ZZ Driggs streamlines the entire process of designing and furnishing real estate across the US at scale through a comprehensive turnkey solution, integrating design, procurement, logistics, installation, and financing.

Operating successfully across hospitality, commercial, and residential sectors, ZZ empowers institutional building operators, multifamily developers, hotel operators, real estate brokerages, family offices, and corporate clients to outfit and launch properties efficiently with cost-efficiency, rapid timelines, and superior design quality. By tailoring solutions to each project’s specific needs and serving as a single accountable partner throughout the entire process, ZZ lets clients focus on their core business while all the details are professionally managed and executed.

Building on years of work across hospitality, commercial, and multi-family projects, the company recently launched an exciting new vertical: ZZ Office. It’s a tech-enabled, full-service turnkey solution for high-growth startups and tech companies who are busy growing their business and need to expand into a new office. Rather than just fulfilling just one piece of the puzzle, they combine all the benefits of a design firm, procurement agency, furniture dealer, warehousing/logistics provider, project manager, and financing provider all under one roof. By reducing costs and hassle while delivering exceptional design, ZZ helps fast-growing teams create intentional and inspiring workplaces as they grow, return to the office, or rethink how they work.

Co-Founder & Chairman Matthew Brimer is a serial entrepreneur, designer, investor, real estate developer, and community builder with a personal mission to build companies and communities that support people and the planet and move the world forward in a meaningful way. He’s best known for co‑founding several influential ventures across education, culture, wellness, real estate, and technology. Before founding ZZ Driggs, he co-founded General Assembly), where he led the charge on its global community, enterprise partnerships, and social impact initiatives. He also co-founded Daybreaker, the global music and wellness phenomenon; Flying Colors, an organic bird seed and garden brand; and Everywhere Ventures (that’s us 😁). Brimer has also developed boutique hospitality properties in upstate New York and the island of Jamaica, and he has served as an advisor, board member, and angel investor to myriad mission-driven startups and nonprofits. He has been recognized by The New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and others for his contributions to entrepreneurship, design, and culture.

What’s the inspiration behind ZZ Driggs?

I’ve always been a designer, tinkerer, and maker. My mom was a graphic designer, and I fell in love with visual design at a young age. At General Assembly (GA), I was deeply involved in the experiential and community design of our campuses. After GA, I started investing in historic properties in the Hudson Valley and Jamaica, getting very hands-on in the planning, research, renovation, and construction process from beginning to end. I’ve also always admired exceptional hospitality destinations, the creation of which is in many ways an exercise in multi-sensory experiential design. As a designer, helping to craft spaces and bring real estate to life in ways that feel truly human was a natural next step. ZZ Driggs blends my passion for design and startups with a long-term, craft-driven approach to furnishings and interiors, impacting people’s lives and work for the better, and creating elevated spaces through a more thoughtful, sustainable, and human-centric model for how we create the places where we live, work, and play.

What’s ZZ Driggs’ North Star?

Our North Star is to become the most trusted go‑to design and furnishing provider for the most forward‑thinking real estate projects across the U.S. We want developers, owners, operators, and employers who truly care about design, sustainability, and experience to instinctively think of ZZ Driggs when they need spaces conceived, furnished, and brought to life.

Tell us about some recent milestones that ZZ Driggs crushed.

Over ZZ Driggs’ lifetime, we’ve furnished more than a million square feet of properties around the country and installed over 1.5 million pounds of furniture. Those numbers capture the scale of spaces we’ve helped design and deliver, and we have a long way to go from here.

How does ZZ Driggs inspire “customer love”?

So often, real estate development, architecture, and construction can feel transactional and impersonal, or at the very least enormously complex and filled with hassles, delays, and disappointments. At ZZ Driggs, we take a very human, thoughtful, hands‑on approach to client service by acting as a true accountable partner and extension of their team throughout the entire process. At the end of the day, we’re creative problem solvers at our core, and our clients recognize and benefit from that. We’ve got their back. We go above and beyond. We’re honest, and we actually care about the details. Sounds simple, but the result is thoughtfully designed properties that nail quality, budget, and timeline goals, and ultimately leads to clients actually enjoying and appreciating their collaboration with us from start to finish.

How has your background shaped you as a founder?

I grew up in the Midwest with two creative parents who each ran their own small businesses. They were both makers who loved getting hands-on, who weren’t afraid to make some mistakes along the way, who valued learning and growth for themselves and our family. I admire them so much! Witnessing and learning from Mom and Dad throughout my childhood, entrepreneurship felt like a natural path and instilled in me an incessantly curious maker’s mindset, a love of creative problem solving, and a strong work ethic. I started my first company freshman year at Yale (ironically, in furniture) buying antique card catalogs that were getting removed from libraries around campus and reselling them online. I then moved on to co-founding a social gaming startup that created massively multiplayer online tournaments for college students that ultimately failed during the recession… a difficult experience, but a crash course in real life entrepreneurship that taught me resilience, leadership, and the realities of building a company. Moving to NYC after college and immersing myself in New York’s burgeoning startup ecosystem, hosting events and building community all along the way, eventually led me to start General Assembly, Daybreaker, Everywhere Ventures, and ultimately ZZ Driggs.

Fun Fact:

I love most things hands-on, whether making art, trying my hand at some new craft, refinishing an antique piece of furniture, installing some house project, or planting in my garden. In an age where most of our work happens on screens, there’s something deeply satisfying about shutting the laptop and using my hands to create something tangible that I can see, touch, and enjoy. I’ve also really been enjoying my hobby of DJing the last several years, which has been an amazing passion project and creative outlet for me in crafting musical journeys and performing at all sorts of interesting places and gatherings domestically and abroad.

Follow Matthew Brimer at:

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mobrimer

Instagram: https://instagram.com/brimer

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/brimer

ZZ Driggs: https://zzdriggs.com

From the archives: Listen to Helle Jeppsson with Matthew Brimer on the Venture Everywhere podcast: The Great SCAPE. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Trade businesses often run on a messy stack. Inventory in one place. Invoices somewhere else. Payments in another system. Customer credit and collections tracked across spreadsheets, chats, and memory.

For wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers, that fragmentation creates real operational drag. Teams spend too much time reconciling information, chasing payments, monitoring credit exposure, and trying to understand what is happening across the business. FusePay is building for that problem.

Tech in Africa recently covered the company’s launch of Fuse360, an AI-powered business management platform designed for trade businesses. The platform brings together inventory management, orders, invoicing, customer credit, collections, and retailer relationships in one system.

That is already useful on its own. But Fuse360 is also integrated with FusePay‘s licensed payments platform, which means businesses can manage operational workflows and financial transactions inside the same ecosystem.

The AI layer is focused on the repetitive but important work that slows teams down: payment reconciliation, collections, reporting, credit monitoring, and business analysis. FusePay describes the goal as supporting employees rather than replacing them, which feels like the right framing for a category where trust, context, and relationships still matter.

Fuse360 also includes a retailer portal where customers can place orders, view invoices, download statements, and monitor outstanding balances. KYB and KYC onboarding tools help suppliers assess customers before extending trade credit, while AI-powered credit intelligence analyzes payment behavior, historical patterns, and outstanding exposure.

That matters because trade credit is one of the quiet engines of commerce. Better data and more connected workflows can help suppliers make faster, more informed credit decisions without losing control of risk.

FusePay was founded by Vidhyasahar Thiyagarajan and Francesco Rocchi, both of whom grew up around family-owned retail and wholesale businesses. That lived experience shows up in the product: Fuse360 is not generic back-office software. It is built around the operational reality of trade businesses in markets where payments, credit, inventory, and customer relationships are deeply connected.

The company launched Fuse360 in Seychelles in July 2026 and plans to expand to Mauritius in September, followed by selected East and Southern African markets before the end of the year.

We have always liked companies that use software to bring structure and intelligence into overlooked operational categories. FusePay is doing that for trade businesses, starting with the workflows that determine how money, goods, and credit actually move.

Read the full Tech in Africa article.

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

For professional athletes, deciding when and how to start a family can be especially complicated.

A recent New York Times article explores how women on the professional tennis tour are increasingly turning to egg freezing and IVF while continuing to compete at the highest level. Players described navigating hormone injections, training restrictions, recovery, treatment costs, and the uncertainty that comes with fertility care.

Their experiences reflect a much broader challenge. Women across industries are balancing demanding careers, relationships, financial considerations, and the biological realities of fertility.

Everywhere Ventures portfolio company Cofertility is building a new model around that challenge.

Traditional egg freezing can cost tens of thousands of dollars, putting fertility preservation out of reach for many women. Cofertility allows women to freeze their eggs for free when they choose to donate half of the eggs retrieved to a family seeking an egg donor.

The model creates value on both sides. Women can preserve their fertility without carrying the full financial burden, while intended parents gain access to donor eggs through a more transparent and human-centered process.

Cofertility is also rethinking the traditional egg-donation experience. Rather than approaching donation as an anonymous transaction, the company gives donors and intended parents more agency over the relationship and level of communication they want to have.

The article also notes Maria Sharapova’s investment in Cofertility After delaying motherhood during her professional tennis career, Sharapova began investing in companies helping women gain greater flexibility around when and how they build their families.

Professional tennis provides a visible example of the trade-offs women face, but the underlying need extends far beyond sports.

As more women seek greater control over their reproductive timelines, Cofertility is expanding access to fertility preservation while building a more thoughtful model for egg donation and family building.

Read the full New York Times article.

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

Most gas stations were built around the fastest possible version of a stop: fuel, snacks, payment, back on the road.

Maggie’s Refuel is asking a better question: what if that stop could actually be worth lingering for?

SlashGear recently covered the company’s planned Beverly Hills flagship, which is expected to open in 2027 alongside the existing Union 76 station on Santa Monica Boulevard. The site is already a local landmark, known for its midcentury modern canopy, and Maggie’s is building around that sense of place rather than flattening it into another generic convenience format.

The concept comes from Alex Canter, a fourth-generation member of the family behind LA’s iconic Canter’s Deli. That hospitality background shows up in the product vision. Maggie’s is not just adding nicer shelves to a gas station. It is combining fuel, curated food and beverages, EV charging, local restaurant collaborations, app-based ordering, and rewards into one modern roadside experience.

According to SlashGear, the flagship is expected to include staples like soda and chips alongside carefully selected snacks from emerging food brands around the world. The store will also offer fresh food and drinks, including craft lattes, ceremonial-grade matcha, fresh juices, artisan soft-serve ice cream, and pastries from Beverly Hills bakeries.

The app layer matters too. Customers will be able to order drinks and snacks before they arrive, turning the gas station visit into something closer to a hospitality and commerce experience than a pure utility stop. EV charging adds another reason to rethink the format: if drivers are already spending more time on site, the quality of that time becomes part of the product.

We have always liked companies that take an overlooked everyday category and rebuild it around changing consumer expectations. Maggie’s Refuel fits that pattern. Fuel may be the anchor, but the opportunity is broader: food, beverage, hospitality, rewards, real estate, and a brand that can make a routine errand feel considered.

If the Beverly Hills flagship works, it could become the launch point for a concept that expands across the West Coast. That is what makes this exciting. Maggie’s is not just trying to make one gas station nicer. It is testing a new operating model for what the next generation of convenience retail can feel like.

Read the full SlashGear article.

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

Enterprise Security and GRC teams have no time for the “important” because they’re constantly battling the “urgent.” Audits, evidence requests, and policy updates (to name a few) leave little room for the proactive work that actually reduces risk. Complyance has cracked the code on customizable AI agents that reliably shift manual work from Security and GRC teams to AI. They lead the market with over 20 purpose-built, domain-trained AI agents that support everything the Enterprise GRC teams do: controls monitoring, risk treatment, third party diligence, policy management, and more. It’s compliance with a (wh)y!

Founder and CEO Richa Kaul is driven by a deep interest in data privacy, security, and the evolving role of technology in protecting businesses and consumers. Before founding Complyance, she held leadership roles at ContractPodAi, worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and the World Bank, and advised organizations across the public and private sectors. With Complyance, Richa is passionate about building solutions that help organizations go from reactive to proactive.

What inspired you to build Complyance?

This is a funny question because it all comes back to the fact that I am a huge data privacy nut in my personal life! I literally go around at parties and help people adjust the security configurations on their phones to better protect their personal data. But I started to realize some years ago that, no matter how many personal privacy configurations I put on my phone, at the end of the day I have to trust companies with my data. We all do. And yet we see the news of companies going through data breaches every day it seems. It all made me realize that the best way to actually secure our data as individuals is to help secure the companies that hold the world’s data. By doing that, we are supporting all of the millions and millions of consumers whose data they hold. Complyance is about securing Enterprises with automated security compliance monitoring and AI agents that identify and reduce risk.

What’s Complyance’s company North Star?

We protect consumer data by helping to secure the companies who hold the world’s data.

Tell us about a recent milestone that Complyance crushed.

We recently raised a preemptive Series A from Google Ventures (GV)! GV wanted to make an investment in the security compliance space, so they reviewed all of the players in our space. They approached us because our AI was far ahead, and our clients actually relied on it every day. It’s an extremely exciting milestone in our journey.

How does Complyance inspire “customer love”?

By shifting core work from the team to our AI agents, our clients suddenly have time back. They use this time to achieve their more strategic goals, which drive real business value, create a better security culture, and deliver on their executive team’s goals. Our clients don’t just ‘love’ our product, they ’need’ our product. Customers including Dropbox, CVS Health, and Major League Soccer love that our product works reliably for them every day.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

I started my career in the public sector and thought I would work in the public sector forever. I would not be satisfied as a founder if I didn’t feel like I was contributing to a greater mission, something for the greater good. In that way, I think my start in the public sector will always influence the way that I define success for myself, both as a founder, and as a citizen of our world.

Favorite quote:

“The best day to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best day is today.” Get going!

Fun fact:
I used to hurdle - that was my track & field event - and I think about that a lot at work. In hurdling, the first hurdle is everything: you time your steps, find your rhythm, and set yourself up for the rest of the race. That’s how I approach important meetings and pitches: I prepare hardest for the first few minutes, because nailing the first hurdle makes everything else easier after that.

From the archives: Listen to Mishal “Mish” Thadani with Vir Kashyap, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Off the Grid. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Digital fraud is becoming more sophisticated, coordinated, and difficult for businesses to detect using traditional rules-based systems alone.

Fraudsters are increasingly combining tactics such as account takeovers, SIM swaps, phishing, , voucher fraud, and social engineering. These attacks are not always isolated incidents. They are often connected to larger syndicates that can quickly change tactics, locations, and targets.

That is the problem Orca is working to solve.

Orca is an anti-fraud technology company that helps businesses identify suspicious activity and stop fraudulent transactions. Its platform currently protects more than R82 billion in monthly transaction volume across several industries, giving the company visibility into how fraud networks operate and evolve.

MyBroadband recently profiled the company and the patterns emerging from its monitoring software. According to Orca CEO Thalia Pillay, KwaZulu-Natal consistently appears as the South African province with the highest level of digital fraud and active fraud syndicate activity.

Orca has also observed fraud networks beginning to migrate into other regions, including the Eastern Cape. By analyzing activity across transactions, accounts, devices, and locations, the company can identify not only individual instances of fraud, but also broader movements and connections between criminal operations.

The article highlighted an alleged scam call center uncovered in Umhlanga in April 2026. Authorities arrested 23 people suspected of participating in banking scams from an upscale property. The operation allegedly used vishing tactics to convince victims that their bank accounts were at risk before directing them to transfer money into accounts controlled by the syndicate.

This reflects the increasingly professional nature of digital fraud. For many fraudsters, these schemes operate like full-time businesses, with teams simultaneously running phishing campaigns, managing SIM card farms, laundering funds, and recruiting money mules.

Artificial intelligence is making these attacks easier to scale. Fraud networks can now produce more convincing messages, target more people, and coordinate multiple forms of fraud at the same time.

That makes real-time intelligence increasingly important. Businesses need systems that can recognize behavior and connections across a network rather than evaluating each transaction in isolation.

We have always liked companies that turn fragmented and difficult-to-detect activity into actionable intelligence. Orca fits that model by helping companies understand not only whether an individual transaction appears suspicious, but how it may connect to a broader fraud network.

As digital payments continue to grow, fraud prevention will need to become faster, more adaptive, and more collaborative. Orca is building the infrastructure to help businesses stay ahead of the syndicates operating across an increasingly complex digital economy.

Read the full MyBroadband article.

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

Wellness is becoming a bigger priority for consumers, employers, and hospitality teams. But access has not always kept up.

Traditional spa services can be expensive and inflexible for consumers. Independent therapists often struggle to build a steady book of business. Hotels and companies want to offer wellness experiences without taking on the cost and complexity of operating a full spa. That is the gap Scape is building into.

Scape is an on-demand wellness marketplace that connects certified therapists with individual clients, companies, and hotels. Through its mobile app, customers can book premium massage and wellness services, choose therapists, and manage the experience from one place.

Pro Network recently profiled the company and its model, highlighting how Scape is combining technology, a managed therapist network, and a premium customer experience to make wellness services more accessible and scalable.

What started as a consumer offering has expanded into a broader platform across B2C, corporate wellness, and hospitality. For companies, Scape supports employee wellness programs through digital campaigns, online registration, and on-site massage sessions. For hotels, it offers a way to provide spa-quality services without major infrastructure or specialized staffing investments.

That expansion is showing up in the numbers. According to the article, Scape has served more than 250 corporate clients, delivered more than 33,000 consumer services, grown B2B 71.5% quarter-over-quarter, and is projecting $4 million in revenue while expanding further in the U.S.

We have always liked companies that use technology to modernize large, offline categories without losing the human experience that makes the service valuable in the first place. Scape fits that pattern: software makes the marketplace work, but trust, quality, and therapist-client experience remain at the center.

As wellness becomes a more consistent part of how people work, travel, and take care of themselves, Scape is building the infrastructure to bring premium services to more places with less friction.

Read the full Pro Network article.

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

In terms of CapEx, the spending curve follows the same pattern-

• Amazon is projecting roughly $200B of capital spending in 2026, up from $131B in 2025.

• Alphabet expects $180B-$190B, roughly double last year’s level.

• Meta guided to $115B-$135B in 2026 after spending $72.2B in 2025.

All the above are planning to pour more than $630B into data centers and AI chips this year.

And obviously, while companies are committing record amounts of capital to AI infrastructure, many are also restructuring their workforces around the assumption that AI will let them do more with fewer people.

• July - Microsoft plans to lay off under 2.5% of its workforce

• June - Oracle’s workforce shrank by about 21,000 employees, or roughly 13%.

• May - Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce.

• May - Intuit laid off over 3,000 employees, or about 17% of its workforce.

• May - LinkedIn laid off about 5% of staff, 875 employees.

The signals seem clear: Ramp token spend → Cut down workforce → CapEx increases

However, I believe the real question is: when will we hit the inflection point on marginal returns to compute? Having used nearly every foundation and open-source model, I think we are clearly approaching a period of diminishing marginal returns. Fable 5 may be excellent, and future frontier models will absolutely matter for certain categories, especially scientific discovery, physical AI, simulation, robotics, and other domains where the hardest problems still require the best models.

But for most organizations, the work is not always that complex. At some point, the question becomes: does it actually make sense to pay more for the next Claude or OpenAI model, or is the better answer to optimize around the model that is “good enough” for the workflow?

That is where the tradeoffs start to matter. Companies will increasingly optimize across throughput, latency, token cost, reliability, and security rather than blindly defaulting to the most powerful model available. As organizations learn how to use AI properly, the conversation will shift from “which model is best?” to “which model is best for this job at this price?”

Alex Karp has been making a version of this argument from the sovereignty angle: companies and governments should be wary of paying for tokens while sending their most valuable data into closed model ecosystems. The risk is not just leakage and dependency.

Is Fable 5 really worth a roughly 2x price increase for the average enterprise workflow? For most companies, the next wave of AI value may not come from blindly building more agents on top of the most expensive foundation model. It may come from having actual “AI specialists” who understand model routing, fine-tuning, inference optimization, orchestration layers, deployment architecture - people who can decide when to use Claude or OpenAI, when to run a company-specific local SLM through Ollama, and when to optimize a smaller model on dedicated GPU infrastructure, i.e CoreWeave. These are also areas I believe where innovation around AI will endure.

The advantage shifts from “who has access to the best model?” to “who knows how to apply the most optimal stack.

Keeping the grid reliable starts with knowing what is happening in the field.

For electric utilities, that work is still harder than it should be. Inspection programs are expensive, senior qualified workers are in short supply, and the findings often end up trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets, and systems that are difficult to use across the organization.

At the same time, utilities are under pressure to move faster. Wildfire mitigation plans, storm hardening commitments, resiliency programs, and federal inspection requirements all depend on asset-level visibility that can stand up to regulatory review.

ThreeV is building for that operational reality.

The company develops AI infrastructure for electric utility operations, helping utilities turn inspection data into usable intelligence across asset strategy, remediation, compliance, and planning. Its platform processes visual field data, classifies assets, detects defects, and makes inspection records searchable and actionable across existing workflows.

Now, ThreeV is partnering with Reliability Transformation Solutions (RTS) to launch Vision, a managed agentic AI inspection offering for U.S. electric utilities.

The model is practical: combine RTS‘ senior Certified Journeyman Linemen and Qualified Electrical Worker expertise with ThreeV‘s Vision inspection platform, AI model training, and inspection software. Utilities can start with a bounded special project on a single circuit or area, or use Vision for a broader routine inspection program.

That matters because many AI programs in industrial settings struggle to get past the pilot stage. Utilities need expert-grade inspections now, not a multi-year data science side project. Vision gives them the inspection capacity and defensible records they need today, while each completed inspection creates ground truth for customer-specific computer vision and agentic inspection models.

Over time, that creates a flywheel. The first inspection cycle produces validated data. Future cycles can shift more routine inspection work to AI agents, with expert linemen focused on quality assurance, spot checks, and the findings that require senior judgment.

As ThreeV CEO Eren Aksu put it, the goal is value in weeks, not years: humans and agents working together to serve utility customers.

The launch also fits ThreeV‘s broader mission. The company is focused on asset-heavy industries where inspection quality is not just an efficiency problem. It is a safety, reliability, compliance, and resilience problem. Better inspection intelligence can help utilities prioritize remediation, reduce avoidable field work, and move from static records to decisions that actually reach the people responsible for the grid.

For a sector where trust, domain expertise, and regulatory defensibility matter, Vision is a strong wedge: not AI in search of a workflow, but AI embedded directly into the inspection work utilities already have to do.

Read the full announcement in Morningstar.

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

From the archives: Listen to Oban MacTavish with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: In the Club with Spade. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Regulatory compliance is one of the most overlooked burdens for institutions. For years, organizations have relied on spreadsheets, emails, and outdated systems to manage compliance and governance. Reportwell replaces that patchwork with a single AI-powered platform for streamlined reporting and regulatory compliance for governmental agencies, charter entities, and school districts. The company is currently serving customers across 17 states and is fielding inbound interest from banks, law firms, construction companies, and federal agencies. By making compliance faster, more accurate, and easier to manage, Reportwell frees teams to focus less on paperwork and more on delivering impact.

Co-founders Jacob Allen (CEO), Lani Luo (COO), and Jennica Adkins (CCO) met over 15 years ago as Teach For America teachers in Chicago, where they lived together before relocating as a group to open charter schools in Indianapolis. Co-founders Jacob Peters (CPO) and David Spitz (CFO) later joined to grow the footprint of the school network. As school leaders, they became frustrated with the clunky, error-prone compliance processes that were used to deliver reports to city, state, and federal agencies. Determined to solve the problem, they moved to Detroit to build Reportwell, inspired by the robust funding and engineering ecosystem. According to Jacob, CEO, the team still travels, works, debates, and celebrates together like family, a dynamic they credit with helping Reportwell maintain 100% customer retention over the past three years. Jacob has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, received the King of Color award from Morehouse College, and was inducted into the University of Washington Hall of Fame. He shares more about Reportwell and why modernizing compliance has become a much bigger opportunity than anyone expected.

What’s Reportwell’s North Star?

Our North Star is regulatory compliance and governance: making the messy, manual, risk‑filled processes around laws, policies, and oversight much more reliable and intelligent. We want boards, superintendents, and industry leaders to have a clear, AI‑assisted view of what they’re responsible for and how they’re performing against those obligations, instead of relying on scattered spreadsheets, emails, and human memory.

What sets Reportwell apart?

We built Reportwell around how organizations actually manage compliance, not how software assumes they do. Before us, teams relied on custom-built internal systems, disconnected software, or manual processes using documents, email, and spreadsheets. By working closely with customers and mapping decades-old workflows, we created a platform that mirrors real-world operations while using AI to simplify and modernize compliance without forcing organizations to reinvent how they work.

Tell us about some recent milestones that Reportwell crushed.

There are three that stand out:

1. We’re ahead of our revenue projections this year.

2. We’re getting serious inbound from industries we thought we’d tackle years down the line; for example, the largest hospital system in the Midwest called us and said they wanted Reportwell now, and we’re in the process of rolling out to about 35 hospitals.

3. We haven’t lost a customer in three and a half years, zero churn. Many of our customers are signing three‑ and five‑year deals and say they love both our product and our team, which is exactly the kind of relationship we were hoping to build.

How has Reportwell evolved over time?

We started in K–12, helping school boards and districts manage compliance, governance, and documentation. As we built deeper AI and workflow capabilities, other industries began knocking on our door: healthcare systems, law firms, banks, restaurants, construction companies, and even a national federal agency we can’t name yet. They all said essentially the same thing: “We have the exact same antiquated, manual problems.” What’s been surprising is how often the software just works out‑of‑the‑box for these adjacent use cases. Regulation is much bigger than education, and we’re excited to tackle large, sticky compliance problems far beyond K–12.

How has your background influenced your approach to building Reportwell?

I started in the classroom more than 15 years ago as a Teach For America teacher in Chicago, where I met my co-founders. Early on we thought the big problems in public education were mostly inside the classroom: curriculum, instructional days, teacher preparation. Later, when we opened our first charter school, we saw a different layer of problems: operations, finance, governance, legal, and regulatory compliance. Those ugly, behind‑the‑scenes issues were keeping K–12 stuck in an antiquated state. That’s why, when we decided to build something, we chose not to create another curriculum or tutoring program. Instead, we went after the hard stuff: operations, finance, governance, and regulatory compliance.

Before education, I also worked as a bartender and server, experiences that taught me the importance of listening to customers and delivering great service, values that still shape how we build our company today.

Fun fact:
My husband and I brew our own beer and make our own wine. Every Christmas, we break out our homemade beer to share amongst family and friends. One day we hope to own a hobby vineyard and farm to keep ourselves “rooted” to the land.

From the archives: Listen to Oban MacTavish with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: In the Club with Spade. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Healthcare access is often shaped by more than clinical need.

It is shaped by time, cost, geography, stigma, and whether the system feels built for the realities of everyday life. In the Philippines, those barriers can be especially visible: crowded hospitals, long wait times, stretched physicians, and health concerns that many people delay addressing because the process feels too difficult or too exposed. &you is building around that gap.

The company is a telehealth platform designed to make care more private, convenient, and supportive for Filipinos navigating health categories that are common but often under-discussed, including weight management, hair loss, sexual health, and mental wellness.

As Rolling Stone Philippines reported, the response has been immediate. &you launched in 2025 and saw 10,000 people sign up within days. More than 100,000 Filipinos have now taken the company’s health assessment.

That demand points to a larger shift. People aren’t disengaged from healthcare. Many are looking for care that feels less intimidating, less judgmental, and easier to fit into their lives.

One of &you’s core offerings is a doctor-supervised weight management program, including access to GLP-1 treatment where appropriate. The company’s approach emphasizes licensed physician oversight, safety, and consistency, aiming to give patients a more responsible alternative to navigating shortcuts or unverified options on their own.

That matters because weight management is not only a cosmetic category. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for heart disease and diabetes, two of the leading causes of death in the Philippines. Better access to proactive, medically guided support can become part of a broader preventive care model.

Founder Emil Eriksen frames the opportunity around removing judgment from care and designing a system that feels private, normal, and supportive. &you is also developing an AI-driven telehealth engine to improve how consultations are conducted and how treatment plans evolve over time.

The bigger opportunity is not simply moving healthcare online. It is redesigning the experience around privacy, trust, affordability, and the actual constraints people face.

For categories where stigma and friction have historically kept people from seeking help, that can be a meaningful unlock.

Read the full article in Rolling Stone Philippines: https://rollingstonephilippines.com/radar/filipinos-healthcare-system-fix-andyou/

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!

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.