Fundraising when no one believes in you: Matt Welle on resilience, rejection and learning to control the room

During his Upstream Festival fireside chat, Fundraising when no-one believes in you, Mews CEO Matt Welle shared the less polished side of building a successful company.

Today, Mews is an operating system for hospitality used by thousands of hotels around the world. But the company did not begin with a large round, a polished pitch or a network of investors ready to back the idea.

It began with a small team, limited resources and a belief that hotel technology could be rebuilt from the ground up.

Less money can create more focus

In the early years, Mews had very little capital.

Welle and founder Richard Valtr stretched their initial funding as far as possible while building the product and trying to persuade hotels to use it. There was no room for unnecessary spending. Every decision mattered.

“Sometimes it’s good to have less money, because it forces focus.”

This is not an argument for making entrepreneurship unnecessarily difficult. A lack of capital can create real pressure, especially when a team is responsible for salaries and customers.

But constraints can also sharpen priorities.

When a startup cannot do everything, it has to decide what truly matters. Which problem is important enough to solve first? Which feature will make the biggest difference? What does the company need to prove before it adds complexity?

For Mews, the early years were not about creating the appearance of a rapidly growing startup.

They were about building something hotels genuinely needed.

Learn by pitching badly

Welle was open about the fact that the first fundraising conversations did not go well.

The pitch deck was not strong enough. The narrative was unclear. Conversations wandered into details before investors understood the larger opportunity.

The team was trying to explain why the hotel industry needed a new technology layer. Investors often responded with scepticism. Could a small startup really compete with established players? Was hospitality software an attractive enough market? Why would hotels change systems?

“We learned the hard way what a good pitch looks like.”

The lesson was not to wait until everything was perfect before speaking to investors.

It was to treat every conversation as practice.

Each meeting revealed where the story was unclear. Each rejection showed which questions needed a stronger answer. Every difficult conversation gave the team another opportunity to improve the way it communicated the problem and its ambition.

A pitch deck is not only a document.

It is the product of repeated conversations.

Control the narrative

One of the most practical lessons Welle shared was the importance of structure during investor meetings.

Founders often enter fundraising conversations feeling that the investor holds all the power. They answer every question as soon as it is asked, allow the discussion to move in different directions and leave the meeting without having communicated the central story.

Welle learned to change that dynamic.

“Do you mind if we finish the pitch, and then we’ll go to the questions?”

It is a simple sentence, but it reflects an important shift.

The founder’s role is not only to respond. It is to guide the meeting.

Investors need enough context to understand the company before they can evaluate it properly. That means communicating the problem, the solution, the scale of the opportunity and the reason this team can succeed.

Questions matter. But so does the order in which the story is told.

“You have to be very clear about your role. Get the message across really fast, allow them to ask their questions, but get money at the end.”

Rejection does not disappear

Mews has grown significantly since its early days. The company has raised major funding rounds and expanded internationally.

But Welle made clear that rejection remains part of fundraising.

“You get one yes, and you get 30 no’s.”

That can be difficult to absorb, especially when a founder is under pressure. In the early years, a no is not simply a difference of opinion. It can affect whether a company is able to pay its team, continue building or survive another month.

The psychological challenge is real.

Founders need to listen carefully to feedback without allowing each rejection to completely reshape the company. Not every investor understands the market. Not every suggestion is right. And not every no means the idea is wrong.

The difficult part is distinguishing useful criticism from advice that would move the business away from the problem it was created to solve.

At one stage, the Mews team followed investor advice and built a solution they did not fully believe in.

It did not work.

The experience reinforced an important lesson: listen, but do not outsource your conviction.

Do not sell too early

At a particularly difficult point in the journey, Mews received an acquisition offer from a competitor.

After years of limited resources, the offer was tempting. It could have ended the financial uncertainty and given the founders a clear outcome.

But something did not feel right.

Welle and Valtr looked at the terms and asked themselves whether selling would mean giving up on the larger opportunity too soon. They still believed in the problem they were solving. They did not think the potential buyer would build the solution in the way they believed it needed to be built.

So they walked away.

“We really did believe in what we were doing.”

The decision created more uncertainty in the short term. It meant raising capital again and continuing through another difficult phase.

But it allowed the company to keep building.

There is no universal rule that founders should never sell early. An acquisition can be the right outcome for a company, its team and its investors.

The lesson is different.

Do not make the decision only because the current moment is difficult.

Run a process, not a series of conversations

As Mews grew, its fundraising approach became more structured.

Rather than responding individually to every investor who expressed interest, the team learned to prepare carefully, warm up relevant investors in advance and create a clear timeline for the round.

When the process begins, selected investors receive the information they need within the same period. Questions are tracked. Deadlines are clear. The team knows when it wants to receive term sheets and when it intends to make a decision.

“You need to be clear that you’re not just fundraising. You’re running a process.”

This approach has several advantages.

It reduces the amount of time the leadership team spends repeating the same conversations. It makes it easier to compare offers. It creates momentum. And it prevents fundraising from becoming an open-ended activity that distracts the company from building.

It also changes the balance of the conversation.

The founder is not waiting passively to see what happens.

The company is managing a process with a clear purpose.

Choose investors who add value

Capital matters. But the right investor can bring more than capital.

Welle described how the needs of a company change over time. During the earliest stage, the immediate requirement may simply be enough money to keep building.

Later, founders need investors who understand the challenges of scaling.

They need access to peers who have already faced similar questions. They need experienced people who can help them recognise the problems that are likely to appear next. They need investors who remain useful after the term sheet has been signed.

“I would love to see investors genuinely add value and support their companies.”

The relationship matters because fundraising is not the end of the work.

It is the start of the next phase.

Say yes before you feel ready

Mews grew by accepting opportunities that initially felt larger than the company.

When the team moved from serving a smaller hotel to a much larger property, it said yes. When opportunities arose to expand internationally, it said yes. When the company encountered challenges it had not solved before, it trusted its team to work them out.

“Say yes to things that feel too big.”

This does not mean making promises a company has no chance of keeping.

It means recognising that growth often requires a team to operate slightly beyond its current comfort zone. A startup cannot wait until every process is perfect and every question has already been answered.

“If you just stay in a safe space, you’re not challenging yourself to be better.”

The work behind the funding headline

A major funding announcement can make a company’s growth look inevitable.

It rarely is.

Behind the headline are the years when the pitch deck was not good enough, the investors who said no, the uncomfortable conversations, the decisions that could have taken the company in a very different direction and the moments when continuing required conviction.

Welle’s story was not about ignoring reality.

It was about learning how to communicate a vision without losing sight of the work needed to deliver it.

Fundraising matters because it can give a company the resources to move faster.

But the round is not the destination.

The real work begins again the next morning.

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