The story
Natu Myers was raised in an apartment in Ottawa by a mother who had come to Canada young and who, in his account, worked for everything she had. Concerned about the middle school he had been streamed into, she wrote to one of the strongest high schools in the city and secured his place there, a decision he describes as the most consequential she made on his behalf. He made the football team in grade nine and went on to Queen's University, where he completed a computer science degree while playing varsity football: class, practice, then the library until two in the morning, repeated through the season. He attributes the discipline to what it had cost her to put him there.
A shoulder injury, and the surgery that followed, redirected him. During the off-season he spent his time among the commerce faculty, attended the Queen's Business and Technology Conference, and began studying venture capital in earnest. He took a software engineering position after graduating and resigned at roughly the six-month mark, having concluded that the culture rewarded manufactured competition between colleagues rather than the work itself. The years that followed were unforgiving. His early ventures were undercapitalized, the paid acquisition channels they depended on did not perform, and he credits his mother with the counsel that steadied him through it: that the spend could be stopped at any time and the problem solved later.
In the summer of 2021 he identified the six-letter Raises.com domain, approached the holder directly and agreed terms the same day, at a price below the one quoted. Raises.com operates as a consultancy that helps clients raise capital to acquire businesses and cash-producing assets. The firm declines development mandates on the principle that the underlying asset should already generate income. He is deliberate about the timeline, putting roughly seven months between a client's decision to raise and funds settling, and declines to quote a shorter figure because the work does not compress. Document production is now drafted by the firm's internal systems, with a person approving every output.
Two weeks before the interview in which he described this, he travelled to meet a client who had completed a raise and shook his hand for the first time, the engagement having run end to end without the founder joining a single onboarding, sales or support call. He treats that as the operative measure of whether the firm works. His stated objective for the next five years is a team of the most capable and ambitious people he can recruit, held to the standard set by his former head coach, Coach Pat Sheahan: that how a result is achieved carries the same weight as the result.
Told on episode 55 of the Raises.com podcast. The firm he describes is Raises.com; the documented engagements are listed under Transactions.