects the metabolic and endocrine systems — but we don't fully understand those systems even when you don't have diabetes. And if you do have it, that system is broken in some way, and it's very crudely diagnosed. Type 1 is your body not making insulin; type 2 is your body not using insulin well. But really, diabetes is just an umbrella term for a symptom of chronic high blood glucose. Glucose homeostasis is incredibly complex — there are so many hormones, tissues and organs involved in regulating it — so to narrow it down to "some cells in the pancreas making insulin or not" is very crude.

Because that's the level of science we have, there isn't enough of a molecular taxonomy to describe it well, to understand it better, treat it better, potentially get to a cure. So everyone who works in diabetes — including people with diabetes who work in diabetes — has to work out their own foundations from where they're starting. You make up your own truths: "for me, it's like this." Doctors do it too: "I advise my patients this way." Everyone builds up their own set of truths and then builds on them, and who knows whether those truths are actually true. So it's this individual, lifelong learning journey for every person — building up the skills, knowledge and confidence to understand this condition for themselves. And how diverse that makes the experience: the population of people is already massively diverse, and then when they have diabetes, even more so.

Making technology that integrates into that lifelong, personal learning journey is an absolute requirement — and that's the thing that's been missed in diabetes self-management technology until now. It's basically been: carbs raise your blood glucose, insulin lowers it, so let me make you a logbook. Log what you eat, log the results, look at some charts. That maps to the theoretical idea of what diabetes is — carbs, insulin, blood glucose — but it's grossly oversimplified relative to what's actually going on in the body, and relative to what's going on in the life of the person trying to regulate their blood glucose. They're making hundreds of decisions a day to stay alive and well. Technology has to see that, respect that, and support that — and until it does, it's really not going to get used.

The thing is, when you get diagnosed with this condition, you have to get on with your life. So you're given some basic tools, probably by someone very well-meaning — a diabetes educator, a nurse, maybe your doctor — and those are the tools you've got. But telling someone who's just been diagnosed "you have a condition that no one understands", or telling a parent "your kid has a condition that no one understands" — that's not necessarily a helpful truth to share. And there's a huge difference between someone who's just been diagnosed and someone who's lived with it for fifty years, with all the steps in between. You have to respect where someone is in their life-cycle journey with this condition. What someone needs to know at two months or six months is very different from what they need at twenty years — there's still education, learning, motivation, encouragement, achievement — but it's very different at each stage. So personalization really has to reflect that: where is this person in their journey with the condition, within their overall life journey, and how do we support them through the different stages they're likely to go through?

Tiring. Very tiring. I should caveat all of it: I'm a first-time founder, so this is the first time I'm going out and raising capital in a significant way. And what we're doing is a big vision that's orthogonal to the way the world thinks about diabetes, about self-care, about medicine. So it's never going to be for everybody to invest in — and that's very obvious every day of fundraising. We're raising right now, in fact. Most of what you're going to hear is no: it won't work, you're too late, these people are already doing it. There are a lot of reasons to glance at this business, not really look into it, and say "no, not interested". I have to keep that in mind, because for me — living and breathing it day in, day out for six years now — it's an obvious no-brainer investment. But I can understand the objections and the rejections.

We wouldn't have got off the ground if it wasn't for friends and family, and people I'd worked with personally in the past. Our early angel investors are all people who believed in us as people, and believed in — or liked — the vision, and wanted to support us. Those personal relationships and connections got our first couple of rounds in. Most of the capital that's come into the business has been that kind of capital, and then we followed on with other, more sophisticated angels we'd met along the way. It's challenging raising money regardless of who you are — but I think it's definitely more challenging for a woman. The numbers are stacked against women raising early-stage capital: it's 2.3% of venture capital that went to female-founded businesses last year. That's not a good statistic. You just have to be aware of it, say "it is what it is", and keep going. We needed capital to continue the R&D and keep going with the product, so you keep putting yourself out there, knowing most of it's going to be no, and you learn along the way.

I try to be very positive about it and see every interaction as a learning experience and an opportunity to connect with other people in the field. You have to make it a bit bigger than a transaction: maybe this isn't someone who's going to invest, but maybe they'll be a friend, or help in some other way. See people as people, in all our flawed glory, and take what you can from it. One of the big things I wrote about is really accepting no — going for no. People are nice, they do want to help, most people aren't jerks — and particularly when it comes to equality and diversity, we all want that in our minds, so it can be especially hard for someone to say no, even to a woman. But a "maybe", left open, just drains your resources and energy keeping something alive that's never going to happen. So you've got to get people to tell you a yes or a no. As much as it can hurt to hear it, you just need it quickly. That's probably been one of my big learnings.

These days, somehow, the investors I've been dealing with have got much more forthright. You do a call, maybe a second or third within a day or two, and you'll have a response — usually a no. I don't know if it's respect, or that they've become aware of how painful and draining it is for entrepreneurs, but even in the last week I've had two or three no's. I didn't agree with their rationale, but they gave quite detailed reasons: "we like this, we like this, and very specifically, we don't like this." In all those cases I disagreed — but I really appreciate people being that specific, because it doesn't change what we're going to do, but it helps me know what they're thinking. In some cases I've obviously planted the wrong impression, and they've drawn the wrong conclusion, so it helps me think about how to position things differently, or what other information to add to the pitch. Over the last year — and I've been raising for six years now — people have got much more specific and polite. Maybe it's just that I'm dealing with a different kind of person as we get bigger, so it's more formal. But however you look at it, it's demoralizing — you're trying to build something and make it go big, you can see so obviously why it's awesome, and everybody else can't yet see that.

We ran a crowdfunding campaign early last year, just before the pandemic — we actually closed it the week after the pandemic hit, so the timing worked out well. The thinking was that we're making a consumer product, and there are millions of people affected by type 1 diabetes, plus their families and kids. So doesn't it make sense to take it out and let people participate economically — share the rewards, share the upside? We ended up raising £690,000, which is a good chunk of change and gave us significant runway through to the end of that year. Since then we've raised another round — a Future Fund financing, part of the UK government's COVID relief scheme — which helped bridge us through the crisis, because angel investing basically went down during that period for obvious reasons. The crowd round gave us a nice long stretch of runway to get to a safer landing: it let us launch our product and complete our ISO 13485 certification, which is the quality-management-system requirement for regulatory purposes. It gave us a real boost, and we got a lot of good feedback and interest in the company as a result.

Crowdfunding is tough, though. It's not for everybody, and not for every proposition — even the crowd platforms will tell you that. You're running a campaign, literally, going out and targeting thousands of people to get £10 here and there. It's a lot of work. But for us it was worth it, because we ended up getting a lot of investment and a lot of awareness of Quin and what we're doing.

A lot of crowdfunding is about mobilizing your own network — and I use that term very broadly: customers we'd connected with over the years through our research, people we've worked with in the past, everyone in our ecosystem. So a lot of it is who do you know, and reaching out to them directly. We did email campaigns, ads on social media, one-to-one personal outreach. You have to work to mobilize your network, and get them to mobilize their network, and their network, and so on. It's a very hands-on, gritty job.

It is crazy, actually. I was a managing director in a much larger business before I started Quin, and it was a real shock to go into startup mode — two girls in a garage — and build up from there. One of the things you realize is that so much of the work is going to be done by the man in the mirror. In my past context I'd have had a whole team: "I'll delegate this to this one, that to that one." And suddenly that's over — for now, anyway. So it was a real shock to transition from a large corporate context to a startup.

The key thing for me is that, even in the corporate world, it's always about building a team — getting the right people on board, the right people in the right seats on the bus, and getting them working well together. One thing we've managed to do at Quin is build an incredible team: our head of product is really strong in product and in people and leadership; our head of marketing is very strong. We've basically got good leaders, plus others who are interested in developing into leadership roles, who we can grow. I used to have a great mentor — a lovely guy — and back in my corporate days, whatever problem I brought him, he'd say: "you've got to get some leverage." Meaning: who's going to help you solve this, because you can't just do it on your own. That's always in my mind — leverage, leverage, leverage. Even when it was just me and Isabella, I was always thinking about how this gets beyond the two of us. And the way you get leverage is by hiring great people and giving them space to be great — getting the right people in the right seats, and building a culture where they can flourish and bring all their gifts and talents. That's always been my leadership strategy. Well — my first few leadership jobs I failed at miserably, so I wouldn't say always. But that's what I learned from those failures: you really just have to get great people and give them space to be great.

It's quite basic, actually. I'm doing an application right now for something for women founders, and it asked me to describe my founder journey — starting with my life journey. For me, the start is: grew up on a hog farm in Nebraska. And when I got to the end of it, what I wrote was that I think hog farming prepared me more for founding a business than twenty years of being an engineer and a managing director. Because it gives you grit. Starting a business is hard work — I know there are founders out there who present this "six hours a day and yoga on the side" thing, but that has not been my experience. It's very hard work. I've never worked harder in my life than I did growing up, zero to seventeen, on that hog farm. You just have to work. So that grit, perseverance, resilience — a lot of it is just being willing and able to stick things through.

The other thing, for me, is seeing things from the perspective of eternity — where you are as a little dot on a timeline. This thing that seems so horrible and massive right now, in five years you'll look back and go, "isn't that funny." Like my co-founder leaving — which was a horrible experience to go through — but you keep it in perspective. You're working so hard, but you've got to hold things a little loosely as well. Ride a bit loosely in the saddle, don't be so uptight, because in so many ways more things go wrong than go right when you're founding a business. You've got to be able to take the bumps and the shakes and keep it in perspective. And those two things come from hog farming more than anything else — because hog farming is hard too, and it's not certain in any way.