We met for breakfast at Le Boulange, a very nice place, and after breakfast we drove to Happy Farm Chairman of the Board Igor Shoifot's office for a meeting with Julian Zegelman. Julian is a lawyer and partner at Velton Zegelman. He works with startups and investors (both venture investors and angel investors). He talked about all the legal issues around registering a company in the United States.  He explained where you can set up your company and what the differences are. He also took some time to answer the questions the investors had.

After the meeting with Julian, we met with Deven Soni, co- founder of Sprayable, a consumer health and wellness company. He first talked about his background a bit. He started his career as an investor banker. He used to work for different funds: Lazard, Goldman Sachs ant Highland. For Highland, he lived in Sofia for a while and even spent a few months in Odessa.

Deven explained how a lot of things have changed in the startup world during the last decade. In 2001 you still needed a lot of money to start a company and founders only ended up with 10% of the company. From 2004 on, cheaper hardware and software enabled companies to create a product of less than five million dollars and the founders owned around 20% of the company at the exit. Between 2010 and 2013, companies can start making their product and selling it with only $500k that they raise from angel investors and they keep the biggest part of the company. And now with Kickstarter, they can even keep 100% of the company.

He talked about how he started. It started on a cruise to Antarctica.  He got along very well with his cabin mate, Ben and they soon decided to start a company together. But what kind of company... Ben had experimented with putting caffeine on his skin, because he couldn't drink coffee, and they joined an startup accelerator in Chile and started working on Sprayable Energy, a revolutionary caffeine based product that users spray on their skin to get the energy they would get from coffee or an energy drink.

They worked in Chile for one year, testing the product, finding a manufacturer for the product and creating a marketing strategy. Then they put their product on Indiegogo (a crowd funding platform) and asked for $20 000, they raised $176 000 and they were mentioned on more than 1300 global media outlets (Time, Good Morning America, etc)

In the next few months they manufactured the spray, designed the bottle,... Then they mailed a bottle to some influential journalists and bloggers and asked them to try the spray and write review about it. Only a few answered, but the stories they wrote about Sprayable Energy got pick up fast by other journalists. 

The distribution is only online right know, so they have a great contact with their customers. Later they will partner maybe with other companies who know a lot about distribution and can help them get Sprayable Energy in the stores.    

One of the most amazing things about Sprayable's story is that they are only a three people team with 2 virtual assistants! And every month they sell between 5k and 15k bottles right now.

It was really inspiring to meet Deven and hear his story!

In the evening we drove to an amazing house in the hills of Woodside. Sasha Johnson from DFJ Aurora invited us to a Global Technology Symposium event. There was a short introduction from Steve LeVine, Washington correspondent for mobile financial news startup Quartz and then there was time for networking. After a few hours we drove back to San Francisco to end the second day of the tour.