Four Applications, One Yes, and a Very Long Wait in a Hallway

For three years, I told people I hadn't applied to Venture Atlanta.

I had. Every year. I just didn't want the conversation in October, the one where someone asks how it went and you explain that it went the way it went last year.

This month I finally pitched there. Fourth application, fourth year. I was number 27 in a lineup of 28, which is a scheduling decision I have chosen not to take personally.

I first heard about the conference in a co-working space in Louisville. I was cold emailing brands that had no idea who I was, and someone told me that if I ever wanted to raise real money in the Southeast, I needed to get on that stage. I wrote it down. Then I went back to sending cold emails. That was a few years and one pandemic ago.

The application stays the same. You don't.

The thing nobody mentions about reapplying is that the form barely changes. What do you do, who is it for, why now, why you. The questions sit still and you walk back up to them every year, like a man returning to the same vending machine hoping it has new snacks.

What changed was my answers.

Year one, I led with features. I was very proud of the features. Nobody else was.

Year two, I led with customers, which was better, because customers are features other people have agreed to pay for.

Year three, I stopped pitching the product and started pitching the story. Kochi to Kentucky. 128 brands. 95% referrals. $1.45M ARR. The AI shelf.

Year four, I don't think I wrote a better application. I think I was a better company writing roughly the same one.

That's the part I keep coming back to. I used to read each rejection as a verdict. Put four drafts side by side and they read more like a progress report. Every no made me explain Xena again, a little tighter, and you can't shorten a sentence about your company without finding out which parts of it you didn't actually believe.

Number 27 of 28

If you have never pitched near the end of a long lineup, here is roughly how it goes. You arrive full of adrenaline. Somewhere around pitch nine, the adrenaline leaves without saying goodbye. Around pitch eighteen you start editing your opening line in your head for no reason. By 26 you have rewritten it so many times it describes a different company.

I have stage fright. I've written about it before, so I'll spare you the bathroom details this time. I'll just say a very long wait is not the recommended treatment.

What actually helped was the hallway. Founders who had just pitched walked back past those of us still waiting, and people I had never met mouthed "you got this." They had just finished the hardest three minutes of their quarter, and they spent the walk back on a stranger. I don't know most of their names. I'll remember them anyway.

Who was actually on that stage

Three minutes is a misleading unit. Eighteen people at Xena built the work I got to present, a lot of it from the days when the company was little more than an argument I believed in. I had the microphone. That's a different thing from having done the work.

It also took Sana, my wife, holding our life together in Louisville with our daughter while I was in Atlanta being a founder in public. I've said this before and it keeps being true: her patience has been the real seed round. She invests on terms no investor would accept, and she has never once asked for a board seat.

What I'd tell year-one me

Not "persistence pays off." People love that sentence, usually right after it pays off for them. It is a much less inspiring sentence in year two.

I'd tell him the no's aren't wasted, but they aren't a lesson plan either. Nobody at the conference was secretly coaching me. I had to reread my own old applications and notice, with some embarrassment, what I'd been hiding behind each year. The rejection just gave me a reason to look.

I'd also tell him to stop saying he didn't apply. Everyone in that hallway had applied to something and not heard back. It's the most common thing about us.

If you're in year two or three of your own version of this, I'd honestly like to hear what you keep reapplying to. I write about the unglamorous middle of building Xena in my Founder's Diary newsletter (opens in a new tab) on LinkedIn, and the less polished version lives on Instagram at @akhilsuresh (opens in a new tab). And if you want to compare rejection collections, my calendar is at meeting.akhilsureshnair.com (opens in a new tab). Bring yours. I'll bring mine, it's bigger.