How Tim Hwang built FiscalNote from a Motel 6 to a billion-dollar IPO

Executive overview

Most founders struggle not from lack of ideas but from unwillingness to do the unglamorous work. Tim Hwang built FiscalNote — a legal and regulatory intelligence platform — by cold-calling hundreds of companies from a spreadsheet, emailing Mark Cuban from a Google search, and building a network one LinkedIn connection at a time.

The core bet was simple: the world was becoming more politically complex, not less. Everything else was execution.

Startups succeed through relentless, unsexy effort — not insight alone.

Picking a macro trend that won't change

• FiscalNote's founding question: what is true that won't change in 20–30 years?
• Answer: the world grows more complex, regulation increases, politics becomes unavoidable for every CEO
• The "what" was locked in; only the "how" needed to evolve
• Positioned as the Bloomberg Terminal for Law — AI-collected regulations, searchable and actionable

Validating the idea before building

• No aha moment — just a Google spreadsheet with 2,000 company names
• Bought a prepaid phone from 7-Eleven; cold-called hundreds of companies
• Ran ~100–200 customer conversations before building the product
• First customer: a defense contractor who paid $20,000
• Contract is still framed in the office — proof that one customer means ten are possible

Landing the first investor

• Was watching Shark Tank from a Motel 6 in Silicon Valley when he thought of Mark Cuban
• Googled Cuban's email; sent a three-to-four sentence cold email with subject line "Changing government"
• Cuban replied within 45 minutes and invested the entire $740,000 seed round
• Key lesson: investors are pattern-recognition machines — understand their thesis before reaching out
• Match investor type (B2C vs. B2B) and frame the company in terms they already believe in

Building a network from zero

• Started with no connections to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or major US companies
• Built it manually: LinkedIn outreach, warm intros, cocktail parties, business cards
• Network building is not optional — even B2C companies eventually need B2B relationships
• Effort, not access, is the differentiator

Navigating being an outsider

• As an Asian founder, faced routine exclusion from informal executive circles
• Often the only Asian person in rooms of senior CEOs, despite leading one of the larger companies present
• Reframed disadvantage as leverage: assumed they'd need to work 10x harder, contact 10x more reporters and VCs
• That expectation of extra effort became a competitive drive rather than a grievance

Thinking in scale from day one

• On hitting $100M revenue: celebrated for one day, then immediately focused on $1B
• Mental model: a billion-dollar company is ten $100M companies inside one business
• Forces the team to ask what new products, markets, and joint ventures are needed
• FiscalNote went public at over $1B valuation on NYSE