Natu Myers and the six-letter shortcut to a complicated business

In the summer of 2021, Natu Myers found a word for sale. Six letters, followed by a dot and a com. He was at his grandmother’s place, looking through a domain marketplace, when Raises.com appeared. He had money from consulting work, he recalls, and a proposition for the seller: reduce the price and he would buy it that day. The seller agreed. For someone entering a business famous for elaborate terminology, it was a pleasingly short transaction.

The purchase came after the enterprise had begun. Raises.com dates its founding to 2019. Myers had already been working his way from programming toward capital raising. The new address supplied a verb people could remember. It also set a fairly demanding test: an uncomplicated name for work involving buyers, investors, lawyers, documents and money that has yet to arrive.

Number 91 had computing homework

Long before the domain, there was Ottawa. Myers grew up in an apartment with a mother who had come to Canada young and worked her way up in government. In his telling, a letter she wrote to secure him a place at a different high school changed his prospects. He joined the football team in grade nine. Education was something his family had worked to make possible, and he remembers feeling obliged to make use of it.

At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he studied computing and played defensive line. His jersey carried number 91. The athletics record places him in games across three seasons from 2013 through 2015, with eight appearances in the last of them. It is an unromantic record, made of tackles and games played. It helps put substance behind the familiar claim that an entrepreneur once played sport.

In April 2016, Myers wrote about combining the two pursuits for four years. The useful surprise was his explanation of why he liked computing. Entrepreneurship gave it a purpose. He wanted to build a service for other people; programming provided a way to do it. The degree was becoming a set of tools for a business he had yet to settle on.

“Training for something is often the best part of it”

Natu Myers, 2016

He compared his progress to an old-school game in which reaching the finish requires returning to an earlier location for a missed key. It was a generous description of uncertainty, written while he was still living through it. The future founder was allowing himself to backtrack.

Before capital, a chorus

That summer, Myers appeared at another sort of contest. He and Ameris Rudland represented FoodVine in the final pitch competition for the Queen’s Innovation Connector Summer Initiative. The scene has the pleasing economy of a campus experiment: two people with a proposed business, answering questions from judges. Years before Myers would question acquisition operators on camera, he was sitting on the receiving end.

His early projects ranged widely. A 2017 account of an interview with Daniyal Zafar described Innovator.Supply, recruiting software aimed at people interested in virtual reality, augmented reality and chatbots, alongside Hypetroop Market. There was also music. Myers had released an album on iTunes. The programmer was trying several forms of making things, with few signs of an orderly departmental boundary.

His Raptroop project makes that mixture particularly visible. He described a website bringing vocalists, producers, fans and others together for collaborative projects, requests and transactions. His public introduction offered app development and rap features. A prospective collaborator could arrive needing either a piece of software or another voice on a track. It was a broad service menu, even by startup standards.

One interpretation of these ventures is that Myers kept finding coordination problems. Musicians needed collaborators. Recruiters needed candidates. Eventually, business buyers would need capital. The customers changed, but the interest in getting the right people into a workable arrangement kept resurfacing. His GitHub profile still carries traces of the earlier life, including a planetary war simulation described as a project made in 2009. Finance had competition for his attention.

A shorter name for a longer process

Blockchain provided a route toward finance. Myers has described noticing a gap between companies wanting to raise money and their understanding of the rules around doing so. He worked with a small Canadian investment bank focused on that market and learned how the process operated. His attention expanded toward ordinary companies and real estate transactions, where the funding problem was less tied to a particular technology.

By his 2022 branding interview, simplicity had become an explicit ambition. A difficult name asked a potential customer to do more work before the service had even been explained. He wanted a name so understandable that, as he put it, “even a dog can understand what we do.” The dog was an exacting audience, though unlikely to ask about an operating agreement.

The remark also reveals how much Myers cared about the first impression. Money requires trust, and the name was part of making an unfamiliar service legible. The domain transaction had an older family precedent: his relatives had secured his personal name online while he was young and learning HTML. His first digital address was a family project. The later one became a business proposition.

The work between yes and paid

Today, Raises.com describes its work as capital-raising consultancy and buy-side advisory for people acquiring businesses or real estate. Its clients include independent sponsors, acquisition entrepreneurs and fund managers. Myers’s role sits around the preparation: structuring an investment vehicle, assembling materials and connecting a buyer with the people needed to pursue a funded close.

The list is concrete. An offering document. A financial model. A data room where an investor or lender can examine the deal. Introductions to capital providers. A buyer may arrive with a business worth pursuing and still need each of these things. The attraction for a former programmer is easy to see: a complicated task can be broken into parts, assigned and checked. Whether the acquisition closes remains the consequential question.

In his more recent account, Myers puts the journey from deciding to raise money to money reaching the bank at roughly seven months. He describes internal systems drafting documents with a person approving the output. The arrangement preserves a human decision inside the process. The name may be short; the sequence still demands time.

His preference is for acquisitions of assets already producing cash. That gives his current work a narrower center than the broad collection of startup interests in his earlier biography. He has selected a particular problem and stayed with its practical details.

On the other side of the microphone

Talking through those details has become another part of his occupation. In 2023, he appeared on The Capital Raiser Show to discuss first syndications, fund structures and the systems behind raising money. His How2Exit conversation with Ron Skelton covered the move from coding into this work and the teams needed to support a raise. The recurring subject was the machinery around a transaction.

A 2025 appearance on Behind The Acquisition had already explored another question of timing: when to begin building an investor network. The conversation considered raising capital before a particular acquisition and the distinction between a syndication and a fund. That interest fits the rest of his work. Myers spends time on arrangements that precede the visible event, when the people and documents are still being assembled. The eventual purchase makes a convenient headline. His interviews keep returning to the preparation that makes the headline possible.

He also turned that material into a book, Raises.com Guide: Starting Your Real Estate or Business Acquisitions Private Equity Firm. The title has rather more syllables than the domain. It identifies the intended reader with little room for confusion.

By 2026, his own show was taking him into other people’s businesses. He interviewed Acquisition Network founder Ryan Morgan in July. In August, he travelled to Navasota, Texas, to talk with Cody Sechelski after a service-business acquisition. The setting moved the conversation closer to the asset and the person who would have to operate it.

Later that month, Saarim Asady put Myers in the guest chair. The change of seats produced the family stories, the domain negotiation and the early experiments that a funding discussion can leave outside the frame. It also returned the host to a familiar position: answering questions about what he intended to build.

How you win, and who can do it without you

Myers credits his former Queen’s coach, Pat Sheahan, with teaching him to care about the manner of a win as well as the result. His company’s July 2026 statement of principles uses Biblical passages to frame integrity, measurement and focus. It is an explicit set of standards against which the work can be judged.

The milestone he chose to describe in his founder interview was an engagement the team had completed without him. He says he met the client after the raise and offered congratulations, having taken part in none of the sales, onboarding or support calls. For a founder, absence can be an achievement. The people he had assembled could carry the job.

His stated ambition for the next five years is to build that team further, recruiting capable, ambitious people to support deals. It brings the story back to the student who saw a use for computing when he imagined a service other people could use. There are more documents now, and fewer rap features. The question remains satisfyingly practical: what can he build that keeps working when someone else takes over?