EP. 227 - Closing the Competency Gap: Helping Founders Build Credibility to Raise Funding feat. Shayna Davis

**Shayna Rattler Davis** (0:00)
Very rarely are they funding your tech.
These investors, they're actually auditing your credibility before you ever even get in the room. You can actually prohibit yourself from being able to get in the room if they don't see the right things when they're auditing you before they even give you the opportunity to pitch them.

**Narb** (0:25)
Welcome to the Dev NTell Podcast, where founders, hackers, and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech.
Hello, hello. Welcome to So Shana. I'm ecstatic to have you on today.

**Shayna Rattler Davis** (0:37)
Yes. I feel like we've been talking about this for months. I've been looking forward to it.

**Narb** (0:41)
Yes. There's quite a backlog of people who want to get a piece of the Dev NTell action, and yes, this was months in the making, but I'm ecstatic we're finally here. And yes, as this is a founder-builder driven show, I think a lot of insights that you'll share today are going to be very, very valuable for a lot of folks, especially in this day and age where everyone is, it's so much easier to become a founder.

**Shayna Rattler Davis** (1:09)
Things are changing for sure.

**Narb** (1:10)
Yes, very rapidly. But I guess before we get into all that, would you like to give an introduction by yourself?

**Shayna Rattler Davis** (1:17)
Absolutely. So I own an executive credibility firm, and tech companies, they hire me when either the founder and or the leadership team are becoming more visible to like investors, the customers, or media.
And the work that I do with them, it helps to make them fundable, and it also helps to make sure that they're winning categories, because like I said, things are changing. And nowadays, having a strong product and the right team is no longer enough to get you there. And so I think it's really important that founders are paying attention to the fact that that era is actually dead. There was a time where it's like, if you had a great product and you had a brilliant team that was behind it, like that's all it took to be successful. And the reason why I exist is because I recognize that that's just not all that it takes to win in this modern day.

**Narb** (2:09)
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of nuances and subtleties. A lot of people don't understand, especially today, like we mentioned earlier, it's very easy to just build something, but to actually get it beyond that is very tough. And if you want to raise rounds on that as well, that's a whole new, whole new ball game, so to speak. But off air, you mentioned you used to work in the tech scene as well at the startup scene.
Just curious, what was your experience like there and how did that kind of propel you to what you do now? Yeah.

**Shayna Rattler Davis** (2:45)
Well, if you would have asked me four or five years ago, if I would be doing anything in tech, I would have been like probably not, like heck no, hell no, just because I don't consider myself, I mean, I know my way around tech. I wouldn't consider myself to be a dev person, but I'm not technologically challenged or anything. But I'd never had any exposure to how tech companies run. I'd never been part of a tech startup before.
And what ended up happening was in 2022, I lost my dad, my grandmother and my boyfriend back to back in three months. And I took a sabbatical and I was single at the time. And so I sold a house that I lived in so that I wouldn't actually like starve to death during the time that I was on my sabbatical. And I said, you know what? I don't have any idea who I'm gonna be when I get on the other side of this. I may have reinvented myself and I don't know what that person is gonna need. And I said, I've got enough money to get me through March of the upcoming year. So by January, I will figure out like, will I just go back into my consulting practice that I've been running since the late 90s?
Or will I get a job? I didn't really know what that was gonna look like. And I was contacted by the attorney of a tech legend, if you will, that was coming out of retirement to build something. And he was looking for who was gonna be on his founding team.
And I met with him for about three and a half hours. And we went back and forth. And he was like, I was like, I've never done this. You know what I mean? Like I've done the things that you need, but I've never done them like in this sphere or whatever. You know, and we decided to take the chance on one another. And I was the second person to be hired in that tech startup. And I was there for two years. And it had become like my identity. I was so involved in everything. Because you can imagine being second person there, even though I wasn't on the product team and I wasn't on the engineering team, I was very deeply involved in what everything, that everyone was doing. And I learned a lot during that time. And to fast forward to kind of what got me here, when that time there ended, I recognized that, I can remember when the founder said to like the head of engineering and the head of CTO, like you guys are gonna have to start having conversations with these Wall Street executives about how what we're building is like gonna revolutionize their industry. And they turned like ghostly white. And I said, oh wow, when I went back into business for myself, I picked up what it is that I had been doing in business prior to my sabbatical. But I just decided to go all in on tech because I recognized the void. Well, you know, you've got this title, the competency gap. And I realized the competency gap that was there. And I decided to go all in on tech. But I was taking a gamble, Narb, because I had no idea. I was like, I know they need it, but I have no idea whether or not they recognize that they have this gap and that these are the types of things that they need to invest in to close the gap. But I didn't have anything to lose because I had paused my business for the whole two years that I was part of this company. So I was like, let's just roll the dice and see what these tech people think about what I have to say.