#156 - Amber Atherton and Iba Masood

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Amber Atherton and Iba Masood. Amber is the founder and CEO of Zyper. Iba is the co-founder and CEO of TARA. You can find Amber on Twitter at Amber Atherton, and Iba is on Twitter at Iba Masood.
All right, here we go.
So today we're gonna talk about fundraising, but before that, let's talk about your companies. So Iba, what do you do?

**Iba Masood** (0:31)
So Craig, it's great to be here. I'm Iba Masood, I'm the co-founder and CEO of TARA AI. So we're building an end-to-end solution for product management.
So we help product managers, engineering managers spec out their products, gain insight into their development life cycle, and essentially monitor progress within software development.

**Amber Atherton** (0:56)
Hello, so great to be here.
Zyper helps brands connect to their super fans to build community. So we work with a lot of big Fortune 500s, like a Kellogg's or a Nike to help them really identify who their top 1% of fans are, and then bring them into a space to co-create product or to become brand ambassadors.

**Craig Cannon** (1:17)
Okay, and so both of you this year raised your Series A, but I think it'd be interesting to start from the beginning. So could you tell me your story of, did either of you raise pre YC?

**Amber Atherton** (1:28)
Yes, I did.

**Craig Cannon** (1:29)
Okay, so yeah, this will be good. So one in one. Okay, so how did you do it?

**Amber Atherton** (1:33)
Okay, so I was 2017, I was in London, started a company in 2017, and I raised 1.2 seed in London from a VC in London, and a lot of angels involved in that, great angels involved in that round too. And then I applied to YC and got in then.

**Craig Cannon** (1:55)
Okay, and then you did YC?

**Amber Atherton** (1:56)
Yeah.

**Craig Cannon** (1:56)
And you just applied to YC, but you applied a couple of times, right?

**Iba Masood** (1:59)
Yeah, I did. So I applied twice, and at the time, it was a different idea, different company, different even market segment, like we were focusing on the Middle East.
So it was basically like a careers platform for fresh grads, and so entirely different company.

**Craig Cannon** (2:16)
Okay, and what did you get in with?

**Iba Masood** (2:18)
We got in with careers platform for grads in the US.
So that was in 2015, when we first got in to YC. And post YC, for that, we raised roughly around 200K or so. So it was-

**Craig Cannon** (2:33)
For that product specifically?

**Iba Masood** (2:34)
Yes, for that product specifically.
And it was very difficult. Like the first 100K, I remember, it was a very difficult process to raise. Pre YC, we had just gotten about 10K in a grant from MIT, because we were doing research into GitHub repos. So we were looking into programmers and their work on GitHub and just kind of analyzing the commits and how we could find patterns, essentially. And also try to identify the best programmers out there based on their work in Git. And so that early research actually formed the thesis and the infrastructure for TARA as it stands today.

**Craig Cannon** (3:13)
Oh, interesting.

**Iba Masood** (3:14)
Which we, so TARA, we officially launched in, and not even the website or the product, but just launched with the idea in 2017

**Craig Cannon** (3:23)
And how did the pivot go with your investors? How did you go about communicating that?

**Iba Masood** (3:26)
So our investors were very supportive.
So when they heard about the market that we were trying to tackle and the product that we were building, they were immediately like, oh, here's more money. So what happened was about a fourth of our investors doubled down. And so from that 200K, when we pivoted, we raised 2.8 million. And so we had a three million, called it a three million seed.

**Craig Cannon** (3:52)
Okay, so what would you attribute that up round to?

**Iba Masood** (3:56)
I mean, it was just the opportunity, the market segment, the early, early team that we had assembled, and then also the early traction that we were seeing from the early ML models that we had applied, as well as early customer traction. So the seed was in 2018, it was a 3 million seed, that's when we announced it, but it had really been a work in progress for a while before that.

**Craig Cannon** (4:23)
So you lumped all that money together and called it 3 million seed?