This is the first post of a series about Talend’s recent Round C Fundraising.
Read the other posts in this series:

• Fundraising in September – Face Time
• Fundraising in October – Leveraging the Market
• Fundraising in November – Inking the Deal
  
• Fundraising in December – Finishing Up

There’s never a time that a CEO doesn’t think about funding, but we started our actual fundraising effort in September 2008 – having achieved a series of business milestones throughout the end of 2007 and the first half of 2008. Working as a team we had built the business, built the product, and cemented our position in the market. Our brand name was solid and we had proven our capability as a challenger to the market leaders. And we had done this in a very short time.

You know, it’s a funny thing about creating and building a company. There are a lot of steps involved. Every step is different and you can’t learn it in school. Experience is the only teacher here and it’s a continual learning experience. There are the idea & the early execution phases; the $0 to $10 million phase; the $10 to $20 million phase; the term sheets, the break-even point; the IPO; and a lot of milestones in between. We have not gone through all of these steps yet, but the ones we have achieved give us a clear advantage for the future.

And a really big advantage is having done it before. Both Fabrice and I had independently created companies previously. We knew what was involved and how to get started.  And our experience, work styles, and competencies are very complementary.

We were ready to take the next step.

We didn’t foresee the economic meltdown coming. Nobody did. Some people may have noticed that January 2008 was a particularly volatile month throughout the world stock markets but, for most of us, it was business-as-usual. A year ago, few people had heard the term “credit crunch”; now it’s in dictionaries. (Un)fortunately, we had both experienced the turn-of-the-century bubble and were in its middle when it burst. So today’s climate, even though it differs from the bubble, did not catch us entirely unprepared.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting blogs that outline the fundraising process we went through, showcased against the deepening financial storm. We’ve come through extremely well and I want to acknowledge everyone on the Talend team for that. Thanks guys! You did a terrific job!

Bertrand

Next post: Fundraising in September – Face Time