When my co-founder Bryan and I first launched Tovala— the first-ever smart oven paired with a subscription meal service—we had a lot of ideas and very little cash. Although we’d won a business plan challenge at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, we spent most of the summer and fall of 2015 with our boots on the ground, taking as many investor meetings as possible. No one wanted to be the first investor, which made raising initial capital a chicken-or-the-egg problem: we needed money to hire people and make progress, but we also needed to show progress to raise money. READ MORE