Full Transcript

Jason Kirby: Hey everyone, this is Jason Kirby, founder and director of Thunder.VC, welcoming Brett Martin to the show today. Thanks so much for joining us, Brett.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Howdy, great to be here, thank you.

Jason Kirby: No, we're great to have you and...

Jason Kirby: All right, we're gonna do that one more time. I just completely lost you. Usually it catches up, so I'm not sure. We lost audio, so I wasn't sure what happened there. So we'll just start over real quick and go back into it. And then I'm picking up a little bit of white noise. Let me see if I can eliminate that. So you're just going off the MacBook speaker, correct?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Okay, cool.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, I'm just on my computer.

Jason Kirby: Is there like an AC or something running?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): No, it's actually my laptop. But you're hearing the laptop, but I just closed everything on my MacBook, so that should stop in a second.

Jason Kirby: I was just overheating.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): I don't know why, I just closed every other application, so... Let me see...

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): I just see what is using so much power here.

Jason Kirby: It's really cranking on you.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): This thing?

Jason Kirby: Now, well, it won't be if it's consistent like this, it usually could be chopped out. So we'll go ahead and just get started. Um, that's all restart. Everyone, this is Jason Kirby here, founder and manager director of Thunder.VC, welcoming Brett Martin to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Alright.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): cool.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Howdy Jason, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Jason Kirby: We're fortunate to have you and it would be great for you to tell the audience a little bit about your background and the fact that you're a VC and also the founder of Kumo Space. So, love for you just to kind of take it away.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, so I'm the co‑founder president of Kumo Space. Kumo Space is a virtual office for remote and distributed teams to show up in and work together every day. You can either call it a productivity software or a B2B metaverse, depending on who your audience is. I'm also the co‑founder and a GP at Charge Ventures. It's a New York‑based pre‑seed, seed‑stage venture capital firm. And then the little bit of time I have left, adjunct professor of data analytics and machine learning at Columbia Business School. So, trying to stay busy over here.

Jason Kirby: Oh wow. Yeah, you most certainly are. That's awesome. And it would be great for you to kind of tell a little bit about the story of your role at Kumo Space as a founder and kind of how that idea came to life.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, well, you know, I had just—I was investing full time at Charge. You know, we're on our third fund in eight years and during the pandemic. So when the pandemic hit, beforehand, we used to throw a monthly happy hour for angel investors at Charge and it was a great source of deal flow. Good way to kind of keep the network warm. And then when the pandemic hit, everyone obviously couldn't do that and everyone said, well, why don't you bring this online? And having a Zoom meeting for 50 of my friends every month didn't actually sound like that good of a time. And so I called up my old buddy and co‑founder of multiple other companies, his name's Yang Mao; we've known each other, built two companies together. And I said, Yang, what are you up to? He said, well, I'm about to just quit my job and start another company in the mobile QA space. And I said, Yang, you might make some money doing that, but that sounds so boring. Why don't we solve this massive problem around video conferencing and the fact that it's all kind of one‑to‑many and there's nowhere you can have an organic conversation with multiple groups of people coming in and out of conversations. And yeah, that's how it started. So initially he came back two weeks later with a prototype and initially I was just gonna advise and then I was just gonna angel invest and then I was gonna invest out of the fund and then we're gonna incubate it out of the fund. And then it came time to, you know, we were ready to raise and he's like, are you just gonna do this with me or what? And I said, okay, let's do it.

Jason Kirby: You try to stay out of it but couldn't resist.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): The best ideas are like that.

Jason Kirby: No, it's awesome. And then, you know, kind of what was the journey from you guys kind of bootstrap it to get it off the ground? You raise some initial capital. What was kind of the fundraising journey?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Well, you know, as an investor, I feel like there's lots of things—if I see them and they have high growth and network effects and virality and technology moats and a good team—you know, usually I just try to give them money and get out of the way; it’s a lot easier way of making money than building. But with this particular one, the mission of Kumo Space is so near and dear to my heart, which is: how do you use technology to help people connect in more authentic sort of human interaction? And now we focus—we build virtual offices. So it's like, people are spending all day on Zoom and having meetings, but they feel isolated. And how do you use technology to make them feel connected? That had a personal mission for me. And so we were lucky, we started it—we started building in May of 2020, and then launched it on the internet in August and it's inherently viral. People are inviting their friends and meeting each other in Kumo Space. So it just started growing organically. Nothing is perfectly organic. You still have to hawk it to all of your friends and email everyone you know. So obviously, we're doing all of that. And it just started to grow. And so we were going to raise a pre‑seed. And in fact, Charge was going to lead that—that's my fund—but then it was already taking off so we just kind of jumped straight to the seed and, you know, Boldstart—which is a seed‑stage fund based in New York; old friends of mine; they're probably the best infrastructure fund in New York—they led it, and that was mostly based on, you know, a personal relationship. I had wanted to work with those guys for more than a decade.

Jason Kirby: No, that's amazing. I don't want to overshadow the fact that like, you just kind of like downplayed it a little bit. Oh, we just sent it out to some friends to kind of get some initial traction. Like, but like, you know, really, what was that concerted effort to get that initial user base? Because obviously you're capitalizing on the fact that everyone feels disconnected. You know, the world is shut down and, you know, here's this alternative solution. But like, really, what was the effort that you guys put in, in terms of getting that initial traction?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, so I mean... We're lucky—we're product guys mostly, in the sense that we, if the product wasn't going to sell itself and spread itself, then we probably wouldn't be in this business. And so I think we're lucky in the sense that—but you know, we used content, you know, we viewed our Kumo Space as the content. So meetings as content that could be shared and distributed. And so, you know, my thesis on any kind of social app is that you have to make it really easy to create, share, and consume compelling content and if you can do that then you have a chance to grow organically. So people were basically creating spaces, putting them—Kumo Spaces, which is like a little virtual world where you can have meetings or video chat in—and then they were sharing them with their friends, inviting their friends and then we had a kind of a key, you know, what they call K‑Factor or virality. So for every one person that we added, they would probably add another half of a person. So for every two people that we brought into Kumo Space, they would bring another person. And so things grow—you get kind of nice organic lift. And so we just, obviously created lists, looked 10 years in New York tech, we know a fair number of people who run events or who are also looking for technology solutions right then. And so emailing them, getting in their hands, getting their feedback and having them invite their friends. And so it really just started to grow—or it did really, did grow—organically with a little bit of a kickstart.

Jason Kirby: No, and I'm glad you bring up the virality factor. I feel like a lot of startups, especially if you're in the social space—like trying to build a social app—if you don't have a virality factor to your app, there's just no growth potential at that point. And there's clearly not product‑market fit. So I'm glad you kind of bring up that point of just how you had a user get another user, you know, organically. And so you go out, okay.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): On that note, actually, I saw a funny tweet the other day from Sam Altman, who ran Y Combinator and now runs OpenAI, the ChatGPT startup. And he said, you know, years of advising startups that they have to have a multiplayer, baked‑in inherent virality, etc.—he's like, we’ve done it. This is OpenAI. I don’t know what I was talking about.

Jason Kirby: Ha ha ha

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Which is funny because I do think that, you know, you look at the OpenAI Chat product—it's like this thing is begging for a multiplayer use case. So it could grow—fastest‑growing startup of all time. It could grow even faster if they had actually put in the right social loops.

Jason Kirby: I know, I saw that tweet too and I thought it was hilarious. It was just like, you know, take every piece of advice with a grain of salt at the end of the day. Like there are playbooks that work and then there are playing outside the books also works just depending on your situation. But again, what it really comes down to is product‑market fit. If you have a great product, it should be able to sell itself. And if you don't have that, then that leads to ultimately either having to pivot or finding alternatives. So you guys skip the pre‑seed. So you get it off the ground, get some momentum, you're on the hot market, you go straight to the seed. So walk us through how did you decide how much to raise and how many VCs were involved in that particular round?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, I mean. It's funny, this trend toward everyone saying, okay, this is how much I'm raising. And I mean, you know, we had a model and sort of said, okay, we think that with a couple of million dollars, we can probably get this to several hundred thousand MAUs, which we felt like would be sufficient to go raise an A.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): But I think from the outside, a lot of times, raising money looks like VC looks like an ATM machine where you insert a pitch deck and then outcomes a couple million dollars. When in reality, most of these things are founded on multi‑year relationships. That's how someone can feel comfortable having a call with you and then giving you a million dollars because they've already known you for 10 years and seen you, seen your career progression or worked with you on prior deals. So, we reached out to Boldstart. Frankly, the backstory there is that on my first company, which is called Sonar—it's a long, convoluted story—but I was going to raise a round and it was actually gonna be a recap round, so kind of a painful round. And after months of trying to put it together, actually the Boldstart guys were the ones who put it off the table and were gonna help me through it. Now that never actually materialized—and I need, it's too early, it's 10 a.m. here, I need a beer to tell that story. But I always wanted to work with them, and I remembered them being like, okay, these are people I wanna work with. And so I built a, shared deals with them for the next 10 years and then when it came time—I took 10 years between startups—when it came time to run it back, they were the top people on my list. So basically I pinged a couple folks on a Friday afternoon and said, hey, I pinged Boldstart on Saturday at 11; by 12:30 we were in Kumo Space—in our product—having a meeting and then by Monday we had basically shook hands on terms. So that's how fast the market was moving in 2021, but I honestly think that's just how fast Boldstart works generally. So to show you how quickly you have to move to get a deal.

Jason Kirby: Well, and see, I think that's something also—granted, 2020–2021 were a bit of the anomaly years and things are slowing down. But that kind of gut instinct or that quick buy‑in—whether you get a term sheet immediately—but when you start to see the other side of the table engage that quickly, you know, again, like product‑market fit, building something that's solving a big problem—these boxes being checked that quickly. And now, granted, you have the relationships, so that makes things accelerate a lot faster because there's the inherent trust that doesn't have to start from scratch. But I feel a lot of founders come in and, you know, the VC is not going back and forth with you and having that kind of banter back and forth to establish the opportunity, then a lot of founders need to realize that that's probably not going to work out and not going to be a fit. And in your case, you had the relationship. It was quick and fast and I would say accelerated to the extreme given just the state of the market back then. And so that was just the seed round, correct? And so you guys raised a couple million bucks. What happened thereafter? Did you guys hit your milestones and then set up a Series A? What kind of happened to the business after you raised that money?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Correct.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, well, it's—so we raised, you know, we raised that seed and we took some money from some other angels that we really wanted to be a part of the round. And then it became time to build. I mean, to be fair, at that point, you know, Kumo Space was only two employees. We had hired, you know, we had one MBA from Columbia who was helping us out, and I think we had just hired a consultant. So, it was really just me and Yang at that point. And so we took the seed money and actually built out a little bit of a team, hired some additional engineers and sort of took what was essentially a proof of concept and re‑platformed it so that it could scale. And what happened then is we were continuing to grow organically; we were kind of doing hand‑to‑hand combat stuff to grow. And then one week, we had this crazy spike in users and we were like, you know, where did that come from? What happened? And Trace sat down and found this random TikTok post that some user had posted about having a tea party in Kumo Space. And we were like, oh wow, that's pretty interesting, and how the power of social here for driving traffic. And so we said, okay, can we recreate this? And so we started doing influencer marketing and driving traffic, driving traffic, but we couldn't figure out how to scale it. So it's pretty laborious. I'm not sure if folks here have done influencer—I feel like it's probably the best channel still today, especially after all these changes that Apple and Facebook made for advertising. Anyway, you know—it's, you got to find the people that are relevant to your audience. You got to figure out how to get in touch with them. You have to email them. You have to negotiate with them, get them your content, track it, give them a UTM tracking code, and then see how it performs. It's a pretty manual process. And so we spent several months trying to figure out, okay, how do we actually scale this, and then we eventually got some good software in place. We actually use a company called Grin, that I'm an angel investor in, that does influencer marketing software and basically helps with that whole sort of sourcing‑to‑supplying‑to‑tracking influencers. And we eventually got that running and so we could scale up. So we figured out how to do—okay, we can actually have 10, 20, 30 people posting about Kumo Space and because we have that content—we talked about video chat as content—we were just getting that all over social and we were acquiring users for less than 10 cents a registration, which is obviously pretty cost‑effective customer acquisition. And we realized, okay, we had that set up. And then in the fall—pretty much the end of 2022—we said, okay, we've got this thing growing; we got hundreds of thousands of monthly users growing; now let's throw on monetization. And so we released our first paid product and it pretty much ripped. I mean, we went from zero to close to a million run‑rate in three months. And so obviously that was the right time to fundraise. When you have everything going up and to the right—it doesn't always last—so when you've got it, I think as an entrepreneur, you gotta capitalize on it. And that's when we went out for the A.

Jason Kirby: So beautifully said and that's what I coach so many founders on is inflection points. Like how can you time your fundraise around an inflection point where everything ramps up because it could be short‑lived and if it's short‑lived you want to get that capital in the door as quickly as possible because it starts to level off and investors are like, oh maybe this isn't so hot, or terms start to change a little bit. So that's incredible to hear how you guys leveraged that so quickly. And then, you know, so you kind of flip on the monetization. Imagine subscription for teams or companies to kind of pay per users—is that effectively the model?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, well, I mean, we've iterated a bunch of times since then, but—

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): At the time, I think we were doing kind of a capacity‑based pricing—sort of like how you'd price a wedding or something—you have a space for 100 people, with a real‑estate analogy. Since then, we've moved toward more of a traditional per‑seat, per‑employee, per‑month model—really simple, right down the middle.

Jason Kirby: That makes sense. And pivoting on the model—did you deal with any pushback from customers? Was it more of a clear fit and that's why you did it and customers liked it? Or did you have any pushback from your existing paying customers that ramped up so quickly?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): I think one thing that we definitely did—and a lot of entrepreneurs do—is you're really precious about pricing. I remember the first time, before we launched pricing, I spent literally a month thinking through 10 different pricing models and modeled them out and agonized over the decision. Then we launched it and sometimes some of it works, some of it doesn't. And now we just change pricing all the time—constantly. Every month we probably try something different on pricing just because you realize that as a startup you can't be too worried about upsetting your existing customers—not because they're not important; they're obviously super important—but just that for you to work for them, you need to find a sustainable business model that works. And so if it's not working, then it's not really gonna serve them long‑term either. So you have to keep iterating quickly and you realize just not to be so precious with it because if you're gonna be 10× in a year, that's way more important than not rocking the boat for where you are today.

Jason Kirby: Yeah, no, I completely agree with that sentiment. So you guys hit this inflection point, you're monetizing, you're getting to a million ARR very quickly. What happens when you go out for the A? Walk us through that process of how you say, all right, now's the time, and then how did you execute to close and what was that timeline?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Well, yeah—I think the process is working with—if you already have a raise, so you're going out for an A, you already have your seed investors. Get everyone lined up; get your Google CRM, your Google Sheet; put in all of the people that you already know or you've been wanting to work with; solicit all the referrals from your existing investors and rank‑order them, prioritize them. You do a couple quote‑unquote throwaway meetings with people that probably aren't your first pick, but you can at least get the kinks out of the presentation. Then it's having all your docs in place, having everything orderly. What I like to do is FOMO fundraising. Essentially, you have to maximize FOMO for investors because it's all about creating heat on your deal. So in this case, the best is you pick a couple of people that—six months in advance—you say, okay, these are the four or five people I really want to work with. You meet those people; you tell them what you're going to do. You meet them three months later; you show proof of execution—this is what I said I was going to do; I did exactly this—so you're starting to connect the dots on your ability to execute. And then ideally, right before you do your fundraise, you release some news or you create some catalyst; you launch a new product; you get some press, which has them wanting to talk to you. Then they come to you. In an ideal world, you coordinate all this and then you kick off your fundraise—same thing: tell close people on Friday, we're going to start fundraising next week; I'm giving you the weekend head start. If they're really interested, they'll lean in. And then that Monday you email your first ten people. Keep adding people to the pipe, as many as you can manage. You don't want to email everyone because you'll get swamped and you won't be able to respond timely, and timeliness is so important. Have about 10–15 people in your pipeline at any given time and as people drop out, add in maybe 2× as many to keep pressure going. You'll know pretty quickly. One mistake entrepreneurs make a lot is trying to convince people who aren't interested to be interested, but in reality it's about finding people that are interested. It's more of getting more people into the top.

Jason Kirby: I love the “don't convince people that aren't interested.” There's so much chasing of investors that gave a no or stayed ambiguous or “come back later”—clearly not leaning in. And there's this like, oh, but if I just give ’em this one piece of information, it's going to change their mind. It never works, maybe 0.01% of the time. It's like that Dumb and Dumber “so you're saying I got a chance.” It's not usually worth pursuing in most cases.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, it's a bad use of everyone's time. And investors have a hard time with it because they don't want to miss the next big thing and they want to keep optionality. They are never trying to say no at the end of the day, but you spending your time trying to convince them is a terrible use of time. Just find more people. And it always works best when you find the person who is already looking for what you're building. They have the idea in their head—“this is such a great idea”—and then you show it to them. That works amazing because then they feel like it's their idea. You need to make investors feel like your idea is their idea, and that's the easiest way to get them across the finish line.

Jason Kirby: That's well said. And so when did you guys go out to market for your Series A? When was that initial outreach?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah, I mean, we were trying to take—you could feel the market was hot at the end of Q4 ’21. We realized we had to move. Another thing entrepreneurs don't realize: for me, it's so much about predictability. Investors are terrified of unpredictability. They want to see consistent growth that looks predictable—the trend line keeps going. What I recommend is: when can you manufacture six months of steady growth? You need the first three months; when you think you can predict six months, you're ready to start your fundraise. The first three months are creating the track record. Once you have three months of growth (really for a seed or Series A company), ask: can you absolutely guarantee another three months? You can't have your growth peter out mid‑raise. Once you have three months, and you think you can do another three, it's go time. Have the 10 tricks up your sleeve to control growth: adding markets, channels, customer deals you can close. As you're fundraising, each month that goes by you can update investors with another 20–30% growth month. It's about creating that window where you control predictability. The worst thing that can happen is a down month mid‑raise. You're not just out a month—you’re set back 3–4 months to rebuild predictability.

Jason Kirby: It's harsh but true—and a lot of founders need to hear it. Many say “now we need money”—that won’t work in most cases. If you don't have manufactured growth and everything you just said, it's a massive uphill battle to convince investors to take a leap. Mitigate risk by creating predictability and consistent growth; a choppy line is much harder.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): And some might say, is that disingenuous? No—that’s what public market investors look for, too. SaaS trades at high multiples because of predictable revenue and steady growth; miss estimates and the stock gets clobbered. It's the same thing smaller‑scale: create predictable growth at seed stage and it's super valuable. That's what investors want.

Jason Kirby: Back to the timeline: you picked up that the market's hot Q4 2021—peak hotness. Is that when you started the growth—manufacturing the next six months? What was that?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Look, we had great timing—got lucky on the market cycle; we didn’t know the top. The takeaway is: we had created a predictable growth machine from marketing, we knew how to scale and control growth. That’s when we started thinking about fundraising. We took a risk on monetization—unclear at first—but when it ramped, we pushed fundraising forward. Many people say “we'll keep growing a few more months and raise at a bigger valuation.” But multiples are as much about growth and consistency as absolute numbers. You might be at 2× revenue in six months but growing half as fast; investors extrapolate trend lines. You'd rather have a shorter but steeper curve to raise than risk slowed growth later. We moved as soon as revenue worked, saying it may never get better than this—let's hop on it.

Jason Kirby: And I think that's—correct me if I'm wrong—being a founder prior to VC, then back into the founder seat: what kind of insights did you uniquely gather being on the other side and use them to convince others? Safe assumption?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): 100%. I’ve invested in things where everything is up and to the right pre‑investment, then goes sideways. That happens often; fundraising presents the best possible picture—that's part of the job. I don't get upset; I try to avoid it, but it happens. Having seen that, I understand what's compelling and how to take advantage of the dynamics. Another thing—from my first company: time kills deals. That's really important for anyone fundraising. Everything is about moving fast and keeping things moving. If things slow down, that's where you die. A lot of entrepreneurs get hung up on this term or that term or valuation and hem back and forth. If you don't have a term sheet yet, you don't have ground to stand on—unless you're profitable (rare at seed). Over‑negotiating doesn't make sense if you don't have options. All that matters is getting options on the table.

Jason Kirby: I completely agree with “time kills deals.” Happened to me in a previous company—we were selling to Samsung, had an acquisition offer. Everything was amazing, but our board pushed for more. That killed three weeks. In 2017 Samsung had a regime change and the day before closing the new CEO killed every deal on the table. We lost by hours—champagne at the office—then a text: it's dead. Brutal. We ended up selling to Walmart, but unnecessary negotiation cost us. I'm glad you mentioned momentum—if a VC isn’t responsive, look elsewhere. VCs find better deals; don’t put all eggs in one basket.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Especially in this market—it's been brutal and I think it'll get worse. We haven't seen the mass startup extinction event looming. People are still working off war chests from 2020–2021; many who raised at inflated valuations haven’t had to go back out or they raised seed extensions last year. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Savvy entrepreneurs have reduced costs, prolonged runway, and are getting cash in. They're not squeamish about down rounds—they're getting deals done because survival is the name of the game for the next couple years.

Jason Kirby: I have a whole thesis we'll see massive consolidation. So much money invested into tech and talent in the boom cycle; many founders weren't quick enough to respond to capital drying up. They may have built something valuable or have a valuable team—cash‑rich buyers will gobble companies up. Lots of me‑too companies raised on similar premises; we'll see top two acquired and the rest fall out. I think you're right—we'll continue to see a mass exodus as capital becomes more difficult to raise.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): 100%—so get whatever you can while you can.

Jason Kirby: Also, building relationships with VCs even when you’re not raising: you've had the fortune of being a founder, then VC, back to founder—those relationships helped you capitalize on a quick raise and add credibility. But also nothing beats a solid business: accelerating growth and a great product. From Crunchbase it says you closed the round in August—was that the close date or just when you made it public last year?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): With larger rounds, you don't close all at once. You can get a lead and then fill out the rest. We locked down at the end of the year and then filled out throughout 2022.

Jason Kirby: And how is Kumo Space doing now? What's been the journey after raising that capital and where do you see the future of Kumo Space going?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): We've got a few million users now. We've got tens of thousands of folks using the virtual office use case in particular, which is how we monetize. People still use it for friends, social, education, and events, but our main business model is providing virtual office space for distributed teams. We get people sitting in there 6.5–7 hours a day—literally working all day in Kumo Space. If there are any founders—works great for founders. There's this return‑to‑office debate. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, had a memo bringing people back to the office with reasons I agree with—better collaboration, culture, management visibility. I just don't think you need to build a concrete box to do that. You can get a lot of those benefits with a virtual office solution like Kumo Space. As a startup, being able to hire and offer remote perks is one of the few competitive advantages you have. If you're looking to take advantage of that, hit me up.

Jason Kirby: I agree. I love the hybrid model. At larger companies, you may be at the San Francisco office, but your team’s in New York or Austin—still spread around. With Kumo, you can be in a physical office but with your remote team in Kumo Space. I see it as a hybrid solution that gives flexibility—not a cookie‑cutter “everyone in office” or “everyone remote.” Founders can choose what's best for recruiting and retaining talent now that tools like Kumo Space exist.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): 100%. We have in‑person off‑sites twice a year because we value it. It's like the inverted classroom: used to lecture in class and do homework at night; now you watch lectures on video and do homework in class for personalized attention. Similar with work: meet in person for deep brainstorming and relationship‑building, then do most work from home or wherever—because fundamentally, what are we doing other than sitting on a chair?

Jason Kirby: As we wrap, you've already given a ton of good advice to founders preparing to raise just by sharing your story. If you were to provide any additional information or a final point for founders preparing a fundraise, what would it be?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Completely simplify your message. We look at all the YC companies every year and YC has perfected the clear, compelling investor pitch. They have a process and everyone runs the playbook—plain English, traction, controlled process. As a VC, all these companies look the same—but they look the same good—which makes it hard to tell what's good. There's a lot to learn: less information is more; clarity; controlling the process. Some YC tactics (dogmatic price caps) help YC more than companies—so be careful. But founders can learn a lot by studying those pitches—lots online—to learn clarity and not overloading investors.

Jason Kirby: I work on that every day with founders: delineate to one clear point—not 40 data points on one slide. “Don't be afraid to kill your babies.” Hard for founders to accept but important advice—appreciate you leaving that note.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Don't be afraid to kill your babies.

Jason Kirby: I really appreciate you being on the show. How can founders follow you or learn more about what you're doing at either Charge or Kumo Space?

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Feel free to hit me up. I'm on Twitter: @BRTT1211, or ping me on LinkedIn. If you're looking for a virtual office space, reference this podcast and we'll hook you up. If you're a pre‑seed or seed‑stage founder looking for capital, especially if you're based in New York, we'd love to hear from you: Brett at charge.vc. Thanks so much for having me.

Jason Kirby: I appreciate that—and I apologize for the bombardment of inbound you might get when this goes live.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Yeah—what a terrible problem to have.

Jason Kirby: Brett, really appreciate you on the show. Thank you so much and good luck on the journey with Kumo Space.

Brett Martin (Kumospace / Charge): Thanks, Jason.