Restaurants run on a chaotic buffet of scattered information. There are staff schedules, food orders, sales systems, and kitchen operations all sitting in different places. As a result, many owners end up making critical calls based on their gut feeling alone. Restoke is building the AI restaurant manager to give operators real-time insights and business guidance so they can spot risks and make informed decisions. The platform started as a basic operational layer that has grown into a full AI-driven recommendation and guidance system built specifically for the realities of running and scaling a restaurant business. Restoke works with everything from single-location restaurants to large multi-unit chains, including one customer that scaled from 27 locations to 120 with Restoke’s operational backbone in place.

Co-founder and CEO Assaf Stizki has been in the restaurant industry for over two decades across Europe, Australia, and the US. After a rollercoaster career spanning multiple corners of the restaurant industry, it was scaling into franchising that exposed just how fragile restaurant operations really are. There are manuals that aren’t followed, systems break down, and consistency becomes almost impossible. That frustration led him to hack together his own operational system. Around the same time he met his future co-founder and CTO Ken Brand, a mathematician with a background in machine learning. They met through a series of restaurant events that Assaf hosted. They are both self described “foodies” and quickly bonded over exploring restaurants together. They realized they could combine Assaf’s operational experience with Ken’s technical expertise to turn Assaf’s solution into a scalable AI platform: Restoke.

What’s Restoke’s North Star?

Our North Star is simple: help our customers scale with confidence. If we can take a restaurant group from a few locations to dozens or even hundreds by giving them the systems to maintain operational consistency, protect margins, optimize profitability, and replicate what works, that’s success. Our goal is to be the backbone that makes expansion predictable, efficient, and repeatable.

How does Restoke inspire “customer love”?

Customers love that they don’t have to dig through endless, fragmented data just to make a basic decision. Hospitality is chaotic: POS systems, scheduling tools, managers, kitchen chaos; it’s a constant motion. We pull those signals together and turn them into clear, real‑time insights. We tell you, “You’ve got a $6,000 risk ahead of you, here’s why, and here’s what to do.” That ability to see trends, protect margins, and make sensible decisions about next week instead of relying on “gut feeling” is what resonates most.

What’s on the horizon for Restoke?

We’re building what we see as a new category: the AI restaurant manager. It’s an intelligence layer that works both at the individual location and at HQ, supporting day‑to‑day decisions and strategic planning across the whole group. The goal is for Restoke to feel like a trusted manager that never sleeps.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

I grew up in a Mediterranean, Middle Eastern family where food was the center of everything. Both my grandmothers were incredible cooks, and holidays and gatherings revolved around eating. In my early twenties I decided to turn that love of food into a career, moved to Europe, and worked insane hours in hospitality, chasing the romantic idea of restaurants and creativity. Later I moved to Australia with my wife, worked for some truly bad operators who taught me everything I didn’t want to replicate, and then started building my own concepts: caterings, farmers’ markets, brick‑and‑mortar restaurants, and now Restoke.

Any favorite podcasts?

I’m a big fan of the podcast TRIGGERnometry with Konstantin Kisin.

Fun fact:
I love a good burger; it’s what drives me. I honestly don’t care much about having a fancy car or house; what excites me is finding or helping create the perfect burger.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

From the archives: Listen to Neha Govindraj with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Catch You on the Bonside. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Egg freezing has historically been expensive, complicated, and difficult to access.

For many people, it is also tied to deeply personal questions around health, family planning, timing, and choice. Yet the traditional process has often felt fragmented and transactional, with high upfront costs, limited access, and donor systems that can feel outdated.

Cofertility is building around a different model.

The company was co-founded by Lauren Makler, a Northeastern alum who experienced the fertility system firsthand after a rare health diagnosis put her own fertility in question. That experience helped shape Cofertility’s approach to making egg freezing more accessible while also supporting intended parents who need donor eggs.

Cofertility’s egg-sharing program allows clients to freeze their eggs for up to 10 years at no cost if they donate half to another family that otherwise may not be able to conceive. Those who choose to keep all of their eggs can access discounted freezing through Cofertility’s network of partner clinics and lenders.

The company also emphasizes a less transactional, more human-centered approach to egg donation. Rather than relying on anonymous, compensation-driven donor matching, Cofertility focuses on a non-anonymized model that gives donors and intended parents the opportunity to understand more about each other and the meaning behind the match.

That is the larger opportunity here. Fertility care is not only a clinical process. It is an access problem, a cost problem, and an experience problem.

As more people think proactively about reproductive health, platforms that can make fertility services easier to understand, afford, and navigate may become an increasingly important part of the healthcare system.

Read the full article in Northeastern Global News.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

For much of the country’s history, American dynamism was visible in the systems the country chose to build before the outcome was obvious. Canals, railroads, laboratories, factories, highways, semiconductors, satellites, and the internet were not just symbols of progress. They were proof that progress required more than invention. It required deployment.

That instinct has always been tied to the technology industry, even when the industry has chosen to tell a cleaner version of its own origin story. Silicon Valley did not begin as a chip or software story. Its early foundations were shaped by universities, government research, and national defense. Wartime radar research helped accelerate the electronics industry and trained a generation of engineers who later carried that technical base into commercial computing, semiconductors, and communications. Frederick Terman, the Stanford dean and provost often credited as one of the fathers of Silicon Valley, helped build the bridge between academic research and high-technology companies. Stanford Research Park was part of that same vision.

The early Valley was also deeply connected to federal R&D. By 1959, more than 85% of U.S. electronics research and development was funded by the federal government, much of it through defense. In other words, modern technology was never fully separate from national priorities. It was built through a mix of ambitious founders, public need, and institutional support.

Over time, though, parts of the venture ecosystem became uncomfortable with that language. “Defense” felt too harsh. Government markets felt too slow. Regulated sectors felt too bureaucratic. Many founders kept building in these areas anyway, but the work often lacked a shared narrative.

That is what the American Dynamism rebrand helped change. It did not invent a new type of founder. It gave a name to a familiar instinct: the desire to build in places where better technology can make institutions stronger and systems more capable. It also helped flip the way people think about bureaucracy. The friction was no longer just a reason to avoid certain markets. It became part of the opportunity.

The point is not that technology should remove every layer of process. Many of these systems are complex for good reason. But when process becomes the bottleneck, better software can help institutions act faster, coordinate better, and make decisions with more confidence.

At Everywhere Ventures, this is the version of American Dynamism that feels most relevant. Many of the founders we back would not necessarily use the phrase themselves. They are not building from a slogan. They are building because they see systems that need to work better.

You can see it in climate resilience, where the problem is no longer theoretical. Wildfires, floods, insurance gaps, and grid strain are forcing institutions to make better decisions under pressure. Rhizome is helping utilities understand climate risk before it becomes a catastrophe. Forerunner is helping governments and communities plan around flood exposure with more precision. These companies are not simply selling software into slow-moving markets; they are helping complex institutions move with more clarity when delay is costly.

In public safety, emergency response is one of the clearest examples of a system where better technology can have an immediate human impact, but where modernization has historically been difficult. GovWorx is helping first responders make sense of the data already flowing through 911 calls, radio audio, CAD systems, and body camera footage. Eve Vehicles is building Drone First Responder infrastructure so emergency teams can see what is happening before they arrive. Aerodome, acquired by Flock Safety, showed how quickly this kind of technology can move from experimental to operational when founders are willing to work inside real agencies with real constraints. This is what American Dynamism looks like in practice: not a rejection of institutions, but a push to make them more capable.

As satellites, software, supply chains, and public infrastructure become more connected, trust becomes a basic requirement. Rebel Space is securing space systems as satellites become more important to communications and monitoring. Azora Space is building optical ground station infrastructure to move data from space to Earth faster and more accessibly. Starcloud is pushing compute infrastructure beyond Earth, reflecting a future where space is not only observed from but also operated in. Operant AI and Pensar AI are protecting the software layer, where vulnerabilities can move quickly from codebase to real-world risk. These companies sit in different markets, but they are responding to the same reality: the systems we rely on are becoming more digital, more distributed, and the stakes of failure are getting higher.

The same is true in the physical economy. For the last twenty years, much of software was built around digital workflows. The next wave is moving deeper into the physical world. Burro is building autonomous robots for agriculture and other labor-intensive environments. Ceres Technology helps companies anticipate supply chain risks before they cascade. Sourcemap gives enterprises better visibility into where products come from. ThreeV brings inspection automation to industries where downtime and maintenance matter. It does so not by skipping the hard operational details, but by making them visible and easier to act on.

Connectivity belongs in the same conversation. A dynamic country depends on the networks that let people work, learn, receive care, and participate in the economy. Ascend Arc is approaching that problem from orbit, building cost-effective geostationary satellites to expand connectivity. Flume Internet is working from the ground, delivering high-speed fiber internet to homes and businesses. Different layers, same underlying need: reliable access to the infrastructure modern life depends on.

Healthcare is another essential system where better technology can expand capacity. Headway is making it easier for people to find mental health providers who accept insurance while reducing administrative burden for clinicians. Particle Health is improving access to patient data so care can be better coordinated. Nirvana Health is automating insurance verification, claims, and reimbursement workflows, removing friction that providers and patients feel every day. Healthcare access belongs squarely in this conversation. If the thesis is about strengthening the systems that make a country work, care delivery and administrative capacity are central to it.

Taken together, these companies point to a broader definition of American Dynamism. It is not only defense, deep tech, or the most visibly ambitious categories. It is technology as a tool for capacity-building. That is the power of the phrase: it created a shared frame for work that used to feel scattered and made more founders and investors willing to spend time in sectors that once felt too slow, too complex, or too tied to government.

This is also why the conversation is not limited to America. Across Europe, a similar question is emerging around sovereignty and technological independence. At VivaTech in Paris, Jenny Fielding joined government officials, defense leaders, and deep tech investors to discuss how defense tech is reshaping Europe’s innovation landscape. The conversation kept returning to a larger point: sovereignty is not only a policy goal. It is a mindset. Europe has the talent and the technology. What it has not always had is the connective narrative. The World Cup can bring people together around identity, ambition, and shared belief. Deep tech has rarely done that at the same scale. But the ingredients are there, and the need is becoming harder to ignore.

That may be the broader lesson of American Dynamism. Rebrands matter when they help people see familiar work differently. Language matters when it gives builders, customers, and capital a reason to gather around a common project. A movement does not remove the hard parts of building. It does not erase procurement cycles, technical risk, or regulatory complexity. But it can make more people willing to engage with them. And in the best cases, it can also reduce the bureaucracy that slows essential systems down. It succeeds, not by ignoring complexity, but by giving founders and institutions a shared reason to move faster.

Because the next chapter of American Dynamism will not be defined only by the loudest or most visible technologies. It will be built inside the systems people depend on every day: the response layer, the care layer, the trust layer, the connectivity layer, and the physical infrastructure underneath it all.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Listen to Mayssa Chehata with Scott Hartley, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: (Don’t) BEHAVE Yourself. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Every task does not need the same model. Some workflows require frontier-level reasoning, while others can be handled by smaller, more specialized models. But for enterprises, deciding which model to use, when to use it, and how to manage performance across a fast-changing market is becoming its own operational problem.

Neurometric is building around that problem.

The company raised $4 million in pre-seed funding from Betaworks, ex/ante, Everywhere Ventures, Encoded Ventures, Vermillion, Abstraction, Mu Ventures, Jason Calacanis, and Dharmesh Shah.

Neurometric provides an automated token engineering platform for companies running agentic AI workloads at scale. Its platform helps organizations route tasks to the most cost-effective and accurate language models, with tools including an automated task endpoint manager, an SLM marketplace, and an auto-SLM creator.

That is the larger opportunity behind the round. As AI usage grows inside the enterprise, the question is no longer just which model is best. It is how to build systems that can continuously optimize across cost, latency, accuracy, and reliability.

Neurometric will use the new capital to expand its engineering and AI research teams and continue developing optimization tools for a language model market that is changing quickly.

As agentic AI moves from pilots into production, infrastructure that makes model usage more efficient, measurable, and cost-effective may become a critical layer of the AI stack.

Read the full article on The SaaS News.

In episode 124 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Mayssa Chehata, founder and CEO of BEHAVE Candy — the first-ever better-for-you confectionery brand making low-sugar gummies without artificial sweeteners. Mayssa shares how her dad’s diabetes and her own sugar addiction drove her to prove that candy doesn’t need artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols to taste good and stay blood-sugar-friendly. She discusses BEHAVE’s vision to build the healthy candy aisle of the future — where taste, accessibility, and clean ingredients all come together.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Reformulating BEHAVE’s recipe to cut sugar without artificial sweeteners

• Landing Erewhon as an early anchor retailer to build credibility

• Rebuilding the supply chain to lower COGS and find a co-packer

• Building a following on TikTok that ultimately doubled revenue

• Pricing BEHAVE for accessibility while protecting margin

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Scott: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures. I’m super excited to be here today with Mayssa Chehata, founder and CEO of BEHAVE Candy, the first ever, better for you confectionery brand.

00:00:45 Scott: I think of you guys as the healthy Haribo. The gummy bears that have significantly less sugar, no artificial ingredients, taste amazing. I love the sweet and sour different versions that I pick up at point of sale.

00:00:58 Scott: But Mayssa’s got an amazing background as a former BD and marketing leader. You were at Uber, you were at Daily Harvest, SoulCycle. I know you’ve had a journey with BEHAVE.

00:01:08 Scott: And we’ll get into all the ups and the downs and the crazy moments that you experienced as a CEO who was bootstrapped and then raised capital and has grown to scale through a TikTok shop into traditional retailers such as Target, Erewhon, Urban Outfitters.

00:01:24 Scott: But really, really happy to have you here today with us, building one of the leading consumer brands in a rare part of our portfolio.

00:01:31 Scott: We don’t have a ton of consumer brands, but those that we have like BEHAVE, Fishwife, some of the others are really outliers in the space and we often contemplate, “Hey, should we be doing more deals like this?” Because you guys are truly incredible. Welcome to the podcast.

00:01:45 Mayssa: I love it. Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:47 Scott: Absolutely. Walk us through this journey. 2019, prior to BEHAVE, you were at a number of big brands. What inspired you to take that leap and gave you that confidence to jump ship into the wild west of being a startup CEO?

00:02:01 Mayssa: I feel like in my career, I kept going smaller and smaller in terms of company size. I started very corporate at a huge legacy business, the NFL. Almost as corporate as it gets.

00:02:12 Mayssa: I love that experience, but I always had this very entrepreneurial itch. I felt like the little piece of the business that I touched or even the executives that I sat under always felt very restricted in a big company. And I love the thought of being able to impact an entire business.

00:02:28 Mayssa: After the NFL, I joined Uber. Uber at the time was much smaller than it is now. It wasn’t tiny, but we were maybe like a thousand employees. Pretty early days still. And there, I felt there was so much ownership.

00:02:43 Mayssa: If you didn’t do something, it wasn’t getting done. If you had an idea, you went and ran with it. And I loved that. And then, I had an opportunity to join an even smaller company, which was Daily Harvest.

00:02:52 Mayssa: That was where I really got this appetite. I worked directly with the CEO and founder there. Very early days. I think I was in the first 10 employees. Really rapidly scaling CPG health food business.

00:03:04 Mayssa: I loved the space. I loved that we were making products that you could actually touch and feel, which was very different from tech and sports before that. The impact that we were having on our customers.

00:03:13 Mayssa: Everyone was doing everything. So we would see customer emails, people who were now feeding their families with these healthier, better products and the convenience of it. And so, I loved the space. I loved that it felt like we were putting something good out into the world.

00:03:27 Mayssa: And then, I loved the size of the team. I loved knowing that like anything that needed to get done, we just would strap up and do it. I loved working so closely with a founder. And I think that’s where I felt like, “Oh, I would love to be in that seat one day.”

00:03:40 Mayssa: I maybe didn’t realize that I would also eventually be getting into food or that it would be so soon. I had another role after that, which was SoulCycle, which was a bigger company.

00:03:50 Mayssa: I had had the idea for BEHAVE while I was at Daily Harvest. That’s where I was really looking to scratch this itch to start something from scratch. And again, that health food space got me really, really excited and really curious.

00:04:02 Scott: Talking to Alex Abelin from PlantBaby and his journey on building that company, this drive to want to create something physical in a very digitized world. But obviously, it comes with massive challenges around inventory, ingredients, the basic beginning building blocks of production.

00:04:20 Scott: How do you go from idea through that very first iteration? How did you get off the launch pad? Because I think a lot of people have some idea and they say, “Gosh, I have no idea how to take this from zero to one.” And you did that through really bootstrapping the business.

00:04:34 Mayssa: What I realized afterwards is I was at Daily Harvest at a very early stage, but we had passed one. I’d missed the zero to one when it comes to manufacturing and product development.

00:04:44 Mayssa: by the time I joined Daily Harvest, our manufacturers were in place, our supply chain was pretty much secure. We had teams and ops teams and people that were putting out fires.

00:04:53 Mayssa: We’re dealing with crises. We’re obviously always iterating and improving, but our supply chain was not broken. Zero to one on a physical product, especially a food product, everything is broken. Everything is a fire.

00:05:04 Mayssa: Obviously, there’s exceptions. You have these industry veterans who have done this a hundred times and sold multiple food businesses and they get into it and they know exactly the right people to hire. They know all the red flags with the wrong manufacturers to look out for.

00:05:17 Mayssa: That just wasn’t the case for me. I had been in a CPG food business, but I was on the marketing side of that business and we had already passed a stage where ops issues were directly touching me.

00:05:26 Mayssa: I came into starting BEHAVE from an ops and a product perspective a little bit delusional. I was like, “Oh, you just create a formula. You go to your co-packer. They start making it for you and you’re off to the races,” because that was my experience at Daily Harvest.

00:05:38 Mayssa: I missed zero to one. I like have to give so much credit to our founder because there’s always the tip of the iceberg and then there’s everything underneath in food and CPG businesses, even in the story that gets told after exit or after the company has blown up.

00:05:52 Mayssa: It’s a little bit because of founder PTSD. I think we wipe our memories sometimes once we get past it. That story of zero to one doesn’t always get told and I think it’s missing sometimes.

00:06:02 Mayssa: To answer your question… the idea I had was clean candy with low sugar that would actually pass the bar for a diabetic. My dad’s diabetic. I learned how to read labels and ingredient lists really young.

00:06:15 Mayssa: We ate super healthy at home. I understood what net carbs were. Like, I knew all of that from a pretty young age. I wanted to make a candy that would pass the check for my dad, which doesn’t spike blood sugar, without replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners like aspartame or sugar alcohols like erythritol and maltitol.

00:06:31 Mayssa: That was the question: can we make a gummy candy that would pass all of these checks? The starting point for me was I decided I wanted to reach out to a chef. That was a model that had been successful for us at Daily Harvest.

00:06:43 Mayssa: Our founder had hired Michelin-trained chefs to create all the early smoothie recipes. The thing is they tasted amazing because we got a lot of press and marketing from that and I had picked up on that.

00:06:54 Mayssa: So I was like, “Oh, a chef kills two birds with one stone.” Your stuff is going to actually taste really good and you have this marketing lever, which is, “Hey, we didn’t just develop this in a lab with a food scientist,” which is the way a lot of food gets developed.

00:07:06 Mayssa: And that’s also why a lot of health food doesn’t taste that good. You’re backing into a formula on a spreadsheet of how do I get the sugar down? Oh, I’ll just swap this for this as a percentage. We actually went ground up. We bought all the ingredients.

00:07:19 Mayssa: So I met a celebrity chef, which again would lend to like having someone with a public persona involved in the business. Elizabeth Falkner, who’s incredible, who’s still involved in the business.

00:07:29 Mayssa: I truly cold emailed a bunch of celebrity chefs and she was one of the people who replied. So we started true product development in her kitchen. It’s how we started out, off of a cold email.

00:07:39 Mayssa: And then, once we had that formula to a place that we were excited about, we brought in a food scientist to help scale the formula up for commercial scale manufacturing. We found our first co-packer and then we went into our first commercial production run.

00:07:53 Mayssa: There were problems like the fiber content was too high. We heard from customers on those early formulas, this is too much fiber for one serving. I’m getting gassy, stomach stuff.

00:08:04 Scott: I remember in the early days, the stickiness was an issue,

00:08:07 Mayssa: Totally. And now we say we blend the magic of chefs with the science of food scientists because you have to have both. Stickiness for a product like ours comes from bricks, water activity. You have to have pH levels balanced. Our products have sweeteners and then acids. And some of these things draw in water. Some of these things exude water.

00:08:26 Mayssa: So much that I’ve learned. I didn’t know any of this in the beginning. I just thought a gummy. You just mix something on the stove and then you pour them into molds and you put it in the fridge. You have a gummy.

00:08:35 Mayssa: We brought people in. Like we hired a consulting food scientist for that first scale up, but they maybe didn’t have that specific gummy experience. This is just the stuff that you learn. I just thought food scientists would understand across categories.

00:08:49 Mayssa: We were also creating a category. Even food scientists that had worked in candy before, almost none of them had worked with the natural sweeteners that we were using, like monk fruit and allulose. That has a huge impact on water activity. That contributes to why our candy was sometimes becoming sticky, whereas a regular sugar candy would not.

00:09:07 Mayssa: So, we now have an incredible food scientist on our team who’s very well versed. We’ve been learning some of this stuff together because these products don’t exist. There is not a rule book on how to remove 95% of sugar from a product that typically is anywhere from 60 up to 85% sugar content.

00:09:25 Mayssa: We’ve learned a lot. We’ve stumbled a lot, but now we’re definitely in a place where we’ve built a supply chain that can scale the business.

00:09:33 Mayssa: For the first couple of years, our supply chain wasn’t there and we were constantly out of stock, constantly producing product that either wasn’t sellable or we’d sell discounted or trying to get it off our hands.

00:09:44 Mayssa: That kills the momentum of the business. That was really, really hard. That was probably the first three years of the company.

00:09:50 Scott: I mean, one of the most amazing things about the category is the shelf stability of the candy. Landing in Munich or Frankfurt and you go to the candy aisle in a German airport and you’ve got about 100 SKUs of Haribo.

00:10:02 Scott: And I would love the future world where I walk into an aisle at Target and I have 100 SKUs of BEHAVE that’s all healthy candy that tastes delicious in all the different form factors and flavors.

00:10:13 Scott: And I think that’s part of the vision, building a healthy candy aisle that, to your point, can not spike blood sugar, can actually give you some vitamins, can give you some fiber content, not an overload of sugar.

00:10:26 Scott: On this journey of the ups and the downs, I know that there were a couple moments where it was existential. You got to the point where you’re at the brink. And what we see perennially with great founders is this irrational exuberance, this ability to push through those moments when a lot of people want to throw in a towel.

00:10:43 Scott: How did you get through those moments and what were some of the ways that you were able to navigate out of those corners?

00:10:49 Mayssa: I love the irrational exuberance because when you said it, all I could think was I wish it felt like exuberance in the moment. It felt a lot more like stubbornness because I was so burned out. I didn’t feel exuberant at all.

00:11:03 Mayssa: But there was some part of me definitely that was like, “We have to keep going.” But you have to think about three years where like, every production run feels like the product’s not where I want it to be.

00:11:16 Mayssa: Then we get some momentum. I remember one time we got on the Today Show. We had production scheduled that was going to bring us the inventory. We needed to fulfill all the orders that we knew were going to come in from the Today Show.

00:11:27 Mayssa: Something went wrong in that production so we were not able to fulfill like, thousands of orders from this Today Show segment, or it took us over a month. You finally get this momentum and you lose it all. It’s like… already being a founder in good conditions is hard.

00:11:42 Mayssa: I felt like I was trying to push this boulder uphill. And so, really taxing mentally. And this stage also, you’re… small business. You don’t really have a team. Me and my co-founder, we had an employee at one point. When she left, we didn’t replace her for budget reasons.

00:11:58 Mayssa: So it was really just the two of us. We didn’t live in the same place. So we were just working on our own. I mean, together, obviously working closely every day. But it’s a very lonely time, those early days and it’s the hardest time.

00:12:08 Mayssa: So I think some of the stuff that got me through… for one, I think that vision that you just mentioned, Scott, I so appreciate you. You’re a great investor because you have tapped into my vision as well. We’re seeing the same future.

00:12:21 Mayssa: From the very beginning, I always saw that. The more things that went wrong, the more I felt like someone has to push this disruption forward because this is the worst category in the grocery store in terms of artificial ingredients, in terms of sugar content, in terms of dyes, things that are really, really harmful to us, extremely toxic – and as far as a category that is marketed primarily to children.

00:12:46 Mayssa: Part of why I started this company, too, I mentioned my dad’s diabetic but I have a huge sweet tooth. Especially over the years of building this business, I’ve thought a lot about this and I’m in this space. I have a sugar addiction, truly.

00:12:57 Mayssa: I’m the type of person where like, if I have a little bit of sugar, I will then for days be thinking about sugar nonstop, eating it like I can’t really stop myself. It is some dopamine loop that I get stuck in.

00:13:10 Mayssa: I just realized I picked this up as a kid. So when you get people into a dopamine sugar addiction loop as children, which is obviously the intention, they will eat and be addicted to sugar for the rest of their lives.

00:13:21 Mayssa: Sugar creates so many of the deepest, most expansive health issues that we’re facing now as a country and just globally – diabetes, obesity, cancer. Sugar’s an attractant for tumors, autoimmune disease, PCOS, hormone imbalance, all connected to sugar intake.

00:13:37 Mayssa: And the solution and mitigation for the symptoms of these illnesses, often, is to cut out sugar if you can. It’s hard to cut something out that you have a psychological addiction to.

00:13:47 Mayssa: Not to go on a tirade and a TED Talk about sugar. But this is just to say that like the deeper I got, the more conviction I almost came into in why we should exist or why at least someone doing what we were trying to do should exist. And so, we just doubled and tripled down.

00:14:02 Mayssa: I think the other thing that kept us going, honestly, is my co-founder. Huge shout out to Emily. My co-founder joined me actually after we launched the business. I hired her as our COO.

00:14:11 Mayssa: She immediately stepped into like, much more of a co-founder type role. And she has that title now. I can think of twice where I literally called her and said, “I think we’re actually done.”

00:14:21 Mayssa: I mean, a hundred times where I called her and needed to be talked off a ledge. But twice, the cash is running out. I don’t know if the math works where we’re even going to make it to, let’s say, 60 days.

00:14:32 Mayssa: You can’t get to day zero because you have people you need to pay back. There’s wind down costs. So let’s say, 60 days out twice. She was like, “We’re not done. I have a plan. Or we’re going to sit together and put the plan together.”

00:14:43 Mayssa: Huge shout out to her, too. I think sometimes as the founder, you’re out of steam, too. I know for some people, it’s their partner who’s like, “Hell no. You’re not going to quit.” For some people, it’s a parent or a great coach.

00:14:54 Mayssa: I think working with coaches in this role is amazing. Or I’ve become so spiritual through all of this too, Scott. I started asking the universe for signs. A hawk landed on my fire escape in New York city.

00:15:07 Mayssa: I was having the worst day. I was like, what are we going to do? And a hawk – a hawk is huge. I thought that a cloud had blocked the sun because my apartment became dark. And there was a hawk sitting outside my window.

00:15:18 Mayssa: And I just was like, “Okay. I don’t know what specifically what this means. It has to mean something. So let me like double down right now.” Get wonky with some of it, but we’re still here now. So there’s a reason for that.

00:15:30 Scott: There is. It’s funny because I think it’s really having a partner in battle. Jenny and I with Everywhere, we’ve had our ups and downs in the yin-yang dynamic of who’s up, who’s down, who’s confident, who’s having a challenging day. It’s really helpful to have that partner in crime that keeps you honest and keeps you moving forward.

00:15:48 Scott: When you kind of went through one of these downturns, I know one of the things that you turned to was TikTok. You guys have done an incredible job generating content and really building a business off of short form video.

00:15:59 Scott: Was that always part of the journey? Was that something you guys A/B tested and experimented with and then found, “Hey, our customer acquisition cost is low. This is a really interesting channel. Let’s double down on that.”

00:16:10 Mayssa: Much less scientific than that. 2020, I was one of those people that was chronically on TikTok during COVID. I think for our age group, I was a pretty early adopter on TikTok and was pretty active as a scroller.

00:16:23 Mayssa: I knew the power of the platform early for a founder, just millennial age group. From when we launched initially in 2020, I always had an intern or someone on the team just posting. We were always aiming for one post a day, because that consistency really does pay off on that platform.

00:16:40 Mayssa: But it was never really translating. We were in 300 view jail for years. Then what actually happened is a funny path to it. It was the third year of the business when like… we realized we had to reset a lot of things.

00:16:53 Mayssa: We had to fix our formulas. We had to find a new co-packer. We had to change our pricing structure and our COG structure. Like, we actually ended up winding down, forward-facing operations. We were still selling through existing inventory, but we weren’t doing any new production while we reset.

00:17:08 Mayssa: There’s a lot of waiting in a CPG business, You’re like waiting for your next formula. You’re waiting for the co-packer to respond. You’re waiting for a contract.

00:17:17 Mayssa: In that time, I decided that I needed to learn TikTok myself. But I think I was so burned out on the business. I was like, I’m not going to force myself to make TikToks about BEHAVE, but I have to post a TikTok every day.

00:17:29 Mayssa: That’s going to be like one thing that I’m going to challenge myself to do. There’s a little more downtime right now. I started posting TikToks. Initially, I think I was talking about dating. It was the last World Cup at the time. I posted a few videos about the World Cup that got 30,000 views, 50,000 views. And I just kept that ball rolling.

00:17:44 Mayssa: And then, after a year, when we were ready to relaunch the brand, I had gained a following on TikTok. I really enjoyed it. I had learned how to edit video, how to create content. Like, it just had this ripple effect.

00:17:57 Mayssa: And then I still, at that time, did not start translating that newfound skill to the business yet because then we needed to relaunch the business. And then, things picked up and I got busy again.

00:18:08 Mayssa: We picked TikTok up in a serious way for the business was one of those phone calls to Emily when I said, “I think we’re like, 60 days out and we might need to talk about winding down.” And then she was like, “No, let’s sit and get together.”

00:18:18 Mayssa: And the reason we ended up saying we’re gonna go all in on TikTok is it was the only thing we felt, it could turn our business around in 60 days. You can’t get a new retailer in 60 days, not a big one. We were like, “One viral video could theoretically turn our business around 60 days.”

00:18:33 Mayssa: And I had been on TikTok now for a year. So me and her, we were like, I’m just gonna turn all my focus to making TikTok videos for 30 days. We’ll see if anything happens. And in two weeks into that, we had a video that went viral and it doubled our business overnight.

00:18:47 Mayssa: We did as much revenue as we had done the previous month. So that was a complete trajectory chain. Literally saved the business. Immediate cash in also. Like TikTok pays out pretty quickly.

00:18:57 Mayssa: Honestly, it was a survival decision. We figured out this formula that was working, that was making these videos go viral. And we just kept pouring fuel on that fire over and over. It was not as scientific as testing.

00:19:08 Mayssa: And then, we just started cranking as much content out as we could for that 30 day period that we thought could potentially go viral.

00:19:15 Scott: And then when you had those viral hits, did that consumer facing success lead back to some of the B2B relationships where you were able to unlock the Target relationship or unlock Erewhon or some of these others?

00:19:27 Mayssa: Absolutely. I mean, retailers now are really looking for brands who can bring people into the store. I think the retail game has changed significantly since COVID. Foot traffic is down for a lot of the major retailers. So they need you actually to like drive that shopper into their store to be looking for your brand.

00:19:45 Mayssa: When you’re a small unknown brand, you’re not gonna do that. We did one or two retail partnerships in the early years that were maybe like a little bigger than we were ready for. We were never performing terribly, but we were never outperforming.

00:19:58 Mayssa: We knew that our brand was too small, not enough people knew who we were. When we have viral videos getting three, five, seven million views, now suddenly you have this whole new audience of people who’ve seen you before.

00:20:09 Mayssa: The first time I was in a Target and I just saw a woman buying BEHAVE by chance, it was the only thing she was buying. She had come into Target, I guess, specifically to buy it. And she was like, “Oh, I’d seen it on TikTok.”

00:20:19 Mayssa: Also now, buyers are looking at TikTok. So candy buyers are going on TikTok and seeing what brands are viral. We had inbound business, too. Like our Sam’s Club business, that was an inbound.

00:20:28 Mayssa: We had an inbound opportunity from another like gigantic retailer that we’ll be launching in…. date not yet confirmed, but coming soon, I hope. The buyers also have their eyes on that platform, at least for the candy industry. And it just brought us so much leverage.

00:20:42 Mayssa: We used to beg these retailers to even answer an email or consider taking a meeting or even to send them samples. And it was crickets. Suddenly, it was almost overnight, our emails started getting answered.

00:20:54 Scott: One of the rollout playbooks that Katie Hunt, founder of Oh Norman! – she was at Showfields, was early employee at Warby Parker, also co-founder of Everywhere Ventures with us – was, building an online brands in the way that you can control. So your website, direct to consumer.

00:21:09 Scott: Then moving to online distribution platforms. So in her case with pet food, moving to the chewy.com. And then only as layer three, moving to physical retail, because then you have all the complexity around inventory and discounts and all that stuff.

00:21:25 Mayssa: Did you think about that rollout of let’s really like refine the unit economics on CAC and LTV and understand price point and all that stuff on the D2C side, then expanding out into maybe online digital retail where inventory is slightly less complex and then moving into physical retail.

00:21:43 Scott: Beggars can’t be choosers. You go where the market pulls you. But is that something that you’ve thought about in the rollout strategy?

00:21:49 Mayssa: Now that you’re saying it, Scott, it’s almost like that is how it played out, I don’t want to take credit that I was as genius and masterful and intentional as Katie probably has been with her business.

00:22:00 Mayssa: Honestly, I think with all the supply chain issues we were running into with cash constraints, we were a little bit more in a beggar situation for many years of the business. Thankfully, I think we’re getting out of that now.

00:22:11 Mayssa: That’s just how it played out. We launched in August of 2020, there was no retail. They were still buying only essentials, basically. Not bringing on new brands, for sure. So we launched D2C. That allowed us to build some online community.

00:22:23 Mayssa: We did a few small retail partnerships after one year of being online. That’s when we launched at Erewhon. Erewhon’s been an incredible partner for us. It’s always been great just to have this anchor at Erewhon where we know people discover us.

00:22:35 Mayssa: We know that’s like a influencer retailer, which means other retailers look to that retailer for what they’re bringing in. In the health food space, too. If you’ve had your ingredients approved by Erewhon, a lot of other health food stores take it as a check of approval that you have a truly clean product. So that was really helpful.

00:22:54 Mayssa: We did start turning on some of the online retailers, including Amazon and some places like SnackMagic, which they sell into corporate offices. There’s a few others that we greenlit.

00:23:04 Mayssa: And then, TikTok Shop, obviously with that big TikTok push. And then that led us into some of this bigger retail expansion. The big one this year being Target. It just takes such a huge supply chain pivot to be able to supply retailers at that scale.

00:23:20 Mayssa: I do wanna say the strategy holds for marketing, for sure. That’s exactly what it is. You build your audience, then you hit the shelf at Target and you have people to actually send to Target who want to buy your product.

00:23:32 Mayssa: But with that said, because food is a low margin CPG business, it’s not like beauty or, some of these other businesses like you’re pushing 80, 90% margin sometimes. That’s not how food works. So the other thing you have to do in food is figure out how to scale your production so you can lower your COGS and improve your margin pretty quickly.

00:23:52 Mayssa: I do also understand it’s easy to tell someone like, “Don’t go into Walmart too soon or don’t go into Target too soon.” But if you can get like a 15% COGS savings by taking a big business like that, I think that’s where sometimes the push and pull really is there.

00:24:07 Mayssa: We’re feeling it now too. Like now we’re very lucky. We have a ton of retail interests coming in, especially on the back of a successful launch at Target. And so, there’s always the part of us that’s like, take everything.

00:24:18 Mayssa: We’re pretty solid on COGS now, but there’s probably still another 5% to 8% to capture as we scale up the business. Maybe I would say 5% to 10%. We want that volume. But as a small team, how many new retailers can you open in one year?

00:24:32 Mayssa: Each of these retailers requires a massive amount of support. So much of the marketing for us as content. So I’m literally going into stores, creating video content. We have a few celebrity investors. We take them into the stores to create video.

00:24:45 Mayssa: We can only do that with so many retailers, with so many doors at a time. So how do you balance that, I think, is always the push and pull with a food brand. Because you do wanna take the volume. And at some point, you have to.

00:24:57 Mayssa: Otherwise, your production costs are just gonna remain too high and you’ll never capture any margin and be able to grow your gross margin as a business to a point where you could actually become profitable.

00:25:06 Scott: I know we’re wrapping up on time, but one question just in the early days on pricing, you have comparable companies and price points in the aisle. How do you think about that? In the early days, like when you need to pick that first price point, because it is an anchor of are you a premium product? How did you navigate that?

00:25:24 Mayssa: I think you start with a cost plus always. And then if you want to like pad your margin, you can always go higher than whatever your cost plus is. And so for us, we went with a stronger margin out the gate.

00:25:37 Mayssa: Stronger margin on paper, if everything goes according to plan, which again, in the first few years, it doesn’t. We were stocked out probably six months of the year for the first three years of the company. There’s so much other hidden loss that’s happening that having a little bit of padding on your margin will help.

00:25:53 Mayssa: But our initial price point was $4.99 when we were initially launching completely D2C. I also ran an ad test. I love doing this, like run a Meta test, A/B test, two things side by side, put $100 on the campaign and see what wins.

00:26:06 Mayssa: And I remember testing, because we had an investor that was like, “We think you should be at $3.99.” We ran this A-B test and actually $4.99 outperformed $3.99. Because I think $3.99 and $4.99 both put you in a premium price category. And then that price insensitive customer, the more expensive almost becomes the more appealing.

00:26:23 Mayssa: And so we ended up with a mentality, which was until we can get closer to $2.99, we’d rather be $4.99. $3.99 felt like this middle ground where we were losing margin, but not actually getting the incremental of that customer that’s going to shop under $3.50 or $3.

00:26:38 Mayssa: The Erewhon customer is completely price insensitive, so forget that. But then we started opening some other different types of retailers. And we did start to feel that price had become a constraint.

00:26:47 Mayssa: And then, we ran a big customer insight survey around that time when we were going to relaunch and reformulate and just really trying to learn about the business. The number one reason people didn’t repurchase had been price.

00:26:57 Mayssa: So that gave us the insight where we were like, “Okay, we need to actually get down.” $3.99 didn’t feel like a price break point for us. So we tried to get down to $3.49 and we rebuilt our entire supply chain in order to reduce our COGS enough to get there. And we did it.

00:27:12 Mayssa: But we had already been in market for three years. That gave us the ability to even go through that exercise to get our COGS down. We couldn’t get our COGS down when we were just starting out because we were producing at such small quantities.

00:27:24 Mayssa: Everything is connected. We had more leverage going into that rebuilding period where we were able to drop the price and improve our COGS. We had more leverage. We had more information. We knew our business better. We knew our formula better.

00:27:37 Mayssa: So all of that really helped and allowed for that. All these things are always art and science. And I almost sometimes lean a little more art and a little more intuition. Theoretically, you’d think $3.99 would sell more than $4.99. I just pushed back because I just felt we should be $4.99 when we launched.

00:27:52 Mayssa: What we’ve stated as our mission is to reduce the amount of sugar in the food system so we are pushing for accessibility. At every COGS break, we’ve lowered our price. And we plan to continue to do that.

00:28:02 Mayssa: If I could sell my candy for $1.99, I would tomorrow. So we are not trying to hold a luxury positioning. We are not trying to preserve a luxury brand identity.

00:28:14 Mayssa: We want accessibility. We want the entire candy aisle to start looking more like products like ours. Less like sugar-filled cartoon character dye-filled candy for kids. We want that accessibility. But you have to build your business and build your way up to that.

00:28:30 Scott: At the end of the podcast, we always do a lightning round. What podcast, other than Venture Everywhere, or book are you currently reading or finding useful?

00:28:38 Mayssa: I just picked up a book that… I guess, I can’t say if it’s useful yet or not, but it’s just been recommended to me a million times, which is called the Celestine Prophecy. But people compare it to the Alchemist. So I will say that that is my very useful book.

00:28:50 Mayssa: I mean, you can get through the Alchemist in two days. It’s so quick. The Alchemist, people think it’s cheesy, I’m sure. But it’s this hero’s journey, and it’s all about the signs and being on your mission and your path in life and that the things you need will find you and random things will appear that help you.

00:29:05 Mayssa: And every time I’ve read the Alchemist… it’s very strange. It’s almost like some weird unlock will happen right after. I feel like there’s some weird magic in the book.

00:29:15 Scott: I may know the answer to this question, but if you didn’t live in New York City, where in the world would you choose to live?

00:29:19 Mayssa: Oh, man. We were talking about this before, but I’m gonna give a plot twist answer. It would be Puerto Escondido, a small town in Mexico, remote, a little hard to get to.

00:29:32 Mayssa: I’ve spent a good amount of time in Mexico City. That would probably be my second answer. But if I could be a little more offline and off the grid, I’d love to just be a beach bum somewhere.

00:29:40 Scott: Puerto Escondido sounds like a good spot for that. Finally, where can listeners find you online?

00:29:45 Mayssa: We’re EatBehave on, I think, almost all platforms. So TikTok and Instagram. Just E-A-T B-E-H-A-V-E. Where you can also find us, and I wanna offer some free candy to your listeners, is on Target stores and on target.com. But we’re running a rebate right now.

00:30:01 Mayssa: If you order two bags of BEHAVE, either on target.com or you buy it at a Target store, we ask that you leave us a review. But even if you don’t leave us a review, it’s okay. We’ll rebate either way. Just email us your receipt to hi, H-I, hi@eatbehave.com.

00:30:18 Mayssa: Just write Target rebate in the subject line, and we will Venmo you back for two bags of BEHAVE and you guys can give it a try.

00:30:26 Scott: Amazing. Well, Mayssa, thank you so much for being with us. We’ve been super happy to be on the journey with you, all the ups and the downs. I’m a huge fan of BEHAVE. Love the candy, love the brand.

00:30:36 Scott: For those that don’t know the logo, look up the website. Incredible what you’ve been able to create. Hats off to you for having the grit to stick with it for five years. And I think you’re on the precipice of really big growth in the category. Congratulations and thank you for being with us.

00:30:51 Mayssa: I really appreciate it. And just in case people don’t know, I think in our very first fundraising round, Scott and his team put in a check, which means so much to me. Everyone that believed in this when I don’t think we had even launched yet.

00:31:02 Mayssa: And then have stuck with us also through a lot of ups and downs, have remained supportive, have always offered words of encouragement when I was in those low moments. So that also means so much to me, Scott. I’m very grateful.

00:31:13 Scott: Thanks, Mayssa.

00:31:14 Mayssa: Thanks.

00:31:16 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

We’re in the era of the General Contractor CEO.

In Asia there’s been a rise of One Person Companies, or OPCs. In the West, many are speculating that soon billion dollar businesses could be single-founder creations, leveraging the output and coordination advantages with AI. I wrote on this idea a few years ago in what I called “The Rise of the Thin Company,” which I first referenced in terms of our portfolio company, Finalis, in May 2023.

The idea around Thin Companies, those enabled largely by AI, builds on the premise that not only can AI can supercharge a founder’s skillset, but also help them dynamically coordinate inputs based on business demands. More like creating a house, a circus or a movie, where skills are assembled and disassembled based on the immediate goals, AI can help in this task coordination and optimization. The company itself need not fully employ everyone to have those output advantages.

CEOs may yet become like General Contractors, bringing together loose ties to achieve organizational objectives, dynamically enabled by marketplaces and AI, rather than needing to bring all of these skills in-house permanently. A GC need not understand every part of the home building process, but they are the coordination authority bringing together foundation, electrical, plumbing, etc. The CEO has long been a lauded position; it’s moving the way of coordination maven.

Federico Baradello, CEO of Finalis, expanded further on this idea. “When we founded Finalis, we asked a radical question: what if the next elite investment bank wasn’t a skyscraper of analysts—but a lean, AI-enabled network of independent dealmakers working from anywhere?” Finalis aims to build the platform that enables 1,000 “investment banks OF one,” rather than a single skyscraper full of 1,000 investment bankers IN one. The reason this is possible, is because the economies of scale, the former advantages of established organizations with regulatory licenses, processes, are dwindling. In other words, you used to have to join a bulge bracket to get your laptop, get your market access, get your licenses, get your capital. No longer.

As the AI-enabled advantages accrue to the independent “General Contractor” CEO or GC-CEO, and to the Thin Company, they soon begin to outweigh the disadvantages associated with bureaucratic scale, working inside the skyscraper.

History repeats as a series of aggregations and disaggregations. The industrial revolution took independent craftsmen and consolidated processes and automation that led to economies of scale, and an inability for a single car manufacturer to compete. Now AI is doing the opposite, pulling on the string that unravels the benefits of being part of a large organization, and providing sufficient advantages to independent operators that they can not only compete, but win with AI.

As Baradello points out, “A Thin Company is lean in headcount but thick in leverage. Rather than scaling with humans, it scales through networks, automation, and intelligent infrastructure.” And so this General Contractor CEO must be adept at assembly, like a movie producer bringing together the components of a film (actors, DPs, gaffers, editors etc), to create art, and stay on budget. These new Thin Company leaders will increasingly be the conductors of AI tools, an agentic workforce, and the fluid human networks when episodic loose-ties are required. Finalis allows bankers to operate independently, but where they are thin on headcount, they’re thick on leverage around deal origination, market making, and info sharing.

I’m not of the belief that every new unicorn will be developed by a single AI-enabled vibe coder in a basement, but I do think we are in a burgeoning period of disaggregation, where AI enabled tools, and loose-tie networks like Finalis will empower far more Thin Companies to compete with bulge bracket players. There will be a break-even where the costs of bureaucracy are outweighed by the AI-enabled advantages of speed, independence, and coordination.

And as to that break-even point, we’re probably already there.

—

Thanks to Michael Barone and Federico Baradello for contributions to this piece.

Scott Hartley is Co-Founder and General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, a $100 million-dollar early stage venture capital fund that has backed over 250 companies

Most diets promise results, but they often ask you to give up the foods you love. Before long, the table you share with family and friends becomes a place of restriction instead of connection. equ takes a different approach by using personalized nutrition built around who you actually are, what you actually eat, and where you actually want to go. The platform delivers deeply tailored nutrition plans built by qualified nutritionists. It also provides weekly check-ins and AI-powered guidance so members can lose weight, build healthier habits, and still enjoy the meals that matter to them. With a decade of real-world coaching data behind it and a growing B2B arm powering gym franchises and telehealth platforms, equ is scaling a model that is as focused as it is flexible.

For founder and CEO Amal Wakim, equ is deeply personal. At 16, a borderline diabetes diagnosis forced her to rethink everything she knew about food. After trying many fad diets that didn’t last, she found an approach grounded in balance, education, and portion awareness that helped her lose 30 kilos and keep them off for over a decade. What began as a passion project helping family and friends quickly evolved into something bigger. As demand grew, Amal made the decision to leave her marketing role at Google and dedicate herself full-time to building equ. Amal’s personal transformation didn’t just inspire the product; it shaped the philosophy that nutrition should feel sustainable, not punishing, and that building a healthier relationship with food has the power to improve every aspect of a person’s life.

What’s equ’s North Star?

Our North Star is to change the way the world views nutrition. For me that means helping people build a better relationship with food (seeing it as a friend, not an enemy) whether their primary goal is weight loss, better health, improved sleep, or more energy.

What sets equ apart?

First, we focus on nutrition and nothing else, which is rare. We don’t bolt on workouts or ten other pillars and that focus has let us build a very deep level of personalization. Your plan reflects what you actually eat and enjoy (down to things like a daily vanilla latte) and even if two people get the same recipe, their portions and macros are tailored to their bodies and goals. Second, we have 10 years of real‑world data from 1:1 coaching with dietitians and nutritionists. That conversational and outcomes data now powers our AI, so our recommendations are grounded in what has actually worked.

Tell us about some recent milestones that equ crushed.

One big milestone that we implemented about 3 years ago was shifting from a 1:1 coaching model, where every new member required a new nutritionist, to a scalable, automated, self-serve product supported by AI. That shift unlocked real reach: we could make expert-grade nutrition accessible to far more people, with growth no longer capped by how many nutritionists we could hire, and without sacrificing the accountability that drives results.

The second is moving into B2B and signing our first large franchise partners. Most companies in our space are fighting for the same individual customers in a crowded, expensive market. We took the opposite path: rather than competing for users one at a time, we became the nutrition engine other brands plug into - gyms, franchises, telehealth platforms - white-labeled and powered by equ. They bring an audience that already trusts them; we bring a decade of nutrition data and a depth of personalization they would never build themselves. We’re not competing for those members. We’re reaching them at scale, through partners who have already earned their trust.

What have been some of the biggest challenges founding equ?

For most of our journey, the challenge was simple: cash. We have built a marketing engine that returned $3-5 for every $1 we put in - but bootstrapped, we could only ever spend what was in the bank, while also funding the product and the team. The constraint was never the model; it was fuel. We could see exactly what scale would do and couldn’t reach for it. Today the challenges have changed shape - managing growth as partners come online, and raising our first real capital. We’re about to start our Series A, and even with deep conviction in the numbers, compressing a 10-year journey into a few weeks of investor conversations (and absorbing the inevitable no’s) is emotionally demanding.

How did you choose the name equ?

We originally called the company “equalution,” a mashup of “equilibrium” (a balanced approach to food) and “revolution” (changing dieting and weight loss), but quickly realized no one could pronounce it. During a rebrand we cut the name, the same way we help people trim the unsustainable parts of dieting (and unwanted body fat), and landed on equ. I like that equ is tied to balance in Latin. It still reflects our core idea of balanced, sustainable nutrition, and it was already how most people referred to us.

Fun fact:
I grew up as a serious online gamer back in the dial‑up days, which definitely didn’t help my activity levels. I love games so much that now I avoid them completely because I know how easily I get hooked. I once hit around level 500 on Candy Crush in three days, before I knew I had to delete it.

Listen to Josh Wöhle with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Set in Mindstone. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 123 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Josh Wöhle, co-founder and CEO of Mindstone — a platform that trains companies and their employees to actually use generative AI in their day-to-day work. Josh shares how Mindstone started as a general learning platform before ChatGPT’s release exposed a much bigger opportunity: companies were spending millions on AI tools while leaving the people meant to use them almost entirely untrained. Mindstone’s vision is to become the enablement layer for the enterprise, starting adoption with executives and scaling it outward through the whole organization.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Pivoting Mindstone from a general learning platform to AI-specific enablement

• Engineering Rebel as an alternative to off-the-shelf AI platforms

• Leading with executives before rolling AI training out to the rest of an organization

• Pushing one enterprise client to switch its entire stack from Microsoft to Google

• Helping Epignosis spot cross-team churn patterns through shared AI memory

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:33 Jenny: Welcome, everyone to Venture Everywhere, where today I’m very excited to have Josh, the co-founder and CEO of Mindstone. He’s going to talk about his AI learning platform that has actually evolved over the last few years.

00:00:47 Jenny: Josh actually has a fascinating background at the intersection, I’d say, of education, games, and now automation. Maybe we could start there and you can tell me a little bit about how you got into this type of work and your mission.

00:01:02 Josh: Thanks for having me. I’m a software engineer by background, so I was born in the Netherlands. About 13 years there, 10 years in Switzerland, and about 16 in London now.

00:01:12 Jenny: How did I never know you were from the Netherlands? I thought you were from the UK.

00:01:15 Josh: No, I’m Dutch. I was born in Amsterdam.

00:01:17 Jenny: I lived in Amsterdam for a year and you don’t have that Dutch speaking English accent.

00:01:22 Josh: No, I was spending a lot more time with people in the US and also my co-founders, actually. Weirdly enough, people have a hard time placing my accent, but when they do, the number one thing that comes through for some weird reason is Irish.

00:01:32 Jenny: Yeah. You have an Irish accent, a very faint Irish accent.

00:01:36 Josh: Well, that is a direct result of how much time you spend with co-founders as two of my co-founders at SuperAwesome were both Irish and somehow it stuck. I don’t know why.

00:01:46 Jenny: I love it. Tell us a little bit about the founding of SuperAwesome.

00:01:49 Josh: SuperAwesome was what? A little bit, 11 years ago, 12 years ago now. It really started mostly from Dylan, who was my co-founder and CEO, and he had had a few investments in the kids space.

00:01:59 Josh: And those investments just seemed to run into the same problems, which was that… trying to comply with the legislations of what you could actually do and how you should build software for kids was very onerous and impossible when you were a startup or a small company.

00:02:14 Josh: And so it became interesting that he saw that multiple times over. And then, we had a discussion about it. But if you built a company around trying to deal with those complexities, you’re able to get the overall price point down. It becomes cheaper for everyone, and suddenly people can actually go and do that.

00:02:30 Josh: And that was off the back of the idea that we knew that child protection online was only going to go up. So, the environment was going to be favorable. And we set out to build that platform.

00:02:41 Josh: That worked really well. I mean, it became one of the biggest kids’ technology companies in the world. We built all of the kids’ safety technology behind the apps of Pokemon Go, Disney, Lego, Hasbro, Nintendo.

00:02:53 Jenny: That was an interesting time because it wasn’t right when, say, the iPhone launched, but it was that next generation of kids who grew up with iPhones in their hands or their parents giving it to them.

00:03:05 Jenny: And so obviously, safety and wanting the kids to have rich content, not just YouTube. It was such a great time.

00:03:13 Josh: Fairly ironic, some of it in terms of just the difference between the legislative environment and where parents were at, because we had to deal with two realities. On the one hand, make sure that everyone was compliant everywhere.

00:03:25 Josh: And on the other, the number one complaint we would get was parents asking us, why are you asking us to jump through all these hoops just to let my child go and enjoy Pokemon Go?

00:03:36 Josh: It’s this weird thing where it’s like, “Well, we’re trying to keep your kids safe.” Well, I only want them to use Pokemon Go. And so they need geolocation data collections…” It’s difficult to try and please everyone in that way. But it was definitely fun undertaking.

00:03:48 Jenny: Especially when you’re dealing with parents and their children. They have a lot of opinions, I bet.

00:03:54 Jenny: What were some of the big challenges of running SuperAwesome? I mean, you guys had a great run and an amazing exit, but what were some of the tough times in those early days?

00:04:02 Jenny: You were running the startup in the UK, I believe? The startup scene was just starting to develop there. You were kind of at the forefront of it. So what was that like?

00:04:10 Josh: To be fully honest, in Europe, it felt as if you were in the startup ecosystem because London to Europe is like Silicon Valley to the rest of the US. It really feels like you’re in the center of things until you start to realize what is on the other side of the ocean.

00:04:22 Josh: It’s like, “Ah, wait. Actually.” So, it didn’t quite feel that bad to start. Now, having said that, it did not feel like we were successful for a very long time. Numbers were going up. We could show growth.

00:04:33 Josh: But I don’t think there were many moments or I know there were almost no moments where I felt like, “Oh, yeah. We made it. It’s like, it’s fine.” Up until the moment that we sold and the money was in the bank account. Even the whole exit process, it almost fell through like five different times.

00:04:48 Josh: Now, what we did really have going for us was that in approximately the same year, year and a half, you had Cambridge Analytica and the Snowden debacle and everything around privacy.

00:05:01 Josh: Suddenly, it just made privacy a thing that everyone was thinking about. Privacy and data were like high on everyone’s agenda. And although no one could agree what that meant yet at a political level, at least for kids, they were like, “Well, let’s at least agree that we need to make sure we’re protecting the kids.”

00:05:18 Josh: And it changed the environment in which we were operating. It definitely led to more conversations suddenly, finally getting to actual deals.

00:05:27 Jenny: It’s so interesting. I mean, we, as investors, rely on our founders to see the future. We don’t always see it. That was clear for you, but not everyone else.

00:05:36 Jenny: You guys saw that from the beginning of how important privacy was going to be. But it took the rest of the world to have these massive events and media coverage for everyone to wake up and be like, “Wow, this is, this is going to be a thing.”

00:05:50 Jenny: How do you think of regulatory environment in Europe versus the US when it comes to startups? You must have had to navigate multiple jurisdictions and ideologies or philosophies.

00:06:02 Josh: At a pure startup level, the UK is great. Probably on par and in some cases better at a starting level than in the US. Within an hour, you can have your company set up, your accountant’s done.

00:06:13 Josh: You have a really good early stage investment scene where everyone gets a tax break to invest in early stage startups. The very, very early stage is actually really good. It’s when you get just beyond that that it gets a bit harder.

00:06:24 Josh: Now, when you think about SuperAwesome and the regulatory environment for Europe as a whole, the rest of Europe is just night and day. I guess the difficulty of just starting your company is already preventing you from getting going in the first place.

00:06:38 Jenny: The good old notary.

00:06:41 Josh: Exactly. I made the mistake of investing in one startup in Germany. I was told I needed to fly over for a signature.

00:06:47 Josh: But actually for SuperAwesome, the fragmented regulatory environment ended up being a strength because, ironically, the fact that it was so hard to try and comply in every single country made the argument that every company individually shouldn’t be doing that themselves.

00:07:03 Josh: They should be outsourcing that to a platform that would automatically figure out where does the user come from? What legislation applies? How do I go about getting all the right consents and audit logs and all this stuff?

00:07:13 Josh: Which was what we were doing at SuperAwesome. It created the space for us to create a value proposition that otherwise would not have had as strong an appeal.

00:07:24 Jenny: Super interesting. So you have a successful exit after a long journey. You take five minutes off, it seems, and you jump into Mindstone. What was the unique insight there? How has it evolved over the years?

00:07:37 Josh: The reality was the starting point for me was I wanted to try and figure out where did I want to spend the next 20 or 30 years of my life. I’m a problem solver. I like solving problems.

00:07:46 Josh: But with SuperAwesome, we were doing a lot around kid safety advertising and I definitely didn’t want to spend my life in that space. I narrowed it down to healthcare and education. One week after thinking about healthcare I was like, maybe not. That was going to take me years before I can be useful.

00:08:00 Josh: And education, I have a really different background than most. One, because I was born in Netherlands, then in Switzerland, then came to London. Also because my parents could never agree on the schooling system, so I did six different schools before I was 13. Six different schooling systems on top of that. So not just different schools.

00:08:16 Josh: And then I am a software engineer, by background. I’m a self learner. I did my MBA entirely remotely. I had all of these different perspectives. I thought I could really add something. That was the choice of just spending time in the space.

00:08:30 Josh: There was actually a book called How We Learn by Benedict Carey. It was really all about the science of learning and how what we know about how the brain works wasn’t widely known at all.

00:08:42 Josh: And these were extremely simple things, like how the brain retains more information when exposed to a certain repetition cadence, how testing yourself or recall has a stronger effect than rereading and rereading stuff over and over again.

00:08:57 Josh: It was so interesting because it was counter to almost everything that every single student I had talked to and knew about was going about learning. And that really felt information arbitrage at the time.

00:09:08 Josh: So, okay, wait, there is something here that is demonstrably true. Like hundreds of studies, not fringe science that just… this is how the brain works. And somehow I was, what? 25, 26, 27, and had never been exposed to it.

00:09:22 Josh: There’s something to be built here. And I thought, “Okay, well, if we can build a platform that helps everyone learn faster somehow, there is clear value there. Everyone wants that.” Time back, less time studying, everything.

00:09:32 Josh: That came with a combination of the idea that the average time any skill stays relevant was falling through the floor. This was just directly linked to how fast the world is moving around us and how long any particular thing that you learn stays relevant.

00:09:46 Josh: It was almost under the time that it took to get a degree to begin with. So it was just about getting under four years. If universities are built to try and build skills to go into workforce, this is not going to last for very long if we go under.

00:10:02 Josh: And so the idea was we need to find a way around the existing education system. Initially, I was trying to work with, and then it became fairly clear that it’s never going to work by working with the system in that way. So I had to try in, at least at the start… as a starting point somewhere around.

00:10:17 Josh: And then just as we had started to build that properly and started to go to market with it, that’s when ChatGPT happened. And that really changed everything again, because it changed both what we could build. But more fundamentally, the types of skills that would actually be relevant in the future.

00:10:33 Josh: Almost everyone in the company thought I was going a bit crazy because I really went in a black hole for about six months. Part of the reason why I was so excited by it… before starting SuperAwesome, I forgot to say that I was supposed to start a Master’s in artificial intelligence at Imperial in London.

00:10:50 Josh: Initially, decided to just defer that by a year, try SuperAwesome, and then potentially go back whenever. If it was successful, not go back. So never ended up doing the master’s.

00:10:58 Josh: But so AI had always been something that I was really excited by and passionate to explore. And when it was right there, initially, I felt a little bit stupid that ChatGPT came out and was like, “How did I not see this coming so strongly?”

00:11:14 Josh: There was just a weird feeling of like, “Wait, this is way, way bigger than what people are making it up to be.” And that’s why I went into that black hole for about six months trying to figure out, “Wait, what does this mean? How can we use this?”

00:11:24 Josh: And it didn’t quite work with GPT 3.5. But then when GPT-4.0 came out, and all the experiments I’ve been running for the six months prior, it’s like, oh, well, now they were starting to actually click.

00:11:35 Josh: I remember the biggest point where suddenly everyone in the company started getting it was you could assess someone’s likely level of skill based on the questions that they would ask on a particular topic.

00:11:46 Josh: So not even the answers they would give, based on the questions they would ask. And that was really where, “Okay, wait. This can be used for learning and education in a way that nothing else we have built ever could.”

00:11:56 Jenny: Does that mean people are assessing me by the questions I ask my guests?

00:12:00 Josh: Weirdly enough.

00:12:03 Jenny: I better come up with some really good questions before I get canceled.

00:12:09 Josh: Exactly. Another six months later, it just became clear that there is no skill in the world that I can teach anyone today, or that we can teach anyone today, that will have a bigger impact than helping them use AI in their job or in their life.

00:12:22 Josh: So we just decided, you know what? Yes, we can do general. But actually, what we need to do is just go entirely focused on generative AI. And that is when everything started to click for Mindstone and started to take off.

00:12:33 Jenny: That’s great. Now you’ve ended up in a pretty interesting place. So talk about how you’re helping your customers and really all of us get up to speed.

00:12:42 Josh: Yeah, very weird as well. So very guerrilla-like to start. The first time we did this, we tried it. We said, okay, what if we just did a Zoom series and we see how many people would be willing to pay to jump on a Zoom call with me where I’m literally just talking to them about how I’m using AI and trying to explain how it works.

00:13:01 Josh: Obviously not scalable. But we had way more signups than we thought. And there was real money coming into the business. And okay, that worked. Then we tried to figure out how do we build the platform behind to deliver the same value in a way that is much more scalable?

00:13:15 Josh: Our original thought was we’re going to remove all of the live cohort based stuff in the long run. Again, software engineer by background,. I want to build products that scales. I didn’t want to go and do live sessions.

00:13:26 Josh: Very quickly, we realized that was actually not what the right version ended up being because in learning and in change management, there’s a very high value on person-to-person stuff.

00:13:39 Josh: And so the challenge actually became how can we build something that feels like it is person-to-person, while having the economic benefits of scaling a platform?

00:13:48 Josh: And that’s where we ended up in this hybrid where we do 200 people at a time. They go through a few hours of live but accompanied by a platform that then personalizes it to each individual and that platform can scale.

00:14:00 Josh: So that really worked. Started working with some organizations like EY and Pearson and some others. And then I had this one opportunity where a friend of mine had to do an exec session. It was with Hyatt and he couldn’t make it.

00:14:16 Josh: And he was asked, “Okay, who’s the one person you’d recommend to go and do it?” He recommended me. It was on two days notice. So I was in London. I said, “Okay, well, jump on a flight tomorrow. I’ll be there the day after. Deliver the session. Go and do the thing.”

00:14:27 Josh: And it was really interesting because I have never been or I had never been a teacher. And so suddenly, I’m in a room for four hours, just live walking through how executives can go and use this technology in their own job.

00:14:40 Josh: And it was interesting because it made it very clear that the problem for AI, at least as it stands today, 9 times out of 10 is it actually starts with the executives. If the executives don’t use it themselves every day in their own job, that is a direct indication that they haven’t yet understood what the technology is about.

00:14:58 Josh: Because really, the executives should be using it every day. They can make their own decision making times 10. They can abstract their own work. And they’re the ones with the highest price on that work. So they should really be using it.

00:15:11 Josh: And so it’s a really good indication. And it then drove us to this new model where now, I’ve done these sessions with Home Depot, Fortnum & Mason, Pearson, like all across the world, some of the biggest firms that we do business with.

00:15:24 Josh: At this point has become a transformation play, which is first, activate and make sure that the entire senior management is aligned on what is possible, how can they use it themselves. They lead by example.

00:15:35 Josh: Then start to work with the rest of the organization, cohort-based. Okay, how do you go and upskill 20,000 people in a way that they all have the skills and more specifically, they understand the mindset shifts required in order for AI to really be useful in their work.

00:15:52 Jenny: What I like about the cohort approach that’s really embracing the whole organization is like you’re not leaving people behind. And I think that’s the big worry in AI is that sure, some people are going to be early adopters and those people are going to get ahead.

00:16:06 Jenny: But there are many people that are just either not comfortable, not confident. They don’t have extra time. So if you build this into the workplace, we really have a chance at like educating everyone. That’s very unique.

00:16:20 Josh: It is very interesting because a lot of companies, they get themselves a bit in a twist on what it means to do training or enablement across the organization because they have an L&D budget. They’ve had that for a while. It was never really used. So the reality is no one actually counts on it being used across the organization.

00:16:35 Josh: The problem there is that at the same time, you have a technology budget that goes into AI and every executive team at the moment will say AI is number one or number two priority.

00:16:44 Josh: They will gladly spend millions on the technology and then wonder if they can spend a hundred thousand on enablement, not realizing that the millions they’ve spent on the one hand are not going to actually have an effect without the enablement.

00:17:00 Josh: I, even often say this at the start of sessions, which is if there’s still a shred of doubt in your mind that you should be easily spending a few hundred to a few thousand dollars ahead in your organization on enablement by the end of my session today, then I have clearly not been successful at showing you what the potential impact here is.

00:17:19 Josh: And I try and put it down to us. So we as an organization, we now spend close to $10,000 a month on AI cost per employee. When you start to look at that, actually the enablement makes a lot of difference in that case. When you’re already spending that on the technology, how do you make sure you’re spending that efficiently?

00:17:37 Jenny: Token maxing, baby. Hopefully those costs can come down though. You’re still a startup.

00:17:41 Josh: But it’s the superpower of the startup. We’re 15 people now. We’ll do work equivalent to 150 people.

00:17:47 Jenny: That’s awesome. Can you talk about a time where you did one of these sessions or you had a customer and they came back with a real unlock? Or you followed up with them later or something that you actually saw that was very tangible?

00:18:01 Jenny: Curious to hear those stories because we hear the other stories, which is the MIT study, 95% of the AI pilots were disappointing or whatever. That study was a while ago, like Gen 1 and who knows what the variables were. We’ve heard a lot of positive stories, but they’re not necessarily getting out. So can you talk about one?

00:18:23 Josh: Let me give you two on opposite ends of the spectrum. So one with a really big organization. In big SaaS, the big tech SaaS players are notoriously hard to unseat from a B2B sales perspective.

00:18:36 Josh: One of the sessions I did with an executive team, one week after the session, they decided to switch to Google from Microsoft because they realized that having the right models available and the right infrastructure from an AI perspective was so critical to the organization that it merited moving away from the Microsoft stack and instead going down the Google stack. They signed the contract one week after the session.

00:19:04 Jenny: And this was so that they could integrate Gemini into all their workflows?

00:19:08 Josh: This was almost a year ago now, and it’s a little bit better now. At the time, there was no question. I literally couldn’t even deliver the sessions I wanted to deliver in Copilot at the time because it was so bad at following instructions. So that was direct effect.

00:19:21 Josh: Now on the other end of the spectrum, more recent in the last four months. So we work with an organization called Epignosis. They’re one of the bigger learning management systems in the world. About 250 people in the company, high growth, scale up.

00:19:36 Josh: And they have rolled out Rebel, which is the AI operating system that we built. Similar to Cowork, but specifically built for enterprise with shared memories and stuff like that across the organization.

00:19:46 Josh: And we had two big stories there. They are slightly low price point, which means you have higher churn, high growth coming through. One of the big targets was how do you reduce churn for them as an organization?

00:19:59 Josh: And the moment they started rolling out AI, specifically Rebel, it started to correlate different data points from different teams together that the teams themselves hadn’t actually talked about.

00:20:10 Josh: So you just had one part of the organization that was using Rebel to talk about churn in one way and another part of the organization that was talking about churn in another.

00:20:18 Josh: But because Rebel ends up writing everything to shared memory, it started to spot patterns like, “Wait, there’s this team over here that… you had a similar thing. These customers are about to churn. Maybe this is the way that you can make sure that they retain.” And they instantly made progress on their churn targets.

00:20:36 Josh: The second piece there was interesting, where just before we did the rollout, one of the people in their L&D team who was behind on their OCR and they said, “There’s no way that I can go and get this done this quarter.” Two weeks after the rollout, they were way ahead on their OCR and they said,”It’s all done. I’m totally fine.”

00:20:56 Jenny: That’s a great story. How do you as a team stay up to date on the latest tools? Because there’s so much. At Everywhere, we’re using a lot of AI to build an automated VC firm in many ways.

00:21:07 Jenny: We’ve built everything from an AI portfolio manager to you name it, up and down the stack. But one issue I’d say is every day as we read about new tools, we have to figure out how to prioritize and not to get distracted. How are you guys thinking about that or dealing with that?

00:21:23 Josh: I think we’re different in that than most because we get to justify spending more time on it than others.

00:21:30 Jenny: Yes, it is your core business. But still, you can’t rip out everything that you’ve built every five days. Maybe you can do that every six weeks. But how do you find that balance?

00:21:41 Josh: Partially, this is how Rebel started. I had built my own AI operating system in order to not be held back by what everyone else had been building, including Anthropic and OpenAI.

00:21:52And when I was showing that to people, they just felt like, “Wow, why can’t we get that?” And that was the whole starting point of Rebel.

00:21:59 Josh: And this is an unfair advantage, but we have our own operating system. Every day, literally on this call, I’ve got five different agents that are rolling out different features on the operating system, because it is ours and I can just tweak it whenever I want to tweak it.

00:22:12 Josh: The other is just living in the uncomfortable zone of always pushing and trying one step further than what is possible. And the team, they love it and they hate me for it at the same time.

00:22:24 Josh: I’m a CEO who pushes code to production 20 times a day. In some cases, really great. And in some cases, it makes it really hard for everyone else to constantly try and catch up or at least stay aligned.

00:22:34 Josh: And then the last piece is we run the biggest AI community in the world. And that is a big part of how we stay up to date. We have more conversations about how AI gets used on a daily basis at work or in personal lives than I think anybody in the world. We do 30 events a month now.

00:22:48 Jenny: That’s amazing. As someone who, you know, is very focused on community and built Everywhere around the thesis of founders and operators being our engine for our fund, I’d love to just to hear a little bit more about how you guys are building the largest AI community in the world.

00:23:04 Jenny: I’m unclear that community really scales and maintains integrity and value. It’s not software. There’s people involved. But you guys have done a really good job. And so can you maybe talk about some of the things you’ve learned around building community?

00:23:20 Josh: I would both agree and disagree. It doesn’t scale like software, but you can build and scale community in a non-centralized fashion facilitated by technology. And we’re still learning every day and trying to do better.

00:23:35 Josh: But we have our own community management software that we ended up building that does simple things like every speaker that has spoken at one of our events is there. Every attendee that came to an event is there.

00:23:46 Josh: When we go to a new city, we can automatically figure out who else is likely to have been in those places to help us start this up. We have sponsor management and stuff like that. There’s loops that you can build that help keep it alive.

00:24:00 Josh: If you have speakers, well, when they have done a great job, who would they recommend would be great speakers in their region? And often good speakers know other good speakers on particular demos.

00:24:11 Josh: Same for attendees. If you enjoyed an event, who do you want to take along next time? If you give them the opportunity to show, “Hey, we have another event next month.” Those are software loops.

00:24:21 Josh: If you built the system that bakes these things in, you can scale a decentralized approach. A Mindstone event, it won’t be the same in Bristol to New York to London. They will have their own vibe, but they will have some structure. They’ll have the same types of talks.

00:24:38 Jenny: I’ve been to one of your events in New York. It was very grassroots. I loved it. It was in a room, down a dark hall and packed with people that were so excited to be there. And pizza. And I was like, “This is a throwback.” I loved it.

00:24:55 Josh: For what it’s worth, partially, that is something that came out of London, to your question earlier of what was the startup scene like in London when we started SuperAwesome. And that was one thing that was different in London – and I would say even better in London than in the US.

00:25:09 Josh: Any day of the week, you could walk out and there would be 20 different events around the city. They would all be free. You’d have pizza and beer there. There would be someone sharing something from all parts of seniority.

00:25:21 Josh: Sometimes you’d have the CTO of Facebook that would suddenly sit up there. He would go and talk through. And then, sometimes you just have a mobile engineer that’s showcasing a new app they’re about to launch. But it was totally open.

00:25:33 Jenny: I remember those days. I did one of the first events at Google campus when it opened. I knew the founders and Eze from Google. And I was at the BBC at the time and we did events there.

00:25:45 Jenny: And I remember that energy. I also remember it in New York. And I would agree with you that it happened fast and furious in London, whereas in New York, it was a little bit of a slower burn. And so you really felt that energy fast.

00:25:59 Josh: One of the bigger moments for me was the first time that I came to San Francisco for professional purposes. Because I was coming out of this kind of mindset, I was expecting I’ll land in San Francisco. There’ll be 100 events that I’ll go in.

00:26:10 Josh: And the reality was they were all private and I knew no one. So the scene is there, but there you needed to know someone to get in to know the event was there.

00:26:19 Josh: Versus in London, you could just go to meetup.com. There’d be like 20 and you just choose the one to go to. There’s no queue. No one’s going to tell you you can’t get there. That was the difference.

00:26:29 Josh: There’s also a big difference in terms of when you do free events with free pizza and beer in the US, that tends to attract different people than in Europe. You have other problems. So I understand where some of it’s coming from, but it was definitely a different vibe.

00:26:40 Jenny: This was super fun. Maybe you can wrap us up with one question I like to ask, which is what does success look like for you?

00:26:48 Josh: With Mindstone now, I genuinely think this is the biggest and most important period of change that we as a society have gone through for hundreds of years, if not more.

00:27:00 Josh: And I really do think that there is a bifurcated future here. This can lead to a dystopian future where really only a few are able to go and use the technology and just end up getting better and better and better and the rest get left behind. Or it is something that allows everyone to live a dramatically better life.

00:27:16 Josh: But it relies on at least the ability to use the technology to be understood by people in a more democratic way, so the discrepancy between people who really know how to use it and people that don’t is as small as it possibly can be.

00:27:28 Josh: The technology is actually fairly cheap to use in a way. Everyone has access to it. There’s little barrier, but knowing how to use it is still very different.

00:27:36 Josh: And so for me, success here would be, if we truly can put everyone in the world in a situation where they feel they understand what the technology does and how to make it help them in their own lives, both professionally and personally.

00:27:52 Jenny: Got it. Okay. This is the speed round. A book, newsletter, a podcast you’re enjoying? You already shared one book, but maybe share another thing that you’re excited about.

00:28:02 Josh: Beyond the Prompt from Jeremy Utley. Very good podcast.

00:28:06 Jenny: Love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:28:10 Josh: Sydney.

00:28:11 Jenny: Oh! Now, that’s in my top five, too. I don’t know how to ask this one to you, but favorite productivity hack without giving me a long list. Just give me one.

00:28:24 Josh: Every day Rebel automatically drafts replies to all of my starred emails. And so I wake up and 60% of my starred emails are just open, hit, send. Open, hit, send.

00:28:37 Jenny: So good. I love it. And where can listeners find you?

00:28:41 Josh: Mindstone.com. Or if it’s me, on LinkedIn is where I post most.

00:28:46 Jenny: Okay. where are you gonna be posting all of your meetups?

00:28:48 Josh: Community.mindstone.com.

00:28:51 Jenny: All right, Josh. This was a huge pleasure. I learned a ton and I didn’t know you were Dutch. So that’s like very exciting as well. But I guess I should have noticed the name, your last name. Maybe it was a giveaway. But great to have you and lots of success with Mindstone.

00:29:07 Josh: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

00:29:10 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Joshua Wöhle in Founders Everywhere.

Freight forwarding remains one of the most relationship-driven parts of global trade. Local expertise, customer trust, and operational judgment still matter deeply. But smaller and mid-sized forwarders are increasingly under pressure from thin margins, manual workflows, and larger competitors with more advanced technology. Starboard is building for that gap.

In a recent feature in The Loadstar, Sumeet Trehan shared how the company is using AI to help smaller forwarders compete more effectively. Trehan’s perspective is shaped by his experience across Maersk, BCG, and Flexport, where he saw firsthand that digital freight was not always solving the right problem.

The issue is not that small forwarders lack expertise. In many cases, they are closer to their customers and better understand the operational nuances of each shipment. The challenge is that much of their day-to-day work is still buried in emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, carrier portals, agent replies, and constantly changing rates.

That friction is especially visible in the quoting process. A forwarder may receive dozens of quote requests a day, with each one requiring manual work across multiple systems and sources. When response times stretch from hours into days, business can be lost to whoever replies first.

Starboard’s approach is to bring AI into the quote desk. The platform connects to a forwarder’s inbox, reads incoming RFQs, extracts cargo and routing details, breaks shipments into legs, searches contract and spot rates, and helps gather missing information from agents or co-loaders.

The goal is not to replace the forwarder. It is to give them the kind of speed, structure, and procurement intelligence that larger players have historically been better positioned to access.

That distinction matters. Freight forwarding is still exception-heavy and local by nature. The person who knows which carrier office to call, which routing may fall apart, or which customer needs extra attention remains central to the process. Starboard is building around that reality rather than trying to erase it.

The company’s broader thesis is that AI can help turn messy, unstructured freight data into something usable without forcing forwarders to rip out their existing systems. For an industry that still runs on inconsistent documents, emails, and fragmented workflows, that is a meaningful unlock.

As AI becomes more embedded in logistics, the most valuable applications may not be the flashiest demos. They may be the tools that make core workflows faster, more accurate, and more profitable.

For smaller forwarders, Starboard is positioning AI not as a replacement for local operators, but as a way to help them respond faster, quote better, and protect the customer relationships that make them valuable in the first place.

Read the full article in The Loadstar.

Led by founders Marc Hermann and Anshul Jain, Everlab is building around a different model: identify risks earlier and make it easier to act on them.

The team raised a A$65 million in Series A funding led by Airtree, with participation from Plural, b2venture, Left Lane Capital, and several angel investors, including Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins.

Everlab combines advanced diagnostic testing with doctors, specialists, prescriptions, wearable data, and AI-supported care through a single platform. Rather than leaving patients to interpret isolated test results, the platform organizes their health information and helps coordinate the screenings, interventions, and follow-up steps that come next.

The company has already analyzed more than 20,000 clients across Australia and New Zealand. The company’s testing has uncovered previously undetected health issues in more than one-quarter of clients.

That is the larger opportunity behind the round. Preventive care is not only about running more tests. It requires an operating layer capable of connecting fragmented health data to meaningful clinical action.

Everlab will use the new capital to expand into the UK and continue building its clinical and technology infrastructure. As healthcare shifts from episodic treatment toward continuous prevention, platforms that can hold the full picture of a person’s health may become an increasingly important part of the system.

Read the full article on the Startup Daily.

Game developers and publishers pour years into building worlds, characters, and experiences, only to lose direct access to their players the moment a game is published. Once a title launches on platforms like Steam, PlayStation, or the App Store, the player relationship is largely controlled by the platform rather than the developer. LootLocker is the game backend platform that gives developers and publishers the tools to own and grow their player relationships directly. LootLocker was built around the idea that, aside from the game itself, a developer’s most valuable asset is its customers. They’re locking up and protecting the developer’s most valuable “loot”: player relationships, identities, progression systems, and content that keep players engaged over time. By keeping those systems accessible and buildable, LootLocker helps developers maintain ownership of that relationship regardless of where a game is distributed.

Co-founder and CEO Alexander Bergendahl brings nearly 20 years of gaming industry experience to LootLocker, having seen the ecosystem from nearly every angle: building and running studios, working inside publishers, and launching startups of his own. After exiting a previous venture, he decided it was time for developers to own their player relationships the way other digital businesses own their customers. He partnered with Andreas Stokholm, CTO, a longtime collaborator and backend engineer, to build the infrastructure that gives game creators the tools to actually own and grow their player relationships, not just their content.

What’s LootLocker’s mission?

Our mission is to change who really owns the player relationship in games. I believe the most successful publishers of tomorrow will have direct lines to their players for communication, engagement, and commerce, instead of renting access from big platforms. As direct-to-consumer models gain traction (helped by things like Epic challenging Apple and Google, and the rise of third-party stores) we want LootLocker to be the infrastructure that lets game companies talk to, understand, and serve their communities wherever those players choose to play.

Tell us about some recent milestones that LootLocker crushed.

Earlier this year we passed 10,000 active games on the platform and we now power a game with well over a million players. We also signed our first publicly traded customer. For a relatively small startup, those are strong signals that both emerging teams and larger companies trust our technology. They also feel meaningful against the backdrop of the last few years, where the funding boom in games created a lot of new studios, many of whom were potential customers for us, and then a lot of that capital dried up, leading to shutdowns and layoffs across the industry.

How does LootLocker inspire “customer love”?

We work with everyone from first-time indie developers and hobby teams to established studios and publishers with multiple titles. Indies use LootLocker to go from zero to one without building a backend from scratch, while larger teams use us to connect their catalog, cross-promote between games, and re-engage players who might have churned. What people love is that we’re very responsive (both on support and in product development) and that you can do a lot without being a backend engineer. When a customer has an idea for a new way to engage players, we try to ship the underlying tools quickly so they can experiment and push their games, and our platform, in new directions.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

Besides being in the gaming industry for over two decades, entrepreneurship has always been part of my life. All of my five siblings have started businesses of their own, both for-profit and nonprofit, so building things from scratch never felt unusual to me. That mindset gave me the confidence to take risks, learn from failures, and keep starting new ventures. We started the company in Sweden and later went through Techstars Philadelphia, which ultimately led us to become a U.S. company. That journey taught me how differently startups operate across markets and reinforced the importance of staying close to customers.

Any favorite podcasts?

For anyone in games, I highly recommend “GameCraft” by Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins. It’s a very well-produced, deep dive into the business of games, with a lot of historical context and analysis of what’s happening now. Outside of games, my two favorites are “Strong Songs,” where a jazz musician breaks down well-known songs in incredible musical detail, and “Sticky Notes,” which does something similar for classical music. My wife is an orchestral musician, so those two shows get a lot of play in our household.

Fun fact:
I’ve been baking sourdough for about 10 years, long before it became a pandemic trend. It’s now a weekly ritual, and my kids get fresh bread every weekend. Their favorite is an olive and gruyère loaf.

Listen to Marty Ringlein with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Highlights, Hype, & Hot Takes on NY Tech. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 122 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Marty Ringlein, co-founder and CEO of Agree, for a founder’s-eye recap of New York Tech Week 2026. Marty breaks down his week — from demoing Agree at Intercom to a poker night at Bessemer — and what the energy on the ground said about where New York’s tech scene is heading. Together they dig into what had every founder and VC buzzing — agents, commoditization, and whether New York is finally having its moment as the center of the tech universe.

In this episode, you will hear:

• New York Tech Week reaching its inflection point.

• The best and worst events of the week as a founder on the ground.

• Agents and commoditization turning once-defensible products into overnight features.

• Regulated industries as the last viable moat against AI encroachment.

• The question every founder is now asking: what won’t Claude or ChatGPT build?

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So, the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Jenny: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Venture Everywhere. Today we’re excited to talk to one of our founders, Marty, the CEO and co-founder of Agree. Welcome, Marty.

00:00:42 Marty: Hey, thanks for having me. This is going to be exciting.

00:00:44 Jenny: I thought, no better person to talk about what’s happening in tech in New York, across all these things than you, because I think you go to more events and are part of more interesting circles than any other founder I know.

00:01:01 Marty: Sometimes it’s contentious for founders whether they should be, quote unquote, “wasting their time at events.” But for us, it’s always BD. I think we’ve just found a lot of success and meet the customer where they’re at IRL. And so, we, by that nature, end up at a lot of events.

00:01:16 Marty: And then I just think New York’s a little bit more social where the events are always twofold where I will meet some interesting people. But also, it’s usually like a pretty good time, whereas in San Francisco, you’ll meet really interesting people, but it’s kind of a snooze fest. It isn’t always the most socially engaging time.

00:01:32 Jenny: Well, also, like what you do. I mean, I know there is that controversy, you know, amongst people of just heads down, should we be going to events?

00:01:40 Jenny: But I feel like for you and what you do, and maybe you can give us a little bit of a plug of what Agree is up to, you kind of have to get the brand out there. Give us the one-minute on Agree and how you guys are doing.

00:01:54 Marty: Agree’s full contract to cash. That really just means the second a customer says yes to the second that the revenue hits the account and all the workflows that go in between there.

00:02:03 Marty: So, e-signature on the contract signing, invoicing, billing, payments, revenue recovery, all-in-one. But essentially, rip and replace of your DocuSign, a rip and replace of your bill.com, even your Stripe. Those are some big brands to go up against.

00:02:18 Marty: One of the things that we always try to do, especially when we do the event marketing is when we get on a demo with somebody, have them say, “Oh, Agree, I’ve heard of you. You’re everywhere.” And the reality is I can’t afford to be everywhere.

00:02:28 Jenny: Wait, that’s my line. You’re everywhere. Don’t take my line. You are everywhere because this is my go-to hat that I wear all around the neighborhood. So, I am doing free advertising for you. And I feel like people stare at me when I wear this hat.

00:02:46 Jenny: One, because I wear it really low. So, they think I’m important and famous. But also, because people are like, “Oh, Agree. You’re a New Yorker. That’s so funny because you’re so unagreeable.” But this is my go-to hat. It’s like right on the little hook by my door.

00:03:01 Marty: I appreciate that. I’m going to make sure that you’ve got plenty of backups in case anything ever happens to that one. But I do feel like when we talk to folks that they do think that they’ve seen or been exposed to Agree a lot.

00:03:10 Marty: But the reality is we just stay within the four block radius virtually or in real life of wherever they are. And I think part of that is you’re just showing up.

00:03:19 Jenny: For sure. So, a little bit of fun history. I started my first company in New York City in 2008. Everyone said, “That is a shitty place to run a startup. Go west, young woman, to California if you’re going to be running a startup, especially software.”

00:03:34 Jenny: And I kind of looked around. I was like, all right. Well, there’s not a lot going on here. I will give you that. But it kind of had all the raw ingredients.

00:03:42 Jenny: So, since 2008, I’ve been really long New York tech and small contributor to it. Over those years, it has really blossomed and now, second biggest tech ecosystem and so much going on.

00:03:56 Jenny: And the thing that I find amazing about New York is like, when I was building my company here, there were some ad tech and media. There were obviously lots of industries, but those were the things that were starting to bubble up in tech. I wasn’t building in one of those categories.

00:04:09 Jenny: But then we saw it become the center of fintech and healthcare, to some extent, and crypto. Now, you know, it’s really developing on AI as well, which is exciting. So, what I love about New York is that it kind of embraces whatever the thing is and figures out how to build an ecosystem around it.

00:04:29 Jenny: Even hard tech, which everyone said it’s just inherently hard to build product in New York cause like the space. But all these amazing spaces have opened around hard tech.

00:04:38 Jenny: I kind of love the resilience and the buoyancy of New York to create what needs to be created. It’s been fun to see that. Tell us a little bit about your journey here in New York.

00:04:48 Marty: I think the biggest differentiator is the diversity of the people and that like, you have to like, will it into existence. Not all founders are going to make it. Not all startups are going to make it, but everyone building in New York, they’re going to will that thing into existence. They’re going to do whatever it takes. Brute force.

00:05:04 Marty: I appreciate that probably more than anything else because I’m just now exposed to so much creativity, especially on the go-to-market side. How they’re building things, how they’re launching things.

00:05:14 Marty: And it is getting a little bit easier to build things like prototypes and get them to market with AI. But it is getting much harder to stand out, getting much harder to launch because we are seeing this influx of people building and launching.

00:05:30 Marty: And now it’s just, you’re over what’s signal to noise has never been more out of whack, but far exceeding anything that happens in the San Francisco Bay Area. New Yorkers are the most creative and relentless when it comes to taking their thing to market. So, I’ve appreciated that probably more than anything else.

00:05:45 Jenny: For sure. Let’s fast forward to New York Tech Week. I’ve obviously been here a long time, building in and around the startup ecosystem. I do remember back in the day there were these startup weeks.

00:05:56 Jenny: I think Startup Weekend and Techstars were actually kind of involved early on in getting them going. And then they petered out. And I remember they were never particularly big. They were very like insidery thing.

00:06:08 Jenny: But I remember asking a couple of very prominent VCs, “Why isn’t Tech Week here a thing?” And they literally looked me in the eye and they were like, “Well, because we’re just busy and we can’t really agree on a week and everyone’s just doing their own thing.”

00:06:27 Jenny: And I thought like, wow, it’s weird because we saw around the world, other ecosystems really coalesced around the important dates. And in New York, everyone was over it. You can’t get all the firms to agree. There’s no center of gravity in New York. Everything’s so dispersed.

00:06:41 Jenny: It’s very different than doing that in like Boulder, Colorado or somewhere where you can actually hit everyone up. And I remember thinking to myself like, “Oh, that kind of sucks, but it does make sense. I mean, we’re a city of radical individuals, so it makes sense that like they don’t want to be part of a club that wants them.”

00:06:57 Jenny: Then this thing happened that Tech Week came into existence. And I would give real props to Andreessen Horowitz for making that happen. I think they started in L.A. as the L.A. scene was coming together as well.

00:07:10 Jenny: You know, I remember when they set their sights for New York and everyone was like, “I wonder if this will actually work.” But I think it took a huge giant like that to kind of get everyone on board.

00:07:19 Jenny: And now we’re a couple of years in. I looked at the calendar a couple of weeks ago before Tech Week. I mean, it was thousands and thousands of events. It was just insanity. So, thoughts on just seeing that all come together?

00:07:33 Marty: I think I saw some 40 to 50,000 attendees throughout all of the New York Tech Week events. That’s wild. That’s a huge turnout. I’ve seen these ebbs and flows of communities and local geographic constrained networks come together.

00:07:46 Marty: Sometimes, you know, you just need those like one or two breakout startups to come back. There’s been a few in New York, but Ramp sort of ramping up so much has helped because there’s just this energy.

00:08:00 Marty: And then you see other folks like Rho and just a handful of other startups like really coming together and launching in a big way that the level of excitement just gets larger. I feel like, especially in New York, it compounds and compounds quickly. That’s been pretty cool to see.

00:08:16 Marty: It’s very classic New York. You know it’s good, but it’s also annoying because there’s a line and I’m just trying to constantly bob between the ones in which I can either skip the line or get there early enough that I don’t have to wait in the line.

00:08:28 Jenny: It’s also interesting because the guidance given by Andreessen, if you are organizing things, you’re kind of on the organizer side. And there’s this whole team of people at Andreessen that are there to really set you up for success.

00:08:42 Jenny: They’ve put a lot of infrastructure into this, but there are a couple of people there and they email you the calendar and to get your Lumas up to date and your Partifuls.

00:08:50 Jenny: And one of the things that they sent emails around was saying that in other ecosystems, other Tech Weeks, the drop off from people that sign up to people that actually attend is 50 to 70%.

00:09:03 Jenny: We’ve done these a number of years. We actually don’t get that drop off, but you do get paranoid. And so in every event, the ones that we were doing and the ones I attended, we over-admitted. We had hardly any drop off.

00:09:19 Jenny: Every event I went to was heaving with people and every event I hosted, we ran out of seats, which I felt really bad about. So, something happened. More people came, more people decided to show up for the things that they signed up for. There was something in the air this year.

00:09:35 Marty: For San Francisco, the weather is almost always consistently the same. But in New York, if it’s really beautiful out, like one of two things are going to happen. Like everyone’s just done working because it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. This is a rare moment. Go out and grab it.”

00:09:48 Marty: Or it just draws more people outside and everyone ends up showing up. And I think like this week, it was just almost perfectly idealistic and everyone wants to be outside. New York, there’s no shortage of beautiful rooftops. Just almost every single event I went to was on a rooftop and the weather was just perfect.

00:10:05 Jenny: And then also, like there’s so much concentration around a couple neighborhoods that you just find yourself walking to one or another. And when the weather is nice, you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I can pop into that other one.”

00:10:15 Jenny: I was pretty much speaking at four events a day and I was mostly walking to each one and bopping between them. So, I think the good weather helped.

00:10:25 Jenny: But getting back to the people, every event I went to, lines at the door had to turn people away. So, that seemed like a little bit of a change from other Tech Weeks I’ve been to or even years past in New York. That was a bit of a shocker.

00:10:39 Jenny: You also mentioned Ramp and Rho and some of those folks. One thing I noticed is just how much resource they’re putting in to, not just sponsoring their own events, but like co-sponsoring events with startups and VCs and other people.

00:10:54 Jenny: There were so many events that were sponsored by what we would call the service providers, but a lot of them were startups. I also noticed a couple of the usual suspects doing more than usual. One of them was Microsoft.

00:11:09 Jenny: We, as a venture fund and before when I worked at Techstars, there was always the like Microsoft for Startups crew. They offer credits and they help startups. But I’d say the last couple of years, they haven’t been as active as some of the other folks like AWS.

00:11:23 Jenny: And then this year, not just for Tech Week, they’re making a huge push into startups and they’re everywhere right now. They’re doing tons of events. They’re sponsoring lots of folks.

00:11:34 Jenny: It’s been interesting just to see them rise up. I guess these things ebb and flow. AWS used to be the one sponsoring everything. They’ve been a little more quiet. Now it seems like Microsoft is really on the prowl.

00:11:45 Marty: It’s been cool just to even go into some of these spaces where there’s so much collaboration and co-sponsorship. I went to a poker event for a startup but then, it was at Bessemer.

00:12:03 Marty: I mean, it’s a beautiful view. You’re just looking over the New York Public Library. But then there’s other ones where like they’re at law firms or like Fenwick. And so pretty interesting to see those.

00:12:12 Marty: And this is another thing I think that’s unique to New York is they just found the shell of a building and then completely renovated it and took it over. Like they were literally installing the bathrooms the night before.

00:12:24 Jenny: Oh, my gosh.

00:12:25 Marty: Yeah, it was this epic space where you walk in and you just kind of assumed it’s been there for like 15 years. It was beautifully designed. And they’re just like, no, this literally just got built up for Tech Week.

00:12:34 Marty: And I was like, “That’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of effort.” They did one of those things where they had the building for the whole week. It was a constant… every hour, every day they had a different event going on. And so it was pretty cool use of space.

00:12:47 Jenny: That’s fun. One of the best events that I participated in was… Mercury had this like Mercury Vinyl Lounge. And it was at one of my favorite restaurants, Port Sa’id, which is an Israeli restaurant originally there is one in Tel Aviv.

00:13:05 Jenny: And if you go to the Tel Aviv one, it’s super cool. Like everyone’s hanging outside. It’s just very like chic, but laidback. You can never find the waitress. They’re like too busy smoking or doing whatever they’re doing. Like super cool.

00:13:18 Jenny: And then they open one in New York and I was kind of like, “How could it be as cool as like being on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv?” But they opened this space, it’s like all windows has this like loungy vibe and then they have all these records and things. So, it’s like actually a really cool space.

00:13:32 Jenny: So, maybe they don’t serve except for during the day or something. So, Mercury took over their space and they made it a coworking and content and lounge space. I just thought it had like the best vibes.

00:13:45 Jenny: They didn’t let in too many people. They had it so it was just kind of enough to be packed, but not painful. They had food going all day and I did a live pitch feedback session. So, people just lined up like whoever wanted to and they pitched and we gave them like real time feedback.

00:14:03 Jenny: It was with Brandon from Harlem Capital. And we just had such a good time. It was like great vibes. It was really good spirited and it was such a beautiful space. I had lots of people that I ran into later in the week that pitched or at that event and they really appreciated it. I feel like that was one of the best events I went to. It was just good vibes.

00:14:21 Marty: I love the ones where they purposely make it so you’re just not shoulder to shoulder. I feel like that’s another thing that can inadvertently happen in New York City.

00:14:29 Jenny: Yeah, you had to sign up in advance. They monitored it. There were a lot of people there from Mercury mingling about, but they had this whole lounge where you could essentially just like work with your laptop and it was super nice and clean and like they serve really good food. That was my favorite. What was one of yours?

00:14:45 Marty: I do go to a handful of events at my Tech Week. I am the super nerd in the back corner that finds the table and just got the laptop out. So, I’ll usually try to show up early so I don’t have to wait in the line.

00:14:55 Marty: I mentioned a Gamma one. I think it was called a Gammarama or something, but it was in Hammerstein Ballroom. So, it’s a pretty cool venue. Malcolm Gladwell shows up. So, it’s like, that’s cool. Bobby Brown’s there who like I’m not that big into fashion, obviously.

00:15:08 Jenny: I signed up for that and I couldn’t go. That one looked really phenomenal. I didn’t realize that’s where it was.

00:15:15 Marty: Mike Birbiglia is there, which is like… Awesome Comics. I’m just like, okay, you got fashion, you’ve got literature, you’ve got comedy. But my favorite one, which is a very like… can only happen in New York, this local guy in New York who I know you know, Andrew Young, hosts a lot of events and does a lot of the collaborations.

00:15:31 Marty: I think this was like a HubSpot event. It’s one of the closing events for the week. I love Andrew. Andrew’s a big Agree user. So, I go to that event. A lot of my friends are going to be there. So, it’s just a good catch up.

00:15:41 Marty: But it’s maybe six to eight blocks away from Times Square area. End up leaving and going to go grab dinner and just start heading in the Times Square direction.

00:15:53 Marty: And you talked about vibes earlier. There’s a vibe shift. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s going on, but something is going on in New York, near Times Square. And I don’t know what it is.

00:16:03 Marty: I just walk up and I’m in a free Madonna concert in Times Square, which is not a New York Tech Week related thing. My most popular tweet of the week was that the ultimate New York Tech Week power move is find events within a 10-minute walking radius. And so this is just Madonna within 10-minute walk of my last event. That’s cool.

00:16:25 Jenny: That’s insane. I thought you were going to say you saw the Everywhere logo in Times Square because we were up on a digital billboard with a few folks. Thank you, Microsoft for Startups.

00:16:36 Jenny: A few people saw it and messaged me, which was really cute. They’re like, I think your logo is in Times Square. It was above the Pele store. That was really fun.

00:16:45 Marty: Like you go to San Francisco, like that is not the equivalent of a digital billboard on the 101. Or like Sam Blond’s getting a lot of credit right now for how successful his airplane ads are. Those are cool. But like we’re talking, you get a billboard in Times Square. That’s a once in a lifetime feeling moment of like, this is cool.

00:17:04 Jenny: Yeah. Do you want to tell us the worst event you went to?

00:17:07 Marty: Oh, man.

00:17:09 Jenny: You don’t have to name names, but you can tell us what happened.

00:17:12 Marty: There’s always a few where you kind of walk in and you realize, one, there’s like nobody you know here, but you’re not early and that’s the reason it’s empty. It’s just empty. But you can kind of tell like they weren’t prepared. And this is one where I dropped the ball. I’m only here because it was in close proximity.

00:17:27 Marty: And I love like learning something new. So, it’s like, hey, there’s a track around AI. I want to hear like a different take. But it’s kind of a ghost town, half assed the AV set up. So, it’s just someone on a higher level than everyone else yelling to the crowd. It’s just like, I would rather just go to Starbucks and open my laptop and get some work done. When that happens, you know it’s not good.

00:17:47 Jenny: Yeah, that’s no good. I had a couple of events where the founders were just aggressively pitching. My piece of advice on that for founders is you have to read the room a little bit.

00:18:00 Jenny: It’s totally fine to go talk to speakers after they’re on a panel, but better off just make conversation and like, thread a needle of something that was spoken about as opposed to like, having to get your two minute pitch out because it’s just a lot when there’s like hundreds of them. So, I found that to be a little bit overwhelming.

00:18:18 Marty: I’m usually a fan of these things. Like at the intercom space, they gave us a slot to do like a demo of something we’re building at Agree. And the cool thing is they had a full on AV team recording it.

00:18:28 Marty: So, they’ll do a video. They’ll do a promo spot around like, all the social media content that you can use and clip up later use on this particular feature you’re launching. So, I was like, that’s cool.

00:18:36 Marty: But you could tell there were some founders who got up where it was just a sales pitch. And some of them almost treated it like a VC pitch and just kind of felt awkward to the room of other founders.

00:18:45 Marty: On your same vein of your advice is like, they want to go grab you afterwards and ask you questions. That’s the goal. Then do your little subtle pitch there, follow up with them afterwards. Like I look at it as like a retargeting thing. Just make them fall in love or get them really curious and spark that curiosity when you’re with them.

00:19:00 Jenny: One of the funniest things was during that thing where people were pitching us, this one guy comes up and he was pitching a pretty interesting story. But it’s like a very hot day and he’s wearing a long sleeve turtleneck, cashmere sweater. He’s wearing dress shoes and socks. And then he’s wearing very short shorts.

00:19:19 Jenny: And Brandon, we’re like, “What would you call that look?” It was so distracting because we’re like someone had stolen his pants. He was in a full on winter outfit with his dress shoes, his dark socks and his long sleeve sweater. And then he was wearing like the shortest gym shorts ever. And we were like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s interesting.”

00:19:41 Marty: But there’s got to be a backstory to that.

00:19:43 Jenny: Got to be a backstory of why he was up on stage pitching. I had a fun one. I did a reverse pitch. So, I was the person pitching to a room full of startups. So, that was really fun.

00:19:54 Jenny: I did a very alternative pitch. So, everyone was pitching what their fund does. And then I got up there and I was like, I’m not going to tell you what our fund does. You can look on our website. I’m going to tell you about me, my startup journey.

00:20:08 Jenny: I launch into like being a startup founder, having a co-founder breakup, having a term sheet pulled, running out of money, like sob story, Jenny. And I think it went over pretty well. So, that was fun just to like mix it up.

00:20:21 Jenny: That’s the other thing, whether you’re a founder or anyone pitching, at least in these performative pitch competition things, that can be a good way to go as well.

00:20:31 Marty: Anything that sparks people’s interest, gets them to peek up from their laptops and phones – and then maybe just anything memorable.

00:20:50 Jenny: Another highlight of the week for me, we always do a pre-seed founder breakfast. This one had 800 founders apply. We do it at a restaurant in a private room, seated. Everyone sits down. They share a meal. They get to know everyone.

00:21:03 Jenny: We did a little bit of content, but that one’s really special for me because I get so many pings after. And someone messaged me afterwards, saying that like, they’re collaborating with the person that they sat next to, it turns out. Like, they’re going to go work on something, which was super cool.

00:21:18 Jenny: And then someone said that they think they might join forces with someone, like become a co-founder. So, there were 800 people applied. We only had 60 seats. And it was a great moment of just connection with founders because I feel like they were all pre-seed. Sometimes there’s just not enough camaraderie or like it’s just hard to find other like-minded people.

00:21:38 Marty: We don’t qualify anymore, but I was super jealous not to come hang with you guys because that looked like a really, really cool event.

00:21:44 Jenny: That was a fun one. That was my Tech Week, all in all. I was dead exhausted on Friday. I like collapsed in my bed after that. I had such a great time. I feel like I covered a lot of ground.

00:21:55 Jenny: I was at and part of a lot of events. I got to see a lot of founders, meet some new founders, hang out with all the amazing sponsors. I mean, literally, I was the agnostic like, “Sure. AWS, Microsoft, Google.” So, I did events with everyone. It felt very collaborative this year. I was pretty pleased, but exhausted.

00:22:15 Marty: I thought it was awesome because I did the same thing. It was Thursday night. It was last night. Friday, I’m exhausted. Still have some work to do. And then I remember on Sunday, I got one of those emails from Katie at A16Z about like, Last day!” I was like, “It’s still going?”

00:22:30 Jenny: I know. I had the same response. Friday to me, it was done.

00:22:34 Marty: Yes. But she had a whole long list of events. I often glanced at it thinking like, “Oh, maybe I could get up out of bed and make it out.” But no, no. Same. Quick roundup. I started off with a podcast interview and then I went to a demo session where I demoed Agree.

00:22:51 Marty: Then I got to play poker at Bessemer and then got to party and then hang out at a free Madonna concert, which was epic. But bouncing around. And for me, it’s get to connect with some VCs that, usually, I only ever see on Zoom, which is weird, even in New York.

00:23:05 Marty: Sometimes we’ll get a coffee meetup but then there’s a handful like, I only ever see them at these larger things. I think that’s what makes Tech Week easy, too. It’s easy for a lot of in-person catch ups. It’s like, “Oh, we’ll be at the same thing together. We’ll just meet up there.”

00:23:19 Marty: Because I think we are sometimes looking for that person we know and, you know, kind of hang out with them for a little bit and then meet some new people, too, and like, broaden our collective circles. Those were all cool, too.

00:23:29 Jenny: What were some of the themes that you saw across all the programming? For me, I was at mostly like, startup-focused things geared towards startups who are fundraising a lot. The number one theme that I heard was defensibility.

00:23:44 Jenny: How do we build and convey defensibility when we’re pitching, when we’re building, you know, when we’re scaling? That was an interesting one just to hear many people’s take on that. But I think in general, startups are really worried about it.

00:23:59 Jenny: And VCs are actually worried about that as well. Like, what are your moats and are those moats durable? And I think there’s just so many unknowns. So, as much as it was like a celebratory week, there also was this air of just uncertainty and unease when it comes to building in the age of AI.

00:24:17 Marty: I think I saw three things. One was the Knicks, which is New York-related, but not Tech Week related. But everyone was talking about it. And then the other one, a little bit of a IPO talk.

00:24:27 Marty: Despite how the economy may or may not be doing, maybe we’re back. We saw a few IPOs last year with Chime and Figment. And then, now it’s SpaceX on Friday, then Anthropic to follow, and then OpenAI after that.

00:24:37 Marty: So, that seemed to bring a little bit of energy and excitement to the room. And then, I think the big one is just agents, agents, agents. I don’t think people are saying headless like they did two or three weeks ago.

00:24:48 Jenny: That was a quick trend. That was a two week trend. We’re done with headless.

00:24:53 Marty: I don’t know if they’re just using the term that Benioff used, but I do think a lot of people are stuck on this, hey, the world might be powered by like APIs and MCPs. So, there might be like an interface-less world. You know, it might be more text-based or voice-based.

00:25:09 Jenny: Oh, I heard the MCPs are dead, Marty. You’re… that’s passe.

00:25:13 Marty: Oh, I’m late.

00:25:14 Jenny: You’re late.

00:25:15 Marty: I think what’s interesting about the headless MCP narrative was what was once defensible or had a moat or could stand on its own is now a commodity. DocuSign can stand on its own, but nobody net new is going to build a business on e-signature.

00:25:30 Marty: Nobody’s going to build a business on invoicing. I don’t even think anyone’s coming to the table and building a business on like payments like Stripe did. Those are all now just commoditized features that a lot of people have.

00:25:41 Marty: And so I think the big conversation is what else is like that? Are the CRMs going to be commoditized? For us in FinTech, it’s revenue reporting, revenue recognition.

00:25:50 Marty: People built their standalone companies even within the last 18 months and raised a bunch of money. But like those seem like they’re going to be just commoditized features that live within someone’s MCP, another MCP. But they’re just calls.

00:26:02 Marty: We’re seeing a lot of CFOs now being able to do real time contextual like financial reporting. But the big caveat is if they connect all their data sources to some model.

00:26:13 Marty: We’re seeing older incumbents be a little uncomfortable with that, especially enterprise. But left and right, some new startup pops up, they just… they connect everything for better or worse.

00:26:23 Marty: But they’re doing a lot with that. And I think that’s going to like change the game. That was the spirit I saw was headless, MCPs, but what was once defensible now just a commodity feature.

00:26:33 Jenny: I’d agree. I think general consensus, if you’re building a single player tool, that might not have a lot of longevity. If you have multi connectivity to your customer and you’re solving many problems through various channels, then that seems like a little bit more messy integration, which… hard to conceive that, you know, an LLM can do that anytime soon. But we’ll see.

00:26:59 Marty: The other one I saw too is people asking, like, if in theory, Claude or ChatGPT, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI, if they could build anything in and Claude could do anything, what would it not do? I think it was Claude or ChatGPT that released basically like a Mint.com for personal finance. So like PFMs.

00:27:19 Marty: They were always kind of dead, but now they’re definitely dead. You just do it within the native environment that you’re working in. But like, what will they not do seems to come up a lot.

00:27:27 Marty: Will they not do payments? Will they not do other like, things that are highly regulated or have compliance? You know, there’s stuff in healthcare they won’t do. And then is that the safer place for a founder to go where they’re not going to – because now everyone’s asking, you know, before it was, what if Google did it? Now, what if Claude releases it?

00:27:43 Jenny: Well, we invest in a lot of regulated industries. I haven’t seen much automation impact there yet because human-in-the-loop and the trust layer is so important in things like healthcare and finance. But I think it would be naive to say, never say never. We’ll see.

00:27:58 Jenny: But I think also the enterprise, not just the sales cycle, but like, to get integrated into a hospital system can take years. And so it’s hard to imagine how a tool would be able to do that without a lot of buy-in from a lot of stakeholders. I think that gives it a little more longevity right now.

00:28:18 Jenny: The problem is you can’t rush into doing a regulated industry. They’re very painful to work in. The friction is huge. The sales cycles are long. So, I mean, yes, there’s more defensibility because they’re more painful.

00:28:31 Marty: You reminded me another popular thing that’s been coming up recently is it was the like death of the SDR. You know there’s those famous billboards in San Francisco. Artisan like, “Don’t hire any more humans.”

00:28:41 Marty: But, especially in New York being so GTM heavy and sales heavy, the death of or the automation of GTM seems to be very hot topic right now. Fire your head of marketing, get rid of your marketing team, let an agent do it all. I haven’t quite seen it yet, but it definitely seems narratively it was very popular.

00:28:59 Jenny: I totally get that that billboard can be on the 101 in San Francisco and like people get it. But it was on a bus stop in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side. And it’s this robot looking woman being like, you know, whatever that tagline is about not hiring people.

00:29:13 Jenny: And I just remember like walking by, cause it’s right around the corner from where I live. And there’s this older woman and she’s just standing by the bus stop and she’s just looking at this, trying to understand.

00:29:24 Jenny: And I was like, well, I’m not sure the Upper West Siders are on board with this. It was so funny just to see like, she had no context of what this was, but like the words just seemed so crazy to her. And I was like, “Well, it’s not really your tech market up here.”

00:29:39 Marty: I love in New York, you’ll see… you’re going to just see the juxtaposition of you’ll have one ad that says stop hiring humans. And then you’ve got another one that says like friend.com. It’s like, AI is your friend. AI is going to take your job. I don’t know which one it is.

00:30:07 Jenny: On that note, Marty, this was so fun. It’s always so great to chat with you. I’m glad you had a good Tech Week. I did as well.

00:30:22 Marty: No, thanks for having me.

00:30:24 Jenny: Shout out to everyone who came out for such an epic week. We’ll catch you soon.

00:30:28 Marty: And go Knicks. Tonight’s a big night.

00:30:30 Jenny: Go Knicks. Woo.

00:30:32 Marty: All right. Take care.

00:30:33 Jenny: Bye.

00:30:36 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Marty Ringlein in Founders Everywhere.

If you walk into a private healthcare clinic, you might see large screens with dozens of browser tabs open: one for scheduling, one for patient records, another for lab results, a separate messaging tool, and a handful more just to get through a single patient interaction. That’s the reality for most private practices today, and it’s costing them hours they don’t have. Tabflows is the AI patient management platform that fixes it without asking clinics to start over. Rather than replacing the tools that practices already rely on, Tabflows sits on top of systems like Elation, Hint, Spruce, and 30+ others, unifying data in real time and distilling complex cross-system workflows into a single, collaborative care layer. It’s become the go-to solution for the Concierge Medicine and Direct Primary Care (DPC) communities in particular, where high-touch patient relationships are central to the model and operational complexity can stand in the way of delivering exceptional care. By bringing every task, conversation, and patient workflow into one place, Tabflows helps care teams spend less time managing software and more time caring for patients.

Founder and CEO Adam Bragg combines the discipline of a professional athlete with the experience of a seasoned builder to reimagine how independent clinics operate. As a former Princeton pole vaulter who competed at the U.S. Olympic Trials, he saw both the best of elite medicine and its limits. After a serious back injury and surgery, he navigated both sides of the healthcare system: big hospital environments that felt impersonal despite world‑class surgeons, and independent providers delivering incredible, one‑on‑one care but were drowning in messy software setups. Tabflows is his third company and second in healthcare, born out of that gap between clinical excellence and operational friction.

Tell us about Tabflows.

Tabflows automates cross-system patient management, processing millions of patient data points into one-click workflows for private healthcare organizations. Instead of forcing providers to switch EMRs or practice tools to drive better outcomes, we plug into the systems they already use. We pull data across their tools in real time, and give them a single, actionable view of what’s happening each day with every patient. With one click, we pull the right information together, suggest next steps, and automate the tedious parts of messaging, follow‑ups, and workflows, so private practices can handle more patients with the same time and attention.

What’s Tabflows’ North Star?

Our North Star is to cut the administrative burden of clinic growth by 90% while keeping the same level of personalization in care. We’re not trying to replace the provider or their staff. We want their style, judgment, and humanity to stay at the center. The goal is to let each clinician deliver the same quality of care to more people (think 20% more patients per provider) without feeling like they’re working 20% more hours.

Tell us about a recent milestone that Tabflows crushed.

Today we’ve processed over 10 million patient records from more than 30 EMRs and healthcare technology tools, serving 100+ private healthcare organizations across the U.S. We added a million records in May and are on track to double that in June, with product usage and the number of automations we drive up 5x in the last month alone. We’re able to be very flexible in how we reach across different systems and workflows, which gives us a rare window into how private practices actually operate.

Under the hood, we’ve solved incredibly difficult engineering problems to connect historically siloed systems and make cross‑system workflows run on-demand, in real time — distilling millions of workflow data points into one-button flows that feel obvious to healthcare teams. On the ground, that means private practices are seeing response and task times drop by around 10x in some workflows, helping them serve more patients without burning out and needing to grow their teams.

How does Tabflows inspire customer love?

Tabflows eliminates one of the most frustrating parts of running a private clinic: managing patient care across a patchwork of disconnected tools. Because it drops into existing workflows, our clinics can get started in under a minute and see value almost immediately. Our strongest traction today is with Concierge Medicine and Direct Primary Care practices, where communication is constant and clinicians are juggling hundreds of patient relationships across multiple systems. When teams see all of that information unified in one place for the first time and routine work reduced to a few clicks, they often describe it as emotional relief to a deep problem they had accepted as normal. That combination of instant value, simplicity, and more time for patient care drives strong word-of-mouth and organic adoption within clinics.

How has your background shaped you as a founder?

Tabflows is my third company and my second in healthcare. My first startup was in education and focused on caring for people, which planted the seed for what I think of as the intersection of culture and care: using technology to meet people where they are and amplify their ability to support others. My second company was in healthcare. It was a big swing at rebuilding the entire clinical operating system as an AI-native, all-in-one EMR. In hindsight, I think there was some athlete ego in that idea. That experience taught me that lasting change in healthcare often comes from accepting fundamentals, and working with the existing ecosystem, not against it. Tabflows grew out of that realization. We integrate with the technology tools clinics already rely on, reduce friction instead of adding it, and still deliver that same vision of scaling human‑to‑human care.

Fun fact:
We’ve set up a 24/7 livestream of our HQ office; a come build with us window into how we work. It comes from our belief that if you’re building tools around care and trust, people should be able to see who you are and how you show up every day.

Listen to Louise Fritjofsson with Scott Hartley, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Shop Smartie with Martie. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 121 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Louise Fritjofsson, co-founder and CEO of Martie, a marketplace creating access through the world of excess by selling surplus and overstocked food and household goods from name brands at a discount. Lou shares how a leftover holiday cookie mix from an earlier startup exposed a broken industry: up to 40% of perfectly consumable products go to landfill because brands have no outlet for their overstock. She discusses Martie’s vision to become the household name in liquidation, building a brand where quality, savings, and sustainability all come together.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Sourcing surplus from brands locked out of traditional liquidation channels.

• Landing partnerships with large retailers to anchor the vendor marketplace.

• Deploying MATE to screen 6,000 SKUs weekly with a lean buying team.

• Prioritizing assortment depth and loyalty over membership tiers.

• Testing mystery boxes and new formats to diversify the customer base.

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Scott: Hi, everyone. I’m super excited to have Louise Fritjofsson. Lou, as I would call her, is a four-time founder. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Martie.

00:00:42 Scott: Martie is an incredible marketplace that helps provide surplus and overstocked foods and household goods. I personally use Martie all the time. I love getting my Martie pizzas in the mail.

00:00:51 Scott: It’s really a mission-driven business that thinks about economic and environmental impact. I know that there’s a lot of food waste out there and you’re doing a great job helping get things that are off the shelves into people’s homes that maybe haven’t moved.

00:01:04 Scott: Lou, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for being with us today. Tell us a little bit more about Martie.

00:01:10 Lou: Thanks for having me. We’ve been around for about four and a half years. Martie really is about creating access through the world of excess.

00:01:16 Lou: We stumbled into this market, as you mentioned, as my fourth startup. I really came into this wanting to build companies that make people healthier. Was looking at the CPG space, the food space.

00:01:28 Lou: Thinking deeply about the 80-20% rule. 80% is what you eat, 20% is how you move. So if I want to build a company that makes people healthier, how can I do so in food?

00:01:37 Lou: It’s an interesting journey of getting here. I spent a couple of years looking at where’s the gap in the market, MVP-ing a ton of different things. In this period of time, I found my co-founder, Kari, who’s a seasoned CPG founder and operator. She had just sold her company, Morris Kitchen, and was looking for something new.

00:01:53 Lou: Some of the things that we really felt deeply worried about when we started looking at this is we have 40 million Americans that are food insecure. We have more people than that that are just struggling to put good food products and general consumables in front of their family. And cheap usually comes with less quality.

00:02:11 Lou: So when we started looking at this space, we said, how do you change the narrative? How do you create access with good products to more people? In this period of MVP-ing, we actually started different companies.

00:02:22 Lou: We went out and we said, what if you would build the next Procter & Gamble that don’t have ingredients that cause cancer, that actually are accessibly-priced still? What would that look like?

00:02:33 Lou: We started spinning up multiple brands with the help of influencers as brand owners. We came to the holidays and one of our companies had a holiday cookie mix. And the holiday came and the holiday went, but we still had a lot of holiday cookie mix on our hands.

00:02:47 Lou: We started looking around and we were trying to figure out who could buy this after the holidays. There are some massive companies out there operating in this space. The liquidation industry here in the U.S. is $800 billion so there’s plentiful of buyers.

00:03:00 Lou: But we were a small up-and-coming brand and we did not want to work with any of them because of the brand erosion of living in a space like the dollar store or the Five Below Five.

00:03:11 Lou: We started talking to many of our other brand owners that we knew and everyone more or less had the same experience of like, yes, it’s a necessary evil at times. We prefer not doing it. Many of them reported actually tossing their products to landfill instead of giving it a second chance.

00:03:28 Lou: When you start looking at that, 30% to 40% of products that are being produced actually go to landfill despite the fact that they’re perfectly fine to consume.

00:03:35 Lou: This was a light bulb moment of saying, wait, there’s definitely a space here to build a good brand, a brand in the space of liquidation where we buy overstock, we buy things that is, in this world, considered short-coded.

00:03:49 Lou: And I will say here in the U.S., anything that is less than 12 months before best before date is considered short-coded because some of Whole Foods will not take it on at that point.

00:03:59 Lou: Me and Kari, we felt very strongly that we have two different positions here to win this market as it pertains to moat. We said, we know that we can build a brand that vendors want to be connected and work with.

00:04:10 Lou: We know that we can build a brand where we take care of the brand affinity in the market and we actually can use this experience as like, a new customer acquisition tool almost for these vendors. We know that we can build an experience where consumers feel like they’re winning when they’re shopping us.

00:04:24 Lou: And then on the other side, we also realized that this is a very old school industry when we’re looking at liquidation. None of them have really come into this world of tech or AI or any of it to make their life easier, more efficient and higher margins.

0:04:42 Lou: So we said we actually were coming from that world too. So now we have this position to win with brand and win with technology as it pertains to selling consumables, the brands you know and love at 40% to 80% off, sent to your door with high efficiency. That’s how it started.

00:04:59 Lou: Today, we offer around 1,500 SKUs at any given one point in time. Martie is an experience where you don’t have to pay membership. You don’t have to pay subscription to come and shop. You simply pick the things that you want. You get free shipping at $50.

00:05:12 Lou: We operate mainly in consumables. We do shelf-stable grocery. We do beauty and skincare. We do home goods, household and pet. The future definitely is a space where we’re looking at electronics. We’re looking at small kitchen appliances as well. Definitely a future where we can continue expanding our TAM here.

00:05:27 Scott: It’s amazing. When we first met you, the real light bulb moment for me was in realizing that even shelf-stable products that have a long duration of quality really are being liquidated off of the shelves of the Whole Foods. And these are perfectly good products that still have six months, nine months of longevity.

00:05:46 Scott: Just because they’re below a certain threshold, they get pushed off the shelves, to your point, 30 to 40% of those, into landfill, which is just outrageous when you think of those 40% of Americans that don’t have access to just filling their pantry or filling their kitchen.

00:06:00 Scott: Talk a little bit about how you built this two-sided marketplace in some sense. It’s always tricky. Did you go more to the supply side first and get partnerships with some of the large retailers on the liquidation side and then build the brand and brand presence around demand generation?

00:06:16 Lou: It’s interesting. Many, many, many moons ago, I read a book called Crossing the Chasm, which is a marketing book. And it really resonated at the time that I read it. It’s remained a true North Star in how I’m thinking about building demand for any business. And it really is about building the top of the iceberg first.

00:06:32 Lou: When we launched this business, we knew that we want to get the best vendors on our platforms. Because when we get to sell their overstock and other brands start seeing that we’re working with the Drunk Elephant and the Osea and the Fishwife and the Momofuku and they’re online and they’re 50% off, that brings such trust to our platform.

00:06:51 Lou: That we can continue building assortment with not only the tippy-top, coolest brands that are up and coming, but we can actually widen the scope after that.

00:07:00 Lou: The second thing that happens when you start working with these best brands in each category and you make sure that you build a close relationship and you get their inventories, the audience that you’re getting.

00:07:09 Lou: So we’re looking at the same process when we’re looking at who’s shopping. Martie. We have shoppers today. We have shoppers nationwide. We have actually quite a wide swath of users as it pertains to who the customer is. But 80% is women. The largest age group that we have is 30 to 40 years old.

00:07:24 Lou: It’s interesting because the largest densities that we have is New York and Los Angeles. These are actually shoppers that are quite affluent who otherwise shops Whole Foods and sometimes Sprouts and Erewhon and Credo.

00:07:35 Lou: Why they’re coming is because they’re seeing that they’re feeling really smart. They’re like, oh my God. I get Whole Foods products at 50% off? It’s brag-worthy at this point. So they tell all their friends. All of a sudden what’s happening is that’s also then an affluent aspirational audience where we can continue building audiences as we go.

00:07:53 Lou: It’s really hard to start super wide or lower down on kind of like totem pole and build yourself up. But if you start just getting the aspirational brand and getting the aspirational shoppers, it is easier then to build wider and more audiences as you grow.

00:08:08 Scott: Two fun facts. Geoff Moore used to sit next to me at my old venture fund, Moore Davidow. He was a venture partner, the author of Crossing the Chasm. Geoff and I have had many conversations about the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, the laggard.

00:08:21 Scott: It’s so true that Fishwife, Becca, they have such an aspirational brand. And that is something where even though I love the product and I’m paying full price for it, sometimes I love even more seeing it on Martie.

00:08:32 Scott: So you go after the aspirational retailers, those key brands, build this brand worthy platform that scales the demand, and then you can move into these adjacent categories.

00:08:41 Scott: Now that we’re on the precipice of AI and agentic commerce and all of these new tools, how are you guys seeing that change how you’re building product or how you’re interfacing with customers? Has it made inroads yet or is it still early days?

00:08:55 Lou: I will say, first of all, it is such an interesting time to be building a company. It is the most fun and it’s the most challenging. And it’s the most challenging because it’s always been fast to build startups, but the speed of things happening now is just exponentially faster.

00:09:11 Lou: One of the things that we did, which is core to our business, is building out a system called MATE, Martie Agentic Trade Engine. It’s an agentic buying tool. This is very important for what we’re doing.

00:09:22 Lou: How we’re operating, what we’re doing could not have been done five years ago. We look at more than 6,000 SKUs every week as an organization, and we buy between 200 and 500 of those.

00:09:32 Lou: The data that goes into understanding what those products are and how we price them and how we present them to our audience, I would have needed probably 15 to 20 buyers as a buying team minimum.

00:09:43 Lou: We would probably have missed a lot of the inventory still that we’re seeing. We would not have been buying inventory to be cash flow positive and neutral, which is the fact of what we’re doing now. I have two buyers in my team just operating all of this, using our tech tool as the go-to agentic buying tools. This is the heart of our organization.

00:10:01 Lou: When you’re looking at MATE, MATE is completely rebuilt if you’re looking at the technical pipelining in the last year. Whatever we had done before, all of a sudden, we’re not up to speed. Was not up on par with how we’re building and how tools are accessible and how efficient they are.

00:10:18 Lou: Which means that you constantly need to go in and redo the work to not fall behind and for the system to have the best chance of succeeding as it pertains to its self-learning capabilities, in terms of how it’s using all the data that we’re piping in.

00:10:33 Lou: It is super exciting. We’re a very small team. We’ve been around for four and a half years. We’ve 3X our revenue in the last two years. There’s nine of us. When you start looking at how you can build very efficient teams as you’re surrounding each core team member with agentic tools, it is incredible.

00:10:51 Lou: The efficiency is just out of this world, but you’re moving incredibly fast. The most challenging part with that is keeping everyone aligned. I’ve always thought one of the hardest things is everyone locked in with what we’re doing because one week can be different than last week.

00:11:06 Lou: We’re moving very fast, and that moving fast is no longer just our own business. It’s the entire environment and the tools that we’re using, how we need to redo the things that we’ve done previously. It’s a different speed. It’s a different process of trying to keep everyone up to speed.

00:11:22 Scott: What we see a lot is the adoption of AI tools, supercharging some of the folks in your team, giving them, for the same input or the same effort, 10x or 100x the output. There’s an amplification of the skills that you hire for.

00:11:36 Scott: And it’s not that you can cut staff and leverage AI to produce the same output, the skinny argument. It’s really you go strong and you supercharge your output.

00:11:46 Scott: It sounds like you guys have built MATE to help optimize SKU purchasing based on demand throughput. Are there certain categories that you’ve seen that have surprised you?

00:11:58 Lou: 100%. I think is where we saw the gap in the market and the industry as well. Buying inventory for this type of business is really hard because you can’t restock the products that sell well.

00:12:06 Lou: That’s normally what you do with an e-commerce. Buy from a marketplace. You just sell more of whatever is popular. In our case, the popular product will sell out and it will not come back in stock immediately. We usually see it again, but not on a stock-to-stock basis.

00:12:19 Lou: Then you need to predict sell-through on products that you’ve never seen to fill the gap for that one product. What this tool is able to do is look at each individual shopper and their shopping patterns. We know when they’re coming back.

00:12:30 Lou: We understand what they have in their cart as it pertains to category, but also what’s the ingredients? What’s the attributes? Where are these products normally selling? Is it a Whole Foods product or a Walmart product? What was the price off? What was the other certifications that this product has?

00:12:45 Lou: Because we can’t come back and say, hey, you bought Barebell’s Protein Bar and here’s a KIND bar. That will never jive. So if we’re going to come back to you and say we’ve stocked their store with the things that you want, it needs to be a BUILT Bar or a Prima Bar that is on par to the Barebell’s.

00:12:59 Lou: To put that work on a buyer, to understand what is it that we need to stock the store with, with such detail, all the intricacies, it’s too much if you’re keeping pace and you’re buying 2 to 500 SKUs a week, launching that number of SKUs on the side and you have such a small team.

00:13:14 Lou: It’s super powerful. And again, it’s wild to think about where we were five years ago. You could probably build something similar, but it would have cost you a lot more money and it would have taken you a lot more time to set this up. Where we are today and all the things that we’ve been able to do with such a small team is actually just incredible.

00:13:31 Scott: As a buyer and user of Martie, it is something that I noticed, that product adjacencies, like here’s a Nutri-Grain Bar, here’s another type of Nutri-Grain Bar.

00:13:40 Scott: It’s drilling down into the data of where did this bar come from? What’s the quality or price point? What’s the discount? The adjacencies that I see when I go to the site really help me increase my basket size. And I do feel that.

00:13:52 Scott: Over the four and a half years that you’ve been building this company, you and your co-founder, what would you say the breakdown is between the two of you or your particular superpowers and what you’ve been able to build over these four to five years?

00:14:04 Lou: We do have a very clear division. I’m more on the marketing and tech side. And Kari, she has a background building her own CPG company. She has a really good handle of building inventory, building relationships with our vendors, understanding how that all comes together.

00:14:20 Lou: She has been a big part of setting up operational warehousing and that partnership as well. Both of our backgrounds really comes into play. It’s been really cool to see how we have just different strengths and together we really have been able to make everything come together.

00:14:36 Scott: On the operational side of the business, how do you guys think about density of population, density of shoppers, where you build these inventory stocks? Because obviously with a national product, there’s some complexity to that.

00:14:51 Lou: Maybe even more so with our product because we constantly rotate our inventory. A SKU usually stays in stock for about 30 days. And again, we have about 1500 SKUs. The operational overhead of getting SKUs in and getting SKUs up on the side and then something sells out, it’s an ongoing.

00:15:07 Lou: We decided a couple of years ago to try and remain with one warehouse as long as we can, just for the efficiency of building that. We know that we have two big growth levers.

00:15:16 Lou: One is the inventory depth and the amount of SKUs that we offer. We’re getting higher AVs. We’re getting lower CAC. We’re getting all the things as we’re building our inventory. It’s a huge growth lever for us.

00:15:27 Lou: And then of course, we have our other growth lever, which is acquisition marketing. We’ve made a conscious decision of trying to stay in one warehouse as long as we can. That is actually in Dallas, in Texas.

00:15:36 Lou: It’s very cool for the purposes of we know who we are. We promise savings. We promise you’re going to get the best deal on the internet when you’re shopping Martie. You’re going to get quality goods. It’s true to that initial mission vision of creating access to the world of excess.

00:15:52 Lou: But we’re not the most convenient. What I mean with that is you will wait for your box. If you’re in California, you will wait four days to get your box. You will save 50, 60% from going to shop the same products at Whole Foods, but you will wait four days.

00:16:07 Lou: We don’t sell you your eggs and your milk. And we have no plans of going into reefer, like refrigerated or frozen aisles. Everything is shelf stable. We’re just very, very clear with who we are, what we promise the consumer and are very gung-ho staying true to those savings.

00:16:22 Lou: It’s really easy to get off track and start having everyday low prices. All of a sudden your pricing is similar to what you find at Walmart. That’s a dangerous path to go because if you’re not staying true to your moat, you could never survive with a four-day ship time if you don’t have really, really good pricing.

00:16:37 Scott: In that same vein, one of the biggest challenges as a founder is having the conviction to stay in your swim lane and know who you are and what you want to build. And also have the ability to listen to feedback from other folks that also have experiences in and around the category.

00:16:53 Scott: Over the four years, what are some of the contrarian viewpoints that you’ve held or disagreed with investors, disagreed with board? Have you had those moments and how did you stay true to that north star?

00:17:05 Lou: Many, and that’s for the purpose that we are a small team. And it’s hard. It’s hard to be very mindful and say no to things because there is so many shiny objects. There are so many things that you wake up being excited, wanting to build and try and figure out how to get it done.

00:17:20 Lou: But this could be anything from, we have really strong opinions that this should be a subscriber-based access, for instance. That you should pay something to get access to these prices.

00:17:31 Lou: Just from a vision standpoint, that goes against what I’m wanting to do. I want to create access through the world of excess. We want to change the narrative that cheap usually comes with less quality.

00:17:39 Lou: We currently have an affluent audience. Again, I think it’s a very great position to be in. It’s not the end all. I’m here to build a household brand name. I want everyone to be able to shop Martie. I don’t want it to be bougie. I want it to be accessible, fun, modern, and all the things.

00:17:55 Lou: I want to be the IKEA of liquidation. Everyone should know us and everyone should know that we’re affordable, but no one should be ashamed to shopping it. That goes against an idea of having a subscriber wall, for instance, where you need to pay to access these prices.

00:18:09 Lou: So that’s something that I’ve come up again and again, where we’ve said this is not what we want to do. And similar programs, which probably will come in our future. And I think some of them are just a timing where, again, what’s the biggest upside for all the things that we have to work on?

00:18:21 Lou: Should we launch membership right now where it’s choose your own adventure and you can pay up for a membership? That’s absolutely going to be a future of what we can offer to get faster shipping or free shipping at a lower threshold, et cetera.

00:18:35 Lou: Do I think that’s where we’re going to make up most our revenue now more than focusing on building deeper assortment or building better loyalty funnels or all the things that we’re working on? No. We’re pushing that in the future.

00:18:47 Lou: There’s so much to do and it’s really hard to stay focused. We definitely have had a lot of pull from even internally to do something like everyday low prices. But again, I am very, very cautious and wary about “We need to be a lot cheaper than Walmart to succeed,” and stay true to our mission and vision.

00:19:06 Scott: I love that you brought up IKEA. Just building the brand, Martie, and the colorful palette and the friendliness of the brand, I think you guys have done an excellent job making it accessible, making it fun and forward-leaning.

00:19:19 Scott: But as you brought up IKEA, and I know you’re from Sweden originally, was there any influence or inspiration, perhaps, from that experience or just the scale of that opportunity and that being locally Swedish in origin?

00:19:32 Lou: I started my first company when it was not cool to be an entrepreneur. I was 19. I was very lucky to get a job out of school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at university. So I was like, let’s take some time.

00:19:43 Lou: I started working for this entrepreneur and a small company. And everyone’s like, why would you do that? Startups was not a cool thing. But I did that. And in that experience, I’m like, yes, he’s asking me to do things where I have no idea what I’m doing.

00:19:56 Lou: I saw these opportunities swirling around me. And I was like, oh, if I can work for him and just figure it out, maybe I can do it for myself. I was very lucky to end up at that job and end up in a community in Stockholm that was the post-IT bubble, still working in startups, doing all the things.

00:20:13 Lou: I just got to know a lot of people that were real, founder DNA, had done it for multiple years. Again, they’d gone through the IT bubble and had successes and then crashed and they were at it again. Seeing that had me feel very confident that I could try and do my own thing at 19.

00:20:31 Lou: Again, it was not a cool thing. All my friends were like, what’s wrong with you? Are you not able to go to school or get a real job? That’s how my journey started. And then two years later, my first business was acquired.

00:20:42 Lou: And then I started another business. In that period of time, as I was building my second business, Spotify came up. Mojang started being built. Klarna started coming up as a shooting star.

00:20:53 Lou: And the tech ecosystem in Stockholm formed in the years that I was having my first couple of years as a founder. That was super formative. So all of a sudden, it was cool to be a founder.

00:21:03 Lou: You could see these great successes and you could start feeling like you could also be on the trajectory of building a unicorn and so forth. I think it was just a very exciting time to be young and have those couple of first startups and couple of first early successes with these companies being built around me.

00:21:20 Scott: Fun fact for those of the listeners who haven’t been to Stockholm. Stockholm has a parallel to San Francisco in Soma. In San Francisco, it’s South of Market. And in Stockholm, it’s Sodermalm.

00:21:30 Scott: And I love that when I went to Stockholm, I said, oh gosh. I feel at home. It’s like I’m in Soma again, except for it’s way more beautiful. Tiny bit cleaner, a tiny bit nicer, a tiny bit better in all respects.

00:21:42 Lou: It was a cool time. Stockholm is not a huge city. So you get to know everyone in the tech ecosystem and everyone’s super helpful and supportive and the tight knit community. That definitely was super formative.

00:21:53 Scott: Shifting gears a little bit, just to ask you about the marketing side of the business. How do you think about channels and how have channels changed over the last few years?

00:22:02 Scott: Do you guys lean heavily on content development? Or how do you think about the mix of channels to drive CAC down and get to this first order revenue profitability and then obviously huge retention over time as people get to know the brand?

00:22:17 Lou: As a startup, you want direct conversion. We live and die with our products. So for us, we launch more than 30 new products every day that is brands you know and love at high discounts off. It is kind of like a marketer’s dream.

00:22:31 Lou: When you put those in product ads on Meta, the likelihood of them converting pretty well is fairly high. We’ve been doing that throughout these years.

00:22:39 Lou: Anytime we put on our big girl pants and wanna get out and try something that is more content driven or other channels, we get cold feet pretty quickly because the cycle is longer and the customer acquisition cost just is higher. We, again, are gearing up to say we need to diversify our marketing portfolio. We need to do more things.

00:23:00 Lou: With the recent build in categories for us like beauty and skincare, I do think there is other channels that we are ready to get into now that we haven’t yet but that we have on the roadmap for this year. But we are looking to do more but we’re just very efficient with our product ads still.

00:23:17 Scott: Are you seeing in that mix of products that you put on to Meta changing consumer grocery habits or behaviors that you’ve noticed shift over the last four years? Is there a push toward greater health more than there was four years ago? Do you feel that in the market?

00:23:33 Lou: Honestly, even when we started like, the fastest moving segments in grocery was better-for-you, organic, specialty. If you’re looking at any growth report throughout the last four or five years, that has been the strongest segment and that just continues growing faster and faster.

00:23:49 Lou: That is our biggest assortment. That’s really interesting because we’re seeing that what we’re doing is we’re also getting a lot of users that consider themselves being air quotation but like, “a Whole Foods girly” but priced out of Whole Foods.

00:24:02 Lou: We’re just getting a really big audience to come find us with huge excitement because these are products that they want to get but they’re priced out. So we become just super important for this audience and that’s also how loyalty and retention really builds.

00:24:17 Scott: Do you guys foresee a world where you would have product adjacencies created by Martie in the mix given your co-founder’s background?

00:24:24 Scott: I know that obviously you’ve got off-the-shelf white label products in Whole Foods and obviously in Trader Joe’s. Is that a direction that you could foresee where there’s maybe higher margin opportunities by taking on categories that you see hype movement in?

00:24:39 Lou: We’re not writing it off. We don’t have it on the roadmap as of yet. It is also something that I’ve come up as a question again and again. And I think we are seeing some interesting brands working with the same type of inventory.

00:24:52 Lou: But there’s a lot of cool companies using the end parts, the inventory that is not being used up, et cetera. where you could probably create some pretty cool brands and products where we see the data of it moving.

00:25:05 Lou: But as of now, we’re very heads down with what we’re doing and supporting the vendors and brands that we’re working with to make sure that they get the best outcome for anything that is overstocked for them.

00:25:15 Scott: I know that you guys to some have been likened to… it’s TJ Maxx of Whole Foods. Do you like those comparisons? This is a… absolutely enormous category with a huge opportunity. But how do you think of that next five years and where you want to take the business?

00:25:30 Lou: I want to build a household brand name. I want everyone to know Martie. I want everyone to know that you’re smartie because you’re shopping Martie. It’s great for the environment. It’s great for your wallet. It has some discovery.

00:25:40 Lou: We’re seeing a phenomenal pattern amongst our users where they usually come and pick out 12 units in a box. Half of them are just, I don’t care what it is. It’s staples for my home. It’s a pasta sauce. It’s nut butters, pasta itself. It’s rice. I don’t really care about the brand. I just want a good brand at a good price.

00:25:58 Lou: And then it’s some of the things that maybe draw them in. Like, oh my God. Drunk Elephant at 50% off. Or maybe someone else is obsessed by another Supergoop. We’re seeing this pattern where we can continue building compounding revenues effect. So I want to build a household brand name. I want to build enormous loyalty and just compounding revenues.

00:26:17 Lou: For me as a founder, when I’m looking at unit economics, I think it’s really interesting to think of your business as a SaaS business when it’s a direct-to-consumer business.

00:26:24 Lou: How can you make sure that revenue just compound month over month because you’re building your cohorts and they keep spending with you? That’s what we want to produce and create. I truly think if you’re focused on building that type of value and that type of loyalty in a direct-to-consumer, you will have phenomenal outcomes.

00:26:42 Lou: That’s, every day, what we’re marching towards and what we’re looking at is are we creating those habits and that behavior? Are we seeing revenue compounding over time? Because then we’re going to be safe from all the unit economics and revenue that we need in the future.

00:26:55 Lou: And thinking deeply about our brand. How do we show up and what channels? How are people talking about us? How do we make it fun? How do we make it a treasure hunt? How do we sincerely help people saving money and just having an easier everyday?

00:27:07 Scott: On the fun bit in the treasure hunt comment, I know you guys recently launched these surprise boxes where people get a number of goods. Talk a little bit about how you had that idea and what’s the market? It’s resonating quite well.

00:27:19 Lou: It’s wild. Who knew people love some mystery? I will admit we were looking at a couple of items that we transparently overbought. Phenomenally great products. They had great velocity in our store. We knew people love them.

00:27:35 Lou: We were just not moving at high enough pace to sell out before we wanted to. We wanted to realize the revenue here. So we said, what about putting it in a mystery box? Because we do think there might be a different behavior for a mystery box buyer than our core buyers.

00:27:49 Lou: Our core buyers are on our site every week, picking the things that they love. They’re just in there. And then we said, there is some buyers that just want to make it easy and they want savings.

00:27:58 Lou: Why don’t we present the mystery box and see if we can get a couple of new users from our database to commit to mystery box and they can also get these great products?

00:28:07 Lou: And the first time we did it was only probably at 500 boxes, but it sold out in 20 minutes. We didn’t even have time to send the email. We put it on the site, it was gone. It led up to a couple of weeks of trying different price points. Is it a theme box? Is it a mix box?

00:28:21 Lou: So it’s really exciting. We have been building on this. We’re doing a bigger launch for a mystery box at the end of the next week as an ongoing product because it definitely seems to have legs.

00:28:31 Lou: For us as an organization, this is the year we can continue 2, 3X-ing our revenue. But as a startup in the consumer landscape today, figuring out what are the green shoots that you can get out and really put efforts behind testing and either doubling down or killing it, if it works or not, those are the things that can 4X your business.

00:28:48 Lou: So mystery box is just one of multiple things that we have slated this year to see how else can we merchandise and present our products to attract an audience who’s slightly different than the everyday shopper from Martie.

00:29:02 Scott: I was gonna say I am a smartie because I shop at Martie, but I have not yet bought the mystery box. But I do think this user behavior for somebody that’s busy, that’s just fatigued with decision fatigue, you go to the shopping page and you say, oh, another 20 things I need to decide today.

00:29:18 Scott: There is a user behavior that just wants to click mystery box, have it come every month, have it be full of delicious snacks, whether you’ve got kids or it’s for yourself. It’s a great innovation that I think will drive really interesting behavior for Martie.

00:29:32 Lou: It’s super fun. One of the best parts of building a company is getting to try these new things and getting to learn about user behaviors across multiple different cohorts and products.

00:29:42 Scott: Just to wrap up, I know that you spend some of your summers in the beautiful archipelago of Sweden. If you weren’t in Los Angeles and you weren’t in Stockholm, where on planet earth would you choose to live?

00:29:55 Lou: Man, I have such a boring answer for you because I think about where I should live all the time. If I didn’t want to live here, I would live somewhere else. I freaking love living here.

00:30:04 Lou: And this is through extensive conversations and looking at everything from business opportunity to weather to where is kids happy? Where is our family? Where is our community and friends? Where do we feel most grounded and home?

00:30:17 Lou: Me and my husband are the crazy people who we travel to someplace and we’re like, should we live here? So we’re just constantly gauging. Is the grass greener somewhere else? But I’m so happy to report this is where I want to live.

00:30:31 Scott: Los Angeles is incredible. Tell me as a founder of a business and four-time founder of a business, what’s one of your biggest productivity hacks, especially as a mom as well?

00:30:40 Lou: Some people may have heard this. There’s different versions of this. Again, it’s funny when you think back at the things that you kind of like learned when you were very young and that stuck with you.

00:30:49 Lou: I felt very scattered with spinning tons of plates in one of my earlier businesses. Having a team and how do you make everyone happy and someone comes into your room and you want to help them. So you’re like, letting everything go to like, figure this thing out for them.

00:31:04 Lou: I got this productivity hack to say, every task is a monkey. If you don’t contain the monkey, everything is going to be just whack. Monkeys are tossing papers and they’re stepping over your computer and it’s just wild. It’s not a good thing to have in your office. You never want a monkey in your office.

00:31:20 Lou: So everyone that comes to you with anything that they’re asking you for help with or to do, that is a monkey. If you’re going to take that monkey, you better contain it. You better understand you need to then figure it out, contain it. That’s on you.

00:31:35 Lou: But best case scenario is that this person leaves with a monkey. You don’t have time for another monkey. Another monkey is going to wreck your day.

00:31:42 Lou: It sounds so stupid, but thinking about anyone coming to you with things and that’s a freaking monkey. And I can’t have it here right now because I don’t have time to contain a monkey. I have other things happening.

00:31:52 Lou: For me, it worked really well. Figuring out how that person leaves and taking the monkey with them sounds stupid, but it’s a very good visualization for me.

00:32:01 Scott: I love that. So one question off script, I have to go back to Stockholm roots. Between the duality of Spotify or SoundCloud, where do you come down across the fence?

00:32:12 Lou: Oh, Spotify.

00:32:14 Scott: Spotify? Okay. Good answer. That’s my answer, too.

00:32:17 Lou: Oh, but here’s the thing. I’m a SoundCloud user, but if I’m looking at the corporate structure and how I want to build my company, it’s Spotify. But that’s only because I know more people at Spotify.

00:32:27 Scott: For those who don’t know, this is a classic Stockholm-Berlin debate.

00:32:31 Lou: Yes, but I’m definitely a SoundCloud user more than a Spotify user for my own music.

00:32:35 Scott: Love it. Finally, where can listeners find you online?

00:32:39 Lou: My name is great because you can find me on LinkedIn super easily. I am pretty active on LinkedIn, but Martie Goods. Instagram is @martiegoods. And I pop in there, and that’s a super fun account to follow. I’m probably most active on Martie’s Instagram account more than my own. Martie Goods is probably actually the best location.

00:32:59 Scott: That’s where to find Lou. Thanks so much for being with us today. If you’re able to get outside and enjoy the perfect LA weather, I wish that for you.

00:33:08 Scott: Thank you for everything that you’re doing to help solve food waste in America and make America healthier. It’s an incredible platform, and I hope that everybody who listens is able to pop on there and buy a mystery box.

00:33:18 Lou: Thank you. Me, too. Get on with the mystery, guys.

00:33:22 Scott: Thanks, Lou.

00:33:22 Lou: Thanks.

00:33:24 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Louise Fritjofsson in Founders Everywhere.

As technologies roll out, initial advantages go to incumbents who can adopt the new technologies for efficiency gains, and margin expansion. I’ve heard a number of friends say, “If companies like Harvey and Legora are growing so quickly, how come my law firm bills haven’t gone down?” If a lawyer is able to perform commoditized legal work in a fraction of the time, shouldn’t this hit billable hours, and therefore the cost for services? In the short run, this margin accrues to the incumbents.

But let’s take radiology as an example.

A decade ago many heralded the death of radiology as a field. The logic went as follows: radiologists predominately look at pictures of MRIs, AI driven image recognition and cognition was getting better and better, so therefore an image-heavy field like radiology would be one of the first things to disappear.

What happened, however, was two-fold:

1. AI impacted hardware (atoms): MRI machines became more powerful, faster, cheaper to build, manage and operate, and more came online

2. AI impacted software (bits): image-processing obviated the need for radiological review on rote and routine cases, and shifted their focus to the edge, where practitioner experience mattered, nuance and context were needed

These two impacts meant that more MRI machines became available to more people, and the number of radiologists needed to process the images went down. For a brief interregnum, image labs could have accrued margin due to being able to run MRI scans more cheaply, and perhaps with fewer doctors on staff as overhead.

But then something perhaps curious, or perhaps obvious, happened. New entrants flooded the market offering MRI scans for orders of magnitude cheaper prices, harvesting the delta between old price and new cost, and offered these services at prices that drastically undercut historical offerings. And because at these new price points there were entirely new use cases for MRIs, like preventative scans, demand skyrocketed, new companies were formed, further compressing margins in a race for user acquisition, and the total number of not just MRI machines and scans, but radiologists reviewing these scans, went through the roof.

This is a phenomena known as the Jevons Paradox, dating back to 1865. William Stanley Jevons first observed the phenomena with coal. Technological efficiencies lead to a rise in production capabilities, a reduction in price, and an ensuing expansion of demand. The very efficiencies thought to eliminate jobs create such a great expansion in production, and fall in price, that it’s net positive for both demand expansion and therefore the need for more human labor, not less. NPR recently did a great deep dive on exactly this phenomena as relates to the expansive effects of AI.

This three part movie will likely play out in legal, and many other industries:

1. AI affords advantages to incumbents who harvest new margins, and there’s a brief interregnum where incumbents continue to dominate, and prices don’t change (this is the valley of disbelief, where people think AI hasn’t changed much)

2. New entrants leveraging these new cost advantages undercut industry norms, and attack this new margin, closing the gap between price and cost

3. Prices for the same services fall, and there is net new demand for these services at new price points, probably leading to market expansion and growth

Both incumbent and new player may continue to exist, but because the incumbent’s fixed costs are likely commensurate with old price points, they’ll have a structural disadvantage to the new players who are AI-native, and don’t carry some of the same deadweight fixed costs, making them more nimble and immune from margin erosion.

Overall, like we saw with Prenuvo, Ezra (now Function Health), EverLab, Axo and many of the consumer-facing health companies offering preventative MRI scans at a fraction of the traditional costs, we’ll likely see new supercharged AI-native law firms who will be able to offer commensurate quality to a top-tier firm, at a fraction of the price. They’ll eat into those incumbent law firm margins and profits, drive the fee per service down, and in turn perhaps create net new market expansion.

At firms like Omar Haroun’s Eudia supercharging in-house counsel with AI tools, they’re providing an AI-native toolbox for in-house counsel to drastically slash legal budgets. While they still may pay premium dollar for white-shoe litigators, mainly for the optical threat of power against peers, commoditized legal will be a race to the bottom, with new entrants cutting into incumbent partner rate charts by being able to do comparable quality work at a fraction of the cost for clients.

Early AI efficiencies accrue to legacy incumbents. Net new AI-native players leverage new cost advantages to attack margin. Prices reduce and clear. Net demand increases for services, market expands, and net new jobs are likely created due to growth. Like was experienced with coal, with radiology, legal might be next. If my legal bills fell from $2,000 an hour to $200, I might actually ask more than 10x my demand. But this new value accrual won’t go to legacy players hoarding margin. It’ll go to new players, or those AI-native firms with the structural cost advantages to support it.

—

Scott Hartley is Co-Founder and General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, a $100 million-dollar early stage venture capital fund that has backed over 250 companies.

Special thanks to Omar Haroun at Eudia, and Michael Barone at Everywhere.

The United States ranks 55th in the world for maternal mortality while spending more on childbirth than any other country. For too many families, the most significant medical journey of their lives is fragmented, expensive, and unsupported. We’re in an incredibly exciting moment for women’s health, with more innovation and attention than ever, yet the scale of unmet need means we still have a long way to go. Partum Health is addressing that gap by bringing together clinical care, doula support, and mental health services in a single, coordinated model that is delivered both virtually and in person and covered by insurance. By integrating lactation support, pelvic floor therapy, infant feeding guidance, and behavioral health under one roof, Partum helps families access comprehensive, continuous care without having to navigate a patchwork of providers during one of life’s most demanding transitions. They are currently active in Illinois, Michigan, and Texas and will be expanding geographically, so look out in your state.

Co-founders Meghan Doyle, CEO, and Matthew Rogers, COO met at Boston Consulting Group, what they jokingly call the “less intense” job they left to become founders. Both worked in healthcare, and Matt also spent time on social‑impact and public‑sector projects, which fits naturally with the public‑health side of maternal care. Meghan’s earlier career sat between consumer brands and healthcare, helping insurers and health systems design care that feels more human and easier to navigate. They share a very similar way of working: using data, telling clear stories, and giving honest feedback. They are applying that approach to deliver the holistic, hybrid care families deserve. They believe this kind of coordinated care is what will really move the needle for families throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

What’s Partum Health’s North Star?

Our North Star is making an elevated standard of care the norm for families, not the exception. We believe care should extend beyond basic OB services to support the full mental, emotional, and physical well-being of every birthing person. By bringing together a coordinated team of specialists, including lactation consultants, physical therapists, behavioral health providers, doulas, nutrition experts, and others, we aim to deliver comprehensive, integrated care that addresses the whole person throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

What makes Partum Health a must-have vs a nice-to-have?

When you look beyond the headline maternal mortality statistics, it becomes clear that the current system often falls short in supporting birthing people and families. Mental health conditions remain one of the leading contributors to maternal mortality, yet many people experiencing perinatal mood and anxiety disorders never receive the care they need. The same gaps exist in areas like infant feeding, where many parents struggle to meet their breastfeeding goals without early, hands-on support. Similar challenges arise with pelvic floor health, as many people experience dysfunction after childbirth that could be prevented or effectively treated with timely physical therapy. These challenges all point to the same underlying issue: too much of maternal care is reactive rather than proactive. By providing continuous, coordinated support across physical, emotional, and practical needs (both virtually and in the home) Partum Health helps address critical gaps in care, improving outcomes and making the transition into parenthood more manageable and supported.

Tell us about some recent milestones that Partum Health crushed.

I’m especially excited about the progress we’ve made toward expanding access to comprehensive maternal care. A key part of that effort has been partnering with major national insurance payers and accepting insurance to make our services more accessible to families. We’ve also expanded into Medicaid, which covers more than 40% of births in the U.S., because improving maternal health outcomes at scale requires serving Medicaid populations. In addition, we’ve begun partnering with health systems such as University of Chicago, integrating our services alongside OB care so patients can access support more seamlessly and clinicians have a trusted partner to address needs that often fall beyond the traditional scope of obstetric care.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

Looking back, Partum feels like the natural intersection of my career and personal experiences. I started in the consumer world, focused on brand strategy and understanding people’s needs, which continues to shape how we design patient-centered healthcare experiences. My move into healthcare was influenced by my brother’s long cancer journey, which showed me how difficult the system can be to navigate and how much responsibility falls on families. Later, at BCG, I worked across payer, provider, and health services organizations, where I saw the growing focus on whole-person care, but also noticed that maternal health was often overlooked. When I had my own children, I experienced those gaps firsthand. Even with good insurance and strong health literacy, accessing support for feeding, pelvic floor recovery, and behavioral health was far harder than it should have been. Once I saw both the personal challenges and the broader outcomes data, it made it impossible not to act.

Any favorite resources or content?

Honestly, the most valuable resource for me has been a community of fellow founders. A trusted group of peers, especially in healthcare, helps cut through the noise with practical, specific guidance. Live, reciprocal support beats almost anything you can passively consume.

Fun fact:
I grew up traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Ireland, where my dad and all my grandparents are from, and I spent much of my childhood Irish dancing. I come from a big Irish Catholic family, and there’s a running joke at Partum that I “have a cousin for everything.”

Listen to Maria Azofra with Anna Barber, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: The Shapei Lending Edge. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 120 of Venture Everywhere, Anna Barber, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Maria Azofra, co-founder and CEO of Sharpei, an AI-native operating system for embedded equipment financing that helps lenders automate and accelerate the loan origination process. Maria shares how building Yakk, a B2B equipment rental marketplace in Spain, exposed a frustrating industry-wide bottleneck: lenders taking 20 to 30 days to approve transactions, losing deals before they could ever close. Sharpei’s vision is to become the origination infrastructure for every lender in the US, modernizing a $1.3 trillion industry that still runs on emails, PDFs, and phone calls.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Iterating through multiple business models to find true market pull.

• Targeting pre-qualification as lending’s most overlooked bottleneck.

• Automating credit file creation from days to hours with AI.

• Using lenders as the distribution channel to reach merchants at scale.

• Building leasing infrastructure that captures residual asset value.

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Anna: Welcome to the podcast. I’m Anna Barber, a partner at Everywhere. Very excited to be here with Maria Azofra, the co-founder and CEO of Sharpei. Today Sharpei is an operating system for embedded equipment financing, but it actually started as a slightly different company. Maria, I’d love to start there and talk about what you’re doing today and the genesis of the company.

00:00:55 Maria: Thank you for having me, first of all. Nice to meet you, Anna. We are three founders from Madrid, Spain – Lucia, Julian, and me. The first iteration of Sharpei started seven years ago in Madrid with a company called Yakk. We were a B2B rental marketplace back then.

00:01:13 Maria: By building Yakk, we identified that the industry was super manual, that everything, we needed to ask the end user for a million documents. The bigger problem in the industry wasn’t that vendors weren’t offering renting or leasing online. The main problem was that all the lenders took 20 days to give us a yes or no, an approval. That was the end cost that the end user was not actually renting out the equipment.

00:01:41 Maria: That’s when we decided to come to the U.S. and start Sharpei in San Francisco. The whole thing was building the infrastructure that allows any lender to offer super fast access to capital in the renting and equipment leasing industry.

00:01:55 Anna: That’s so interesting. First of all, in 1999, I was the early team member of a company called Rent Anything. That was a rental platform for consumer equipment, but it was just too early. So what kind of equipment do you deal with? And is it the same across Yakk and Sharpei?

00:02:12 Maria: That’s interesting because Yakk, we started as a peer-to-peer rental marketplace in Spain. The thing was, as you told me, it was a bit early for the market, especially in Spain. We started with mostly electronics, phones, computers, drones, DJ sets, and so on. But the main problem was that everyone was stealing the products.

00:02:35 Maria: So we had to pivot. That’s when we decided to go full B2B. We became one of the biggest rental equipment leasing marketplaces, but very focused on electronics, especially computers and phones for companies.

00:02:48 Anna: That’s so interesting. I like to say being early is the same as being wrong. That’s a tough lesson to learn. But you made this great pivot. You made the pivot to B2B marketplace and then you made the pivot to the financing side. Tell me a little bit about that, how you ended up there, thinking that that was really the interesting business to build.

00:03:09 Maria: We did another pivot in between Yakk and Sharpei version two. That is what we’re doing now. At first, we came to the U.S. with the idea to build a buy-now-pay-later for equipment finance.

00:03:21 Maria: So we were going to merchants saying, “Hey, LG. Do you want to offer equipment finance fully online as if you were offering a traditional buy-now-pay-later like Affirm or Klarna?” We’re seeing that more and more vendors and merchants are putting or adding their B2B online sites. It makes sense to provide the end user with more options to buy at checkout.

00:03:44 Maria: We’re able to have big logos like Mercedes, Ford, LG. We were doing our job correctly in terms of capturing demand. We were creating an embedded equipment finance at checkout. So, the ones doing the underwriting were the banks.

00:03:56 Maria: But even though we were able to get a lot of demand to the banks, the banks weren’t approving anything because they took 20 to 30 days to approve a transaction. So, the end user was leaving to another company or even buying the product instead of leasing it because the banks took very long.

00:04:15 Anna: So, I’m assuming that most of your customers are smaller businesses. And so, it’s just tougher for them to navigate financing. So it sounds like the pain you’re really solving is shortening the time to approval.

00:04:30 Anna: Being their financing partner, you’re really supporting small businesses and being able to get the equipment that they need to run. Who are your customers? Give us a snapshot of who you’re serving.

00:04:41 Maria: Nowadays we are serving small and medium-sized lenders, very specifically in the equipment finance industry. Even though Sharpei is prepared to serve any kind of commercial lending, we’ve been in the equipment finance space for a long time so that’s the first industry that we are attacking.

00:04:59 Anna: So, you’re not serving the small businesses directly. You’re the connective tissue between the lenders and the financial institutions.

00:05:06 Maria: We can speak about this in a minute, but I feel like we were going to the vendors and we were nice-to-have, because we were trying to charge a SaaS fee because we are infrastructure. We were trying to charge the vendors. For the vendors, we were like a payment option. Vendors are used to pay like a take rate per transaction if you’re a payment option.

00:05:27 Maria: As the lenders were coming to us and say, “Hey, guys, can I offer these Sharpei leasing button for my own vendors,” that’s when we decided, okay, maybe it makes sense to go to the lenders and become the lending infrastructure. We can use the banks as the distribution channel to get to the big merchants.

00:05:45 Maria: Because Walmart or LG, they’re already working with the JP Morgan’s of this world and they’re not going to skip JP Morgan or they don’t want to offer lending with other players that Sharpei has integrated. That’s when we decided to move full into the lending infrastructure playbook.

00:06:03 Maria: The go-to-market actually… much more easier because we are offering a white label solution for lenders. In terms of trust, when the customer is going to the checkout, if they see leasing powered by JP Morgan or Wells Fargo, the conversion rates are going to be much higher than if they’re going to see Sharpei.

00:06:22 Anna: You’ve pivoted so many times. You’ve become a master of pivoting, which personally, I think is one of the signals of a really successful entrepreneur. What does it look like and how does it feel different when it’s working? What was it about this version of the idea that you really saw that it was taking off?

00:06:40 Maria: Willingness to pay, actually. I feel like we pivoted so many times that even ourselves, sometimes when we’re explaining what we do, we don’t even know how to explain it correctly.

00:06:51 Maria: But now, the last pivot was six months ago. We did the hard decision to literally let everything go and start from scratch. We told to our current customers like, “Hey, we’re not doing this anymore.” Almost revenue went to zero and we decided to pivot the whole company to this new AI lending layer.

00:07:11 Maria: When we pivoted, all the lenders were coming to us. That’s when it started to feel that this is working, when people are actually using your product and you can feel that you’re building something that they are willing to use on a daily basis. You’re not a nice-to-have.

00:07:27 Anna: It’s great to hear that that flywheel has really started working and you’re seeing it. You’ve worked in circular economy as well as finance. How does your work in circular economy affect what you’re doing now or relate to the business that you’re building today?

00:07:42 Maria: I feel like sustainability and finance are more related than people think, especially in equipment finance and circular economy. When you’re leasing an asset, that asset has to come back. There’s an opportunity to resell the same asset. That’s our first iteration of the product.

00:08:01 Maria: That’s also our ambition: create the whole infrastructure layer that is going to allow people to use every single item on a lease, but then it’s going to be able to make the banks participating in the secondhand of the asset. So it’s really important to see the asset as a long term asset and also be able to calculate the residual value out of it to be able to get more margin from the second rotation.

00:08:28 Anna: I think a lot of circular economy is really about efficiency and leveraging existing resources to avoid the creation of new resources. And so it sounds like you’re doing that in the equipment field.

00:08:41 Anna: You’re also talking about this AI native lending infrastructure. Can you talk about how AI is making your product work better? What is it about the current tech platform transformation to AI that makes the business you’re running now possible for the first time?

00:08:59 Maria: I think now we call everything AI, but Sharpei is building lending infrastructure that has a layer of AI on top of it. For us, equipment financing industry is a super legacy industry, $1.3 trillion industry. Everything runs on emails, PDFs, Excels.

00:09:19 Maria: Mostly 90% of all the workloads in origination are manual. Here in the US, in Spain, in Mexico, what we’ve identified is that every single lender worldwide operates on a manual basis in equipment lending specifically.

00:09:35 Maria: We are very good at connecting the dots. So we connect the vendors with the lenders, the lenders with insurance partners, the insurance partners with the secondhand and the resellers. We build that network and that’s what we call the core infrastructure. But on top of it, we have an AI layer that automates the collection, validation and creation of credit files in minutes.

00:10:00 Maria: What we’re offering on the ROI that we are selling to the lenders is instead of having 30 people working on one transaction and collecting the docs, following up with the phone like, “Hey, you’re missing two documents. The business license is not correct,” we automate that layer of validation of data collection and validation with AI. An AI agent can do this in two hours instead of a human that has to call the end user.

00:10:30 Anna: What’s interesting about that is the borrowers, they have a massive incentive to give you that information because they want to get that loan approved.

00:10:38 Maria: We say that we only give you qualified leads because if a customer doesn’t want to fill out the form, they’re not going to receive a loan. That’s what we do. We’re very centering the origination phase, the pre-qualification.

00:10:52 Maria: There’s been a lot of innovation in the credit, in the underwriting specifically, but no one is doing anything in the pre-qualification step. That is actually the biggest manual and the biggest bottleneck for every lender because every lender receives applications via brokers, email, phones, vendors. So every channel gives the lender the data in a structured way.

00:11:16 Maria: What Sharpei does is we create a unified layer that even though the application comes via email, via phone, via vendor, we structure all this data. We package that into a very clean credit file so that someone can say yes or no. That’s when the human in the loop enters the process.

00:11:36 Anna: Pre-qualification is, in a sense, its own form of underwriting, as you just said.

00:11:42 Maria: And obviously, KYB and KYC.

00:11:45 Anna: What it reminds me of a little bit is in interview platforms, sometimes one of the things employers are looking for is how quickly does a candidate respond to the request for information.

00:11:57 Anna: That shows how interested they are in the job, but also how organized they are and shows other things. So you actually are reading really psychographic signals about potential borrowers.

00:12:09 Maria: This is really interesting because in our past company, fraud was the main issue. I was a data scientist for one of the biggest banks in Europe, BBVA, for a long time. I was in the equipment finance division, but in the fraud, specifically studying why people commit fraud in the B2B business.

00:12:27 Maria: We identified that if you had a new email, and you had a prepaid phone number, you were more keen to commit fraud than if you had a traditional email and that email was logged into Netflix or whatever socials that you had.

00:12:44 Maria: We created our own pre-scoring algorithm in Yakk. So when we were thinking about the pivot, we thought about creating a KYB company because we had so many learnings and so much information about the past company that our first option was creating a new KYC-based on social signals and email on phone validation.

00:13:07 Anna: That’s so interesting because in a sense, your clients aren’t really paying for that, but they’re getting it anyway. You’ve built businesses in Spain and in the United States, so what’s the difference and why here? What was it that prompted you to want to build this here?

00:13:24 Maria: My co-founder and me, Lucia and me, we used to be professional soccer players. We are very ambitious people. We got selected by Draper University in San Mateo. I remember our first day, it was four years ago. We saw this guy, Brett Adcock, the founder of Archer, and now Figure, the humanoid company.

00:13:45 Maria: We saw these guys speaking about humanoids and Silicon Valley. I remember that I looked at Lucia and she was like, “Man, we are playing in second division. We have to be here. If we want to build something great, we need to move.” Two weeks after that, we went home. We shut down the company in Spain and we came to the US.

00:14:04 Maria: Actually, I did my first exit in Spain. I started my company when I was 17. I sold it when I was 20. It was not a big exit. Spain is a very good country in terms of quality of life, but it’s not a country to build businesses.

00:14:17 Maria: When I go back home, everyone was asking me like, “Why are you an entrepreneur? You have the worst life ever.” And here in the US, it’s the other way around. Everyone is building things. You feel so inspired.

00:14:31 Maria: So I feel like that’s the main difference between Spain and the US. The ambition and the best people building businesses are here. We’ve been living in San Francisco for almost two years. The type of people that you meet, the conversations that we have.

00:14:46 Maria: In Spain, of course, we love to party. At 3 a.m. in Spain, I’m at this big party and I’m having a lot of fun. But in SF, I’m speaking about the energy that the protons of the rockets of the NASA.

00:14:59 Maria: So you’re surrounded with so many good people that the learning capacity and the speed of things is much higher than in Europe. I feel not even Spain, the whole Europe. The US is years ahead of Europe in terms of startups and everything.

00:15:15 Anna: What you’re really pointing to is an underlying cultural point of view about the role of entrepreneurship and how people see entrepreneurs. It is interesting how in the United States, we’ve developed a little bit of a… idealization of the whole process of entrepreneurship that really is embedded in the culture here.

00:15:37 Maria: Also, people are much more risk-averse. And if you fail, that’s not a bad thing. For example, I’ve created a lot of companies. Most of them, of course, have never worked. But at the end of the day, all these learnings compound.

00:15:51 Maria: I’ve been a super shitty CEO in my first company, but the second one, I’ve learned from the best. I keep getting all this information and all this knowledge that would make me a very good entrepreneur. I don’t know if now, but maybe in a couple of years. That risk and intrinsic risk that you Americans have is super cool. We have so much to learn from you in that terms.

00:16:16 Anna: You’re teaching me now. I love how you put that about learning velocity and also just reflecting back on how you were a leader in your last company and what this one is like.

00:16:25 Anna: Now you have Sharpei that is working. I’d love to talk about what the ultimate vision is, where you see Sharpei going when it’s fully built out and fully realized. What does it look like?

00:16:37 Maria: The whole goal here is that every lender in the U.S. uses Sharpei for pre-qualifying their applications. I think we’re getting there. We are partnering with a lot of great people to create these distribution channels.

00:16:51 Maria: But of course, it’s a very legacy industry. It’s a very niche industry. We had to create a lot of credibility in the industry to be able to sell to the first customer. Our goal is becoming the infrastructure layer for origination for every lender in the U.S.

00:17:07 Anna: What are the next big challenges or opportunities that are facing you right now as you move towards that goal?

00:17:13 Maria: As we pivoted into this new infrastructure layer, I feel the next challenge would be partnering with the right people so they can resell our solution as white label. So we did, at first, a partnership with Tamarack. It’s the biggest consultancy agency in the U.S. for equipment finance. They’re going to be the ones reselling Sharpei as one of their products.

00:17:37 Maria: For us, the brand doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all about finding these distribution channels that are going to be able to allow us to be in as many lenders as possible. We learned this the hard way because we were going one-by-one to every single lender.

00:17:53 Maria: We are immigrant founders. We don’t have the credibility that we need in the industry. It’s much easier to create a product that is fully resellable by others than having your playbook of direct sales. The challenge is finding the right channels to sell Sharpei to the mass market.

00:18:11 Anna: That’s super exciting to be at this point and having pivoted through so many things and found the one that works. What an exciting moment.

00:18:19 Maria: Now we have to raise again to be able to be in the game for a long time. But we are feeling that we have something between our hands. Super happy to be and also to enjoy this moment because we’ve been entrepreneurs for seven years now together. Now that we have something that the market is getting and that we are feeling the traction finally, it’s going to be a fun moment for us.

00:18:44 Anna: Congrats, Maria. That’s awesome. I’d love to close our conversation with a speed round. Can you tell us what’s a book you’re reading or a podcast that you’re enjoying right now?

00:18:54 Maria: I don’t read so many books. I read a lot online. I’m in love with this podcast, The Diary of a CEO of Steven Bartlett. Literally every single day I listen to one podcast. It’s two hours.

00:19:08 Maria: I spend most of my afternoons hearing about these entrepreneurs and CEOs and experts. I try to apply every single thing that they say into Sharpei. Really interesting, this podcast. I fully recommend it to anyone.

00:19:23 Anna: Okay. Diary of a CEO podcast. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:19:29 Maria: New York. I’m living the full life here. But actually I believe that I would split the year between SF and New York. So six months SF, six months New York and have best of both coasts in the year.

00:19:44 Anna: The perfect coast to coast balance. Okay. What’s your favorite productivity hack?

00:19:49 Maria: I use Granola to record every single meeting to create my follow-up messages. That’s my best productivity hack. And have a lot of coffee at the same time.

00:20:00 Anna: Coffee and Granola, a great combination. So tell the listeners where they can find you if people want to connect with you.

00:20:05 Maria: LinkedIn. I’m very active on that social. I would start my newsletter very, very soon. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and actually I want to help other immigrant founders come to the US.

00:20:20 Maria: I run a Telegram group, one of the biggest ones for Hispanic female founders. We are more than 6,000 people in two years. I have to translate all that community into something bigger. I’m thinking about creating a podcast and a newsletter for female CEOs.

00:20:37 Anna: It sounds like you’ve already built the community, so that sounds like a great idea.

00:20:40 Maria: I try to help. I try to publish things that I use or templates or my email templates for investor updates. But I feel like I don’t have enough time to put into that type of community so, I want to translate that into a more specific newsletter or podcast maybe.

00:20:59 Anna: Great. This has been a great conversation. Maria Azofra from Sharpei, thank you for joining me and best of luck.

00:21:05 Maria: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:21:08 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Tax season creates a familiar kind of urgency. Refunds, assessments, payment notices, and compliance updates all arrive at once, often through the same digital channels people already trust. That familiarity is exactly what scammers are using.

Orca Fraud CEO Thalia Pillay is warning South Africans to watch for a predictable spike in SARS impersonation scams this filing season. The messages vary, from fake settlement notices and refund SMSes to letters of demand and auto-assessment prompts, but the playbook is the same: make the message feel official, make the deadline feel urgent, and push people to click before they verify.

What makes these scams more convincing is the shift to digital. With SARS now relying fully on digital correspondence for system-generated letters, legitimate communication is already happening through inboxes and SMS threads. That gives fraudsters more cover to imitate the process.

The core advice is simple: do not trust the link, trust the source. SARS will not ask for banking or credit card details by SMS or email, will not send payment instructions through random accounts, and will not route taxpayers to external sites for compliance steps. Anything suspicious should be checked directly through eFiling or the SARS website.

For Orca, the broader issue is not just scam awareness. It is about helping people recognize fraud in the moment it matters, before urgency turns into action. As more financial and government interactions move online, that layer of trust and verification is becoming increasingly important.

Read the full article on the Business Explainer.

The Philippines’ used car market is booming, but the dealers driving that growth have been constrained by how they provide financing to their customers. Many rely on their own capital or slow, traditional lenders that are not built for the speed and flexibility of the industry. Now these dealers can use OneLot, the Manila-based fintech that provides working capital and digital tools designed specifically for used car dealers. Its AI-native platform underwrites businesses in hours instead of weeks, allowing dealers to move faster, buy more inventory, and scale their operations with less friction.

Harm-Julian Schumacher, co-founder and CEO, grew up around his family’s Mercedes-Benz dealership in Germany, which gave him early insight into how car retail and financing work in practice. He did some undergraduate studies in Southeast Asia and developed a strong personal affinity for the region before eventually moving to the Philippines. He met co-founder and COO Tommy Campos, a former operator at Uber and Postmates, through their first local investor. Subramaniam Srinivasan, CTO, joined later as technical co-founder after they connected through a mutual contact in Indonesia. The three previously built a quick-commerce company together, an experience that helped them build trust, pressure-test ideas, and establish a strong working dynamic before starting OneLot.

What’s OneLot’s North Star?

As a lending business, our North Star is net interest income. It’s effectively our gross profit after cost of capital and loan losses. It’s easy to grow a loan book by handing out cheap capital, but that doesn’t mean you’re building a healthy company, so we focus on growing in a clearly profitable way. That metric forces us to balance growth, risk, and unit economics instead of chasing vanity volume.

Tell us about some recent milestones OneLot crushed.

The first few years were about building the foundation by onboarding dealers, building the platform, and proving the model. In 2026, we launched pilots for our consumer financing product, which lets us finance both dealers and the customers buying their cars. We’re also integrating AI agents across the company to automate sales, customer support, credit analysis, underwriting, and internal operations. This is making the business faster, more scalable, and more efficient.

Why will OneLot win?

It really comes down to two things. First, we’re digital and AI‑native, which lets us move faster, be more data‑driven, and take better, quicker credit decisions while always being available for customers. Second, we’re obsessively focused on a single vertical (used cars) while most competitors are horizontal lenders or marketplace players. That focus lets us build highly tailored underwriting models, specialized processes, and very specific products for used‑car dealers, all wrapped in a deeply vertical, AI‑enabled platform.

How do you think about work–life balance for yourself and your team?

For me, work–life balance doesn’t mean 9‑to‑5. In a startup leadership role, that’s just not realistic. I typically work six or seven days a week, but I make sure I have anchors like sports and time away from the laptop to clear my head, and I want everyone in senior roles to have their own version of that. At the same time, I’m very conscious about burnout: we work incredibly hard, but I don’t believe in burning through people. If I see someone online late in the evening too often, I’ll tell them to shut the laptop and go home early another day, because in the mid to long term, protecting our human capital is non‑negotiable.

Any favorite books?

I often recommend Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and, even more so, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which explores how potent genes shape evolution and extends that as an analogy to ideas, or “memes” that spread through societies when they help those societies function and grow.

Fun fact:
I’m really into water sports and anything with a bit of adrenaline: kitesurfing, sailing, freediving. I enjoy those activities a lot, even if my enthusiasm (and the occasional accident) doesn’t always make my mum very happy.

Listen to Anshu Jain with Scott Hartley, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Outmarket the Market. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Insurance remains one of the largest industries in the world, but many brokerage workflows still depend on manual processes, disconnected tools, and institutional knowledge.

Outmarket AI is working to change that by building an AI platform purpose-built for insurance brokerages.

The team announced its $17 million Series A, led by Permanent Capital Ventures, with participation from SignalFire, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, Dash Fund, and strategic investors across the insurance ecosystem. The round brings Outmarket’s total funding to $21.7 million and reflects growing confidence in the company’s vision for the future of insurance operations.

Outmarket’s platform connects directly to agency management systems and transforms structured and unstructured brokerage data into an intelligence layer that powers key workflows across commercial, benefits, personal lines, and specialty insurance.

The company is already seeing strong market adoption. Since launching in March 2025, Outmarket has grown ARR 5x year-over-year and is now used by more than 250 leading insurance brokerages. Its platform processes millions of quotes, policies, applications, and loss runs documents, helping customers save more than a decade of manual work each month.

The impact extends beyond efficiency. Customers have reported up to a 65% reduction in errors and omissions through AI-assisted policy comparison and gap detection. Brokerages are also using Outmarket to improve win rates, identify cross-sell opportunities, and deliver better service to clients in less time.

The broader shift across insurance is clear. Brokerages are moving from manual, fragmented processes toward connected, AI-enabled infrastructure that can support every stage of the brokerage workflow.

The funding will support continued platform expansion, including new AI-driven workflows for complex, high-stakes insurance processes. Outmarket also plans to more than double its product capabilities in 2026 as it expands across commercial lines, benefits, personal lines, and specialty insurance.

For Vishal, Anshu, and the team, the opportunity is to build the operating system for the modern insurance brokerage and help define how the industry works in the years ahead.

Read the full article on PRNewswire.