Episode Summary

• Thesis: Build trust and liquidity in pre‑owned luxury watches via verticalized marketplace + robust authentication.
• Fundraising tactic: Compress meetings into tight windows to generate simultaneous term sheets; prioritize strategic value over price alone.
• Press strategy: Consolidate announcement post‑launch to amplify demand and credibility.
• Founder advice: Recruit experienced operators as early angels; turn investors into customers; avoid under‑capitalizing; track SAFE dilution meticulously.

What is Bezel?

Bezel is an authenticated luxury watch marketplace, designed app‑first with a premium buying experience. Purchases are routed to Bezel’s Los Angeles HQ for multi‑point, in‑house authentication—including inspection, time‑loss and pressure tests, and stolen‑status checks—before overnight shipping to the buyer. The platform lists over $300M in watches, with a typical 3–5 day purchase‑to‑delivery window.

Founding Team

• Quaid Walker — Product/design background at Google; watch enthusiast turned marketplace founder.
• Chase Pion — Finance/ops; lifelong watch aficionado; internal CFO discipline.
• Darrell Johnson — CTO; product execution + implementation focus; former Google colleague.

Seed Raise: Strategy & Timeline

• Aug 2021: Initial ~$3.5M via SAFEs as founders left roles; led by seed‑stage specialists (Box Group, Courtside, Abstract) plus operator angels and respected dealers.
• Jan–Jun 2022: Product launched (June) after private beta and operational build‑out.
• Late 2022: Additional ~$6M strategic SAFE capital; market shifted to metrics‑driven diligence.
• Jan 2023: Consolidated $8M+ seed announcement (e.g., Bloomberg) to maximize brand lift and demand.

Celebrity Investors as Active Partners

Notable collectors—including John Legend, Kevin Hart, Steve Aoki, Michael Rubin, and Kyle Kuzma—participated via personal checks, family offices, or funds. Many engage directly for product feedback and amplification, leveraging their roles in shaping modern collecting culture.

Term Sheets, SAFEs & Valuation Discipline

• Tight process concentrated 70+ meetings into 2–3 weeks to stimulate simultaneous offers.
• SAFE approach: clean caps (no discounts), rigorous internal cap‑table tracking to avoid dilution surprises.
• Round construction: prioritize strategic value (supply, buyers, press) over price alone; leave room for operators and category leaders.

Advice to Founders

• Recruit operator angels early for hands‑on guidance.
• Where possible, make investors your customers to accelerate product‑market fit.
• Avoid under‑capitalizing; target ~24 months runway; track SAFE math relentlessly.
• Time PR to product readiness; consolidate announcements for outsized impact.

Full Transcript

Jason Kirby: Everyone, welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. You have myself, Jason Kirby, Founder and Manager—Founder and Manager—ah, damn it. I don't know why I only screwed that up the first time. All right. Welcome everyone to Fundraising Demystified. Today we have Quaid Walker on the show with us from Bezel. Thanks for joining us on the show today, Quaid.

Quaid: It's all good.

Quaid: Awesome, thanks so much for having me.

Jason Kirby: Well, I would love for you to just go straight into just sharing a little bit about you and your background and how that led to you starting Bezel.

Quaid: Absolutely. So, first off, Bezel is an authenticated luxury watch marketplace. And I guess the best way to probably start is to go into my background a little bit to kind of walk through how we started it. So my background, I spent most my career at Google. While I was there, I was very much kind of on the product design and product side of the court there. But I was also kind of obsessed with watches while I was there. So my very first bonus that I ever received from Google, I bought a Rolex with it and some would say that maybe it wasn't the most rational decision at the time, but I got to have this really awesome experience of nerding out in the watch space, realizing the very liquid aspect of the space, watching these prices fluctuate and change and I got very hooked to the mechanical nature of the industry. It was such an interesting juxtaposition to what I was doing every single day, staying at my computer screen, building technology products. And the way that kind of Bezel started for me was, it was such an intimidating process to buy my first watch. I was one of the naive individuals kind of in the early stage of my career where I thought I could walk into a Rolex boutique and just take a bag of money to buy the watch. And in reality, there's massive wait lists for all the pieces that I had wanted. And I was kind of politely ushered out of the door and pushed into the secondary market. And then once I was in the secondary market, it became this very much shop the seller mentality. It was on me to vet the sellers and who to trust and different collectors gave me different pieces of feedback and there was just generally a lot of distrust associated with a lot of the existing marketplaces at play. My local dealers didn't have what I wanted in stock and I was just so used to buying sneakers and other verticalized products like StockX and GOAT, that kind of my expectation as a buyer and a product person was how do we build something or something should exist like this in the watch space. So that's kind of what naturally kicked that off. My co-founders and I happened to all be kind of watch and kind of technology adjacent individuals and we kind of jammed on the product from there. And the goal with Bezel was how do you build out a product where you have the vast inventory of the watch world, but everything that I transact on, I know that Bezel is authenticating it and I can trust that aspect of the purchase. So the way that Bezel works is we have just north of 300 million in watches available on the platform today. We are app first, so the goal is to kind of have a really premium product that feels like it's built around the luxury of the products that we are selling and does them justice. Anything that is purchased overnights to us, we have our headquarters in Los Angeles, it’s going through multiple hands. We have a really robust authentication team in house, so they're doing everything from inspecting multiple touch points of the watch to running it against a time-loss test, a pressure test, or making sure it was never reported stolen. The whole goal is to make sure if you are buying a watch on the platform, you are getting everything that you could expect and more. We then overnight the watch to you, and the goal is, you know, you press purchase, and within three to five days you're receiving the watch. You can put it on your wrist and really what you expected you would buy.

Jason Kirby: So I appreciate you giving us context on the brand and the offering and you know something I always like to kind of dive into that I don't always get the opportunity to do so in these stories is, you know, you have a great kind of origin story of a personal need seeing the opportunity but what about your co-founders? How did you find your co-founders? Did you already have an existing relationship and kind of how did you assemble that original team?

Quaid: It's a great question and really happy you asked it because when I talk to founders, it's the thing that I'm most excited about is that we have—I got so lucky with the co-founders that I have in this team and I think that's so important. So it's three of us. One of my co-founders name is Chase Pion. He has very much a finance background and an operational background. He comes from kind of the finance and the hedge fund world. He's also been one of my best friends since I was in third grade. So we have such an interesting complementary skill set that when I thought about building this business, he was always the person I would call and he would help me validate things and 99.9% of the concepts that we wanted to work on in the past, he would shut down for a host of reasons. He was kind of the one that was responsible for the viability from a financial perspective of the business. And he happened, I called him the day I thought about this and it was a very different response. Like he took it very seriously. It wasn't like you're crazy. And we went out and kind of did an analysis in the industry. He happened to have been even more of a watch guy than I was. I didn't really grow up in a family that wore watches. I always thought they were interesting. I grew up surfing and loved having aquatic watches on my wrist to kind of back up that lifestyle. But it wasn't until I kind of got my first meaningful paycheck that I was able to kind of dive into the collecting aspect of watches. Chase, I think, grew up with a background where he always had watch magazines and was obsessed with that. So that's my kind of co-founder on that side. And then Darrell Johnson is our CTO and our third co-founder. Him and I had worked on previous startups together and jammed on things in the past. He was at Google with me so we had built like a really awesome friendship around building products and I think Darrell's superpower is he cares about the product execution as much as he cares about the implementation of it. Like he wants to build really beautiful amazing products and that just is so important in the vertical that we are. If you're selling luxury the goal is that the product should feel like it represents that and Darrell appreciated watches, but I think now seeing it kind of from the belly of the beast, he now has a collection that he's built up. So he's been able to kind of experience it through the product as kind of a new user would, which has been so awesome to see. So I think we're coming at it from all angles where Chase was probably the biggest watch head out of all of us. I was kind of a more, you know, budding enthusiast with a couple of Rolexes and APs and things like that. And Darrell was relatively fresher. So we're able to kind of cover all aspects of the spectrum here at Bezel.

Jason Kirby: No, it's a great founding story. And it's fun to kind of hear those origin stories where you get to work with such a close friend for such a long time. It's not common that skill sets align with friendships that last that long.

Quaid: It certainly makes the late nights a lot easier and more fun when you love who you're working with.

Jason Kirby: That's fair. Well, let's dive into the meat of it. Let's talk about your fundraise. You announced an $8 million seed raise in early this year, around January 2022—or sorry, 2023. Tell us about your fundraising journey, from what you told me prior to this call as chopped up in a couple of bits and then kind of consolidated into one clean announcement. Walk us through what your strategy was and the timeline of everything, from getting that first check to closing out your last check.

Quaid: Absolutely. And I think the important thing to mention is that my co-founders and myself are first-time founders. So we had robust product backgrounds that had launched a lot of things within larger organizations, but this is our first step at doing something larger ourselves. So we were very intentional about a fundraising process. The way that we broke everything out: we closed our first round in August of 2021. We closed that round just as we were segueing out of our jobs. I came from the Google background and had launched Google TV while I was there and got to see that trajectory of going from a four‑person team to a multi‑hundred‑person team and an idea on a whiteboard to a product that Google launches. So I understood the life cycle of that, but the fundraising process was incredibly intimidating when you first start. So we started by making sure we had angel checks to help segue us into a more thoughtful approach. I had operators who had previous exits or had built awesome businesses—really impressive operators. They were our earliest angel checks. My third call after Chase was one of these operators who said, here's a $25k check—whatever you're doing, I'm here to support you. He quarterbacked a lot of the early meetings. We ended up raising $3.5M in our first round before we left our jobs. We structured that round intentionally: (1) seed specialists like Box Group, Courtside Ventures, and Abstract Ventures; (2) cultural leaders in modern watch collecting (e.g., John Legend, Michael Rubin, Kevin Hart, Steve Aoki, Kyle Kuzma); and (3) deep watch experts like respected dealers to bolster credibility and unlock early hires in authentication.

Jason Kirby: And what was it like raising money from notable celebrities like Kevin Hart and Steve Aoki? Did you meet with them, or was it through managers?

Quaid: Great question. We were lucky that even in the first round, when we were just a deck, most of the notable investors built a personal relationship with us. It's not a conceptually complex product: many are watch fanatics and have felt the pain of sourcing and trust, so calls often turned into collecting chats. We got intros via VCs and angels, jumped on calls, and the vision resonated. Many still roll up their sleeves—e.g., we recently asked John Legend for product feedback on an unreleased feature and he hopped on a call. In other cases it depended: some personal checks, some via family offices, some via their venture funds, each with different processes and diligence.

Jason Kirby: In your fundraise across celebrities, angels, and funds, what were the friction points? Were you constantly pounding the pavement, or did it click quickly? How did you get them to the table?

Quaid: We launched in early July (2021). Timing wasn’t perfect—people were traveling—but we ran a very tight process: ~70+ meetings in 2–3 weeks. The goal was to compress conversations so term sheets arrived simultaneously and created a faster, competitive environment. It went comparatively smoothly, acknowledging the 2021 market. Still a roller coaster of no’s, maybe’s, and yes’s. Once the first yes landed, the challenge became fitting the right people in while respecting ownership targets and saving space for key strategics.

Quaid: For context, we raised $3.5M in Aug 2021 via SAFEs; we like keeping a SAFE open for ongoing strategics. We decided to hold off on a Series A and raised ~${6}M more in late 2022 from strategics. The second tranche was a very different market: less storytelling, more metrics and product differentiation. We fused both into a larger seed and announced it in January 2023.

Jason Kirby: Why hold off on the announcement and consolidate it?

Quaid: Planned answer: focus on building the foundation and leverage the announcement as a “we’ve arrived” moment. We left our jobs and raised in Aug 2021, spent ~a year building a complex two‑sided marketplace with logistics and authentication, opened a closed beta in Jan 2022, and launched publicly in June 2022. We then raised additional strategic capital and pushed the announcement to Jan 2023 for a splashier $8M+ headline in Bloomberg. It worked: 2023 brought strong growth, including multiple 50% MoM spurts.

Jason Kirby: Exactly—that’s strategic. Plus your audience includes HNW individuals who read outlets like Bloomberg and WSJ. Announcing post‑launch meant maximizing conversion and avoiding early‑UX hiccups.

Quaid: One of our earliest operator investors challenged us to treat fundraising as a way to gain an unfair advantage beyond capital: leverage investors for press, buyers, and supply. We intentionally built a cap table we’d envy as a competitor. That lens shaped both who we brought in and when we announced.

Jason Kirby: When the market responded and you had multiple term sheets, how did you choose partners?

Quaid: The tight process produced concurrent term sheets, which keeps control with founders. Our decisions were easier because we’d pre‑defined which investors created the right strategic scaffolding (access to supply, buyers, and operational know‑how). Saying no was still stressful, but many who didn’t get allocation early came in later as strategics.

Jason Kirby: Any wide discrepancies in terms or valuation?

Quaid: In 2021, we protected dilution by not jumping at early, lower offers, and instead using the compressed process to improve terms and align on ownership through increased check sizes at higher caps. In late 2022, it was less about walking up the number and more about justifying it with metrics to sophisticated investors without the same inside look.

Jason Kirby: Roughly how many VCs did you meet or pitch?

Quaid: Hundreds across angels and institutions. We take meetings broadly; worst case, you learn or gain an intro. Many who passed became customers—not a bad outcome for a marketplace selling what VCs personally enjoy.

Jason Kirby: You mentioned SAFEs all the way through—no priced round yet. How are you thinking about stacking SAFEs and a future equity round?

Quaid: We kept SAFEs clean (caps only, no discounts) and maintained an internal priced‑round simulation to track dilution precisely. SAFEs let us move fast and keep legal costs low. A future Series A will likely be priced, but if the market supported it, we’d still prefer SAFEs, provided we track them responsibly.

Jason Kirby: Sensible. Discounts can make things hairy. Diligence is slower now; larger raises tend to be equity. How are you thinking about runway and timing?

Quaid: We over‑provisioned runway so we don’t have to raise until we want to. Biggest learning: don’t under‑capitalize. Aim for ~24 months, then approach the market from a position of strength with metrics that stand on their own.

Jason Kirby: Parting advice for founders currently raising?

Quaid: Get experienced operators as early angels—they’re the first calls for real‑world problems (hiring, payroll, term‑sheet nuance). If you can, make investors your customers: SaaS pilots, marketplace buyers or suppliers. It creates a forgiving early feedback loop and accelerates traction.

Jason Kirby: Where can people learn more?

Quaid: Bezel: getbezel.com or search “Bezel” in the App Store (iOS). Reach me on LinkedIn or email quaid@getbezel.com.

Jason Kirby: Founders often commemorate milestones with a watch. When you’re ready for that memento, you know where to go.

Quaid: If you’re a founder celebrating a win, ping our concierge and we’ll help you find something.

Jason Kirby: Quaid, thanks for coming on. This was great.

FAQ