The story
Natu Myers grew up in an apartment in Ottawa, raised by a mother who came to Canada young and, in his words, had to fight for everything she ever got. When horror stories started coming out of the middle school path he was on, she wrote a letter to one of the best high schools in Ottawa to get him in, the move he calls the single best decision she ever made in his life. He made the football team in grade nine, and that engine carried him to Queen's University, where he stacked a computer science degree on varsity football: wake up, eat, class, practice, then the library until 2 a.m., repeated every day in season. He ran the whole thing on gratitude, determined to squeeze that lemon dry after watching what it cost her to get him there.
A shoulder injury rerouted everything. Recovering from surgery in the off-season, he started hanging out with the Queen's commerce students, went to the Queen's Business and Technology Conference, and fell deep down the venture capital rabbit hole. After graduating he took a coding job, watched management manufacture artificial competition between teammates, and handed in his resignation at roughly the six-month mark. The early entrepreneurial years tested him: he remembers lying in bed in the fetal position because Facebook ads were not working, while his mother protected his mind with the reminder that he could simply turn the ads off and figure it out later. Then in the summer of 2021, sitting at his grandmother's place, he spotted the six-letter Raises.com domain, offered to buy it that same day at a lower price, and the seller agreed. A company about raising money now owned the word itself.
Today Raises.com operates as consultants who help people raise money to buy businesses and cash-producing assets; the assets have to make money, and the firm pushes back on developments for exactly that reason. Natu is blunt about the timeline: from the day someone decides to raise to the money landing in their bank account runs about seven months, and he declines to call it shorter because the work is real. AI now drafts the mountain of paperwork a raise requires, with a human approving every document. The moment that told him the machine was working came two weeks before this recording, when he flew down to congratulate a client who had raised $3.4 million, shaking his hand for the first time because the system had carried the client end to end without the founder on a single onboarding, sales, or support call. His five-year plan is a team of the smartest, most ambitious people he can find, run on the standard his head coach, Coach Sheehan, drilled into him: it is not just about winning, it is about how you win.
Told on episode 55 of the Raises.com podcast. The firm he describes is Raises.com; the documented engagements are listed under Transactions.