EP. 234 - Shark Tank Meets TikTok: How Elie Bouzaglou Is Rewiring Early-Stage Fundraising

**Elie Bouzaglou** (0:00)
We started posting on Instagram, and it fell into the right person's feed. By the way, it wasn't just that person. I could say I probably got over 30 messages from people asking to invest. A few of them were actual VCs, it never went anywhere, but there was, out of that of them, actually we spoke, it was a fit, and a week later, the wire hit.
And it's just, it's very like, oh wow.

**Narb** (0:27)
Was this while you were still in high school, or was this after?

**Elie Bouzaglou** (0:31)
It was before final exam, so I know I was still in high school.

**Narb** (0:34)
Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers, and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. Hello, hello, welcome to the show, Elie. I am ecstact to have you on today, man.

**Elie Bouzaglou** (0:46)
That was a great intro.

**Narb** (0:48)
Ah, thank you, thank you, yes. I practiced it, I'm glad you liked it.

**Elie Bouzaglou** (0:53)
Like I should have brought something too now.

**Narb** (0:55)
It's all good, man. It's all good.
Yeah, it's really ecstact to have you on. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us. Really excited for our audience to learn about FishTank and your story and background as well as you have quite an inspiring one. But yeah, I guess I'll let you take the mic. Would you like to give just an introduction about yourself?

**Elie Bouzaglou** (1:20)
Yeah, thanks for having me, first of all. Yeah, so FishTank started because I was trying to raise capital for a smaller project I built. I knew it wasn't fit for venture dollars, so I turned to crowdfunding, and then I just realized how broken isn't even the right word for it.
It's so outdated and so old, and the only people involved are people over 60 They don't understand anything about how the new generation of founders work, and that's why when you go on any of these platforms, you see that you'll never see someone who's probably under 50, that's a founder on those platforms. And they're building the boring things, the things that people don't really care about. And if you're asking someone whose job isn't like a VC or an angel investor, crowdfunding is not meant for people who that's their job, meant for regular people. If you're asking regular people to take money and put it into a company, it better be a pretty damn exciting company, right? And if you're saying we're building a cement company, that doesn't interest me, maybe it interests you, but it's just not interesting. And so these crowdfunding platforms are like so boring. Oh, and that's like on a higher level. Go deeper down. Okay, fine, something poked your interest. You like the logo or the tagline, you click on it, what's next? Read a 15 to 30 page pitch deck.
Who is doing that? I know I'm not.
And well, the numbers show it clearly. I mean, I'm honestly surprised at how these companies are still functional. I'm surprised that people actually invest into these companies on these platforms. And I mean, we're coming and we're going to make it a whole lot better. Because it is very, very broken.

**Narb** (3:22)
Yeah, certainly a lot of the, let's call it the old guard, is hesitant to kind of switch to new ways of doing things. And I think it's natural, it can be said of almost things. Once you develop a habit, it's, humans usually don't want to divert from that, unless you kind of train yourself to do so.
But I mean, as you mentioned, you're forging a new way for people to start raising funds through things that they're already doing on social media anyhow. But before we get into that, I'm very curious to kind of dig into kind of the origin stories around how you just became a founder overall. As I understand, you started a couple of companies, or at least one, while you're in high school. And yeah, just curious if you can speak on that, and like what drove you to do that?

**Elie Bouzaglou** (4:24)
Well, depending on how far we want to go back, that's how long we're going to be here for. If you want to call my first real company or my first, you know, like everyone, every kid in their lemonade stand, for me, it was in camp. I was at sleepaway camp, and there was, we had this thing, there was canteen, and the drinks were only available at 12.30, from 12.3 to one. And that's when you could buy the drinks. And you know, that was when people were eating lunch. They had their drinks, whatever it was. But at 3.30, when sports was over, that's when everyone was thirsty, canteen was over, people were forced to drink water. So what I did, I bought a bunch of cans, sold them at 3.30, and pretty wildly, I sold drinks, not the craziest thing. I scaled to eventually buying a fridge. Now, oh, you bought a fridge.