Jason Goldberg has learned his lessons in running a startup, especially when to take on venture capital investment, how much to take, and when to say no, he told Insider.
Goldberg has founded a number of startups, with mixed results, and is best known for e-commerce startup Fab, which raised $330 million before it infamously shuttered in 2015.
His current company is virtual fitness platform Moxie. It just closed a $6.3 million second seed round on Thursday led by Resolute Ventures with Bessemer Ventures, Greycroft Ventures, Gokul Rajaram and others participating. This follows an earlier $2.1 million seed round, closed in October, bringing Moxie's total seed funding raised to date to $8.4 million, the company said.
While $8.4 million is quite a healthy raise for a seed investment, Goldberg said he was cautious before accepting.
"We've turned down a lot of people who offered us a lot of money," Goldberg said. "We had to resist the urge to raise more capital and instead really focus more on our business."
Moxie aims to be the "Patreon of fitness," it said, luring instructors away from popular fitness studios such as Barry's Bootcamp, Orangetheory, and SoulCycle to teach virtual classes to people in the comfort of their homes, with classes ranging from $5 - $25 and various subscriptions packages available. And the pandemic has been good for growth. In March alone, instructors taught 8,000 classes and logged 1 million class-minutes on the platform, the company said.
Goldberg said Moxie saw significant growth at the beginning of the year which then led to talks with investors on raising again, but it had to be right.
Resolute cofounder Raanan Bar-Cohen, a former exec at Automattic, won the round because Goldberg felt Resolute understood what it was like to operate a startup, "It was less about the price and more about them being aligned with an entrepreneur like myself working in startups for a long time."
Other angels and investors include Bruce Bell of Square, Manik Gupta of Uber, Jay Parikh of Facebook, and Mark Kingdon, the company said.
But still, Goldberg was wary from his past experiences."I've been in companies with little capital raised and I've been in companies with tons of capital raised," Goldberg said. "That's not always the success factor. It's why Fab didn't quite make it."
E-commerce company Fab, founded by Goldberg, burned through $200 million in two years. The company, once valued at $900 million, failed to find a sustainable business model which led to its demise.
"Some day Moxie may raise $50 million but not until we're ready for it," Goldberg said.
The company will use the money to beef up features and provide its instructors with health care benefits in partnership with Stride Health, he said.
With Goldberg's lessons-learned attitude, Moxie could be a nice come-back story for him. Besides Fab his previous startups range from ones that were quickly shut down to Jobster which boomed then struggled before being acquired by Recruiting.com; and Xing, also acquired, both for undisclosed sums.
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