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.

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

In this episode, you will hear:

• New York Tech Week reaching its inflection point.

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

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

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

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

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

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:17:07 Marty: Oh, man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:25:13 Marty: Oh, I’m late.

00:25:14 Jenny: You’re late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:30:33 Jenny: Bye.

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

Read more from Marty Ringlein in Founders Everywhere.

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

In this episode, you will hear:

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

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

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

• Prioritizing assortment depth and loyalty over membership tiers.

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

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

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:32:12 Lou: Oh, Spotify.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:33:22 Scott: Thanks, Lou.

00:33:22 Lou: Thanks.

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

Read more from Louise Fritjofsson in Founders Everywhere.

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

In this episode, you will hear:

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

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

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

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

• Building leasing infrastructure that captures residual asset value.

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

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:12:44 Maria: We created our own pre-scoring algorithm in Yakk. So when we were thinking about the pivot, we thought about creating a KYB company because we had so many learnings and so much information about the past company that our first option was creating a new KYC-based on social signals and email on phone validation.

00:13:07 Anna: That’s so interesting because in a sense, your clients aren’t really paying for that, but they’re getting it anyway. You’ve built businesses in Spain and in the United States, so what’s the difference and why here? What was it that prompted you to want to build this here?

00:13:24 Maria: My co-founder and me, Lucia and me, we used to be professional soccer players. We are very ambitious people. We got selected by Draper University in San Mateo. I remember our first day, it was four years ago. We saw this guy, Brett Adcock, the founder of Archer, and now Figure, the humanoid company.

00:13:45 Maria: We saw these guys speaking about humanoids and Silicon Valley. I remember that I looked at Lucia and she was like, “Man, we are playing in second division. We have to be here. If we want to build something great, we need to move.” Two weeks after that, we went home. We shut down the company in Spain and we came to the US.

00:14:04 Maria: Actually, I did my first exit in Spain. I started my company when I was 17. I sold it when I was 20. It was not a big exit. Spain is a very good country in terms of quality of life, but it’s not a country to build businesses.

00:14:17 Maria: When I go back home, everyone was asking me like, “Why are you an entrepreneur? You have the worst life ever.” And here in the US, it’s the other way around. Everyone is building things. You feel so inspired.

00:14:31 Maria: So I feel like that’s the main difference between Spain and the US. The ambition and the best people building businesses are here. We’ve been living in San Francisco for almost two years. The type of people that you meet, the conversations that we have.

00:14:46 Maria: In Spain, of course, we love to party. At 3 a.m. in Spain, I’m at this big party and I’m having a lot of fun. But in SF, I’m speaking about the energy that the protons of the rockets of the NASA.

00:14:59 Maria: So you’re surrounded with so many good people that the learning capacity and the speed of things is much higher than in Europe. I feel not even Spain, the whole Europe. The US is years ahead of Europe in terms of startups and everything.

00:15:15 Anna: What you’re really pointing to is an underlying cultural point of view about the role of entrepreneurship and how people see entrepreneurs. It is interesting how in the United States, we’ve developed a little bit of a… idealization of the whole process of entrepreneurship that really is embedded in the culture here.

00:15:37 Maria: Also, people are much more risk-averse. And if you fail, that’s not a bad thing. For example, I’ve created a lot of companies. Most of them, of course, have never worked. But at the end of the day, all these learnings compound.

00:15:51 Maria: I’ve been a super shitty CEO in my first company, but the second one, I’ve learned from the best. I keep getting all this information and all this knowledge that would make me a very good entrepreneur. I don’t know if now, but maybe in a couple of years. That risk and intrinsic risk that you Americans have is super cool. We have so much to learn from you in that terms.

00:16:16 Anna: You’re teaching me now. I love how you put that about learning velocity and also just reflecting back on how you were a leader in your last company and what this one is like.

00:16:25 Anna: Now you have Sharpei that is working. I’d love to talk about what the ultimate vision is, where you see Sharpei going when it’s fully built out and fully realized. What does it look like?

00:16:37 Maria: The whole goal here is that every lender in the U.S. uses Sharpei for pre-qualifying their applications. I think we’re getting there. We are partnering with a lot of great people to create these distribution channels.

00:16:51 Maria: But of course, it’s a very legacy industry. It’s a very niche industry. We had to create a lot of credibility in the industry to be able to sell to the first customer. Our goal is becoming the infrastructure layer for origination for every lender in the U.S.

00:17:07 Anna: What are the next big challenges or opportunities that are facing you right now as you move towards that goal?

00:17:13 Maria: As we pivoted into this new infrastructure layer, I feel the next challenge would be partnering with the right people so they can resell our solution as white label. So we did, at first, a partnership with Tamarack. It’s the biggest consultancy agency in the U.S. for equipment finance. They’re going to be the ones reselling Sharpei as one of their products.

00:17:37 Maria: For us, the brand doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all about finding these distribution channels that are going to be able to allow us to be in as many lenders as possible. We learned this the hard way because we were going one-by-one to every single lender.

00:17:53 Maria: We are immigrant founders. We don’t have the credibility that we need in the industry. It’s much easier to create a product that is fully resellable by others than having your playbook of direct sales. The challenge is finding the right channels to sell Sharpei to the mass market.

00:18:11 Anna: That’s super exciting to be at this point and having pivoted through so many things and found the one that works. What an exciting moment.

00:18:19 Maria: Now we have to raise again to be able to be in the game for a long time. But we are feeling that we have something between our hands. Super happy to be and also to enjoy this moment because we’ve been entrepreneurs for seven years now together. Now that we have something that the market is getting and that we are feeling the traction finally, it’s going to be a fun moment for us.

00:18:44 Anna: Congrats, Maria. That’s awesome. I’d love to close our conversation with a speed round. Can you tell us what’s a book you’re reading or a podcast that you’re enjoying right now?

00:18:54 Maria: I don’t read so many books. I read a lot online. I’m in love with this podcast, The Diary of a CEO of Steven Bartlett. Literally every single day I listen to one podcast. It’s two hours.

00:19:08 Maria: I spend most of my afternoons hearing about these entrepreneurs and CEOs and experts. I try to apply every single thing that they say into Sharpei. Really interesting, this podcast. I fully recommend it to anyone.

00:19:23 Anna: Okay. Diary of a CEO podcast. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:19:29 Maria: New York. I’m living the full life here. But actually I believe that I would split the year between SF and New York. So six months SF, six months New York and have best of both coasts in the year.

00:19:44 Anna: The perfect coast to coast balance. Okay. What’s your favorite productivity hack?

00:19:49 Maria: I use Granola to record every single meeting to create my follow-up messages. That’s my best productivity hack. And have a lot of coffee at the same time.

00:20:00 Anna: Coffee and Granola, a great combination. So tell the listeners where they can find you if people want to connect with you.

00:20:05 Maria: LinkedIn. I’m very active on that social. I would start my newsletter very, very soon. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and actually I want to help other immigrant founders come to the US.

00:20:20 Maria: I run a Telegram group, one of the biggest ones for Hispanic female founders. We are more than 6,000 people in two years. I have to translate all that community into something bigger. I’m thinking about creating a podcast and a newsletter for female CEOs.

00:20:37 Anna: It sounds like you’ve already built the community, so that sounds like a great idea.

00:20:40 Maria: I try to help. I try to publish things that I use or templates or my email templates for investor updates. But I feel like I don’t have enough time to put into that type of community so, I want to translate that into a more specific newsletter or podcast maybe.

00:20:59 Anna: Great. This has been a great conversation. Maria Azofra from Sharpei, thank you for joining me and best of luck.

00:21:05 Maria: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:21:08 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

In episode 119 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Anshu Jain, co-founder and CPO/CTO of Outmarket AI, an AI-native platform that helps insurance brokerages grow revenue, reduce errors, and close more policies. Anshu shares how years at IBM Research, Meta, and Ethos Life revealed that insurance agents were drowning in manual data entry, buried exclusions, and uncompared quotes, with zero tools to help them. Outmarket’s vision is to become the AI infrastructure layer for insurance distribution, modernizing a chronically underinsured market by giving every agent the intelligence of a team behind them.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Closing America’s chronic underinsurance gap with smarter agent tools

• Catching policy exclusions and coverage gaps before claims surface

• Evolving pricing from seat-based to usage-based to revenue-share

• Turning policy data and agent workflows into proprietary AI advantage

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. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures. Everywhere Ventures is a global pre-seed fund, and I’m super happy to be here today with Anshu Jain.

00:00:43 Scott: Anshu is the co-founder and CTO of Outmarket AI. Outmarket is transforming the insurance industry by bringing AI native intelligence to brokerages so that they can grow revenue, make things more efficient, scale smarter.

00:00:57 Scott: He’s also a programmer by training who’s found his way into the heart of insurance over a storied career. But I know that prior to founding Outmarket, you worked at Meta, Ethos Labs, IBM, SAP. So, Anshu, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here with us today.

00:01:13 Anshu: Thank you, Scott. Really appreciate the opportunity.

00:01:16 Scott: Given you’ve been living in AI land for much longer than most of us, give us the 60,000 foot view of what you’ve seen over your career studying and working in AI and how fast the world is changing today with this new evolution that we’re all experiencing.

00:01:32 Anshu: I appreciate that question because it takes me 20 years back into my life journey when I first joined IBM Research, which is when I got into natural language processing and text analytics. That allowed me to be a part of the original AI commercialization effort, which was the IBM Watson effort.

00:01:47 Anshu: Around the constraints of computing at that time, took a very different approach, which was a rule-based approach to AI. Things, of course, evolved significantly different when deep learning and neural networks came.

00:01:58 Anshu: But even the best of us who were deep into deep learning and neural networks, except for the few who had the real vision long back, could not see it coming until it almost started tipping over in early ‘21. That this seems to start to have the appearance of a brain of its own.

00:02:17 Anshu: I think it took everybody by surprise as to how good it got, how the act of next token generation can start to define and generate what are very intelligent sounding reasoning tokens. Everybody had to react.

00:02:32 Anshu: Even though we understand that it is in the end token generation, it is not true intelligence. The technology and frontier has come so far that it’s great and good enough to change an industry landscape for the next decade, even if it were to stop all model innovation today.

00:02:46 Anshu: If there was nothing beyond Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, it will take 10 years for the industry and world to realize all the gains from what has happened. It’s been overwhelming.

00:02:56 Scott: It’s pretty remarkable. I’m midway through reading the book by Sebastian Mallaby. He was one of our speakers at our annual meeting a couple of weeks ago in New York City. Sebastian wrote The Power Law, but his most recent book is a deep dive into Demis Hassabis and the evolution of DeepMind. He’s actually gone 10 years of interviews with Demis.

00:03:15 Scott: What’s so fascinating, as you alluded to with IBM Watson, the deterministic rote form of AI, and really his background in neuroscience and thinking about non-deterministic ways to build these neural networks that were moving in the direction toward where we are today.

00:03:33 Scott: On the investor side, I don’t think we’ve seen a fundamental shift like this since the advent of the iPhone and the App Store, and maybe before that, the internet.

00:03:42 Scott: The last 15 years, we’ve been living in sort of a rinse-repeat SaaS world of very specific growth curves, very specific KPIs to manage and navigate and scale very predictable pathways to IPO. We’re completely in a sea change that we probably haven’t seen since 2007, and maybe before that, 1995.

00:04:02 Scott: So it feels like a fundamental restructuring of venture capital the way startups are scaling. You guys predicted this going after a huge market like insurance two or three years ago when the writing was not totally on the wall, not everybody was a believer in AI. What gave you that confidence?

00:04:19 Scott: Was it the fact that you were in these worlds 20 years ago and you saw the evolution, how quickly things were changing? And you said, “Gosh, we got to get ahead of this and where are the biggest opportunities in the market? Well, let’s go after insurance.” How did you guys arrive on this particular industry, this particular go-to-market?

00:04:37 Anshu: I call this the Medici effect, where it was the intersection of different streams of thoughts which happened for us. You could always call it accidental when you connect the dots back. The fact that me and both Vishal, my co-founder, we spent our lifetime in technology.

00:04:52 Anshu: Vishal had done a startup in doing sentiment mining from social networks more than a decade ago. I was at the frontier of this at IBM Research. He was at the frontier of it in the social landscape, and we knew this technology, and we were following it very closely.

00:05:06 Anshu: But then what happened was we both were at Meta. So Vishal joined Meta, I joined the same team there. That’s where we started serving some of the largest businesses of Meta, and that’s when insurance first happened to them.

00:05:18 Anshu: I started managing the FinTech and insurance vertical, and we were serving their ads worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We started working closely with the insurance industry, and I understood, hey, how much the insurance industry spends to do distribution, acquisition.

00:05:31 Anshu: One thing led to another, we started helping Ethos Life, which was a direct-to-customer life insurance MGA reseller. We said, “Hey, we could help you do this.” And when they saw the impact our background brought into this insurance world, they said, “Hey, why don’t you just join?”

00:05:47 Anshu: So we joined Ethos Life. Vishal went there first. He headed the product there, and then I joined to head the platform team. That opened our eyes completely in two ways.

00:05:57 Anshu: From the technical side, for me, understanding how much of a big data problem insurance is was mind-blowing, because I believe that insurance is the original big daddy of big data, even before there were computers.

00:06:09 Anshu: 200 years ago, they were having these thick registers where they were handwriting the probabilities and computing the stats to insure the ships which were traveling through the sea to get to India and America. More than that, it was also about complex natural language, which is contracts.

00:06:27 Anshu: All these contracts are essentially natural language, very hard to understand by machines, at least until recently. They are the things that make or break the actual policy. They can have multi-million or even hundreds of million dollars of consequences.

00:06:40 Anshu: Understanding that technology landscape of it, that there are some technical limitations which have stopped this industry from being benefited, but they are on the cusp of being solved, was one thing.

00:06:50 Anshu: The other thing, even the consumers for life insurance would not be inclined to buy the life insurance unless there’s an agent who they can call. The single biggest experiment which increased our return on ad spend was putting an agent phone number there.

00:07:02 Anshu: So we decided to build an agent business at Ethos. Towards building that business, both Vishal and I participated in a lot of interviews where we literally shadowed them. “Hey, just show us what you’re doing.”

00:07:12 Anshu: Many of these agents were actually PNC agents who were trying to get into life. But when we saw the actual work which they do every day, it blew our minds because they had zero tools which are helping them. They just had a monitor which was allowing them to do data entry.

00:07:27 Anshu: But their actual work, it’s deep underwriting work which agents were doing without a law degree, without a data science degree. They need help. This is a technology which is ready for revolution.

00:07:38 Anshu: At that time, I had enough understanding. I was already using ChatGPT to write code. This was using the browser ChatGPT 3.0 and ChatGPT 3.5, I was using to write code. I could see this going in that speed and scale.

00:07:50 Anshu: Three years ago, I was shouting at the top of my voice on LinkedIn that “Guys, this is bigger than we think. This is not 10 to 20% productivity improvement. You could be writing three times the code with this very soon.” And we knew that this would happen in other domains.

00:08:03 Anshu: I also look back at this and say we were fortunate to choose the timing right. Because to me, when the internet was happening, I was still in high school. To me, this is the next big or as big or bigger than internet.

00:08:13 Anshu: We are at the cutting edge of this and in that confluence of we being technology providers who understood insurance as a business first was the biggest driver of the fact. We’re just lucky to have that sequence of events happen to us.

00:08:25 Scott: It’s really fun, having spent time on the ad team at Google 20 years ago, on the platform team at Meta 15 years ago, sometimes being in those positions where the day-to-day mechanics of the role maybe weren’t that interesting.

00:08:38 Scott: But getting to see the 60,000 foot view into an industry, I remember in my early 20s being absolutely perplexed by the amount of ad spend in some industries that I didn’t know were that big.

00:08:48 Scott: You would say, “Gosh, these guys are spending this amount. They must be generating 10 times this amount of revenue.” And it’s some obscure business that you had never conceived of being at that scale.

00:08:59 Scott: So part of that 60,000 foot view of you guys being at Meta, seeing the ad spend from insurance coupled with that age old idea that insurance is really an underwriting, is an understanding of data and probabilities and risk, which are maybe the things that machines can do infinitely better than humans. So it’s a natural combination of effects.

00:09:19 Scott: Taking a step back to what Outmarket is doing as a company, walk us through how you guys are baking AI into some of these agent roles and helping supplement. Because in legal, for example, there’s the black letter law of precedent of what the mechanics of the law. But then there’s also a very commercial layer that’s much more human-driven, that’s much more nuanced-based on a client risk profile, based on a client goal.

00:09:45 Scott: So I imagine there’s both agentic machine part of this, and there’s also the human layer part of this of leveraging Outmarket and some of the intuitions, but also baking in these human elements that a good agent knows how to structure a contract or how to push a deal forward. Walk us through a little bit of the business of Outmarket and how you guys are enabling these agents.

00:10:06 Anshu: You absolutely called out a very unique aspect of this industry, where the same function/role is so significantly a relationship-based role, which has so many touch points with the customer, and then so significantly a data processing and information processing role. Because they’re not the underwriters, but they have to do a lot of work, which is in the same vein of understanding risk and exposure.

00:10:29 Anshu: The legal parallel is great because they’re effectively acting as the lawyers for their clients. Some of the largest corporations, one of the biggest job of the lawyers there is actually to have airtight insurance policies.

00:10:40 Anshu: But most businesses cannot afford that set of lawyers, and that’s why they depend on their agents to do that. That’s an actual big aha for me that, “Hey, these guys are actually doing complex legal work. The precedents of law also apply here.”

00:10:53 Anshu: But also there is this notion of endorsements and exclusions, which is what makes the policy. So there is the deck page of the policy, which says, “Hey, this is the amount of coverage you have for these different sections.”

00:11:05 Anshu: And then there is a bunch, not necessarily hidden, but deep, embedded into the 400 page policy on page number 262 that, “Oh, by the way, digital theft is excluded from this.” Or, “Oh, by the way, you cannot be performing service in a specific industry if you want this insurance.”

00:11:23 Anshu: The agent, if they don’t look at it deeply, may not realize that the client I’m giving this insurance to actually is in that industry. This is a true story that the first insurance we got for our cybertech liability had an exclusion in it that you cannot be in professional services in finance.

00:11:40 Anshu: The agent failed to notice because it was buried on some last page that we are actually in the insurance industry. For six months we were exposed. And when we were putting it through our own policy review system, building that AI, we actually found out that this was a gap.

00:11:54 Anshu: This is a huge nuance of this industry, exclusions and endorsement, which make or break the industry. And we have intersected there as the first thing. So going back to your question of where are we addressing the problems of this space? It starts with a touchpoint, which is how do you gather the context of the client.

00:12:08 Anshu: Because that’s necessary to be able to tell them what’s the right risk exposure profile for them and what kind of markets I can bring them. We start from the point they have a lead. I’ll also touch upon that.

00:12:18 Anshu: Why do we start from the point we have a lead? Because bulk of this industry today is not stuck at lead generation. They have more leads than they can process on their desk, but they cannot get through enough of them.

00:12:28 Anshu: Even though our background was distribution and lead generation at Meta, we said, “Hey, let’s park that problem for now. Let’s focus on the lead to close problem and then the operations problem.”

00:12:38 Anshu: So we say from the time you get the lead, understanding the customer context, filling up the forms, taking your last two policies, and then instead of having to do data entry, use that information to automatically fill up the forms.

00:12:50 Anshu: From that point, having the quotes, application forms being submitted to comparing the quotes which come back from multiple carriers. That’s a very complex task. You’re not just looking at premium, which is what people do because they don’t have time.

00:13:01 Anshu: But buried under those 40-page quotes is some exclusion which talks about the same coverage, the same premium, but this one is much better for your client. Or in fact, higher premium, but this one is much better for your client.

00:13:12 Anshu: They fail to see it because the client themselves are also indexed on the premium and the coverage, but not the details. So now every day, our agents are coming back and saying, “Hey, Anshu, I was able to sell a policy which was the higher premium because the conversation never went to premium. It went to the details of what’s covered in these quotes.”

00:13:30 Anshu: From that point, the quote comparison to then actually the policy being issued… in these steps, there are so many issues which happen in terms of fat fingering, human errors. You had eight vehicles you wanted to cover in the input application, but somebody missed it and there are only seven vehicles, or the VIN number got wrong.

00:13:46 Anshu: Figuring out all of these, which are hidden errors and exclusions. So until the actual accident happens of that vehicle, nobody looks into the policy to say that, “Hey, it’s entirely missing in the policy.”

00:13:54 Scott: We have a number of cybersecurity companies that we’ve invested in. And thinking about pen testing, of looking for vulnerabilities in the code base or vulnerabilities in the potential threat mapping to what you’ve built, in some ways, it’s doing that in reverse.

00:14:10 Scott: What’s so fascinating about insurance is you get the benefit of the premium in the short run, but you have potential catastrophic costs of the payout or the claim in the long run. And there’s a timing mismatch where you really don’t know that you’re wrong catastrophically for a number of months or a number of years.

00:14:24 Scott: This was a pushback on some of the companies that went public, like the Lemonades of the world that were up and to the right on premium. But there’s this long tail of risk that may be baked into those companies with claims that may be poorly underwritten out a few years. You guys are effectively enabling real-time pen testing almost in between risk exposure and client archetype.

00:14:47 Anshu: 100%. That takes me to the 100,000 feet vision for the company. America is underinsured. Be it businesses, be it individuals, be it homes, we are underinsured.

00:15:00 Anshu: As an example, very recently with some of our own friends in Los Angeles, the risk was clear for many years making. Even then, most houses were underinsured. When it came to the actual recovery and rebuilding, they’re now suffering because of lack of information, lack of time, lack of attention.

00:15:18 Anshu: It’s not like there was no intention of anybody to do this right. But because of the lack of tools and information and sheer time, there was not the right advice coming to the final insured. In this case, it was individuals. In some cases, it is businesses.

00:15:31 Anshu: We want to remove that entire inefficiency in multiple layers of this ecosystem so that agents can go back to focusing on what is the most important thing: advising their clients to be appropriately insured and giving them enough reasons to say, “Hey, a higher premium is better for me.”

00:15:47 Anshu: Ask the folks in Los Angeles, they’ll pay double the premium if they have to now. I think that’s the grand vision here. And that’s the opportunity that because everybody is underinsured.

00:15:55 Anshu: This is not about automating this world and removing the efficiency. It’s about increasing the TAM of this industry. The same agents will not be losing their jobs. In fact, they will be having more because they can actually do more.

00:16:08 Scott: As somebody that has to buy insurance and pay for insurance, the biggest risk is that you pay a high premium and you’re still not covered for the catastrophic things that you want to be covered for. So it’s kind of this mismatch of I’m fine paying a high premium as long as that I’m legitimately covered for the highest risk events that I may experience.

00:16:27 Scott: But there’s probably an information asymmetry there where sometimes I’m paying a low premium for the amount of risk coverage I’m getting and other times I’m paying an extremely high premium for very low risk coverage and helping kind of align those incentives.

00:16:40 Scott: To your point, I would maybe spend more money, therefore increasing the TAM of the market if I knew for a fact that there were real risk mitigation elements that I was paying for.

00:16:51 Scott: One of the most interesting things we’re seeing in this new AI driven world is an evolution of pricing. It used to be you kind of sell off the shelf SaaS for a fixed per seat per month model.

00:17:01 Scott: We’re really starting to see where you can drive asymmetric growth and revenue or asymmetric savings and cost, a pricing based on the Delta, the increase in revenue or pricing based on the efficiency of cost savings. How are you guys thinking about pricing in this new AI led market?

00:17:19 Anshu: This is the most active thread of go to market for us right now, Scott. We’ve experimented already. We’re starting to arrive at a very good place here. We started with a seat-based model in the early days because two years ago, nobody knew how to price this based on outcomes.

00:17:33 Anshu: Now that we have the credibility in the market and we’ve been the first to arrive in some sense, what we are starting to see is that the seat anxiety is actually a much bigger problem.

00:17:42 Anshu: I’ve never seen a product market fit like this in my lifetime of building software. Once somebody uses it, they cannot unuse it. They can never get back to not using it. The validation from our customers is that, “Hey, if we drop Outmarket, I’m quitting.”

00:17:56 Anshu: Now everybody wants a seat. The end customers and the CEOs are realizing that, “Hey, I need to give a seat to everybody.” But now the traditional seat model starts to sound very expensive for them also. So it’s been a great boon for us that adoption makes the traditional seat economics drive more anxiety for the customer.

00:18:12 Anshu: Then we were able to quickly experiment and pivot to a model where I think the innovation we ded was we normalize it to a very simple and understandable price point, which is per page of data ingested.

00:18:23 Anshu: Instead of trying to make it hit this workflow, this module, so many credits of usage, we said, “Hey, this doesn’t matter how many of ever times you want to use this. Bring in the data, bring the policy pages, the code pages, and we will just price it by page.” So it became a usage-based model.

00:18:38 Anshu: Within months of launching, we’ve done several deals now on that usage-based model, especially including the larger deals, because now a large insurance agency can say, “Hey, I can put it on all my 2000 employees and then just pay for usage.”

00:18:51 Anshu: The more pricier outcome for them is a happier outcome, which means it’s being adopted. So if they exhaust their entire usage, it just means that they are hyperproductive as an organization. That model is starting to play out.

00:19:01 Anshu: And then we are slowly now, from there, also evolving to a revenue-based model because even the page-based model has an uncertainty and an anxiety of, “Hey, what if I start to use it a lot? Will my budget just go double because I’ve used double the pages?”

00:19:13 Anshu: So from there, we are now able to move to a model which is revenue-based that, “Hey, this is your revenue.” If we can just say that, “Hey, this is the percentage of revenue. So forget counting pages, counting seats, nothing. It’s really tied to your outcome. The happiest case for you is the happiest case for us, that your revenue is doubling and our remuneration from that revenue is doubling.”

00:19:30 Anshu: We are evolving there, but I think the evolution cannot happen as a step function. It has to happen gradually as you build credibility. In some cases, we might still start with seat-based model, let them build trust into the environment and then say, “Okay, now that you know us, let’s do the revenue-based model.”

00:19:46 Scott: That’s a great learning that you kind of need a blunt go to market in the form of per seat per month, followed by maybe a volume-based pricing as you gain scale and then concluding with an outcome-based pricing as you’ve built credibility.

00:20:01 Scott: But a lot of people are trying to jump straight to outcome-based pricing. It’s hard. You guys have developed a simple model, but sometimes these modules with tokens and it’s very complex pricing. That’s a great intuition around seat to volume to outcome-based pricing, which I think would apply to a lot of different businesses that we see.

00:20:19 Anshu: Everybody using AI is struggling because the cost of gas in any SaaS, which is run by AI, is much higher than it used to be. Compute does not scale linearly. And for 100X usage, compute probably scales by 5X. But with AI, for 100X usage, AI usage scales 100X and that’s a big problem.

00:20:39 Scott: As you think about being on the inside of AI, a lot of the stuff that I read about and hear about is the coming crunch of compute,

00:20:58 Scott: Do you guys foreee a world in the coming couple of years where demand really outpaces the ability to keep up with compute supply? What does that do for the underlying cost structure of a business like yours? How do you think of those risks under the hood?

00:21:13 Anshu: My technology view as an AI researcher in the past, and as somebody who’s watching and reading every new paper which is published, especially in the compute efficiency domain, I believe there is a lot of hype going on in terms of this capacity issue.

00:21:28 Anshu: That’s the job of the industry to sell that hype so that they can capitalize on it right now. But I think there is a lot of people who are working on advances which drastically reduce the compute needed and the energy per token needed to do the same token generation.

00:21:44 Anshu: In a matter of a couple of years, it’ll start to show up in the actual technology landscape. In a matter of five, six years, it’ll also start to be in the chip and the silicon. That’s happening on one end. So I believe the long term, I don’t have to worry about pricing too much.

00:21:58 Anshu: In the short term, I feel like I can actually use it to my advantage. There is potentially this demand supply gap which will be there. That demand supply gap will reveal itself when, let’s say, the head of data or technology of a large insurance company says, “I’m going to build this myself using Claude and price to do it.” They will see that it’s actually hyper expensive to do it.

00:22:19 Anshu: It’s not easy to scale it out at their scale of economies. While at my scale of economies, when I am serving hundreds and thousands of those customers, I can manage that better as well as because I am having a deep technology team which is doing the token compression. When I say token compression, it’s not literal.

00:22:35 Anshu: Because of the knowledge graph I’m building, because of the knowledge compression I’m building, I don’t have to go back to AI for everything. I have actually been able to deliver the same outcome by using much fewer tokens because I’m not depending on AI to do everything.

00:22:50 Anshu: I have been able to break down the problem into many small steps, optimize each step, and then reuse the step, cache the step, whatever, to have a much higher outcome to token ratio.

00:23:02 Anshu: Then what? Somebody who tries to build the same thing themselves might still get the outcome somewhere in the vicinity. It will not still be the same accuracy, but will be paying much bigger price. So I’m going to use that to my advantage.

00:23:13 Anshu: I think that is the reason why people should not even try to do that. They should lean on somebody who’s specialized to do that. As a technologist, I feel it’s a short-lived problem and people are hyping it up more than necessary. But from a GTM, I can actually use it to our advantage.

00:23:27 Scott: What you said just there is so fascinating because one of the existential conversations that’s always bubbling around Ventureland is with the frontier models, “can’t Claude do that? Can’t Claude do that?”

00:23:38 Scott: You know, that’s the trope that constantly bandied about is that there will be no vertical specific solutions because there’s this one super model which can do many things.

00:23:49 Scott: But to your point, if you’re tapping that one model in a very blunt way and utilizing it for every bit of knowledge that you need to extract from it, you’re very quickly going to get to a price point that’s untenable as a business.

00:24:01 Scott: You’re then going to look for cost-effective alternatives. Which to your point, as a vertical specific solution, you can really do a lot of knowledge compression before ever tapping into AI so the outcome per token price or the outcome per ping to AI is actually much more economical for the business.

00:24:20 Scott: In the short run, while people may do off-the-shelf Claude builds to try to figure something out, I think they’ll very quickly eclipse a cost threshold that is tenable for the business and then be shopping for vertical solutions like Outmarket in the space of insurance, for example.

00:24:36 Anshu: Absolutely. This is really just something that any vertical stack should take into account as they build and as they start planning for this. I’ve lived through this crisis in my own head and I’ve come out on the brighter side of this that… can Claude do this.

00:24:49 Anshu: I’m going to get a little bit of flak for saying this out loud right now, and I’m happy to take the criticism that what is Claude under the hood? It’s just a model which is providing enough data centers to execute. It’s a model which is running on the chips and providing the inference.

00:25:05 Anshu: If you look at the evolution, Claude’s 4.0 technology, which is where we were starting to get very accurate results, is already there in open source right now. So Claude’s 4.7 will be there in open source in six months from now or maybe ten months from now. If you really peel under the hood, they have a great execution engine, but there is nothing proprietary about it at some point.

00:25:24 Anshu: What is the hard things Claude will never be able to do? The amount of calls I’m taking from insurance agents on a daily basis to support them. I have a big customer success team who’s saying, “Hey, these people are coming and saying, hey, my proposal needs to look like this. My output needs to look like that.” That can be done only by somebody who understands the vertical deeply and is able to invest in that.

00:25:44 Anshu: So I feel like what Claude has today is replaceable. I can actually literally replace Claude with OpenAI, but what I have today is not replaceable. I’m living much more peacefully with that concept now, now that I’ve seen it in action. And I, in fact, think that we can actually remove these technologies and these as a commodity.

00:26:00 Scott: Interesting. It’s almost the opposite of the platform reliance trope that’s often thought of in the sense that as these models get eclipsed and open sourced, there’s almost like a platform openness rather than reliance.

00:26:12 Scott: It is actually the vertical specific application that you guys are building, the deep domain expertise, the ability to service the customer, the ability to understand that nuance and that pen testing between buyer and underwriter, that really gives you guys a durable advantage.

00:26:27 Scott: We’re close on time. So I want to shift to the lightning round of just a couple of fun questions for you, Anshu. I know you’re in the Bay Area, been in Silicon Valley for a long time. If you didn’t live in the Bay, where in the world would you choose to live?

00:26:41 Anshu: I think of two places. So I’m going to put both the places which are extreme contrast of each other. I love warm beaches because you cannot get a warm beach here in the Pacific. So Hawaii would be that place. I could live and work on the beaches of Hawaii for life, not just one year.

00:26:55 Anshu: And then the other place, which I’ve always been fascinated by, I wish I grew up there, is New York City. The other place is if I could be on the Upper West Side overlooking the Central Park and spend my life there – because the energy that city brings is just next to nothing. I would definitely want to go back in New York and live there for a year.

00:27:13 Scott: That’s great. You could be Jenny’s neighbor on the Upper West Side.

00:27:16 Anshu: Yes, I know.

00:27:19 Scott: With all this stuff that’s happening in AI, you alluded to reading all the frontier papers. Are there any books or podcasts or ways that you keep up with how fast the world is changing?

00:27:29 Anshu: I’m a big podcast guy. That’s something I live and breathe by with all my rounds of dropping my kids to different places. On the AI side, Dwarkesh’s podcast is the most fascinating one. Dwarkesh speaks to most of the industry leaders in this space. He’s been doing that for many years. So that’s been a big help for me keeping pace with the future.

00:27:48 Anshu: I’m an absolute fan, if I was to not keep the AI lens on it, of the Acquired podcast, Ben and David. They literally do a podcast which is a book on a company.

00:27:59 Anshu: As an entrepreneur, I’ve actually made some choices in my startup which have been very helpful based on the learnings from that podcast because they talk about companies and how they evolve and their thinking.

00:28:10 Scott: Oh, yeah. You need a good three-hour walk or a full doubleheader soccer game with your kids or something to get through a three-hour podcast.

00:28:19 Anshu: The whole podcast lasts for a week for me, but it’s so educating in some sense. It’s my favorite. I would recommend that to every entrepreneur listening to this podcast. Acquired should be in your must-have listens always.

00:28:31 Scott: I know you guys are building productivity hacks for insurance agents and brokers. How do you guys use it internally? What do you use? How do you time block your calendar? Are there any AI hacks that you use to be more efficient as a CTO?

00:28:44 Anshu: My two biggest hacks is… one, of course, connecting Claude to my calendar and all my systems. So now I actually ask Claude a lot of questions. So Claude can connect to your Gmail, Claude can connect to your calendar, Claude can connect to your CRM and all of that.

00:28:58 Anshu: I start asking questions to my Claude rather than going into these individual tools and even ask it, “Okay, what’s my day looking like in the morning,” and scripting some of those things.

00:29:07 Anshu: The other one, from a technologist perspective, we’ve deployed in the company something called Claude Conductor. Conductor actually conducts and orchestrates a lot of parallel activities.

00:29:17 Anshu: So even as a person who’s spending all my time in client meetings and strategy and discussions, I’m able to, in parallel, have many development tasks. That is made so easy because now you’re moving out of the IDE. You’re not doing any more IDE.

00:29:30 Anshu: It’s all happening directly on the Claude Conductor console and it just manages so many threads. I’m sitting in a meeting, I think of an idea, I start that thread. It starts actually implementing it and I can come back to it tomorrow and see what’s happened.

00:29:40 Scott: Even just what you said there is a fundamental shift from the role of CTO 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago in the sense that it was sitting in the IDE, it was writing code, it was managing engineers.

00:29:52 Scott: And the fact that you’re able to spend half your day in client meetings, in strategy discussions, that is a fundamental shift already in productivity, the ability to be doing both at the same time.

00:30:03 Scott: Finally, where can listeners find you online?

00:30:05 Anshu: I’m most active on my social networks on LinkedIn. It’s my first name, last name together, Anshu Jain and always be able to answer questions or just connect.

00:30:14 Scott: Amazing. Thanks so much. Congratulations on the $17 million Series A you guys just closed and announced. I know that the business is better than ever and you guys are just in an incredibly exciting pole position on a huge market at the right place at the right time.

00:30:29 Scott: So hats off to you and Vishal for having the foresight and the conviction to be building in this space two or three years ago. We’re super excited to be a small player in the company.

00:30:40 Anshu: Thank you for this podcast, some amazing questions you asked. I mean, I’m going to go back and listen to it myself because we had some really engaging conversations. And thank you for being one of the earliest backers when me and Vishal were just two guys with not even a deck actually and just a mission. You took a bet on us and hopefully it’ll pan out in the right direction in the future as well.

00:30:59 Scott: Absolutely. I love it. All right. Thanks, Anshu.

00:31:01 Anshu: Thank you, Scott. Take care.

Read more from Anshu Jain in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 118 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Mickael Roger, co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero, a data-driven real estate investment platform that helps everyday investors identify, buy, and manage high-return properties globally. Mickael shares how a painful personal experience losing money on an investment inspired him to build a company that takes the guesswork out of real estate. He discusses how PropHero uses machine learning across 25 years of data and hundreds of variables to consistently deliver 16% average annual returns across 4,000+ properties, outperforming every major index, by pairing machine learning with the local insight that no dataset can fully replace.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Predicting property performance with 25 years of machine learning data.

• Managing the full investment lifecycle through a single digital platform.

• Deploying AI for 24/7 support while keeping humans in high-stakes decisions.

• Launching PropHero Academy to deepen client investment knowledge.

• Building a lifetime wealth partnership over a transactional real estate model.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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: All right, everyone, welcome to Venture Everywhere, where today, I’m very excited to have our special guest, Mickael Roger, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero. I’m particularly interested in talking to him, because he’s built a data-driven real estate investment platform that helps users identify, buy, manage high-return property investments globally.

00:00:54 Jenny: As someone who has a bunch of properties, never really knows how to manage it, and is interested in the category, but really doesn’t have the skills, I was super excited to be able to talk to you and support you guys. Welcome, Mickael, to the program.

00:01:08 Mickael: Hey. Thank you for having me.

00:01:09 Jenny: Awesome. I’d love to start off a little bit at the beginning, because you have such an interesting background. Half Australian, half French, grown up across cultures. But you also started a little bit less traditional than some of our founders in that you worked at big companies, finance, places like McKinsey. Just talk a little bit about your background before we get into PropHero.

00:01:28 Mickael: When I was 16, I had a big master plan. I’ve always wanted to launch my own business and make it successful. I felt that I need to know how the world works before, and especially in terms of finances, strategy, management, etc.

00:01:44 Mickael: And so the ideal path was to study maths, because maths runs the world. Even before AI, that was already the case 20 years ago. Learn about maths, then go to banking, then go to management consulting. That was my plan and feel ready before launching my own business.

00:02:00 Mickael: What happened is that about 10 years ago, I started to fall in love with AI and being absolutely convinced, so way before OpenAI, that AI was going to change humanity. I launched the McKinsey AI practice with other colleagues. Things went really well doing that, and then I thought, “Wow, the world is changing. I have to be part of it.”

00:02:20 Mickael: And so that was five years ago. Found the business idea that I believed in, and we launched PropHero. We are celebrating our fifth birthday next month.

00:02:27 Jenny: That’s awesome. You talk about PropHero. What was that like going from more big company? I know maybe you felt entrepreneurial, and I had a similar experience. I felt very entrepreneurial. My parents worked for themselves.

00:02:38 Jenny: There was a lot of that type of ethos in our family, but I went to law school. I worked at J.P. Morgan. I’d worked at big companies before I launched my first startup. So what was it like taking that leap?

00:02:48 Mickael: Learning that in real life nothing is ever perfect. When you work in investment banking at McKinsey, people get crazy for a comma missing somewhere. In startups, you can’t get mad about this part, otherwise you just become completely insane.

00:03:03 Mickael: I must say that. When I resigned from my corporate job, I remember dropping my son at daycare at like 7:34 a.m. back at my place, sitting alone on my couch thinking, “Wow, where do I start?”

00:03:17 Mickael: This feeling of like, “Wow, no one cares about me.” I have to learn how to create a company, create an email, create a website, find my first clients, build our tech, find money. Well, this is a huge mountain to climb. And the thing is just to go step by step. Because if you only look at the top of the mountain, you will panic. Just go step by step.

00:03:39 Jenny: I’d love to jump in and just hear really where the idea came from and what was the problem you were trying to solve? Again, I I mentioned that I’ve always been fascinated with real estate. I grew up in New York City, seeing booms and busts and have participated in a very inefficient way because I have a day job. So I’d love to hear where this idea came from.

00:03:58 Mickael: From my own painful experience. 12-15 years ago, I was at McKinsey at the time. So making good money, but not that much time. I wanted to invest my money across multiple asset classes, including real estate. Because I had no time, I hired a buyer’s agent. Paid her about $50,000.

00:04:16 Mickael: I remember telling her, I’m into AI. I built this model. I’m predicting that right now in Australia, I should invest on the gold coast. I think prices are going to more than double in the next three years.

00:04:28 Mickael: “Ah, Mickael, you know nothing about real estate. I’ve been in Sydney for 20 years. Buy there. Okay?” So I spent one and a half million seven years ago. As of last week, as of CBA, my investment is worth 1.4 million. So actually, I lost money in seven years.

00:04:44 Mickael: Terrible investments, but amazing business idea. What if real estate investment was done by serious people who know about data and who make the experience ultra simple and digital and use data and local knowledge to outperform the markets? That was our vision from day one.

00:05:04 Mickael: Not thinking in real estate in transaction, okay, I just want to sell you something. But no, I’m going to help you for the rest of your life to build wealth through real estate. We’re going to use data and an amazing digital platform to make it super simple and super profitable. That’s how it started from a very bad investment, which in the end was maybe the best one.

00:05:24 Jenny: That’s an amazing story. A similar story. My investment turned out well, but it was buying when people just thought it was crazy. I bought an apartment in San Francisco in about 2010, and San Francisco was in this real estate slump.

00:05:38 Jenny: Everyone was like, “That city is dying.” I just was like, “I have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. How can this city be dying?” But you get a lot of bad advice is my point. So can you talk a little bit how PropHero is using data as opposed to vibes?

00:05:53 Mickael: We don’t rely on gut feeling. We are relying on mathematics. If you think about it, what drives real estate? Growing demands, lack of supply, gentrifying population, growing economy, lack of land, et cetera, just like business sense.

00:06:09 Mickael: What we do, we convert these business principles into data. So evolution of land available, new build, time to market, liquidity. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of variables over 25 years of data.

00:06:24 Mickael: We run a machine learning model on this to see – which I’m simplifying but which indicators are predictive of future price and rent growth. This is surprisingly not used by so many people.

00:06:37 Mickael: I was talking to one of the biggest trillion dollar company recently in London, and somehow they still use old school macroeconomic analysis. We use machine learning to predict where to invest and what to invest in.

00:06:50 Mickael: What’s great is we also measure our accuracy. So we know how good we are, and we know also how good we are over time during bullish and bearish times as well. Our performance is ultra consistent. So we’ve bought over 4,000 properties at PropHero over the past five years.

00:07:06 Mickael: Our average annual total return is 16% per year, 1-6, which is outperforming any index that you can look at. Great results and not because of luck, honestly. It’s just mathematics.

00:07:18 Mickael: Mathematics, and if I may just add, we have local people on the ground who find the best deals and data does not see everything. We are very well conscious of what the data doesn’t see. So we have people on the ground who know and see what the data models don’t see.

00:07:34 Jenny: Amazing. What’s been something that has surprised you most about building a startup in the property space? You hear a lot about real estate people being cutthroat. You hear about all the problems with management. What’s been something that’s actually surprised you?

00:07:49 Mickael: It will sound maybe a little bit arrogant, but how much people love us. I wanted to create a cool company that was useful for people, but in my previous life, clients didn’t really love us. It wasn’t really the point.

00:08:01 Mickael: Some of our clients are just like fanatics. My analysis on this is that most people are not passionate about real estate, but it brought them a financial independence and a peace of mind for which they feel proud of themselves for having made the decision and taken the risk.

00:08:17 Mickael: And also they feel, for many of them, grateful. I wasn’t expecting so much of that. I’ve got very often clients reaching out to me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, some even have my WhatsApp and say, “Hey, Michael, we don’t know each other. But FYI, I’m one of your clients. And thank you. We’ve done so well.”

00:08:32 Mickael: It’s one of the perks of this job. Apart from that, it’s a very fascinating industry. It’s much more complex than it seems, and it’s got a depth that I was not suspecting.

00:08:43 Mickael: While now as a business owner, I see it as a defensibility barrier. Because what we’ve built in all these country, all these revenue verticals, all these types of assets start to replicate. It’s actually a pretty deep industry.

00:08:56 Jenny: Interesting.

00:10:09 Jenny: I was looking at your website before this call. You had a lot of properties in Spain. I’ve always dreamed of owning an apartment in Barcelona, but I saaw the interesting properties and probably the best value was kind of in the South, Alicante and some of these other places. So I was like, “Gosh, that’s so interesting.” So what makes a good customer and a good high return property? How do you define that?

00:08:57 Mickael: When you join PropHero, first of all, you talk to an investment advisor and this person will understand your profile and firstly, is PropHero the right company for you? If you’re looking for a purely emotional asset, don’t go with PropHero.

00:09:13 Jenny: Right, right. That’s the Jenny apartment in Barcelona. Don’t do that.

00:09:18 Mickael: We’re super honest. Yes, we could make money, but actually we don’t want to. Our investments are purely based on where we believe you are going to build wealth, not emotions at all.

00:09:27 Mickael: Then depending on your profile, we’ll build your investment strategy. And then once you sign up, we will start sending you properties to buy, either full properties or club deals. So buying a share in a building.

00:09:38 Mickael: Then on the app, you can buy this property or this club deal ticket completely digitally. And then you can, from your phone or computer, track your wealth growth over time. So all your properties are all connected in one place.

00:09:49 Mickael: And for us, a great investment is actually super simple. It’s the sum of capital growth and net rental return. The denominator is how much the investment, the property costs you: cost to buy, to renovate, to furnish in some markets, all the fees like stamp duty, etc.

00:10:06 Mickael: And then all the money you make is capital gains plus net rental return. So rent minus all the rental expenses. Super simple. Depending on your strategy, you may want to favor more capital growth or rental yield. And we’ve got different asset classes depending on how much of each you want. But, in short, we optimize for capital growth plus net rental return.

00:10:26 Jenny: And you guys manage everything. Is that correct?

00:10:28 Mickael: Everything. What you have to do is to decide which assets you want to buy, sign a few documents and make a few bank transfers. 99.9% of our clients have never seen the property with their own eyes.

00:10:40 Mickael: Me, myself, I invest almost all of my savings into PropHero properties. I know in which cities they are. I couldn’t tell you the neighborhood or how many rooms. I’m just seeing the returns. That’s it. Pure investments.

00:10:50 Jenny: That’s really cool because I think many of us have bought some properties. It’s just a hassle to manage. And then if you buy like a REIT, you’re so disconnected from the product that it’s just a financial product.

00:11:02 Jenny: And so I love this. That was why we got interested in being involved, in investing is I love this middle where you actually get to pick. You get to understand. You get to learn about how you guys are underwriting this. But you take care of everything, which is really cool.

00:11:15 Mickael: Speaking of this, what we launched a few months ago is the PropHero Academy, courses for those of our fans who want to learn more and become much more knowledgeable about the industry.

00:11:26 Mickael: We got a few thousand people who signed up almost overnight. We’re surprised to see how interested people were. You got some people who get really, really into this.

00:11:34 Jenny: That’s amazing. Can you talk about macro trends? Interest rates in the U.S. have gone up a lot, and that’s causing some interesting bumps here. Things like inflation, AI. What are some of the macro trends that are either headwinds or tailwinds for you guys?

00:11:49 Mickael: The big thing is that at any point in time, there are always good assets to buy and bad assets that you shouldn’t buy. At any point in time. The data is ultra clear. There has never been a time where you should not buy anywhere.

00:12:03 Mickael: Maybe 2008, I didn’t check this in detail, but I’m actually pretty sure that, yes. It’s even better when the market goes down is when you make the best deals. I’m not stressed about macroeconomics ever.

00:12:13 Mickael: Personally, I prefer buying when the market is going down. Some people prefer the opposite. When you get data on a 7 to 10 year holding period, it doesn’t change much.

00:12:23 Mickael: People tend to overpanic on the real estate changes. But what happens if you buy in the right areas, rents keep going up almost always. And when they go down, it’s only a few percentage points. And by the time your lease will not be over anyway, so it doesn’t affect you anyway.

00:12:41 Mickael: Our yields are constant or increasing. And property prices in the areas where we invest, the biggest fall we’ve seen are maybe 10 percent within one year, but then with a sharp catch up. And over a 7 to 10 year holding period, doesn’t change much.

00:12:57 Mickael: And so just like the stock market, don’t try to time the market. It’s just not working. If you can try to not put all your eggs into one basket. Try to buy one asset every two to three years. And if you do this, one will be bought at a small peak, one at a low, etc. But over time, you will flatten the timing risk and will just benefit from the long term trend.

00:13:18 Mickael: And as a fact, I was saying where I sold, so we’ve bought thousands of properties for our clients. So 100% have outperformed the S&P and all other indexes. And all of them have outperformed the real estate market.

00:13:30 Mickael: Yes, interest rates can be a pain, especially in markets where interest rates are viable. So you should really be careful on your cash flows. But apart from that, as long as you can manage your cash flows, don’t worry too much about it. Based on thousands of properties bought.

00:13:43 Mickael: One mistake I see, which I think is such a shame, is people who buy at their limit borrowing capacity. And then when interest rates go up, massive trouble.

00:13:52 Mickael: My sincere advice is that brokers will often tell you, “Hey, you should borrow one million, two million streaming.” No, don’t borrow at your maximum capacity, borrow much, much less and try to invest in multiple assets in different locations to hedge your timing and location risk.

00:14:08 Jenny: Great advice. I think I read that you studied engineering. That’s your background. You just said that you were obsessed with AI before the LLM models made an appearance.

00:14:17 Jenny: Can you talk about a little bit of that journey going from V1, which was more about machine intelligence, machine learning to how you’re able to really utilize AI now and how that’s reshaping real estate in general?

00:14:30 Mickael: When we launched PropHero, AI was mainly machine learning so predicting what to buy. That’s how we started PropHero and how our clients got great investments.

00:14:40 Mickael: Now, AI, of course, with LLMs is a whole different game. What we launched about one year ago is brand new. We call it the ecosystem ERP software. It’s like a big software that runs all real estate for the entire industry for PropHero, for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, notaries, renovators, property managers, etc.

00:15:02 Mickael: So we’re building this big software to run the industry. And this, of course, we’ve got some massive help from vibe coding. What we are building now in one month before would have taken us one year. And I think we can still go even much faster.

00:15:16 Mickael: That’s one big area. So building the platform, a much more robust and comprehensive platform with LLMs. The big dream we have, which was only a dream five years ago and which is now becoming a reality, is using generative AI to have your own real estate wealth advisor.

00:15:33 Mickael: And so we are connecting LLMs to our data sets, connecting tens of thousands of properties and hundreds of hours of our call recordings, so of our advisors talking to clients. Retrain the model with all this data. And now we’re starting to advise clients with an AI model.

00:15:52 Mickael: What we’re seeing is that for simple queries, this is really amazing. Because clients can get answers 24/7 straight away. What we see, however, is that when the time comes to make the big decision, writing a big check to buy a property, our clients still want to talk to their human wealth advisor.

00:16:09 Mickael: And this, I’m actually not seeing it change because it’s such a massive amount of money. People feel safer talking to a real human being. And so that’s why we keep our wealth advisor team, who are complemented by our AI wealth advisors.

00:16:23 Jenny: That was actually one of my questions I wanted to ask you is like, what parts of the investment decision do you think will never be fully automated? So I guess you answered that.

00:16:32 Mickael: Making the big check, making the big bank transfer. This is always the big moment where we think, “Hey, am I really trusting this company? Is it really a great deal?” This is where things get serious.

00:16:43 Jenny: All right. Well, humans still have a fighting chance. This is kind of more of a macro question, not just about PropHero, but do you think that traditional real estate agents or brokers are going to be disrupted in general by AI or empowered or both?

00:16:56 Mickael: Real estate agents will remain for owner occupiers, so for emotional purchases. I don’t really see a world where they are necessary, for investors, to be honest. Mortgage brokers, apologies to my friends who are brokers, but I know they agree with me.

00:17:11 Mickael: I actually just bought a house… I don’t see why the broker was necessary. It’s the bank’s job to improve their processes and automate their processes to provide instant mortgages or mortgage approvals.

00:17:25 Mickael: I’m certain this will come. I was expecting them to be faster to deploy this, to be honest. But I think with AI development and AI checks now, I think this will accelerate. I’m not watching mortgage brokerage business.

00:17:38 Jenny: Good to know. What’s one idea that experts in your field say that you just totally disagree with?

00:17:44 Mickael: People, especially venture capital funds, always tell me, “Oh, it’s a transactional business.” Absolutely not. It’s a wealth business focusing on customer lifetime value. We are our clients’ lifetime wealth partner.

00:17:58 Mickael: I don’t care if they buy today or tomorrow. What I want is to help them throughout their lives, helping them buy, sell, renovate, manage, finance, whatever they need to build real estate wealth. And so it’s a lifetime wealth business, not a transactional business.

00:18:14 Mickael: And I think that is one of the reasons why real estate agents have sometimes some bad press, because they push you so much to buy, not procure. We are not here for the short term and just to have you make one transaction. We are here to help you for the rest of your life. Especially for investments, it’s a lifetime value optimization game, not a transaction game.

00:18:33 Jenny: For sure. So tell us a little bit just more about your team. Are you still spread across continents or mostly concentrated in Spain now?

00:18:40 Mickael: We used to think that we would hire people anywhere, just hire the best talents. That was our people and culture policy for about three years.

00:18:51 Mickael: What we realized that for the most senior roles, being able to be in the same room at least twice a month changes everything. So now the most senior roles are all in Spain. Not necessarily in the same city or Spain but at least 45 minutes flight or one hour flight from each other to be able to see each other once or twice a month at least.

00:19:12 Mickael: All the other roles can be anywhere. And what we try is for the top talents to have them see each other once or twice a year. So we went back from we don’t care where you are to well, actually, for some role, we do care. Our biggest offices now are in Spain. We still have people all around the world.

00:19:28 Jenny: Got it. So what’s next for PropHero? What should we expect next? What are some of the things that are on the horizon?

00:19:34 Mickael: So we’ve got big dreams. To be honest, when I launched PropHero, for me, success was just having a good business, maybe 10 employees, just making some revenue, being profitable, being sustainable. That was success.

00:19:49 Mickael: Well, now we are 250 people, profitable, four countries. My first dream is already achieved. So now the next one is how do we build a global sustainable institution?

00:20:00 Mickael: And so we’ve got many, many big dreams. One of them is to build this software that will run the entire real estate industry. It’s a big ERP or CRM for all the industry. It’s crazy, but I know we’re going to get there.

00:20:13 Mickael: I really, really want to launch a real estate investment fund, a listed investment fund, because I think we have the best supply. And for so many people, it would be so much easier. I know if you’re institutional, also, if you cannot have at least 50 or 100K to invest, this would be so helpful for so many people.

00:20:30 Mickael: Many dreams. Keep enjoying the ride, opening new countries and having a lasting impact on our client’s lives and our employees.

00:20:37 Jenny: I love it. Okay, speed round. So just quick answers here. Is there a book, newsletter, podcast or some type of media that you’re enjoying right now?

00:20:44 Mickael: You have to listen to A Short History on Spotify. For the past 100 years, history has accelerated like never before in human history. Understanding the past helps you so much understand what’s happening today. So A Short History Of. I listen to dozens of history podcasts. It’s by far the best one.

00:21:03 Jenny: I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:21:08 Mickael: So I’ve lived in 12 countries, five continents already. When I could, I will do a one year road trip across Africa. So I’ve lived in Morocco and Tunisia in the past. I miss Africa. I love this continent so much and it’s so big. I want to discover the rest.

00:21:22 Jenny: I love it. Favorite productivity hack. What keeps you super efficient?

00:21:26 Mickael: If you’re anyone doing some form of corporate job, if you don’t have Claude Cowork open 24/7 on your laptop doing 80% of your work, something is wrong. Claude yesterday did the work that I would have done myself in one month and did it in one afternoon.

00:21:44 Mickael: So honestly, whatever you do, as long as there is a computer needed, have Claude Cowork open 24/7 and force yourself to use it and not do things. I know it’s not crazy. Most people are now doing it. But if you’re not doing it already, you have to.

00:22:00 Jenny: Love it. Okay, Claude Code. Where can listeners find you? Where is the best way to get in touch with PropHero?

00:22:05 Mickael: Airport lounges is where you will most likely find me. Otherwise, go to www.prophero.com, book a call with one of our wealth advisors and they will walk you through our investments and what we can do for you.

00:22:18 Jenny: Amazing. This was so fun, Mickael. Might be your next customer, so we can talk about that. But excited to see you in Spain this summer. So thanks so much.

00:22:25 Mickael: Thank you. See you. Have a great week. Bye bye.

00:22:29 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 Mickael Roger in Founders Everywhere.

The host of episode 117 of Venture Everywhere is Kameale C. Terry, co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp, an EV charging maintenance and workforce development company keeping charging stations operational across the country. She talks with Su Sanni, co-founder and CEO of Dollaride, a clean transportation company electrifying small urban fleets in New York City. Su shares how growing up in East New York with limited transit access shaped his conviction that underserved communities deserve better transportation options. He discusses how Dollaride evolved from a digital app for dollar van riders into a B2B electrification platform, positioning small fleet owners as key players in New York’s clean transportation transition.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In this episode, you will hear:

• Digitizing dollar van payments and routing through a consumer app.

• Pivoting from B2C rideshare to a B2B fleet electrification platform.

• Winning a $10 million NYSERDA grant to electrify New York’s dollar van industry.

• Offering EVs, charging, and parking as a turnkey solution for small fleet operators.

• Balancing government contracts with a commercial ground game to sustain cash flow.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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 Kameale: Hello and welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Kameale, the co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp!. I am so excited because I’m here with Su Sanni, who is the co-founder and CEO of Dollaride.

00:00:47 Kameale: And this is a bit of a treat because one, I’ve been on this podcast before. But two, I have gotten the pleasure to meet Su in a lot of places while building my company, ChargerHelp!. Let’s hear more from him. Su, introduce yourself to the people.

00:01:02 Su: Thank you so much, Kameale, for that great intro. Hey, everyone. My name is Su Sanni. I’m the founder and CEO of Dollaride. I’m calling in today from Brooklyn, New York, where I was born and raised and where Dollaride is also headquartered.

00:01:18 Su: For those of you who don’t know, Dollaride is a clean transportation company that focuses on bridging transit gaps in New York City by electrifying fleets. Happy to be here and happy to talk more about what we’re doing and our journey through the clean tech startup ecosystem.

00:01:37 Kameale: I think this is my first time interviewing a founder. And the one thing that I am always interested in, because it’s a very interesting story for me, is what sparked your idea? How did you even know to start Dollaride? Let’s start there.

00:01:51 Su: Dollaride is actually the family business for me. I say that because what inspired me was my two uncles who were immigrants from Nigeria, moving here to New York in about the 70s or early 80s. The first jobs that they were able to get were jobs as, quote unquote, “dollar van drivers.”

00:02:12 Su: For those of you who don’t know, in New York City, we have this underground network of drivers who own their own shuttle vans and buses. They’re known around town as the dollar vans. That’s because back in the 80s, it literally cost only a dollar to get on these vans. They would take you wherever you needed to go within a certain neighborhood.

00:02:34 Su: My uncles were among the early pioneers of this industry. Their story in moving to New York, starting this little business of theirs, and then it growing into a little bit of a phenomenon was what inspired me to start Dollaride.

00:02:50 Su: The name is piggybacking off of them. The problems that we’re solving have a lot to do with transportation access in communities that the dollar vans serve today.

00:03:00 Kameale: That’s so incredible. I’m from LA and anytime I learn more about the dollar rides and even your company, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. That would have been something so cool growing up in LA,” because we didn’t necessarily want to catch the bus per se. But I could imagine us getting into this really cool, sleek electric van and getting around.

00:03:20 Kameale: Could you talk a little bit about how it was for you growing up in Brooklyn and how did that shape your perspective on mobility, access and underserved communities?

00:03:29 Su: Yeah, sure. And this is an integral part of my story and like lens on building businesses and transportation, especially in New York. I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, which is right next door to Brownsville.

00:03:42 Su: I always tell people Brownsville is the home of Mike Tyson. These are some of the most challenging neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Especially growing up in the 90s, not only was it dangerous oftentimes, but we had very limited access to public transit.

00:03:58 Su: It was common in my neighborhood for kids as young as six, seven, eight years old like I was to walk about a mile from our apartment buildings to the nearest subway where we could finally hop into public transit and then get to school.

00:04:13 Su: My earliest memories of taking public transit always started with a lonely, cold and sometimes dark walk to the subway. That always left an impression on me about why is my commute so difficult or different from other people who live in New York?

00:04:31 Su: That pretty much shaped my view on transportation, and it just made me have a soft spot for folks who live in areas that are far away from public transit or even people who might not be able to take public transit because they might have a physical disability. These transit access issues were really prevalent in my neighborhood.

00:04:49 Su: By the time I became an adult and felt like I was empowered or had the agency to do something about it, I was really driven by that experience that I had as a eight-year-old trying to get to school every day, having to start with a 25, 30-minute walk to the subway.

00:05:06 Kameale: That’s so impactful and just dope to see just how our lived experiences can really shape what we build. When did you start Dollaride again and who was your first customer and what did the business first look like when you started?

00:05:21 Su: I first started Dollaride… you can say officially in 2019. At that time, it was just me and my co-founder. His name is Chris Coles. He’s our CTO. We essentially just built a website and a prototype app. The idea at the time was to create the Uber for New York City dollar vans.

00:05:43 Su: This was an app-based service where the driver from his phone can see any nearby passengers that wanted to hail a dollar van or his particular vehicle. At the time, this was novel, very unique because the way people take dollar vans in New York City, even today, is they’ll get out onto the street and hail it just like you’re hailing a yellow cab.

00:06:07 Su: You have to physically know where the vans are driving each day in order to see them. And then you physically wave your hand so that the driver can pull over, open up his door and let you into his van or his minibus.

00:06:21 Su: Our idea initially was to make this experience digital and more transparent to both the driver and the passenger and also enable them to transact digitally. We introduced credit card payments and paying digitally into this dollar van service, which was primarily cash-based at the time.

00:06:42 Su: That’s how we started in 2019 and what the business and the service looked like then. But after COVID in 2020 and a bunch of iterations, the company has definitely evolved from that initial vision.

00:06:55 Kameale: That makes total sense. Before we get to just where you all are at today, as someone who started the company in January of 2020, it’s always interesting to hear what was your biggest challenge back in 2019? What was keeping you up at night in 2019? Because I think that probably what was keeping you up then is different than what’s keeping you up now. Tell me about that a little bit.

00:07:19 Su: In 2019, the biggest challenge that we were faced with then… it was a couple of things. I remember we were really struggling with this idea of somehow allowing passengers to still pay in cash. Believe it or not, even in 2019 in New York City, amongst people who are going to work every day, there are still a significant number of people who wanted to pay for their rides in cash.

00:07:47 Su: We just found that roughly 35% of passengers preferred to pay in cash even though they had credit cards, they have bank accounts and they were using services like Uber and Lyft. They just still had the habit of using dollar vans and paying the driver with two or three dollars in cash.

00:08:05 Su: We often had that request and we were oftentimes arguing internally about whether we should change our technology or make some new features that would account for drivers receiving cash but still providing their service digitally to the passengers who wanted to pay with credit card.

00:08:23 Su: Another challenge that we were faced with then had to do with routing. In 2019, we had a bit of a technical issue. This just was a reflection of our team’s ability to get access to real time routing data that would enable us to show a driver the most efficient route to the passengers that were in their geography.

00:09:47 Su: Traditionally, dollar vans operate on fixed routes like a bus service would. But when you can actually see everyone’s geolocation through their phones, it behooved us to give drivers the ability to pick up passengers that weren’t directly on the fixed route, but that might be only one or two blocks away.

00:09:09 Su: But we realized that when you were doing that, you do have to also take into account if there’s traffic or if there’s obstructions that you can’t really see through the Google Maps API, but would ultimately affect the driver’s ability to get to that passenger on time or within a reasonable amount of time.

00:09:27 Su: I remember we spent a lot of time just trying to optimize our routing algorithm so that it could take into account real time traffic signals or predict if there would be some traffic congestion based on weather patterns.

00:09:42 Su: Needless to say, we do not take for granted the magic that the Uber and Lyft apps have. There’s a reason why those apps work so well today. They basically have invested a lot of engineering time and many millions of dollars into making their service flawless. For us in 2019, that was not easy to do. We spent a lot of engineering cycles trying to figure that out for our startup.

00:10:08 Kameale: Thank you for sharing that. I know that this podcast is one that has a lot of founders and VCs, so it’s always super interesting to think about what kept you up at night when you first started. You guys are almost a decade in.

00:10:22 Kameale: Let’s come to the future. Talk a little bit about how Dollaride has transformed, how you guys operate now and the intersection of mobility and climate. How is the business evolving into an EV fleet solution?

00:10:35 Su: Today, Dollaride operates more so like a B2B platform as opposed to a digital rideshare service. In 2021, maybe even early 2022, we started realizing that as good as our digital product could be, it would be really difficult for us to make an impact on our customers, particularly the drivers and the fleet owners, with only a digital app.

00:11:05 Su: I’ll share an example of my uncles. My uncles became my first customers. They onboarded their drivers into our app and we started using their drivers, their vehicles as the supply in our marketplace to pick up passengers.

00:11:22 Su: But at the end of the day, my uncles and other business owners like them, whenever they would complain about the issues that kept them up at night, it wasn’t our app, it was things like the cost of a vehicle or the cost of gas or getting more customers.

00:11:40 Su: We realized that although our app was getting better and we were getting more and more users, it wasn’t really making a difference in our customers’ true day-to-day operations.

00:11:50 Su: That was when I had a light bulb moment and realized that we could probably be making a bigger impact by taking on more responsibility in the operations of our customers. That means dealing with more of the physical world that they’re in as opposed to only operating a digital app service.

00:12:10 Su: At that time, we pivoted and began providing a B2B service where Dollaride would help our fleet customers. These are the business owners who employ the drivers or who own the vehicles.

00:12:26 Su: We started working directly with the fleets and provided them services like identifying contract-based opportunities to grow their businesses, learning a little bit more about the cost of insurance and how they can optimize insurance so that they can lower their operating costs. Again, it was my uncles and then some of their competitors who became my earliest customers.

00:12:50 Su: But in early 2023, we reached an inflection point and had a huge opportunity to go much deeper in building out a platform that truly helps the business owner. Dollaride eventually won a large contract with New York State. In particular, it is an agency called NYSERDA. Which is the New York State Energy Research Development Authority.

00:13:16 Su: NYSERDA provided Dollaride with a $10 million grant and contract to electrify dollar vans. The general idea here was that Dollaride already knows the dollar van ecosystem very well. We had over 400 drivers already using our app at the time. But all of these drivers and their vehicles emit a ton of carbon or greenhouse gas emissions as they’re providing transportation around Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

00:13:49 Su: As the state wants to decarbonize transportation, they chose Dollaride as an engine for decarbonizing small urban fleets. They wanted to use us as a service provider to the dollar van industry for electrifying dollar vans.

00:14:07 Su: This was an opportunity, but also an inflection point where we had to decide, do we want to get into clean energy as part of our business model in our service offering? It was an opportunity that we embraced with open arms.

00:14:20 Su: This is what Dollaride does today. We are a turnkey solution for small businesses that provide transportation. We provide them with access to an electric vehicle, a charging station and even dedicated parking so that they can electrify their fleet, whether they’re starting with one vehicle or electrifying a fleet of 50.

00:14:45 Kameale: That’s incredible. And it’s so beautiful to see this full circle moment of where you started out before, but also understanding the customer, understanding the market and then bringing something to market that people needed and then being recognized by an entire state that they saw that you all were the best folks to drive this solution. That’s incredible. Hats off to you, Su.

00:15:06 Su: Thank you, Kameale.

00:15:07 Kameale: You’re welcome.

00:15:08 Su: I want to say one thing, too. I’m condensing the story because I just want to give people the highlights. But what led to getting the contract with the state was proposing this actual solution based on the feedback that we were getting from our customers.

00:15:24 Su: We ended up getting over 40 letters of intent from small business owners who are all complaining that the cost of gas and insurance and replacing their vehicles is a big inhibitor on their growth. That gave us the framing and the narrative to propose to the state of New York that there needs to be a solution to this.

00:15:49 Su: Because if we want to electrify and decarbonize our cities and our state, we need to actually think about small businesses who are typically cash strapped and have very limited resources, but make up the majority of the vehicles on the road, especially commercial vehicles. That’s how we really bridged the gap from our experience with customers to a concept and a pro solution that even governments could get behind.

00:16:17 Kameale: I’m so glad you brought that up. You have to truly, one, utilize what you know about your customer in order to create the opportunity. It sounds like, Su, you did that so well and even did it in such an organized way to get those letters. Some people may think, oh, that may take a lot of work, but honestly, it’s totally worth it. So that’s super impressive.

00:16:36 Su: Thank you. Thank you.

00:16:38 Kameale: You’re welcome. Just revisiting the question we had before, what was your biggest challenge back in 2019, super interested to hear what is one of your biggest challenges today? What is keeping you up at night today?

00:16:52 Su: This is an easy answer. It might be a bit of a nod to you, Kameale, and what you’re doing with ChargerHelp!. What keeps me up at night today and the biggest challenge we have is simplified by two words: charging infrastructure. In short, there’s just not enough chargers in New York City to support the electric vehicle fleet transition.

00:17:16 Su: We have policies, even in New York City, that require rideshare drivers and other for-hire vehicles to convert to electric by 2030. But there’s not enough public chargers. There’s not enough chargers that work consistently and reliably.

00:17:34 Su: It’s very common that a driver, whether they have a Tesla or an electric van, will pull up to a charging station and the station doesn’t work or they have to wait in line for over an hour before they can actually start charging, which takes them another half an hour to an hour anyway.

00:17:52 Su: This is a huge problem if you’re a small business owner and you make money off of driving that vehicle. Time is money and the money lost in sitting, waiting for a charger for an hour versus the amount of time that it takes to fuel up if you go to a gas station becomes a really challenging value proposition for my company to get over, as well as something that everyone who’s considering an EV has to really deal with.

00:18:19 Su: At the end of the day, we spend a lot of time right now at Dollaride trying to figure out how to build or procure better charging solutions. It’s something that is inevitably an issue that we deal with every customer and something that keeps me up at night literally every single day.

00:18:37 Su: This is not supposed to be a plug for ChargerHelp!, but I just have to say this. I kid you not, literally today we’re dealing with an issue at one of our charging hubs. We don’t own this particular hub. All the chargers are not owned and operated by us, so we’re relying on third parties.

00:18:54 Su: From time to time, the chargers don’t work or they’re having malfunctions. It’s the worst when we learn about this the morning of when the customer is supposed to take their vehicle out and do their routes in order to earn money.

00:19:08 Su: I’ve already talked to my director of fleet ops about ChargerHelp!. We should definitely talk because we need more of your services and your technicians out here in New York City, for sure.

00:19:17 Kameale: I appreciate that, Su. The other call out here is as you build, sometimes your partners and your customers may be other startups and figuring out how to do that well. That’s a really big deal.

00:19:30 Kameale: I’m going to interject this sales cycle question. So you guys won this really big contract. I’m sure that’s not the only deal that you all have. But then also, I’m sure with transportation, at least from outside looking in and as somebody that’s been in transportation, especially working with government, it just sounds like a very long sales cycle.

00:19:47 Kameale: Talk a little bit about how has the sales cycle been, how have you guys been working towards improving your sales cycle and then, just any tidbits that you could give to founders out there that are trying to build in the transportation, working with government space?

00:20:01 Su: Flat out, working with government is definitely a long sales cycle, especially as you get into larger six figure and seven figure deals, if not more. We’ve experienced that and we’ve dealt with those challenges in a couple of different ways.

00:20:17 Su: Firstly, with the NYSERDA contract where we won $10 million, that in and of itself was at least 18 months of, quote unquote, “sales.” It started out with an RFP, but then there were many milestones and interviews and different steps along the way until we actually received that award and email that we finally got the deal done.

00:20:41 Su: That at least can give the audience some view of how long deals like this can actually take. We also had a similar experience with another contract that also took about 12 to 15 months. With this particular one, once that contract landed, it took another year before we got paid.

00:20:59 Kameale: That should be a whole segment. Just because you win the contract, don’t mean you’re going to get the money in your bank.

00:21:04 Su: This becomes a lesson for us founders about managing cash flow and figuring out how to capitalize your business properly, because you might have a huge contract from a government customer, but they pay late. They don’t necessarily pay reliably or in a predictable way.

00:21:23 Su: You still need to keep the lights on. You still need to pay payroll while you wait for the checks to come in. This is something that we had to learn the hard way, but hopefully folks can learn from our mistakes.

00:21:34 Su: But what I would encourage other founders to do if they are in a highly regulated industry, where government becomes your customer and these contracts are attractive to you… what we do at Dollaride is we do two things at once.

00:21:49 Su: We pursue government as clients. We’re always responding to RFPs and finding ways to pitch our services as a small purchase agreement, which is typically under a certain cost or threshold that might be outside of the RFP process. But we use that as a way of getting our foot in the door and then building up that relationship to a much larger contract agreement over time.

00:22:14 Su: We do that, which is like our sales approach with government. But then at the same time, we’re constantly still building the commercial side of our business, which is selling B2B. In combination, the B2B sales have a much smaller or shorter sales cycle. There’s a lot more customers out there that we can sell to.

00:22:35 Su: I use a football analogy. While you’re throwing for the big Hail Marys, which are the government contracts, you still have a ground game and you’re running these short plays with your B2B customers.

00:22:47 Su: That approach is balanced and can help you weather these long spurts of time where government pays late or they don’t pay on time. You still have a commercial business that is sustainable.

00:22:58 Kameale: That’s really smart. Everybody’s just trying to get their first contract. Once you get your first contract, you do have to start really looking at, okay, what was this process? What do I need to change? How do I go faster?

00:23:08 Kameale: I’m going to ask this last question and then we’ll go into the speed round. If you could wave a magic wand and fix one urban mobility problem tomorrow, what would it be?

00:23:21 Su: Sometimes I think about incentives as a more systematic way to influence customer behavior or markets. So if I could wave a magic wand to fix an urban mobility problem, I would want to somehow create another revenue stream that is durable for urban transportation and local transportation.

00:23:50 Su: What I mean by this is all around our country, public transportation is actually subsidized by government as much as up to 80%. The fares that we’re paying as consumers when we ride the bus or the subway or the light rail, that barely covers the true cost of transportation. It’s our taxes and loans that are covering the rest of it.

00:24:12 Su: But this makes it really challenging if you’re running a for-profit private business or a small business in this sector because the passengers can’t sustain you. You have to somehow have a revenue stream, and this is typically with contracts with government or larger institutions, to help you build a business.

00:24:31 Su: If I could wave a magic wand to solve a problem in urban mobility, it would be to create another revenue stream that helps public transit become more affordable, but also less reliant on government to actually fund its operations and its expansion. If we did that, it’d be easier to build more subways and to expand bus lanes and bus service so that we have fewer transit deserts and more mobility options overall.

00:25:03 Kameale: I love that, and that makes so much sense. Thank you for that. This has been so much fun. I’m going to close this out with a speed round. Are you ready?

00:25:12 Su: I think so. Well, let’s do it.

00:25:14 Kameale: What’s a book you’re reading or a podcast you’re enjoying right now?

00:25:18 Su: I love, love, love The Founders podcast. It’s by David Senra. He interviews founders, but he also reads biographies and autobiographies of famous founders and he talks through his CliffNotes.

00:25:33 Su: It’s a super engaging podcast. It’s helped me learn a lot about building businesses based on the stories and the tactics and techniques of founders before me. So I would highly recommend that one. And that’s one that I listen to nearly every day.

00:25:49 Kameale: Oh, I’m definitely going to have to look that up. I’ve never heard of that. Thank you. All right. Next question is, if you could live anywhere in the world for a whole year, where would it be?

00:26:00 Su: I would go with Tokyo, Japan.

00:26:03 Kameale: Oh, have you been?

00:26:04 Su: I have been. My wife is Japanese, so our family goes to Japan. We try to go there at least every year or two to see her family so that our kids can also be as close to Japanese culture as possible.

00:26:18 Su: Every time I go there, I am floored by how organized and clean and easy it is to live in Japan, especially in places like Yokohama. That’s a place that would be very easy for me to live for a whole year. Hopefully, I’ll get that opportunity at some point.

00:26:36 Kameale: That’s amazing. All right. Last two, favorite productivity hack.

00:26:42 Su: I ran a business almost 10 years ago called WeDidIt, which was a fundraising platform for nonprofits. I’ve had a decent amount of success winning RFPs and government contracts and these opportunities where you have to first know about it and then you have to apply before you actually have a chance.

00:27:05 Su: It occurred to me that the reason why I find these things so often is because I have built a little bit of a system. The productivity hack here is I literally spend an inordinate amount of time subscribing to every government agency and philanthropic foundations newsletter where they will announce when they have an RFP or some grants based opportunity.

00:27:30 Su: And then in my inbox, I filter the newsletters so that they only show me the most relevant opportunities to my business. Over time, when you are subscribed to 30, 50 or hundreds of newsletters, your inbox becomes this consistent magnet of relevant opportunities that you can apply to within your city, state, or region that might be coming from a government agency or a philanthropic foundation.

00:28:01 Su: This is something I’ve done over the years, but you could literally hack together something like this in a week and it tends to pay for itself very quickly.

00:28:12 Kameale: That’s amazing. Last question is, where can listeners find you?

00:28:17 Su: Listeners can find me on LinkedIn. That’s super easy. Just type in Su Sanni, S-U, first name, S-A-N-N-I. And on X @thesusanni.

00:28:30 Kameale: Amazing.

00:28:31 Su: Likewise Kameale. In fact, I should ask you, where can listeners find you if they want to learn more about you and your story, or follow along the journey of Charger Help!?

00:28:42 Kameale: Oh yeah, on LinkedIn as well.

00:28:43 Su Sanni: Excellent.

00:28:44 Kameale: This has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing with us and I hope that listeners enjoyed.

00:28:50 Su: Likewise. Thanks for your time today, Kameale. This was fun.

00:28:54 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 Su Sanni and Kameale C. Terry in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 116 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Alfie Pearce-Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Rodeo — an AI-powered careers platform helping people understand the job market, build personalized career plans, and find the right opportunities. Alfie shares how watching startups outperform years of institutional work in developing countries convinced him that the right people, tools, and capital could change everything — a conviction that led him back to the UK to fix one of the most broken markets he’d seen: the job search. He explains how the collapse of the traditional job application market, driven by zero-click application on one side and AI screening tools on the other, created a Akerlof-style market failure that Rodeo is purpose-built to solve.

In this episode, you will hear:

• How synthetic applicants and fake job posts are breaking the job application market.

• Rodeo’s voice-first onboarding approach to building rich, personalized career profiles.

• Combining AI efficiency with human advisors for the most powerful careers solution.

• How AI is making parental and school career advice dangerously out of date.

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

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

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

00:00:32 Jenny: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Venture Everywhere. This week, we’re very excited to talk to Alfie Pearce-Higgins, who’s the co-founder and CEO of a London-based company called Rodeo, which you’re going to hear all about.

00:00:44 Jenny: Because it’s a startup building the tools that help job applicants plan their careers. This couldn’t be the most opportune moment to talk about this. So I’m really excited. Because everything that’s going on in the world of AI, when it comes to job opportunities and preparing professionals, it’s a very important time. Welcome to the show.

00:01:03 Alfie: Hi. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

00:01:06 Jenny: Awesome. I’d love to start a little bit at the beginning because you, like me, started in a very different place. I worked at J.P. Morgan, seems like you worked at Barclays. So I’d love to hear a little bit of the journey of going from finance and big company to starting your own startup.

00:01:23 Alfie: I’ve definitely had, what you’d call a nonlinear career, which is an interesting start for someone trying to build advice tools for other people. I studied economics and maths, and the natural place to go was going into the city and do some finance.

00:01:35 Alfie: I did a bit of M&A and then ended up trading credit default swaps back in the post-financial crisis days, which was quite fun. I think I’d do the same again.

00:01:55 Alfie: I always recommend to young people, big companies are great places to get training, to understand the world of work and to get that platform. But it didn’t take me that long to realize it wasn’t something I wanted to do for 30, 40 years.

00:01:53 Alfie: So I then left and went into international development and spent the next five years in Nigeria and then Nepal implementing economic reform projects. Trying to help privatize Nigerian electricity companies, trying to support investment into agriculture and tourism in Nepal after the earthquakes there.

00:02:11 Alfie: I enjoyed it, but I didn’t realize that… there were frustrations working for big donors. I love the work environment, but not necessarily the structure of the industry.

00:02:21 Jenny: Were you living in these places or you were just traveling?

00:02:24 Alfie: I was in Nigeria for two and a half years and then Nepal for about the same. And then lots of travel to various other parts of sub-Saharan Africa along the way.

00:02:31 Alfie: And I really enjoyed the environment. So I then very fortuitously got an opportunity to join SafeBoda, which was an early stage company in East Africa doing motorized taxis.

00:02:41 Alfie: Uber on two wheels is the easiest way for the European or American audience to understand it. And that was amazing. We were training drivers, we were giving them helmets, generally for the first time. And then we were helping to improve driving standards.

00:02:53 Jenny: And so interesting because you were working on the other side of that, which I imagine was slow and institutional. And then all of a sudden you’re like on the ground with the drivers. You’re actually seeing things happen from a consumer point of view every day, I imagine.

00:03:07 Alfie: There’s a marked contrast between what startups can achieve in developing countries versus some of the very slow institutional top-down structures. We’re all amazed and impressed by what startups can do in the UK or the US.

00:03:19 Alfie: That’s nothing in terms of the power that can be achieved by the right people with the right tools and a bit of capital in developing countries. Be that in healthcare, be that in education or consumer services.

00:03:28 Alfie: I was blown away by how powerful that can be. I certainly think that I achieved more with SafeBoda in three years than any of the development projects that I’d seen.

00:03:37 Jenny: Incredible. Incredible. So then what gives you the confidence or idea to start your own company?

00:03:42 Alfie: Well, lots of things that turned out not to be true. And we’ve come a long journey since then. So, the thesis with which one starts a company is often not the same thesis that one ends up building around.

00:03:52 Alfie: We started building tools for gig economy workers in the UK. Interesting. I saw how in developing countries, the economy can be very powerful because, in fact, you’re taking even more informal labor and adding more structure to it. Whereas in developed countries, it’s often perceived as taking structured jobs and removing security and making them less secure and more flexible.

00:04:11 Alfie: So I was amazed coming back to the UK by some of the challenges in the gig economy in the UK. I teamed up with an old friend who is ex-delivery. We started building tools for gig workers in the UK to understand and optimize their earnings.

00:04:24 Alfie: We had some success with that. We built a tool that took a lot of traction. There were real challenges around the data. To cut a long story short, the platforms didn’t see data the same way we did and were very aggressive about us helping drivers to understand their data.

00:04:38 Alfie: I think similar stories have played out in the US. It’s a longer story there. But we’ve then adapted that. But what we’ve stayed true on is that our aim is always to build tools that help workers navigate the world of work.

00:04:50 Alfie: What that’s evolved into is AI-powered careers advice to help people understand what the job market looks like, understand what their strengths are, how they can best fit into the job market and build a career plan.

00:005:01 Alfie: And then take it from there into finding live opportunities for training, for learning, for earning, for accommodation of all of that, And helping them secure those opportunities.

00:05:10 Alfie: Any of us who have had any engagement with the job market in the last couple of years will realize it’s changing extremely fast. What jobs are out there is changing. What skills are needed for them, what the jobs are called, how to apply for them.

00:05:21 Alfie: There is a speed of transition going on in the labor market that I think is unprecedented. And unfortunately, the people who are bearing the brunt of this are younger people entering the workforce for the first time. That’s very much part of our mission is to help younger people understand and enter the world of work.

00:05:37 Jenny: I would imagine also mid-career people that are getting caught in the transformation that’s happening. They grew up under one paradigm. And now, the way you get a job, the way that you approach a job search probably changed from when they enter the workforce. So I imagine that’s a big opportunity as well.

00:05:56 Alfie: Absolutely. I think looking for a job, planning a career, these have gone from occasional things that we will do to an ongoing, evolving question.

00:06:04 Alfie: We haven’t seen entire job categories destroyed or removed in the way some people have predicted. So I don’t think there are a whole bunch of mid-career people who suddenly wake up one morning and find that industry is no longer there.

00:06:14 Alfie: That may happen. Who knows? So I think a lot of people are seeing their jobs evolve. And the smart ones are realizing that if they want to progress or if they want to take their career forward, they’re going to adapt what their skill set is or how they’re going about it or where they’re specializing.

00:06:28 Alfie: This spans across the whole of careers, but I think it’s felt most acutely at the early stage of phase.

00:06:34 Jenny: So can you just talk more specifically what was broken about traditional job boards that you guys sought to transform and rodeo? As investors, we’ve seen so many iterations of this over the years. And so I’d love to kind of get your perspective on what you were really focused on.

00:06:52 Alfie: There are two things we should reference. One is job boards and the other is careers advice. Job boards are definitely broken. The model of a job board has always been someone turns up, searches for something, whether that used to be in the back of a newspaper or on a website or an app or with an agent. And then they try and identify the right roles.

00:07:10 Alfie: It’s broken a number of different ways. Job boards are typically optimized for volume. And that’s been same the metric. If you put up a job, you want to get enough applicants. And then you kind of assume that there are enough applicants, somewhere in there will be the right applicant. And we’ve seen that.

00:07:24 Alfie: The first job I applied for was, I think, in a supermarket stacking shelves. And at that point, it was a form. I had to stop in at the supermarket, pick up a form, fill it in and take it back in order to be able to spend my Saturdays stacking shelves.

00:07:36 Jenny: I did that as a waitress. I walked in and I was like, “Hey, are you guys hiring?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And then they went behind the counter and they handed me a form. I mean, this was a long time ago, but that was wild.

00:07:46 Alfie: Exactly the same. And then the… next would be banking internships. And that was online. But I remember each of them taking about half a day because I had to write a creative essay about why J.P. Morgan was so close to my heart. You had to write out these answers and it took a while.

00:08:01 Alfie: And then you fast forward a bit and then you got one click, apply. Then you got your LinkedIn one click apply. Indeed did something similar. We’re now in a world where there’s zero click apply. You don’t even need to apply now. You can have an agent apply for all these jobs in your sleep.

00:08:13 Alfie: You can apply for a thousand jobs by next week without lifting a finger. Now, the reality is that in some ways, a rational approach on the applicant side, it’s a numbers game.

00:08:21 Alfie: What we’ve seen then on the business side is that they’ve deployed a whole bunch of AI screening tools because no one can conceivably sort through a thousand CVS between now and next week.

00:08:31 Alfie: It’s a really interesting case of market failure that both sides of the job application market have behaved rationally in adopting AI. And the combined result has been a complete breakdown of the actual mechanism.

00:08:42 Alfie: I remember studying Akerlof’s lemons and the second hand car markets and how asymmetric information causes market collapse in that sense. There’s lots of parallels with what’s happened on the job market.

00:08:53 Alfie: If someone applies, you’ve got no idea what they’re serious. You maybe don’t even know they’re a real person. And as an applicant, you don’t know whether it’s worth putting effort into applying for this job because you don’t know whether your CV is going to be read by a human being, how serious they are on their side.

00:09:08 Alfie: So I think there’s been a definite breakdown there. And ironically, to your point, we might be going back to a world where you stop in the cafe and ask for a job. I’ve heard people talking about going back to handwritten applications, because if someone sends you a handwritten application, you know that they’re real, they’re serious.

00:09:22 Alfie: We’ve seen a lot of job fairs because it’s much easier to do that early stage of applications if someone’s in front of you. That’s kind of on the job market side.

00:09:30 Jenny: It’s like I hadn’t really thought about that, but everyone’s creating synthetic users. So I imagine there’s synthetic applicants that these people have to deal with all over the place.

00:09:39 Alfie: Absolutely. And synthetic jobs. There’s a lot of fake jobs that are either swiping data or just collecting CVs. It’s a real mess. That’s connected to what we’re doing. We haven’t set up just to try and solve that problem. And there are bits that we can’t solve.

00:09:52 Alfie: In the other side is the careers advice. I don’t know who gave you careers advice, but this has always been a slightly messy market for how people get that advice. Parents still rank highest as a source of careers advice.

00:10:03 Alfie: That’s a challenge because… it’s always been out of date. What your teacher or your parents say to you is probably always got like a 20-year time lag. That’s always been an issue.

00:10:11 Alfie: Now it’s a serious issue because 10-year-old information about the job market is worse and useless when it comes to advising someone entering the job market today. So what the market people are advising on bears no resemblance to what their children are actually going to be entering into.

00:10:26 Alfie: People get careers advice from social media. That’s become a common source. It’s mostly about highly aspirational, get-rich-quick, not particularly reliable advice, but it can be quite useful in some cases.

00:10:36 Alfie: And then obviously people go to ChatGPT, off-the-shelf AI tools that we see in the data, are now cited as one of the most common sources for careers advice. And that can be really powerful.

00:10:46 Alfie: I’m sure that many of your listeners have probably experimented with giving Claude a copy of their CV. They are really powerful tools for brainstorming, for ingesting this information, but they come with quite big risks.

00:10:58 Alfie: One of the ones that we’ve seen mostly is sick fantasy. I’m sure that if I put my CV into ChatGPT, it’ll tell me that I should absolutely be a FTSE 100 CEO in five years and do I want him to make me a step-by-step route to getting there? Which is lovely to hear, but can be quite damaging.

00:11:14 Alfie: And those are not very good with structured data. Getting an AI tool to do a job search for you often will result in unreliable information and there’s no safeguarding, if you’re talking about young people who engage with this to make quite consequential decisions for their lives.

00:11:28 Alfie: So AI is already playing a big role in this. Our aim is to build the responsible tooling around that, which means being able to enable, to turn it into a properly useful tool for people to understand, build up a rich picture of who they are, what they need to do right now, what their current situation is, what their long-term ambitions are, how this could be mapped into their local job market – because a lot of this is contextual and local – and then turn it into an actual plan and help support them through putting that in place.

00:11:52 Jenny: I love the part about career advice. In my generation, the people that I asked were my friend’s parents. I was going to law school and my best friend’s father was a lawyer. My parents weren’t lawyers.

00:12:04 Jenny: And so I asked him. There we are in like, his Hampton’s house. He was like a partner at some big firm. I was like, Steve, what’s the advice you would give? Because like I think I was going into law school, so I was like 20.

00:12:14 Jenny: And he was like, well, Jenny, I think you should join a members club, a private club, and you’re going to get a lot of business there. And I was like… 20 years old. And I was a woman. I feel like a lot of those members clubs of that generation were these old guys and whatnot.

00:12:27 Jenny: I just like… remember looking at him and being like, “Wow, that seems a little out of touch.” But like that was literally the advice that I got.

00:12:35 Alfie: Absolutely. I’ve had so many experiences of going into a degree and then being like, how come this isn’t what I thought it was going to be? Because that’s what it was like 20 years ago while I was being told about that world. It’s always been a problem. But the speed of change of AI has just radically exacerbated that.

00:12:50 Jenny: So you mentioned this idea of agents. And just for anyone who’s not fully caught up, how do you see the agent on behalf of the person looking for a new career, looking for a new job?

00:13:02 Jenny: In the future, how do you see that actually playing out? I’m really interested. We obviously hear a lot of talk about it. There’ll be agents out there running around, looking for jobs. How do you actually see it benefiting individuals?

00:13:13 Alfie: In the first instance, it’s about helping people to understand themselves, the job market, the intersection of those two points and make a plan. In the longer term, there are a lot of open questions.

00:13:22 Alfie: It’s interesting to think about how human agents work in, say, the creative industries. If you’re an actor or musician, you will have an agent. Or maybe if you’re a writer.

00:13:30 Alfie: And that agent will know you quite well, go out into the market and source opportunities on your behalf and then bring them to you and say, Jenny, there’s a new film next year. Do you want to do four months’ work in Hawaii playing this? Here’s a script.

00:13:44 Alfie: So, you’ve got this idea of human agents in some sense. I think there’s a world in which we professionally have that type of structure. Whereby rather than us ourselves trawling through LinkedIn or Indeed or any of these job boards and trying to identify opportunities, we are represented by an agent who understands a great deal about us and we share information.

00:14:05 Alfie: We update that over and over and it iterates and it learns us better and better and then goes out and represents us. I think that’s particularly the case in areas of work which could become more freelance-dominated.

00:14:15 Alfie: One of the questions that we’re really interested in is what AI does to the employment versus self-employment balance. We’re already seeing some indications that that could be… there could be a bit of a tipping towards more self-employment because in some ways, AI makes it much easier to manage freelancers.

00:14:32 Alfie: In the UK, we’ve also got challenges around cost of employment going up and up, which has always been a sort of nudge towards the use of self-employed workers. So I think there… there are really open questions around what the medium to longer term structure of the labor market looks like.

00:14:47 Alfie: When people talk about labor market, they talk about both the market for work and the market for matching. On the matching side, I think, sourcing applicants is way more common than in the past now and there’s been a lot of tooling built around that.

00:14:59 Alfie: We don’t profess to have a clear view on what that’s going to look like in the longer term, but I think the idea of a personal creation that understands you and helps you frame your thoughts, understand your local job market, and identify the best opportunities for you to learn new skills, apply for work, and get the job and career that you want is very much in keeping with what people need right now.

00:15:21 Jenny: Let’s talk a little bit about that idea. You guys focus on personalization. You can’t train agents or think about getting great recommendations without it being personalized. So can you talk about some of the signals and architecture that you’re using to really understand the user and their context and really what they’re looking for?

00:15:39 Alfie: The personalization is all about understanding the user. And we’ve iterated a bit on how to do that. Most of us, if we’re asked a question, what do you want to do with your life and given a blank piece of paper, we struggle.

00:15:49 Alfie: And the reason why human beings are good at this stuff is because they’re good at encouraging us to open up. The prompts, the nudges, the encouragement to reveal more information and to share and to frame your thoughts.

00:16:00 Alfie: We found that voice calls are just by far the best way of getting the early information out of people and building the starting point of a profile. So our onboarding is quite heavily structured around voice calls. We still use CVs as well, because it’s useful to get that information early on for people. But voice calls are generally a very good way of understanding more about someone’s situation.

00:16:18 Alfie: And then after that, there’s always the opportunity to go back to that and add more context. But it’s also intuitive. A user will come to us, they’ll upload a CV if they have one. They’ll chat to their personal career agent in a voice call. They will then be presented with this starting point of a career plan.

00:16:35 Alfie: They will give feedback on things they like, things they don’t like. We’ll start sharing opportunities that we think might be a good match. They will give feedback on them and we’ll improve it over time.

00:16:45 Alfie: Their situation may change. They may suddenly decide they want to go in a different direction. And this can all be incorporated into it. And that’s what AI is really good at, is piecing together this information into where a human careers advisor often struggles. Because remembering what happened in the last meeting, keeping notes, updating it all when you’ve got 30 different people you’re speaking to today, it’s super tough.

00:17:05 Alfie: The personalization is a question of gathering early information in a way that makes the user comfortable and encourages them to open up and frame their thoughts, and then constantly improving and adding to that to build a rich picture of the person that you’re trying to help.

00:17:18 Jenny: Just out of curiosity, are candidates recording their calls and then feeding that information to their coaches? The best way to get feedback is to be on a call with someone. You can’t usually be on a call with someone who’s in an interview, but if that was recorded… Sometimes it’s recorded by the employer and shared, and sometimes you’re using your Granola or whatever. That could be interesting.

00:17:39 Alfie: At the moment, people are generally using us as an alternative to... They may be using a career service on the side. And then we’re hoping to work or we’re scoping out opportunities to work directly with career services.

00:17:49 Alfie: I can tell you more about where we see the hybrid approach. But no, we haven’t encountered people sort of recording one meeting and feeding that back in. But it’d be a great way of testing.

00:17:57 Jenny: Yeah! Again, everyone needs to opt in. But you know, everything is getting so transparent now. It’s like, everyone assumes in our meetings as VCs that that meeting is being recorded on both sides.

00:18:09 Jenny: And so oftentimes those meeting notes are just shared amongst the parties. And that a year ago, if you would have told people that that was happening, people would have freaked out and be like, no, I just want to have an intimate conversation. And now it’s just normal.

00:18:22 Alfie: Give it a year or two and AI-powered glasses will mean that every conversation you have in person is also recorded and filmed. Our goalposts definitely moved on that in terms of what people assume is recording.

00:18:33 Jenny: So do you think that the traditional CV and traditional way is just dying? Or this is a subset of people that are taking things to the next level? I mean, I notice when we’ve had job roles, people don’t even really offer to send a CV. They just like send their LinkedIn and maybe a little paragraph. And obviously, if you ask for it, they’ll do it. But I feel like it’s really changing.

00:18:54 Alfie: Yeah. It’ll vary a lot sector to sector. LinkedIn is great for some sectors. It doesn’t work for others. I think there’ll be more sector-specific tools for different areas of expertise.

00:19:05 Alfie: The truth is, I think, the CV is evolving. People are always lying on their CVs. They’ve always exaggerated stuff. I’m sure that’s happening in the US. But certainly, the UK has had its fair share of political scandals, where it turns out someone was quite liberal with the truth when it came to what their professional record says.

00:19:21 Alfie: So that’s nothing new. I think any good hiring process only ever seen a CV as a very small part of the bigger picture. Anyone who’s hired based purely on CVs is probably not going to get the results they wanted.

00:19:32 Alfie: The two major things that have changed is that it used to be that a well-written, tailored CV… a real sign of seriousness for an applicant. That’s no longer the case.

00:19:41 Alfie: The most beautiful CV that speaks directly to the job that you’ve advertised and looks lovely, and it could have been generated in two seconds passing. So that’s no longer a good signal of seriousness.

00:19:53 Alfie: And then the other side is that CVs have stopped being written for human beings. Applicants have had to adapt what they’re doing, because it may well be that these CVs are getting screened by some sort of AI feature, whether that’s in an ATS, whether that’s separately.

00:20:07 Jenny: Can you give us an example of that? What’s a tweak that a candidate would make to their CV because they realize a person isn’t looking at it?

00:20:15 Alfie: Reflecting back the exact language of the job description, which means it doesn’t always read that naturally. And I’m very skeptical about that. I think there are lots of people promising candidate screening tools. The risk with AI that we mistake precision and accuracy. You can put 100 CVs into your AI screening tool, and it will tell you that I’ve scored 64.2%.

00:20:34 Alfie: Now, that sounds really precise. Could just be very randomized. Put the same information again and see how much variance there is in results. And it may well be that you rank 10 candidates using your whatever AI screening tool you’ve been pitched by some company. And they come up with different ranks. That’s a pretty big drawback.

00:20:52 Alfie: The second is that they completely overlook non-traditional candidates, which I think is an issue in terms of bias, fairness, and also just not good sense. Mostly applied for jobs that I haven’t been properly qualified for, but have managed to, at some point, convince someone that the skills that I do have offset the things that I’m missing.

00:21:12 Alfie: They may well have regretted it. But the good hiring processes always have that subjective, qualitative approach and are willing to accept that maybe what they thought they were looking for isn’t actually what they need and be persuaded of that. If you automate a lot of the hiring process on the employer’s side, you lose that flexibility.

00:21:30 Jenny: So really, the way to stand out is not in that first round of screening. You want to basically mimic what the job description is. And then the place that you stand out is potentially in the interview or the next rounds.

00:21:42 Alfie: If there is that sort of objective hurdle that you need to get through early on, then yes. I think one of the things that worries me, and this applies less to the world we’re looking at, more to the sort of white-collar mid-career, is it feels to me like there’s been a bit of a return to nepotism.

00:21:56 Alfie: Because the application market is broken in many of the ways that we’ve discussed, the easiest result is, well, look, I know so-and-so who’s recommended so-and-so, or so-and-so has got a connection into the company, or whatever it happens to be.

00:22:09 Alfie: And LinkedIn kind of makes it a lot easier because you can look at connections. And you end up hiring people through warm introductions. That’s something like the VC world has always been, if I could say, a little bit guilty of. The way money is allocated, the way people raise money, the way people get injections, has always been quite warm introduction-driven.

00:22:27 Alfie: And there’s some logic to aspects of that. But I think it’ll be a sad sign if that becomes more widespread in the jobs market, because it’s not marriage granting. It’s about connection that favors some people over others.

00:23:38 Jenny: Right. So getting back to Rodeo, you guys have had some iterations, and I’d love to just hear a little bit more of where you are today and how you’re thinking about the future of the company.

00:22:48 Alfie: Today we’ve got a product and a whole bunch of users using it to do everything from plan their careers to find opportunities to apply for, to supporting them with their applications. It’s a free tool.

00:22:58 Alfie: It’s really important to us. We’re getting a lot of good validation. I love talking to people who are using the product. I love getting negative feedback. I love getting positive feedback. That’s working well.

00:23:06 Alfie: Ultimately, we see this ideally as working in partnership with traditional career services. There’s a risk of a sort of either or debate between human careers advisors and AI. We’re very strongly of the belief the most powerful solution to ensuring everyone gets the advice and support they need is for a hybrid approach.

00:23:27 Alfie: There’s some people who will prefer to lean more on an AI solution. And this is particularly true because setting up a careers appointment in two weeks time when you’re trying to juggle two jobs that you’re working and family commitments, everything, can be really difficult. AI is amazingly convenient, can enable people to fit it around their lives a lot more easily and has some super powerful aspects to it.

00:23:49 Alfie: But ideally, it can also be combined with human career support so that other people who need the human support most can get access to that. So that there could be safeguards in place, things can be escalated if they need to.

00:24:00 Alfie: Or the AI can be used for something AI’s really good like speedy onboarding via an agent voice call or skills mapping from CVs, job database searches. And then the humans can be used for other aspects that they’re really good at like some of the empathy and support and sense checking. I think there’s a lot of opportunity.

00:24:18 Alfie: So we’re talking to everything from the government through to career services, colleges and schools and further education colleges and charities that work in this area.

00:24:27 Alfie: So the whole ecosystem of traditional career support, which we think is and will remain super valuable. We hope that we can turbo charge it and augment its impact and scale because there is this massive problem that… unemployment is high in the UK and a lot of people have dropped out of the labour market.

00:24:43 Alfie: I’m ultimately an optimist. I think AI is a productivity enhancement. It should make society richer, but the transition is going to be highly disruptive and could be very painful. Giving people support and advice to help them through that transition is going to be super vital.

00:25:00 Jenny: I mean, you’ve mentioned the word impact a couple of times. So what does success look like for you and Rodeo?

00:25:06 Alfie: Our mission is to ensure that all young people have the advice and support they need to help them find the right career path. Now, there are a whole range of different metrics that. But that’s a mission and success will be judged by how many people we’re able to help through that process.

00:25:19 Jenny: Love it. All right. We’re going to just move to the speed round. So just quick, one sentence answers. Book, newsletter, podcast, some media that you’re enjoying right now?

00:25:28 Alfie: I’m currently reading Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter. She is a professor of psychology and philosophy somewhere on the West Coast, Her work spans everything from childhood development through to AI and cognitive models.

00:25:41 Alfie: I just think that if we’re going to understand what artificial intelligence is, then the starting point and crucial bit needs to be to understand what human intelligence is. And the best place to start back is to understand how babies and children develop and like how we develop human intelligence.

00:25:54 Alfie: Probably also helps that I’ve got a small daughter and so I spend most of my time trying to like understand her. Try and be a vaguely good parent in terms of supporting her.

00:26:02 Alfie: And then I spend a lot of my work life trying to understand what AI is doing, how it works, how it’s going to change society. And so I think her work is this really great intersection of those two areas of understanding like what intelligence is and how it develops, both in a human and artificial sense.

00:26:18 Jenny: Love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:26:22 Alfie: I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to live in a few places. I really enjoyed my time in East Africa. I mean, I was in Uganda, but across Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda. And so given the chance, I would love to go back there at some point in my life, probably not just yet. But the scenery, the outdoors, exploration and activities were just amazing.

00:26:38 Jenny: I love it. Favorite productivity hack?

00:26:41 Alfie: I find handwritten to-do lists are just so much better than anything else. Having a notepad and writing down each morning what I’ve got to do, physically crossing stuff off.

00:26:50 Alfie: I’ve tried over the years any number of tracking tools or perhaps Linear tickets or any of those other tools. But I just want to be able to write everything down in bullet points in a… on pen and paper and then cross it off when I’ve done it.

00:27:03 Jenny: That’s great. And then where can listeners find you?

00:27:05 Alfie: We’ve talked about LinkedIn. It’s not my natural environment. I’m as critical as probably many other people are of that environment, but it’s functional. So either that or, I don’t know, Strava.

00:27:15 Jenny: LinkedIn or Strava? First time answer on that one.

00:27:18 Alfie: Depends what you want to ask me.

00:27:20 Jenny: There you go. All right. Well, this was a real pleasure, Alfie. Thanks so much for taking the time. And we are excited about Rodeo and all those lives that you’re going to be impacting. So thanks for joining.

00:27:30 Alfie: Great. Lovely to talk. Thanks, Jenny.

00:27:34 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 Alfie Pearce-Higgins in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 115 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Elliot Katz, co-founder and CEO of mixus AI — a legal AI platform that lets attorneys delegate work to agents directly from email. Elliot shares how riding in early autonomous vehicles and seeing the gap between the hype and the technology convinced him that humans would always need to stay in the loop — a conviction that drove him from law to co-founding mixus. He discusses how mixus is cutting through a crowded legal tech market by demanding zero behavior change from attorneys, meeting them in email and Word rather than asking them to learn yet another dashboard.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In this episode, you will hear:

• Applying the human-in-the-loop thesis from autonomous vehicles to legal AI.

• Winning AmLaw 20 firms through zero behavior change integration.

• Taking financing workflows from days to minutes with email-native agents.

• Shifting corporate legal work from billable hours to fixed-fee engagements.

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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, Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures. Super excited to have my really good friend, longtime friend, and portfolio CEO, Elliot Katz on the call here today with mixus AI.

00:00:45 Scott: So Elliot and I both grew up together in Palo Alto, California. We’ve known each other since we were probably 10 years old playing knockout basketball in the driveway. Elliot went on to Vanderbilt and Cornell Law, and then built a career at DLA Piper, where he was an attorney.

00:01:02 Scott: I know you started the autonomous vehicles practice well before that was a thing. You really had incredible foresight to dive in deep and build the AV practice at DLA.

00:01:12 Scott: And then, I think from that, you learned a ton about this whole world of human-plus-machine automation, went on to found Phantom Auto, raised a lot of money for that. And then saw this movie replaying in the legal space with mixus AI. We’re super excited to be investors in the company, and welcome to the podcast, Elliot.

00:01:31 Elliot: Thanks, Scott. Great to be here. It’s been quite a journey for us over, I think, about 30 years at this point.

00:01:37 Scott: I know we’re not gonna recount trampoline stories or knockout basketball stories today, but there’s plenty of that for the off-podcast conversation later.

00:01:47 Scott: Walk everybody through your journey because you started on a traditional career path in law. Went to a great firm, became a partner. What was it that you saw in this development of autonomous vehicles and human plus machine and robotics that made you want to start the AV practice and then jump out into Phantom Auto and into mixus.

00:02:06 Elliot: As you mentioned, I started at DLA Piper. I became the chair of their Autonomous Vehicle practice. Then I went to McGuireWoods, became a partner and chair of their Autonomous Vehicle practice.

00:02:18 Elliot: But by dint of the fact that I was very early on autonomous vehicles, I was one of the only attorneys at the time—if not the only attorney—that was focused on legal, regulatory, and policy issues pertaining to that space. Because of that, I got to represent a lot of the biggest players in the space at that time.

00:02:41 Elliot: It was still very, very early days. And through that, I got to ride in all of their vehicles. I had a front-row seat to see the delta between the actual state of the technology at the time and the marketing.

00:02:58 Elliot: So if you asked my grandma in 2014, she read a New York Times article that told her she was gonna fall asleep in Palo Alto and wake up in New York and never have to touch the steering wheel in between. The car was just gonna do everything.

00:03:12 Elliot: And at that point in time, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I’m riding in these vehicles, my clients’ vehicles, you couldn’t go more than 100 yards without something going wrong.

00:03:23 Elliot: What I started to think about at that time was if you actually want to commercially deploy these vehicles at scale, there has to be some sort of technology that can keep a human in the loop. There’s just too many things that were going wrong and that would go wrong in the future. There’s just such a long tail of these edge cases. A lot of weird things happen out on our roads.

00:03:48 Elliot: And so fast forward to 2017, I was connected with my now co-founder, Shai Magzimof. There was a VC that I was doing some work with that came to me and said, “Hey, there’s a new guy in town. He built this technology and we think it’s the technology that you’ve been talking about for some time. Go meet with him.”

00:04:06 Elliot: “We’re thinking about making an investment.” So I went over to Shai’s house in Palo Alto. He put me in a car in his garage. He went to his living room. He drove me around the block in Palo Alto via remote control. My brain basically exploded because that was exactly what I had been dreaming about.

00:04:23 Elliot: What happens when something goes wrong with these vehicles? Well, if you can have a human sitting thousands of miles away, that’s able to remotely assist or even operate the vehicle, then you have a full system.

00:04:35 Elliot: And so at that point, I left the practice of law entirely. We started Phantom Auto together, and our technology was just that. Now, the problem there with autonomous on-road vehicles is it was still quite early days. I mean, now you can actually get a Waymo, especially if you live in the Bay Area. I would highly recommend it. It’s an amazing experience.

00:04:58 Elliot: By the way, they still use some form of remote-assistance technology—exactly what we were talking about all the way back then. But it was very early days, so no one had actually gone to market.

00:05:09 Elliot: We ended up pivoting to vehicles that were more so in enclosed areas like forklifts in a warehouse, like yard trucks in a warehouse yard. That was a great business because even when you’re in an enclosed environment, again, you still need a human to help out the autonomy. So that took us through Phantom Auto.

00:05:31 Scott: Just to jump in there, I remember it was probably around that time, 2016 or so, 10 years back, maybe even before that, where we had lunch at the Four Seasons on University Avenue in Palo Alto and you told me that you were thinking about leaving law to go and be a startup entrepreneur.

00:05:48 Scott: Even though I live in this world, I think I said, “Time out. Beware of what you’re wishing for. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t leave the confines of a highly paid, nice office to come out into the wilds.” But you had such conviction at the time and really had the foresight to make that leap.

00:06:03 Scott: It was something that really resonated with me as well, because that was around the same time that I was writing my book about human and machine and all these interfaces that needed to come together.

00:06:12 Scott: Actually, I think you inspired me to talk to a woman that’s featured in my book, Melissa Cefkin, who’s the lead anthropologist at Nissan, but running the autonomous vehicles practice. The whole idea there was that the edge cases of autonomous vehicles are often tacit communication. They’re human edge cases issues.

00:06:31 Scott: And so why would you have at the helm of an autonomous vehicles practice somebody who has a PhD in anthropology? It really confirmed all of those things that were the thesis behind Phantom Auto and even the thesis behind mixus today.

00:06:45 Scott: That there’s rote and routine tasks that can be automatable up to a certain point. And then there’s generally a gap where you have to have human in the loop. You’ve been beating this drum for 10 years, and I think you’re still right on the money.

00:06:59 Elliot: What myself and Shai, my co-founder, like to say when we open any meeting is “We are the human-in-the-loop guys.” If you believe that AGI is here and humans are just going to be able to go frolic at the beach and the AI is just going to do all the work, we’re not those guys.

00:07:16 Elliot: Our view is that autonomy and autonomous vehicles, they can do so much. Again, you will be blown away if you ride in a Waymo or if you’ve already rode in a Waymo, but they have their limitations.

00:07:29 Elliot: We took that same concept and now applied it to high-stakes work. In legal. there’s amazing things that our AI agents can do for attorneys. They can do so much of the work, but they can’t do all of the work.

00:07:48 Elliot: There’s so many things that you need human judgment for, especially in the law. Typically, people don’t come to lawyers for just straight-up black letter law. They’re looking for their interpretation, their judgment, their assessment of risk, et cetera.

00:08:05 Elliot: Even though AI can do a very good job with the basics, you still need to “mixus” together. That’s the name of the company—mixing together human intelligence with artificial intelligence. That is the way that you’re going to get a complete product.

00:08:23 Scott: 100%. Shifting gears, so Phantom Auto obviously had human in the loop, remote operators and drivers of forklifts in facilities, say, in the US where you could have that vehicle driven from Mexico. You could do cost arbitrage and 24/7 support without needing to deal with some of the current issues that we have around immigration and various things like that.

00:08:46 Scott: But fast forward to where you guys are today with mixus. Taking that same principle, but rather than a forklift operator operating remotely from Mexico to Central Valley, California for Home Depot, it’s instead a lawyer being able to offload tasks to agents in specific workflows where they can interface with both their associates, but also with AI agents powered by mixus to supercharge the expertise that those lawyers already have.

00:09:14 Elliot: That’s exactly right. There’s a lot of differences between Phantom and mixus. It’s a different space. But at Phantom, you hit the nail on the head. So, we worked with very large Fortune 50 customers, some of the biggest businesses in the world. They had remote operators sitting literally, in some cases, thousands of miles away, in some cases on a different continent.

00:09:41 Elliot: Those remote operators were not employees of our customers. They were employees of Phantom Auto. Now here, everyone who’s working with our system is an employee of whatever the organization is that’s using the system.

00:09:56 Elliot: So right now, we’re working with some of the largest law firms in the world, multiple AmLaw 20 firms. And to be clear on exactly what we’re providing them, we’re providing them email-based AI agents with that built-in firm-level oversight.

00:10:15 Elliot: What is important about that is a couple of things. First of all, we are mimicking exactly the way that attorneys work today. What attorneys do today, they’re mainly on email, they’re in Word.

00:10:29 Elliot: So, when you want to use one of our agents, instead of emailing your associate “@John do X, Y, Z,” you email the agent, agent@mixus.com, and say “@Agent do X, Y, Z.” It’s all collaborative because the law’s a team sport, so you can CC any of your colleagues. Everyone can talk to the agent together. Anyone can review the outputs.

00:10:53 Elliot: But the point is that you just email. You do exactly what you’re already doing today. You email the agent, the agent is going to email back the work product. Then there’s a human attorney who will review and make sure that everything looks good.

00:11:07 Elliot: A very overlooked piece of this whole transformation that we have in AI is that change management piece. A lot of other tools in the space, it’s providing a net new tool with a net new UI, and you’re asking attorneys to learn that and bring that into their workflow.

00:11:28 Elliot: We’re doing the opposite thing. We’re starting where the attorneys already are and just saying, “Keep on doing what you’re doing, but now do it with an agent involved.”

00:11:38 Scott: It’s a really important point because I think that as these tools, we’ve seen a whole glut of legal AI tools come to market. This was a space that probably wasn’t that heavily trafficked five years ago.

00:11:49 Scott: Nobody was in their thesis, from the investor standpoint saying, “We’re looking for legal automation software.” That wasn’t a thing. Now, it’s probably one of the hottest categories that there is. You see the rise of forms like Harvey and others in the space.

00:12:03 Scott: But to your point, they really have a new work dynamic where they’re not catering directly to how law partners and operators are historically working. Which, to your point, it’s… you’re running between meetings, you’re running from a launch to something else, you’re rifling off a contract to an associate to redline and come back with feedback.

00:12:23 Scott: And instead of that workflow being at the desk, sitting down with the dashboard, it’s primarily happening over email. It’s happening on a mobile device. And that’s where mixus is trying to embed is in these specific workflows that partners to associates are already doing and have been doing for a hundred years.

00:12:41 Elliot: Absolutely. The work is also happening in Word. So, we have a Word plugin as well, but we are tracking exactly where they work. It’s all in the Outlook, Microsoft Outlook, and Word. That’s where we sit.

00:12:52 Elliot: What I will say is that when I was at DLA, for example, when I was a very junior attorney, I remember working with one much older partner who he was a brilliant attorney, but I don’t even know if he knew how to turn on his laptop. I’m not exaggerating.

00:13:11 Elliot: Attorneys are not always at the bleeding edge of technology, especially in the older generation. I think the newer, newer generation, the folks that are going to law school now and coming out of law school, they’re going to be trained on this new technology because it’s such a big part of how you practice the law.

00:13:27 Elliot: But this idea that you can get this certain subset, which is a large subset of attorneys to learn this new technology and integrate it into their practice, I think is a non-starter.

00:13:39 Elliot: We’re seeing that in real time. Most of the firms, if not all of the big firms that we’re working with, they already have seat licenses to use other legal AI tools. But what we hear consistently is they brought in those tools, not because they don’t think they’re going to be value add. Of course they do. But the uptake isn’t there amongst their attorneys.

00:14:02 Elliot: So again, that zero behavior modification that we’re enabling, I think is often overlooked, because people are really focusing on the technology, but critical piece in getting AI technology into his attorney’s hands and having them use it on the daily as opposed to something that’s on the side, “Okay, maybe I’ll use it once a week.”

00:14:23 Scott: And that’s a prime case of having domain expertise, understanding workflows, understanding the ICP, the customer profile and how these guys operate day to day. You’re not building technology in the abstract and then trying to shoehorn it into a law firm in the form of how Salesforce works.

00:14:40 Scott: What you’re trying to do is look back historically at how you operated as an acting attorney and partner at multiple law firms and saying, “This is really where the rubber hits the road. Our go-to-market has to be through zero behavior change integration into existing workflows,” which I think will serve you guys well.

00:14:57 Elliot: Absolutely. It’s hard to think like an attorney if you’ve never been an attorney. I am a recovering attorney. When I was practicing law, my brain was always thinking about how can I bill the next six minutes of time.

00:15:13 Elliot: And if you have to take six minutes, let alone an hour or two to learn a new tool and then get used to that new tool and integrate it into your practice, that equation is tough. You want to keep on doing what you’re doing and effectively bill time pretty much all of your day.

00:15:27 Scott: Thinking about like the specific workflow is, where have you guys seen the most traction as far as hyper-specific point solutions around specific legal examples? Is it in redlining? Is it in contract review? What are some of the workflows where you guys have come to market with the initial agents and where you’re seeing a lot of uptick from these AM 20 law firms?

00:15:48 Elliot: First of all, we have many, many different agents that we’ve deployed that do everything across the board. That’s from document generation to document redlining to data extraction.

00:16:00 Elliot: But I’ll use an example that’s near and dear to my heart as a startup founder and probably near and dear to yours as a VC, which is… we work with a lot of ECVC practices. We can take them with our agents, soup to nuts, through that financing process.

00:16:18 Elliot: Let’s say that Everywhere sends me a term sheet today. What’s the first thing that I’m going to do? I’m going to send it to my ECVC partner and that partner is probably going to send it to one of their associates to do the actual underlying work. And then a few days later, I’ll get back what I want, which is a red line of the term sheet and an issues list.

00:16:39 Elliot: If you’re using mixus, if our attorney is using mixus, I forward them those materials, they forward it to agent@mixus.com. The agent in a couple of minutes will send them back the exact same thing, which is a red line of the term sheet and an issues list, which is exactly what I want. So, that’s step one.

00:16:58 Elliot: What’s the next thing that you have to do in the process? Well, as a founder, I want to see the pro forma cap table. So again, the attorney emails the agent. You attach the previous cap table in the new term sheet. A few minutes later, it’s going to give you the pro forma cap table.

00:17:12 Elliot: What’s the last step of the process here? Well, let’s say that we’re raising series A and in our seed, we had the MVCA docs, but they’re for seed. So now, we need the MVCA docs for the A round.

00:17:23 Elliot: So again, you email the agent and they’re going to provide you with those new docs. Soup to nuts, we’re taking them through this whole process that used to take days in minutes. It’s a great outcome for them. It’s a great outcome for us.

00:17:37 Scott: It seems like, in the go-to-market, the benefits of this for the law firm could be two-fold in the sense that if you’re a top tier law firm utilizing these tools, where you can gain more efficiencies.

00:17:48 Scott: The obvious question for a lot of these guys is, isn’t this going to reduce my billable hours and therefore my business revenue? The general consensus is it allows the attorneys to up level and upskill, have more human interaction, and obviously offload the really rote and routine tasks that they didn’t want to do anyway.

00:18:05 Scott: That assumes that there’s unlimited business maybe behind that law firm where they can continue to eat away at more interesting work and give away this less interesting work.

00:18:14 Scott: The other bucket is maybe empowering smaller law firms to be able to compete in the sense that you have this idea of strong and skinny with AI. Skinny being you can save costs and cut corners here and there and have the same output.

00:18:29 Scott: Strong being you could be a really small team and suddenly punch way above your weight, where you may be a team of 20 attorneys. But now with mixus with supplemented and enhanced and amplified with AI, you could compete with a law firm that has 200 attorneys.

00:18:44 Scott: Where are you seeing more uptake or demand? Is it more in the big law firms enhancing efficiencies and outputs, or is it in the smaller law firms that really now can punch above their weight and compete?

00:18:55 Elliot: There’s a couple things there because you looked in the billable hour too. So let’s cover that. First of all, I was shocked at the pace with which the firms that we’re working with now engaged with us, in the sense that law firms are very conservative. It’s like enterprise sales.

00:19:13 Elliot: But they’re moving very quickly right now because if their competitors are leaning into AI and they’re not, they have a big problem, potentially an existential problem. That’s number one.

00:19:23 Elliot: Number two, in terms of the billable hour, we work with and speak with a lot of different law firms, some of the biggest law firms in the world. Maybe that won’t change on the litigation side, but I get the sense that on the corporate side, there’s going to be much, much more fixed fee work.

00:19:40 Elliot: Meaning, you handle our entire financing. Instead of billing us by that hour, we’ll pay you a hundred thousand dollars and you do all of it. And then the client doesn’t care if it got done in 10 minutes or it got done in 10 hours. They’re just looking for an outcome.

00:19:57 Elliot: I think that the way that large firms are looking at this right now is… listen, we have a ton of competition out there. Everyone’s kind doing the same thing. If other people are getting these gains, they’re going to pull clients away from us.

00:20:10 Elliot: Now on the small firm side, we are working with a firm that’s about 100 attorneys. They’re very, very innovative. And I think that they’re very much so thinking about AI in the right way.

00:20:22 Elliot: They’re very much leaning in with our product and they are already rolling out a client facing version, where their clients can email in to firm email address, their AI email address. They can email in term sheet or MSA or an NDA, whatever it is.

00:20:40 Elliot: The agent is going to take the first pass at doing the work. And then our agent is going to route that to the appropriate attorney, the subject matter expert within the firm, to just review and make sure that everything is okay. They’re going to charge a lower fee to do that.

00:20:56 Elliot: Now, My initial thought was, how is this going to work? Because if you’re just charging a lower fee, you’re going to take a revenue hit.

00:21:03 Elliot: The founder of the firm, who’s a very forward thinking person, said, “No, you’re not seeing it. If we do it this way and it catches fire, which I think it will, we’re going to have more and more clients coming to us. Because they can get the same service.” It’s not better. The agent does an incredible job and you still have the human in the loop for a much lower cost.

00:21:24 Elliot: That’s the basic ways that I think firms are thinking about this. Now, the interesting thing here is a lot of firms are using these legal AI tools that have been on the market now for some time.

00:21:38 Elliot: But I don’t know where the advantage comes at the end of the day if you’re all using the same thing. So they’re all still trying to seek out alpha and see where the edge is. Only time will tell as to which firms really pull ahead and which do not.

00:21:53 Elliot: Now, one other thing that I’ll mention, Scott, real quick is we’ve had some very interesting discussions with some elite law firms, old school, white shoe law firms, which from a technological perspective, I’m pretty concerned about their ability to lean in.

00:22:13 Elliot: There could be a big shakeup in this space because we talk with firms that have not yet migrated to the cloud, right? They’re still completely on-prem.

00:22:23 Elliot: So I think that there’s going to be a separation, not based on how people have viewed these firms before, meaning their level of lawyering, but based on their ability to lean in to AI. Because now everyone, or soon everyone, will have access to the same intelligence. It’s how you’re able to use and maneuver with that intelligence.

00:22:47 Scott: It’s fascinating. I wonder if you looked back at the prior rise of LexisNexis or the earlier technology waves that hit the legal industry where you had old school law firms literally utilizing law libraries and looking up case law versus those in the 90s or the 2000s were heavily leveraging the new systems like LexisNexis at the time.

00:23:09 Scott: If there was a big inflection point of who won clients and who took market share during that time, it’d be interesting to see because we’re probably at another inflection point, where those firms that can lean in and adopt these new tools are going to have a structural advantage to be able to win clients, get back faster.

00:23:27 Scott: The other parallel it reminds me of from 10 years back was the debate about radiology and medical imaging. And everybody said AI is going to take away all these jobs because what’s a radiologist do but look at images and find certain anomalies.

00:23:43 Scott: Of course, what it did was it lowered the cost of MRIs, made radiology a more in-demand service, and you have the rise of things like Pronovo, Ezra, Everlab, all sorts of at-home almost MRI scans where you can, for 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks, get something that used to cost 20,000.

00:24:00 Scott: It really democratized the space. It didn’t erode the demand on radiologists. It actually made that a more sizable career path because the costs of running MRIs went virtually to zero.

00:24:13 Scott: Similarly, to the partners comments about increasing demand, if the cost and the marginal cost of doing some legal service was super low, I would probably get more feedback, more advice on a much higher cadence than I currently do because we play defense as much as we can and only talk to lawyers when we want to pay them $2,000 an hour, which is not very often.

00:24:32 Elliot: By the way, there’s more radiologists today than there were five years ago. People ask me all the time, even attorneys. We work with a ton of attorney. Is AI going to take my job completely away?

00:24:45 Elliot: And my answer is a resounding no. You are not going to lose your job to AI. The risk to your job is losing it to another attorney who’s very good at using and savvy at using AI. I do think that attorneys absolutely need to lean in to using these tools immediately.

00:25:07 Elliot: Because like you mentioned Westlaw, LexisNexi, those are all tools that I used when I was an actual practicing attorney. They’re helpful for doing the job. With our agents, you’re talking about things that do the job completely.

00:25:20 Elliot: And so, the attorney needs to get used to being the final sign-off, being the person who has the knowledge to be able to make the judgment call. Did the agent get it right? Did it not?

00:25:32 Elliot: AI is just guessing the next most probable word. Actual attorneys have the experience to know, “Hey, I need to make a judgment call here. I need to base this on risk. I need to base this on the risk profile of my client, who the counterparty is, et cetera.” Lawyers are still going to play a huge part of the role. It’s just a changing part of the role.

00:25:53 Scott: There’s a great piece that somebody that you know. Omar Jarun from UDF, wrote a piece a week ago about the compression of Pareto. And so this Pareto principle that came from wherever it was decades ago, that 80% of outputs are driven by 20% of inputs.

00:26:09 Scott: And the compression of Pareto being that with AI, maybe that 20% compresses down to 5% where each attorney needs to find their edge where they have a real true comparative advantage in whatever domain. Because those that are the best in those domains, they’re in the top 5%, they’re really going to be able to supplement 95% with AI.

00:26:30 Scott: You got to be farther out there as the tip of the spear in whatever domain is your expertise. And a closing question, existential question for the bottom rungs of the ladder. The way I think about it is maybe the middle rungs are the ones at risk to your point where attorneys that are in the practice don’t fully yet adopt AI.

00:26:50 Scott: Because as you said, the new graduates coming out of law school are going to be heavily adept with this stuff and come in swinging way above their weight. And they’re going to be supercharged from day one as first year associates. And then maybe you have the bleeding edge AI doctors that are the tip of the spear, those top 5% in their practice areas.

00:27:08 Scott: And where it seems the real erosion in the legal industry could happen is in folks that are already in the role but are not savvy enough to adopt AI or lean heavily into tools like mixus. Where do you kind of see that hierarchy or where the opportunities might be or the erosion might happen?

00:27:24 Elliot: I already see it today. When we work with firms, it depends on how long we’ve been working with them. Usually, we start with a practice group or maybe 20, 25 people.

00:27:35 Elliot: The people that are using the tool every day, and I know they’re using the tool every day because they’re constantly giving us feedback. They’re excited. They’re pinging us. How can I do X, Y, Z?

00:27:44 Elliot: Oftentimes that’s the first-year associates, first and second year associates. They’re very much leaning into AI. So, those folks, I’m very bullish on their careers, not because they know a ton yet. Law school doesn’t actually teach you how to practice law. It just teaches you how to read cases.

00:28:03 Elliot: And so, they still have to learn the practice of law, but they have a very unique in right now, is they understand how to use the AI tools. That’s making them very uniquely situated at these firms to be value add.

00:28:17 Elliot: Because in the same way that partners, long time partners at those firms are teaching them how to practice law, they’re essentially teaching the partners how to adopt AI technology. So, that’s on the low end.

00:28:29 Elliot: On the much higher end, say a 30-year partner or whatever it is, those partners have years and years and years of practice under their belt of being able to make these assessments, being able to make these judgment calls because they’ve gone through all the motions.

00:28:46 Elliot: Law is not about black letter laws. It’s interpreting that based on many different client interactions. Those people have a very valuable knowledge base that the AI, at least at this point, cannot replace.

00:29:01 Elliot: I do think that those people similarly need to lean into AI and/or have very savvy junior associates that can do the AI component of their practice and they come in from above.

00:29:12 Elliot: The portion that I’m worried the most about is if you are, say, a senior associate. You’ve been practicing law maybe for six or seven years. So, you don’t have that same knowledge base as a 30-year partner who knows this stuff like the back of their hand. They have the judgment. It’s almost a reflex at this point.

00:29:34 Elliot: That seventh year is still learning how to practice law and if they’re not leaning into AI, I would be worried about them. Because again, you can get the same baseline intelligence now that a 30-year partner has. You don’t have the judgment.

00:29:49 Elliot: But if you’re not using the tool that gives you that baseline knowledge and you don’t have the judgment, you’re left in this murky middle. And that’s what I’m seeing playing out in real time. Even at the firms that we’re working with, the people who are really pulling ahead are leaning into using the tool.

00:30:04 Elliot: Now, to figure out how amazing the tool can be for your practice, you have to experiment some. You have to get used to using AI. But there seems there’s an inflection point right now where the firms themselves are really coming in from the top and saying, you must use this tool. We’ve seen other attorneys make massive gains and we want to see that for everyone here.

00:30:28 Scott: It’s such a fascinating time to be building and congrats on everything that you guys have done at mixus. We’re super excited for the path forward and can’t wait for my law firm bills to go down through the floor when they start using more of these AI tools.

00:30:42 Scott: I guess in quick lightning rounds, you’ve spent a lot of your life between Tennessee, New York, and obviously Northern California. If you were to live anywhere else outside of those spots, where would you pick to live?

00:30:54 Elliot: I’m a California boy through and through, but if it was outside of California, I’ve spent a good amount of time in Austin, Texas. I really, really like it there. It gets a little too hot and humid for me, for my likes, during the summer, but I think it’s an amazing place to live. They’ve got a thriving tech ecosystem. So, I think that’s where I choose.

00:31:16 Scott: You’re going to follow the train of every other Silicon Valley entrepreneur to Texas for one reason or another.

00:31:24 Scott: What’s one podcast or book that you’re reading you found really insightful recently?

00:31:30 Elliot: I love podcasts. That’s my favorite medium because I’m generally quite busy, but you can listen to it on the run. What is my favorite podcast?

00:31:40 Scott: Other than Venture Everywhere, of course.

00:31:42 Elliot: Obviously, obviously. That goes without saying. I really like the Hard Fork Podcast. The New York Times puts it out. They do a lot of good coverage on AI and other stuff as well.

00:31:55 Elliot: But I think they have a very good and balanced take on where this is all going. What I mean by that is I feel like AI right now, the sector is very similar to American politics, in the sense that it’s very extreme.

00:32:14 Elliot: Either you think that AGI is here and you’ll never have to work another day in your life and the AI is going to handle everything. Or you think this is total and utter BS and these things are guessing the next word and they’re not going to be that helpful.

00:32:30 Elliot: What I like about Hard Fork is they take a very measured approach. They’re journalists, so they’re not trying to hype the technology, but they use the technology a lot themselves. They’re like, both of these extremes are wrong. It’s somewhere in between. And they do a nice job of breaking things down from that lens, which I appreciate.

00:32:46 Scott: I love that. Finally, where can listeners find you online?

00:32:49 Elliot: You can go to mixus.ai. The main other place that you can find me is LinkedIn. If you message me on LinkedIn, I might not be the quickest turnaround, but I’m usually able to get back to those messages. So, that’s a good place to find me.

00:33:04 Scott: Awesome. Elliot, always great to see you. Great to chat. Super excited about mixus and thankful for 30 years of friendship with you and getting to work with you now more than ever. So, it’s great.

00:33:15 Elliot: Likewise. Likewise. If you had told my sixth grade self that we’d be doing this podcast in 2026, I would have been pretty happy about that. So great to be here. Glad to do it.

00:33:24 Scott: Awesome. Thanks, Elliot.

00:33:27 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.

In episode 114 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Dylan Lew, co-founder and CEO of Ecotone Renewables, a company replacing traditional waste hauling with on-site biodigesters that convert commercial food waste into a locally distributed organic fertilizer. Dylan shares how building and operating an early digester that broke down constantly pushed him to rethink the entire food waste system from the ground up. He discusses how Ecotone is rewriting the economics of food waste management, turning what businesses write off as a disposal cost into a revenue stream and a locally sourced fertilizer supply chain.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Using state food waste bans to landfill as a distribution accelerant.

• Building a decentralized grid of on-site digesters over centralized facilities.

• Upcycling commercial food waste into a locally distributed organic fertilizer.

• Expanding from digester hardware to AI-powered waste intelligence with Athena.

• Sequencing a multi-sided business from digester manufacturing to retail fertilizer.

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. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures. I’m super excited to have here, today, Dylan Lew, who’s normally based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, founder and CEO of Ecotone Renewables.

00:00:46 Scott: Dylan’s working on some really fascinating stuff around food waste management, turning nutrient-rich foods that come off of restaurants primarily into reusable fertilizers and really helping solve the global fertilizer crisis that we’ll talk a little bit about today, pioneering a new method of doing this at scale.

00:01:05 Scott: So Dylan, thank you so much for being with us today on the podcast and we’d love for you to tell a little bit about your background. You guys started Ecotone straight out of college, made all the lists, the 30 Under 30s for people really innovating in circular economy. But maybe walk us through that decision to start Ecotone, the market opportunity that you saw and how you got started.

00:01:26 Dylan: Definitely, and thank you, Scott, for having me on the podcast today as well. I’m the CEO and co-founder here at Ecotone. My background is much more on the technical engineering side. Studied material science and engineering from Carnegie Mellon, got my bachelor’s and master’s there. And then was working for both NASA and GE Renewables, helping them manage their fleet of hardware systems.

00:01:49 Dylan: For GE, was doing failure analysis on their 55,000 operating wind turbines around the world. Every time one of them broke or collapsed, they’d send my team all the broken parts to figure out what went wrong and how we prevent it for the rest of the fleet.

00:02:04 Dylan: Really, really helpful experience as we are also building, deploying, and operating a fleet of hardware systems that are software-enabled. But for us, instead of wind turbines, it’s on-site biodigesters for commercial buildings and kitchens.

00:02:17 Dylan: We did start this while we were still in school, which is a lot to do at the same time. But I do think it was really helpful to have those first three years of the company’s life in this bootstrapping R&D phase.

00:02:31 Dylan: We actually started more as an operator. We asked and we got a custom order for a small scale digester and it was really difficult to operate. The 40-hour a week job was breaking multiple times a week and not actually running well. So we had a few key epiphanies early on.

00:02:49 Dylan: First of all, we think we can build a more reliable system. And the second piece is the automation and really the opportunity that we saw in the market of food waste management and fertilizer, which combined is over a $280 billion global market opportunity.

00:03:06 Dylan: And we saw that there was this gammacing of… you have waste management solutions that are sending all the waste typically to landfill, and you have really expensive fertilizers that are getting shipped from international countries, shipped to the US and to our farmers.

00:03:21 Dylan: There’s no interconnection of that supply chain. That’s where we saw a really interesting opportunity to create what I almost call a vertical integration play in the food waste solution space, where we are doing it all.

00:03:35 Dylan: We manage the food waste, we upcycle it into fertilizer. We actually then distribute that fertilizer to retail stores and farmers directly. That’s where we’re capturing a lot of value across the chain and also then sharing that with our customers and partners along the way.

00:03:50 Dylan: Hopefully that gave you a little bit of context in how we initially started and saw some of the opportunities in this space.

00:03:57 Scott: It’s fascinating because it’s a two-sided problem that we’re all learning about maybe for the first time with the global crisis in the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz and the choking of global supply chain. Obviously, a lot of natural gas that goes into fertilizer production comes out of the Middle East.

00:04:14 Scott: With the global shipping routes shut down currently, I’ve just been reading about how China has really limited the export of some of the main components in fertilizers, therefore shooting the cost of fertilizer through the roof. Obviously, a lot of farmers buy these on contracts six months in the future.

00:04:31 Scott: Now, fertilizer manufacturers are reneging on those contracts under force majeure, and this stuff is happening simultaneously—not buying corn and pushing the price of crops through the floor.

00:04:42 Scott: So all these global supply chain levers that are moving as a result of conflict shed light on how integrated this global supply chain is. What’s so interesting is you may be taking a step back and talking about this two-sided marketplace where you have huge demand for fertilizer from US farmers and anybody that’s tilling land and cycling crops, contrasted with this urban development dense centers with restaurants with food waste.

00:05:09 Scott: Everybody’s walked their dog through the back alley behind a restaurant and you see the dumpsters and you see the biofuels and the storage of all of the offshoots of urban development in restaurants.

00:05:19 Scott: Tell us a little bit about the ZEUS system and what you guys have built and how you’re integrating that into large restaurant chains. I guess, the first part of the problem is offloading this food waste and how big of a problem is this? And then how you guys are then plugging that into this fertilizer market as you talked about.

00:05:37 Dylan: Very high level. The ZEUS digester is an easier and cheaper way to manage food waste. And it also, especially for businesses in the 11 US states now that have food waste bans to landfill, it helps these businesses meet new compliance requirements.

00:05:52 Dylan: The ZEUS digester is basically a fully automated anaerobic digester. It operates very similar to how our stomachs use. It’s a form of biomimicry. You’re basically using nature’s superpowers, but helping to do that in a condensed and faster way.

00:06:08 Dylan: For us, it is using trillions of different bacteria, fungi, microbes in a stomach tank to basically break down the food waste, turn it into an actual liquid organic fertilizer that we call soil sauce.

00:06:21 Dylan: Right now, our flagship product is the ZEUS digester. It’s an on-site biodigester for commercial kitchens and buildings, not just restaurants. We actually do all commercial kitchens: hotels, hospitals, corporate offices, schools, municipalities as well, are all market verticals that we currently serve today.

00:06:39 Dylan: It’s basically a trash chute on the outside of a shipping container where you dump your food waste in the trash chute, you walk away, and system takes care of the rest.

00:06:49 Dylan: Inside the box is where all of our advanced technology is that processes all of the food waste, produces the fertilizer. We hire local artists that decorate the outside to make sure it really fits in with the local communities where we deploy.

00:07:02 Dylan: The real key is really that automation piece. We’ve developed what’s called the PLC and HMI. Without getting too much into the weeds, it’s the brains of the system that lets us control and monitor these digesters fully remotely, help send our service team as needed.

00:07:19 Dylan: We also have a really advanced data analytics system as well that we’re about to be publicly launching in a few weeks too. Little sneak peek is that’s gonna be called Athena Waste Intelligence. Pairs very well with our Zeus digesters.

00:07:32 Dylan: It’s basically using camera sensors that are taking photos of the food waste, running it through a machine learning and AI program that’s basically tracking and detecting exactly what’s being wasted.

00:07:45 Dylan: These systems are not just upcycling food waste, but they’re also helping to reduce food waste of the source and food purchasing costs, which can be $50,000 to $100,000 a month, especially for some of these larger operations.

00:07:58 Dylan: Today, people have three different vendors to do this. They have a waste management vendor. They have a data analytics vendor. They currently aren’t really doing anything with any byproducts or fertilizers. Our goal is really to provide a really firm key solution that handles everything in one.

00:08:14 Scott: I love the references to Greek mythology. A lot of people are probably familiar with the backyard composters where you collect your banana peels and whatnot. And you maybe throw your food waste into a drum that you mix in sawdust and turn it every once in a while.

00:08:29 Scott: And it emulsifies and turns into a soup that you can then use in your garden. You guys are basically taking that same principle with much more technology, much more analytics, and doing this at scale for large commercial kitchens.

00:08:43 Dylan: Exactly right. What we’ve learned along the way, one of the keys in operations that we’re solving is odor and pest issues, is, especially in the summer months, food waste either sitting in a dumpster for a few days before pickup or in compost collection bins, which is definitely better for the environment, but operationally is still pretty difficult.

00:09:04 Dylan: For a hospital, for example, they cannot have flies going around or odor issues or complaints coming from their dumpsters. Being able to have fully self-contained airtight, watertight tanks, and pipes even within the shipping container really enables the system to actually reduce and eliminate a lot of those pest and odor issues, which are very typical for food waste.

00:09:27 Dylan: There’s this business piece, which we saw first, of making sure we’re reducing waste hauling costs. We’re helping to reduce purchasing costs as well along the way. But there’s also this operational piece of making sure that their operations are easier, cleaner, and faster.

00:09:42 Dylan: For those that are familiar with typical backyard composting, our digesters are basically eight times faster than that process. So instead of multiple months, it’s constant input and output that if you track up a banana peel thrown in to when it comes out as soil sauce, it’s about two or three weeks.

00:09:57 Scott: Wow. It’s amazing. For those of us who’ve may lived 11 years in New York City, we’re very familiar with the summer odor from the dumpsters and food waste.

00:10:06 Dylan: Exactly.

00:10:07 Scott: Maybe talk a little bit about these 11 states that have these requirements of no food waste in landfills. That’s an interesting development where there’s a carrot and a stick and some regulatory compliance aspects. Is this a trend that you’re seeing expand out? Are these 11 states the early leaders and then you see this continuing across the country?

00:10:29 Dylan: Definitely do. There are some states like Pennsylvania where they’re trying to pass similar regulations, but I think is gonna be… a little bit of a long haul to make it happen. There’s some amazing organizations that are really pushing that forward.

00:10:42 Dylan: It’s been interesting to see pretty much every year you see either new states adding these types of regulations or existing states reducing the threshold of who’s included. How they usually roll these out is they’ll have, let’s say, a three or five year rollout plan where they’ll start the regulation of it’s really only large producers.

00:11:01 Dylan: It’s people producing 5 to 10 tons of food waste a week. Those are the only ones that need to find a solution to their food waste that avoid sending it to a landfill. Then they usually stagger it down year over year where then it reduces to one ton a week, half a ton a week, or even less.

00:11:18 Dylan: A good example of that is Washington State actually, who just in January reduced their threshold to anyone producing 500 pounds a week or more. I think they counted it in gallons, but people don’t really understand what gallons typically look like for food waste. So the pounds, I think, is a more helpful metric.

00:11:36 Dylan: But that basically is every food service business. Every restaurant, school, commercial office building, hospital are now legally required to find either compost hauling or an on-site waste management solution like our ZEUS digesters.

00:11:50 Scott: And is that because of greenhouse gas emissions of food waste in landfills like methane? Or do you know what the rationale behind this regulation is?

00:11:59 Dylan: There’s a lot of different reasons that come into play. Honestly, one of the biggest drivers of this is landfills are filling up and starting to get capped. We are losing out on landfill space. There’s not much left in a lot of regions in the country.

00:12:13 Dylan: They’re really trying to make sure we’re intentional of diverting certain waste products out of landfill, trying to extend those lifetimes. Food waste is one of the biggest levers to reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally.

00:12:25 Dylan: For reference, food waste is 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s just wasted food waste rotting. That’s not even accounting the production and transportation of all the food.

00:12:35 Dylan: Even though people are complaining about Taylor Swift on her jet or all these people flying around, food waste rotting is double the impact of all aviation globally. Just to put that in perspective of the impact that this has.

00:12:48 Dylan: That’s what’s been driving us very early on, to be very excited about solving this problem, is this is really what helps us create global positive climate impact. States are approaching that on a similar perspective of a lot of states have these climate or carbon reduction goals.

00:13:05 Dylan: Reducing food waste into landfills is one of the biggest levers to pull that. It’s also very practical of what they’re doing, again, of whether landfills are filling up. Sometimes a lot of these states and cities are paying really high waste hauling costs to ship these to other states or countries sometimes as well. It’s also a way to actually improve business operations for a lot of facilities.

00:13:27 Dylan: Some states offer some incentives as well to switch over. I’ve seen Austin, Texas has something in place that’s been effective. But it is really helpful to see. We’re never gonna see that at a federal level anytime soon, but states are definitely taking some really practical next steps and options to keep food waste out of landfills.

00:13:45 Scott: It’s a fun action item. Rather than complain about jet traffic to Davos in January, maybe vote for your local compost bill. That’s fascinating. Talking a little bit about both partnerships on the commercial kitchen and restaurant and hospital and school side. I know that you’ve got a really exciting partnership in development with inKind and groups of restaurants.

00:14:08 Scott: Talk a little bit about that on the supply side and then how you guys package and take the soil sauce and then have a bit of a demand side as well, probably from farm communities and groups that want to buy this fertilizer as an alternative, to this heavy reliance on global supply chain and obviously probably more expensive fertilizer that’s less natural.

00:14:30 Dylan: For the digester side of the business, we work directly with a lot of these businesses. So we do just direct outbound campaigns. We’re starting to see a lot more inbound leads as well, which is really exciting to see.

00:14:42 Dylan: At the same time, a lot of my personal time and efforts are really put towards a lot of these more strategic long-term partnerships. So we basically have four or five of those in the works today.

00:14:52 Dylan: And the most up and coming one is with inKind, who is a large financier of restaurants across the country. They help make restaurants and food more affordable for consumers, help restaurants also invest in their own infrastructure and business operations, which is pretty incredible to see.

00:15:08 Dylan: We’ll be launching our fully mobile off-grid ZEUS digester out in Denver, Colorado at the end of this month for multiple restaurants to test the unit out, see if they like it or not before committing to a permanent installation.

00:15:22 Dylan: It’s been interesting. We’ve seen this mobile and off-grid ZEUS digester as a huge unlock for our sales process from start to finish, ‘cause it lets people, again, try a system out, really see if it works the way we say it will.

00:15:36 Dylan: Yes, it really is really easy for your staff to just dump their waste and walk away. And then it makes that decision process a lot easier. So we’ve seen it pretty much cut that sales cycle length in half, which has been pretty incredible.

00:15:49 Dylan: We actually have two different mobile off-grid systems in the work. We have a East Coast one that’s already been touring around the East Coast. Our engineering team is building another one in two weeks. So they’ve been very fast. And that’s gonna be the one that’s going out to Denver, Colorado, and then staying out on the West Coast throughout the end of the year.

00:16:09 Dylan: So that’s been really exciting to see that we’ve seen this coast-to-the-coast expansion that honestly follows some of those state regulations and high waste hauling bills, which go hand in hand. So we see the California, Denver, Colorado, Pacific Northwest has really high waste hauling fees. They also have these existing food waste bans to landfill. Same with the Northeast US. That’s been our two main expansion areas.

00:16:34 Dylan: For this soil sauce, it’s been really interesting to see. So, we’ve done very extensive field trials with this at this point, just to see how does this compare to synthetic fertilizers on the market.

00:16:45 Dylan: If anyone’s familiar with a compost tea, it’s a very concentrated version of that. Very low macronutrients, very high micronutrients, available carbon metabolites. We’re still trying to figure out what makes it work so well, ‘cause with these field trials, we basically saw 14 to 22% yield improvements compared to not using it on corn, soy, and potatoes so the major staple crops.

00:17:08 Dylan Our fertilizer expert… I think his theory is that it really is the available carbon and the metabolites, ‘cause it’s a very different approach to supplying nutrients and microbes to the soil and plants than is typically done.

00:17:22 Dylan: So most farmers and commercial ag, you basically dump nitrogen on the soil very intentionally. They map it all out. It’s all in terms of pounds per acre. But the plants are uptaking all that.

00:17:34 Dylan: So that’s where we also see a lot of issues of nitrogen leaching into our waterways. That’s where we get these toxic algae blooms, whether that’s local or regional. In the Gulf, we see that pretty often as well. There’s a lot of issues right now happening, just the fertilizer industry.

00:17:48 Dylan: And as you said, fertilizer prices have spiked 25% in the past two weeks. 40% of the world’s sulfur goes through the Strait as well. So we’ve seen those prices pretty much double, too. That’s where you see in the fertilizer space, this whole issue of international supply chains that are very volatile that if anything goes wrong, those prices completely destabilize.

00:18:13 Dylan: At the same time, the actual use case of these products isn’t actually the best way to be providing nutrients to the plants. That’s where we’ve seen a very unique opportunity with soil sauce where we can be a really low-cost fertilizer that’s saving farmers money compared to synthetic fertilizers.

00:18:29 Dylan: We’re also then not dumping nitrogen on the soil. So you’re actually reducing a lot of that water runoff issues. And at the same time it’s produced locally, so you’re not worried about shipping this from Russia or Ukraine or China. It’s produced at your neighborhood restaurant or from the hospital down the street.

00:18:46 Dylan: That’s really where we’ve seen really stable and reliable hyper local supply chains that we’re creating. We create these mini hubs in our operating regions. So yes, we work with local farmers and community gardens that use the soil sauce directly.

00:19:01 Dylan: It’s been interesting. We’ve actually seen a ton of traction and interest on the retail side. We actually just launched in 24 Giant Eagle store locations. These are large grocery stores in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana region.

00:19:15 Dylan: Last month, they just expanded to add another dozen stores. Focused on their highest performing stores first, then planning to roll out to all 200 grocery stores pretty much by the end of this month.

00:19:27 Dylan: That’s been super exciting to see that the retail space has actually seen a ton of commercial growth. That’s for house plants and gardens for people to have a very easy to use sustainable fertilizer.

00:19:39 Scott: I need that for my own 20 plants that I have.

00:19:41 Dylan: I love it.

00:19:43 Scott: I’m always taking my coffee grinds and various things and Googling what would be a good addition to the soil. Obviously, enough finite plants that then uses all the nutrients in the dirt and you got to refresh it from time to time.

00:19:55 Scott: We have an LP, a good friend of mine, founder of a company called Farmers Business Network based in Omaha, Nebraska we should connect to you with, because they’re basically providing all the raw supply materials for commercial ag in the form of three or four hundred million dollars a year of sales, fertilizers, all these things.

00:20:14 Scott: I think what a lot of people don’t recognize in the commercial ag space is the planning that goes into each harvest and the six to nine months before that you’re buying features or you’re basically investing in fertilizer.

00:20:27 Scott: To your point, these supply chains are insanely long. Prices can move dramatically. And that in addition to the weather and the yield of the crops and the price per bushel of corn, all of these things come in tandem and determine if you have a great year or a not so great year.

00:21:43 Dylan: And it really all comes down to input costs and what you can sell your product at. The yield improvements really help bridge some of those gaps. But I think exactly as you said towards the beginning of this is that’s where a lot of farmers today are getting pressures of increased costs on inputs and actually pretty stable costs on the actual crops themselves. So they’re not really able to bridge the gap between those two.

00:21:07 Scott: Taking a step back just as a founder building a relatively complex business in the form of hardware, material science, selling into ag, maybe walk us through just the genesis of the business and obviously coming straight out of school, what have been the biggest challenges.

00:21:25 Scott: And obviously we invested three years ago, you’re probably more than four year in. What’s been some of the surprises that you’ve encountered over these last four years?

00:21:34 Dylan: It’s a lot to take on in one company. And it’s been a super exciting and interesting challenge. That’s probably the biggest challenge on its own is just the complexity of the market and the business and trying to figure out all these moving parts.

0021:48 Dylan: What we have found personally to be super helpful is the sequencing of all this. We don’t have to figure it out right away. There’s certain pieces of the business and milestones along the way that we have to hit.

00:22:00 Dylan: And we use OKRs, so just objectives and key results to really be very clear on what we are going to get done every year. And then we have a endlessly growing backlog of things that are of interest at some point we want to tackle, but intentionally postpone and put down. So that, instead of dropping the ball on certain things, we’re intentionally placing that down and pick that up at a later date that’s needed.

00:22:22 Dylan: For us specifically, how that looked is really focusing on the digesters first. It’s making sure that we’re building a reliable system, building a sales process that can scale and is repeatable so that you start to build a supply for the soil sauce.

00:22:37 Dylan: Right now we’re at that inflection point where we’ve really built that repeatable manufacturing, deployment, and sales process for the systems. We’re starting to see a lot more traction on the soil sauce side. Definitely taking some advantage of that and starting to really invest some time and effort and resourcing to making sure that that part of the business is successful.

00:22:56 Dylan: But I think, biggest challenge overall is trying to take on a lot all at once. And we also do all of our own manufacturing in a house. That’s how we have really tight control over quality of our products and services.

00:23:09 Dylan: Something that I always keep a very close eye on is really matching pace our production schedule with our sales schedule. Making sure that we ramp both up in tandem together, that’s definitely a big challenge to try figuring out.

00:23:21 Dylan: But I think over the years, we’ve really gotten into a good pace and intuition on when we need to push the levers and the buttons with additional manufacturing technicians or sales reps. At this point, we also know metrics and outputs of what we get from those investments at a company level.

00:23:38 Scott: If you were to look out five, ten years, I imagine becoming the de facto natural fertilizer brands in the form of… say, a Miracle-Gro that’s derived from food waste, from urban kitchens. Do you have the north star of where you think you’d like to take the business?

00:23:56 Dylan: Overall business goal is global climate impact and world domination of food waste solutions. It’s really true. Today we’re focused on the US market, but we’re even starting to see a lot of international business opportunities.

00:24:10 Dylan: We started working with Compass Group Canada. Compass Group is one of the biggest food service providers in the world. They have 50,000 locations that they service. I think over that at this point. That’s where we’ve seen a ton of opportunities, not just in the US, but globally too.

00:24:25 Dylan: I think a really great example is Island Nations in the Caribbean and in the Pacific as well, where right now they pay not just a truck to pick up their waste, but a boat. It’s immense cost to haul waste outside.

00:24:39 Dylan: They also are seeing a big resurgence in really trying to reclaim a lot of native recipes and local crops and trying to rebuild their food systems because a lot of these populations have basically been relying on international exports for actual food.

00:24:57 Dylan: 90% of a lot of these islands are imported food rather than stuff that’s grown locally. That’s a really good example of areas where we see long-term, where we can be providing a lot of value tapping into these existing problems and potential solutions of very high waste falling costs and really a strong desire to improve local soil health and the food system resilience as well. That’s the big picture for the company.

00:25:24 Dylan: For the different product lines as well, for the digesters, we definitely do see additional product SKUs coming out. Right now, it’s a single one-size-fits-all ZUES digester, but whether it’s smaller systems, larger ones, ones that fit inside the building is what our team is currently working on.

00:25:40 Dylan: We actually are about to deploy a system for the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening up July 4th. So this will be our first inside the building digester, which is a brand new capability, especially for hotels, restaurants, places, offices that don’t have room outside of the building to actually have an inside the building solution.

00:26:01 Dylan: And for the soil sauce, pretty similarly as well. Right now, it’s a single brand of soil sauce and type of it, but most fertilizers have a blooming version, a flowering version, a growth stage for the plant fibers, which is basically just different MPK ratios.

00:26:18 Dylan: Additional products SKUs, international distribution as well of soil sauce too, but again, produced locally. That’s the whole point of our distributed grid of these digesters is you don’t need to ship it, the soil sauce, to a farmer across the world or a country. You actually have a local production hub that you can tap into.

00:26:38 Scott: Not only that, but you have a beautiful ZEUS machine that’s painted with local graffiti and local artists. Which I absolutely love what you’ve done in Pittsburgh to really ensconce them into the urban fiber and actually improve neighborhoods and communities with what would otherwise look like an ugly dumpster.

00:26:55 Scott: One of my last questions, I had the chance to have lunch many, many years ago with the founder of Allbirds, the shoes. And what he said is that people on the front end say, I wanna buy these shoes because they’re sustainable business and they’re coming from New Zealand sheep fibers and recycled plastics. But when we actually hold people at the point of sale, the real drivers of purchase behavior are they look cute and they’re affordable.

00:27:20 Scott: A lot of businesses may have the broad desire to do better for the world and save food waste, but probably the brass tacks that comes down to the economics of the carrot and the stick of there’s either regulatory compliance that they have to stick with or the cost of getting rid of that food waste is astronomical.

00:27:39 Scott: How do you guys think of the unit economics of installing these systems, maybe the revenue share around the production of soil sauce on the back end and basically turning this from a cost center of a business into maybe a revenue driver?

00:27:53 Dylan: You’ve hit the nail on the head of this is exactly the flipping of the script that we’re doing today. Most people see food waste as waste. They see it as a cost center. All they do is pay to have it all the way and that’s it. That’s exactly what we’re actively doing today: is turning that into an income and revenue driver for their business.

00:28:12 Dylan: What that does on a unit basis for our partners is increases, provides a little bit of revenue from the soil sauce, we collect and resell that they don’t need to do anything. They’re also reducing their waste hauling bills.

00:28:24 Dylan: So we’re usually saving businesses at least a few thousand dollars a year net, which is really exciting to see that… yes, this is a great solution for the environment and it’s easy to use, but the main driver, exactly as you said, is making sure this makes financial sense for their bottom line, which we’ve been able to prove out. That’s really the big unlock for us is making sure that’s really what helps us scale globally.

00:28:47 Dylan: One of the biggest things that we figured out pretty early on in the company’s development is equipment financing to help with that. We actually finance these digesters for our customers. We work directly with a bank subsidiary that does equipment financing.

00:29:01 Dylan: What that does is it basically turns what is usually an equipment purchase or capex expense into just an ongoing operating expense, which is immediately offset from reduction in waste hauling bills. There isn’t some 24, 36-month ROI. It’s immediate cost savings as soon as you switch over to ZEUS digester.

00:29:21 Scott: Amazing. My last question for you, and this is something that we think a lot about, is not being contrarian for contrarian sake, but predicting where you think future consensus is going and building something that skates ahead of where market trends are.

00:29:35 Scott: Everybody has frameworks that generally lag based on heuristics of past things that have happened. As an entrepreneur, it’s really your job to think about the future, think about where the world is going and make a bet that is something that you have to stick with for many years.

00:29:51 Scott: The question is: within the industry, within the expert pundits of this domain, what’s something that you guys took an approach that was different or fundamentally at odds with, or these folks would disagree with, “Hey, this is not going to work. You guys are never going to be successful.”

00:30:07 Scott: But you guys drew the line in the sand and you said, “We’re going to do it anyway.” ‘Cause I think a lot of great businesses like yours, it takes a high conviction founder, the blend of both stubbornness to continue to go in a certain direction.

00:30:19 Dylan: Very stubborn indeed.

00:30:21 Scott: And the ability to listen to feedback. It’s always that dance of humility and grit and perseverance. But what’s one major maybe industry norm that you guys have gone against or disagreed with that you think that you’re right and the rest of the market is wrong.

00:30:37 Dylan: I think the main one is this concept of centralized versus decentralized waste processing. I don’t think the market is necessarily right or wrong. Ultimately, we need both.

00:30:47 Dylan: But I think this idea of on-site decentralized waste processing systems just isn’t out there. It just doesn’t exist. The only thing we have today are these large centralized landfills, large centralized composting, or anaerobic digestion facilities. Those exist already.

00:31:04 Dylan: But they’re $50 million at a minimum to build. They take 5 to 10 years to get permitting, financing, actually constructing, get it operating. That’s where we maybe do agree with market consensus is there is a really large lack in waste processing infrastructure, specifically for food waste.

00:31:23 Dylan: We know we only have a limited amount of time to make impact for greenhouse gas reduction, also to divert food waste from landfills to keep those operating and make sure they don’t fill up. And so I think that’s where we’ve seen a very unique opportunity in the market of moving quickly.

00:31:40 Dylan: That’s why our bet is on-site solutions. That’s really where we disagree. Yes, sometimes you have to haul it. You don’t have any room. That’s the only option and that works well. And that’s why we still need these large centralized facilities. But a lot of the time, it’s actually better, cheaper, and more reliable to have an on-site digester solution.

00:32:00 Dylan: For us, it’s digesters. You can pick other options or technologies if you want to. But I think this idea of a decentralized grid of these systems is very unique. We’ve started to show people it actually does work.

00:32:12 Dylan: We had all these huge snow storms and power outages over the winter and we’re operating. We are not waiting for a truck to get through the snow and for the driveway or road to get plowed. For an operating business, that’s difficult. They can’t deal with mountains of food waste just sitting there waiting.

00:32:30 Dylan: That’s where we’ve started to show the market that by being on site, by being decentralized, it’s actually a superpower in reliability, is you never need to worry about missed pickups or refused pickups or something going wrong. It’s 24/7/365. You dump your food waste in the trash chute.

00:32:49 Dylan: That’s been exciting to see that it’s starting to work in this space. I think there’s other models and industries where they’ve done this as well. But I think for waste specifically, that really hasn’t been done before. It has always been these large centralized facilities.

00:33:02 Dylan: The financing and construction piece, it also is a permitting benefit. By being on site, you’re actually typically falling under permit by rule exemptions for states. We’re deploying these systems. I think our last system deployment was two weeks from contract signed, to system on site operating and processing their food waste.

00:33:22 Dylan: Because as soon as you start hauling food waste from one facility to another or to one centralized facility, that’s where you need these like large state permits. They’re not super expensive, but they take a while. And again, that’s the thing we don’t have time for. We don’t have time to sit around and wait for permit approvals.

00:33:37 Dylan: And so I think that’s where… initially that was a pretty large bet that the market disagreed with. We started to show that it works well and it actually enables us to scale a lot faster than a lot of other options out there on the market.

00:33:51 Dylan: My perspective is we need both. You need to build more of these centralized facilities. That’s what gets you huge capacity improvements, but we also need these smaller and faster solutions to fill in gaps in the meantime.

00:34:04 Scott: I love that. That’s such a well way of articulating agreement with just the broad gap in the market and the supply for these facilities, but then the contrarian bet to build out a more decentralized way of handling food waste.

00:34:18 Scott: In the quick lightning round that we have to wrap up the podcast, we got a couple of questions for you. What’s a book that you’re currently reading or a podcast that you’re enjoying?

00:34:28 Dylan: Oh, I think a book that I recently read and I’m due to reread soon, very opinionated as you can tell by the title is called, The Man That Broke Capitalism. It’s about the former CEO of GE and his approach of just prioritize shareholder returns above everything, above employees, above staff, the environment, the communities that you serve. It shows the results of it, of what happens when you build that system.

00:34:57 Dylan: I’m personally very interested by that. We actually founded Ecotone as a public benefit corporation. So we have a triple bottom line of positive investor returns and very strong revenue growth, but also positive social and environmental impact as well. So that’s been I think one of the most interesting reads most recently. That was from our IP attorney who’s a former GE engineer as well.

00:35:20 Scott: Amazing. If you could live anywhere, I know you’re in Florida currently and otherwise in Pittsburgh, what would be on your number one place to live?

00:35:30 Dylan: Oh, that’s a tough question. I feel like at least if we’re talking about a year or two, maybe not indefinitely. Long-term, I have to be close to family. So that’s the Northeast, New York area.

00:5:41 Dylan: But short term, I’d maybe say Spain. I’ve been studying Spanish for a while. I’ve always wanted to live in a Spanish speaking country. So I think that would be one, maybe for more personal reasons that I’d be very interested in.

00:35:55 Dylan: Half my family actually lives in Australia, but I think that’s a little too far away and my mom and dad would not be very happy if I was completely on the other side of the world.

00:36:06 Scott: And finally, what’s your favorite productivity hack as a busy CEO traveling, building a complex business? You have any secrets for us out here?

00:36:15 Dylan: Not like a super complex one. It’s really just time blocking is mine. One of my friends taught me maybe four years ago or so at this point. It’s just been a huge unlock for my productivity.

00:36:27 Dylan: Especially as a founder, as a CEO and executive, you get pulled in a lot of directions. Brain switching from sales to manufacturing to engineering to operations has a bit of a toll. So I think the time blocking helps reduce that.

00:36:42 Dylan: You can combine or have half a day that’s just sales or just engineering or just operations, switches that at task switching lag. It also really is just a way to live through your prioritization.

00:36:55 Dylan: We all talk about brutal prioritization of what is urgent and important and needs to get done now. I found that as one of the most effective ways to make sure that I’m blocking off time to complete the things that are both urgent and important. And again, intentionally postpone things that might not be.

00:37:12 Scott: Amazing. Dylan, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Where can listeners find you if they want to reach out or learn more about Ecotone?

00:37:21 Dylan: We’re on all socials at Ecotone Renew and our website is ecotonerenewables.com. Has a ton of information on our digesters for specific business types on soil sauce. You can order soil sauce right there as well if you want. You can also learn a little bit more about the company and mission as well there.

00:37:40 Scott: Amazing. I’m gonna pick up my soil sauce today.

00:37:42 Dylan: I love it.

00:37:43 Scott: Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you soon.

00:37:46 Dylan: Thank you so much for having me, Scott. Appreciate it.

00:37:50 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, where 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 Dylan Lew in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 113 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Kenzie Butera Davis, founder and CEO of Maro — a platform providing early intervention and risk detection for youth mental health in K-12 schools. Kenzie shares how a personal family experience pushed her from nonprofit and venture work into building the infrastructure schools were missing. She discusses how Maro challenges the entrenched belief that mental health has no place in the classroom, instead unifying universal screening, family communication, and care coordination into one system that identifies struggling students before they fall through the cracks.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Deploying universal screening to close the gap between first symptom and treatment.

• Building school-based infrastructure to bridge families, health plans, and providers.

• Navigating parent consent and data privacy in K-12 health adoption.

• Leveraging state screening mandates as a distribution accelerant.

• Expanding from screening tool to full-stack school and health system network.

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

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

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

00:00:32 Jenny: Welcome everyone to Venture Everywhere, where today we’re very excited to have Kenzie, the founder of Maro, a platform that provides early intervention and risk detection for youth mental health.

00:00:44 Jenny: I love the mission of Maro, focusing on children, which I feel have been overlooked in some way. So excited to jump in there. But I’d love to start with, tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a little bit of background, Kenzie, as we learn more about the company.

00:01:00 Kenzie: I have a huge passion for working with startups. It didn’t start off that way. I used to work in the nonprofit space. So I spent quite a bit of time working for policy and advocacy organizations, education, and then did a short stint in direct service as well, where I was working for a rape crisis and domestic violence shelter that served women and children in 16 counties in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area.

00:01:26 Kenzie: I really loved that work, but generally in the work that I was doing, felt frustrated because a lot of our funding was earmarked for specific needs that were determined by the grants that we were receiving. And they weren’t always applicable to the actual needs of the people that we were serving. And so there was this innate tension to the work.

00:01:49 Kenzie: I applied for an internship with an accelerator program, something that we have in common. So I got this internship with The Company Lab, is what it’s called, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So quick aside, Chattanooga was the first area in the country to get The Gig. So we’re the fastest internet in the nation. We get a shout out in Ironman 3.

00:02:10 Kenzie: And so we built this incredible accelerator program around that notion. Brought founders into the city to build the early days of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. I got to benefit from that and get a lot of exposure to early stage companies through this accelerator program. It was very early. Precursor to the Techstars and YCs of the world.

00:02:30 Kenzie: Through the nature of working there for a few years, I built a relationship with one of the board members, and she ended up bringing me on to work for her venture fund. It’s called the Jump Fund. They invest early stage, pre-seed through Series A and women-founded businesses.

00:02:47 Kenzie: I just got a lot of exposure to what it looks like, what it takes to build an early stage company and get off the ground. We did quite a bit of work in education and healthcare as well. So I was already personally really interested in that side of the work and just got the professional education to back it.

00:03:04 Jenny: I always tell people that an accelerator is this amazing training ground because of the volume. I spent almost eight years at Techstars and it was just reviewing not dozens or hundreds. It was literally like thousands of applications and pitches.

00:03:18 Jenny: So I think it’s a great transition point for many people that don’t necessarily have exposure to entrepreneurship. The accelerator is such an interesting onslaught of entrepreneurship. I love that you ended up there and that maybe informed your trajectory of being your own founder now.

00:03:35 Kenzie: And I think people would be surprised at how many pivots you could fit into a 12-week period. So you see a lot of what the startups are going through in those early days.

00:03:45 Jenny: So then tell us about the early days. Obviously, everything that you just described is the perfect confluence for this company – your experiences with not-for-profit, with communities, with all those things. Was the idea like, you woke up one morning, you’re like, this is what I need to do? Or was it more of a slow burn, you’re figuring out where the opportunity set was?

00:04:05 Kenzie: It was more of a slow burn. I wrote an academic thesis during my junior and senior year on the implementation of healthcare in schools. I was looking at sex education at the time, but pivoted to mental health in my personal research post-academic thesis after seeing it up close and personal.

00:04:25 Kenzie: I had a younger family member who was really struggling. She ended up in and out of inpatient hospitalization for suicide attempts. And I was so surprised because I feel like I’m super close with her. We have a great relationship. And I didn’t believe that I didn’t know that she was dealing with what she was dealing with.

00:04:46 Kenzie: It was a big wake up call for me to start looking at how do you more systematically track when kids are struggling, if they’re private, or if they don’t have the language to put around the things that they’re experiencing. I just started deep diving into what ultimately I found was screening and learning more about how screening takes shape in K-12 schools.

00:05:10 Jenny: Give us a little color on the early days of the company. I’m sure you’ve experienced some twists and turns along the way. So tell us about getting the company off the ground in those early days and then fast forward to maybe where things are now.

00:05:24 Kenzie: I would say what really put us in the map in the early days, early career experience was we pitched at ASU GSV, which is the world’s largest education conference. So they used to have this massive pitch competition where they bring in… over 900 companies from 60, 70 different countries.

00:05:45 Kenzie: It’s a multi-round pitch competition from application to the original pitch, and then you have to make it to the final. And we won. The final competition is at the Radieshell Amphitheater in San Diego. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was there, which was very cool. I’m a very short person, and he’s not, so being backstage with him was pretty funny.

00:06:07 Kenzie: But Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, spoke. And so we kind of had this really incredible opportunity where we were just sharing this vision that we had for what youth mental health could look like in schools. The final winner is selected by educators.

00:06:22 Kenzie: And that’s what put us on the map. We were able to close our pre-seed round and hit the ground running from there. And then now, we’re really starting to figure out how we expand beyond mental health in schools to partner with health plans, providers, families, and the school systems.

00:06:39 Jenny: What do you find the most challenging part about working in this space? Obviously, there’s some regulatory things, there are some traditional cultural things. What’s super challenging, would you say, about the space in general?

00:06:52 Kenzie: With screening, it’s actually pretty controversial. It’s very evidence-based. We do screening in so many other areas of healthcare, and it’s preventative. If you actually do go see a therapist or even in pediatric office settings, a lot of times they will do mental health screening now.

00:07:10 Kenzie: But bringing this to the masses has been more controversial than I originally anticipated. What that means from an operational standpoint is just there’s a lot of trust to build.

00:07:21 Kenzie: The only way to really do that is through data to show, hey, this population got better because we identified kids who are struggling that maybe weren’t on your radar. We did that without overburdening your school system or overburdening a broader health care system. We only refer, on average, 2% of students out to external care. The rest is usually feasible to be managed by the school, which is really incredible.

00:07:50 Kenzie: So there’s that piece. And then there’s the parent communication piece as well, which is we want to equip schools with all of this information about parental rights. You, as a parent, absolutely have the right if you want to choose whether or not your child is screened at school.

00:08:06 Kenzie: And just making sure that people don’t feel like, oh, there’s this scary company that’s going to come in and screen my student. That’s not what it is, but that can be people’s perception until they engage with the materials.

00:08:18 Kenzie: And so I think that’s been one of the harder challenges of building specifically within K-12 schools, where they are often a politicized place for healthcare, and then specifically within screening.

00:08:29 Jenny: You’ve used that term before, building trust with the community. So can you talk a little bit more about how you’ve been able to do that? The education part and conveying that this is optional, but any other methodologies you’ve learned along the way for building trust with those communities?

00:08:45 Kenzie: It’s all about collaborating with the district. They know their families and what they need the best and just being really transparent. We tell you the questions that your child would be asked if you consent to screening. We make it really easy for you to opt in or out. We try to be as clear about what that process looks like. So the transparency piece.

00:09:06 Kenzie: And then, in terms of the collaboration with the schools, it’s really just customizing all of the communication and making sure if there is a question that you know your parents are going to want to know, let’s pull that out of the FAQs. So instead of sending 40 FAQs, we’re sending this really custom 5 or 10 that we know are most relevant for your community.

00:09:24 Kenzie: And we’ve seen this play out. For example, we see this a lot in our rural communities. I’m from Montana. All my family’s in Tennessee and Mississippi. I have a huge heart for rural healthcare. And that tends to be where we run into the most questions about privacy and student data. And so we’ve just been really thoughtful about how do we make sure that parents don’t feel blindsided when we implement screening.

00:09:47 Jenny: Talking about opportunities, which also can be challenges, sounds like some of the states are implementing their own compliance mandates. And so that could be an accelerant for you or potentially the other way. So I think, people listening, there’s a lot of this that is collaborative with government as well.

00:10:09 Kenzie: Illinois is a really good example of this. They have recently passed legislation to require screening for grades 3 through 12. They did a wonderful job. They did a landscape analysis. They talked to educators. They went to communities. The policy is informed by all of this community feedback. And they have a phased implementation plan. So it’s not all happening at once.

00:10:33 Kenzie: What we’re doing for schools that are adopting us in Illinois is we’re saying we recognize that no matter how informed this policy is, implementation is still really scary and it’s hard when you are under-resourced as a school. We’re going to take that off your plate and here’s how we do that specifically.

00:10:49 Kenzie: So I think there is a huge opportunity in screening alone. And then there’s this bigger opportunity that we’re growing toward, which is there’s still a lot of missing infrastructure when you go to implement… or I guess as a family, when I go to engage with intersection of the health system and the school system. And so as we grow, that’s where we think we can play a really big role.

00:11:12 Jenny: Walk us through a little bit of where you are today. I think I read somewhere that you’re in more than 60 schools. What does the future look like for you guys?

00:11:22 Kenzie: Currently, we’re serving just over 70,000 students and growing, especially with the Illinois accelerant there. So we are primarily in Illinois and Northern California, although there’s nothing stopping us from serving students in any other state.

00:11:35 Kenzie: We’ve been really focused. You know the startup mantra, start small. And we did. We started small with just screening and just focusing on mental health and building relationships with schools.

00:11:48 Kenzie: We are seeing significant evidence of product-market fit with this tooling. Now, we’re growing toward this bigger opportunity, which the vision has always really been. There’s this network effect that you can build if you have distribution of schools, if you can really own that channel, you can reach families and you can build trust with families.

00:12:11 Kenzie: That’s something that’s really hard for health plans and providers to do. And so you create a lot of value by being that intermediary. As we’re growing, there’s a lot that we’re doing in stealth right now that we’ll be able to share soon from a product line standpoint, but it really is about building that infrastructure so that families engaging with the school system and health system don’t meet points of friction.

00:12:34 Kenzie: Just one really specific example of that is if you’re trying to share your immunization records at the beginning of the school year so that your child can compete in sports or just generally attend school.

00:12:47 Kenzie: That’s something that is a huge pain point. Really annoying and requires a lot of manual effort, believe it or not, in this day and age. That’s a prime example of a high friction pain point that involves all of those parties where we can play a role.

00:13:00 Jenny: Since you worked in an accelerator, you obviously know the value of mentorship and surrounding yourself with more than capital. So can you talk about how you got that support around you as you were building, especially in the early days?

00:13:14 Kenzie: Two very specific people come to mind in my early days, and I will shout them out. Jessica Millstone, she really took me under her wing. We were her first investment out of that fund. I met her in one of my very first presentations in New York, pitching the concept. She’s just been someone who has mentored me all along the way, now sits on our board.

00:13:35 Kenzie: And then, Dr. David Adair was also one of our earliest investors. He is a maternal fetal health doctor and supported a lot of high-risk pregnancies and just has worked with a lot of young women who, often, their health issues are coinciding with mental health concerns.

00:13:53 Kenzie: He was just a big believer from day one and has always been a sounding board every time we have challenges. And he also runs a venture firm on the side, so it’s a great combination. So I feel like I’ve received just a lot of people who are willing to be there through the pivots.

00:14:07 Jenny: So speaking about your supporters, what’s an idea that experts in your field say that you disagree with. So what’s the common parlance and you’re just like, I don’t think that’s right?

00:14:19 Kenzie: Mental health experts will not say this. This is more on the education side, but there are a lot of folks in academia who just don’t see a place for mental health in schools.

00:14:29 Kenzie: The argument is that if you’re a teacher or an academic counselor, your role should be purely academic and that time spent away from an academic orientation in the classroom is not time well spent and that the health system is there for health or the school nurse is there for health, but the classroom time is just for the class.

00:14:50 Kenzie: There is a growing body of research to show that specifically anxiety and depression are the number one student self-reported barriers to academic progress. That’s from a certain national survey of 220,000 students conducted by Youth Truth.

00:15:07 Kenzie: We see evidence of this as it relates to adverse childhood experiences and trauma. We see it as it relates to some levels of social, emotional learning as well.

00:15:16 Kenzie: So there really is a growing body of evidence that we are hoping to contribute to to say, hey, actually, the 5, 10 minutes that it takes to universal screening, although it is taking that out of advisory period or what have you, it’s worth its weight once you see how students progress post receiving an intervention… screening plus intervention.

00:15:37 Jenny: I get why people thought that in the 60s, but mental health seems to be the biggest issue these days across categories, adults and children. We had a school nurse at our school. Let me tell you, that was where you went when you wanted to like get out of your math test.

00:15:51 Jenny: There wasn’t much happening there. I don’t think that’s changed in many places. That’s crazy that people still think of the separation between students thriving at school and their own mental and physical well-being. That’s insane.

00:16:06 Kenzie: It’s challenging for sure to still see this difference. When we’re going to implement in schools and realize, hey, there is quite a bit of education that still has to be done. There’s a lot of opportunity there.

00:16:18 Kenzie: We’re going through the Georgetown Thrive Research Program right now, working with their researchers to actually develop our own body of research around this and show that mental health can improve attendance, can improve certain academic factors related to grades and graduation.

00:16:33 Kenzie: One of the areas where even if you don’t see eye-to-eye between, for example, us and a school administrator that you can start to align is school safety, because that’s so intertwined in mental health.

00:16:46 Kenzie: Students are committing acts of violence or if they are harming themselves. If you meet someone who doesn’t agree, that’s a problem. They probably shouldn’t be working in the school system.

00:16:57 Jenny: When people think about you, what do they think is your superpower? I love this question because, especially as founders, we have to wear a lot of hats and be multidimensional, but if people kind of distill it down to that thing that you’re really great at, that you’re known for. Your passion and your mission here is so clear, but what’s the thing that people say, yeah, Kenzie’s amazing at that?

00:17:19 Kenzie: It’s been two things. One has helped me as a founder and one that has helped me as a leader of my team. So when I say founder, I mean really fundraising, which is storytelling.

00:17:29 Kenzie: The benefit of working for an accelerator program is you hear a lot of pitches. You also pick up on a pattern. And so I coach entrepreneurs now on this. One of the things is I try to coach them to go against the grain of the pattern because people tune out without even realizing they’re tuning out if you don’t trip them up on what they’re expecting to hear.

00:17:48 Kenzie: That’s been a really fun skill set for me to refine because I’m an absolute theater kid and I’ve enjoyed that part of the work.

00:17:55 Kenzie: But I think what I’m learning as I make that transition from founder to CEO and I’m leading the team is connecting the dots between the bigger vision and the day-to-day work and feeling really comfortable navigating policy and painting the picture for our health plan, who are receiving this new product line that we’re building out.

00:18:19 Kenzie: Versus been jumping into a call with one of our school counselors who’s just working to smoothly implement universal screening in their school. That’s been an absolute requirement from the past year of being a founder.

00:18:32 Jenny: I guess my last question before our speed round is what does success look like for you personally and for the company?

00:18:39 Kenzie: Success for the company near term is our mission, which is to eliminate the average 11 year gap between first symptom and treatment in youth mental health.

00:18:49 Kenzie: Over time, it’s what I keep hitting at with regard to just making sure that when parents are engaging with the school system and the health system that they’re not running into friction that makes them stall, not receive the access to care that they need. On a personal front, I just had a baby so being a good mama.

00:19:10 Jenny: I love it. Well, congratulations on that. Okay. speed round. So these are just very fast answers to the questions before we wrap up. Is there a book that you’re reading, a podcast or some media that you’ve been having fun with or excited about?

00:19:23 Kenzie: Honestly, aside from the news, most of what I’ve been reading is very specific blogs about healthcare interoperability and some of the latest policies coming down the line with regard to individual access to health records.

00:19:36 Kenzie: If anyone listening happens to be nerding out over that subject, one of my favorite new blogs is from a startup called Fast and Health and their founder, Jason, writes great content. And then Brendan Keeler, of course, has a blog called Health API Guy. Your other investment, Nirvana, I’m sure they read that all the time.

00:19:56 Jenny: If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be and why?

00:20:00 Kenzie: There would be some European beach just because Europe and it’s warm.

00:20:05 Jenny: Favorite productivity hack these days?

00:20:07 Kenzie: We’ve been doing a lot of coding with Claude and experimenting with that to create internal products, both personally and professionally. Just give a really quick example. I know this is a speed round, but we had a client the other day give us a potential hurdle we could run into.

00:20:22 Kenzie: In a day and a half, I was able to spin up a tool that completely solved that for them. And so it’s just amazing, the speed to which you can respond to challenges that come up versus just throwing something on an agile roadmap that you hope you eventually get to.

00:20:37 Kenzie: And then I’m using it personally, too. Like the things that takes the most time on the weekends is meal prep for the family and going through the Pinterest board. And so I’m creating an app that does all of that for me.

00:20:48 Jenny: Where can listeners find you?

00:20:51 Kenzie: Just LinkedIn or you can reach out on our website, which is www.meetmaro.com.

00:20:58 Jenny: Well, thank you so much, Kenzie. This was so fun to get to know you a little bit more and your journey and your company is very inspiring. It seems like you definitely have founder market fit. Best of luck and talk to you soon.

00:21:09 Kenzie: Thank you so much, Jenny.

00:21:12 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 Kenzie Butera Davis in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 112 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Allison Lee, co-founder and CEO of Revive, a turnkey virtual tailoring solution that helps fashion brands reduce returns and dead stock by refurbishing and reselling garments. Allison shares how a pandemic-forced pivot exposed a damages problem every brand was quietly absorbing but no one was solving. She discusses how Revive challenges the industry consensus that damaged inventory is a write-off, instead unifying item-level inspection, refurbishment, and resale into one system that recovers value brands didn’t know they had.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Replacing SKU-level inventory systems with item-level inspection and decisioning.

• Bridging the gap between brand needs and 3PL capabilities.

• Refurbishment as a higher-recovery alternative to donation and liquidation.

• Live commerce as the resale channel for Gen Z shoppers.

• Human-in-the-loop operations where AI augments rather than replaces physical inspection.

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

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

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

00:00:32 Jenny: Welcome, everyone, to Venture Everywhere. Today, we have a very special guest, Allison Lee, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Revive, a turnkey virtual tailoring solution that helps fashion brands reduce returns and dead stock by analyzing and refurbishing garments for resale.

00:00:49 Jenny: I love this company, not only because I’ve known Allison for a long time and a huge fan, but I love the sustainability angle here. And that’s the thing that grabbed me, always, with all the iterations of Revive. Welcome, Allison, to the pod.

00:01:03 Allison: Thanks so much, Jenny. I’m so excited to share more. I feel like our business model has certainly evolved in over seven years that you and I have known each other.

00:01:13 Jenny: We’ve known each other for a while.

00:01:14 Allison: Yeah, and talked about how we can really bring value to the brand. I feel like sustainability and this feel-good side of like, “Oh, how do I rescue items from prematurely ending up in a landfill?” But I think the other side of that is how do I maximize the actual financial value of these goods?

00:01:32 Allison: Yeah. It’s been a really fun journey as we went from a tailoring company to a refurbishing company and now it’s a resale company. So definitely have expanded quite a bit.

00:01:43 Jenny: I love it. I’d love to talk about the beginning and the inspiration for the original company. But, aside from mission, where did you get this idea that this was going to be the future seven, eight years ago?

00:01:56 Allison: Long, long time ago, it was actually called Hemster. It was not even called Revive. When we first started Hemster, the mission was simpler. It was more for the brick and mortar stores to really capture the right sales happening in the fitting rooms.

00:02:11 Allison: So we’re really focusing on the fitting room experience of like, you’re trying on that item, but you can only pick between small and medium. And you’re like, “Still doesn’t fit me.” What do you do? So we just wanted to really provide tools to these store associates and managers that can maximize sales and minimize returns.

00:02:28 Allison: Our first go to market strategy was like, how do I work with the malls back then? Westfield, San Francisco is RIP now, but that was actually like our first place that we launched and got in touch with 30 brands right away. We signed the deals with Westfield, G.G.P., Simon, Macerich.

00:02:46 Allison: We were able to work with a lot of stores right away and that’s how we built our relationship with the brands as like an outsider. Once that happened, we’re like, “Amazing. Let’s raise our seed.” In 2019, moved to New York from SF and we’re growing our footprint quite rapidly. And then, pandemic happened in 2020 and all the malls, stores closed down literally overnight.

00:03:11 Allison: What had really helped was we had a really close relationship with these brands so we were able to deploy e-comm and sort of repair portal for their consumers to try on. In that process, we actually noticed that the warehouse managers were using our repair portal way more than the consumers.

00:03:29 Allison: And that’s how we organically figured out that there was this damages problem that every brand was dealing with. And that’s how we pivoted into more of the Revive.

00:03:38 Allison: Yeah. It was very consumer-driven and very user-driven journey, but in that process, you observe how they actually use your product. And you’re like, “Oh, there’s a whole new use case that I didn’t even think about.” And you sort of like follow what you see.

00:03:53 Jenny: I love that. I remember when we first met, I am an unusual sized person because I’m 5’10. I have no hips and clothing online does not fit me. I’m like one of those weird people that always struggled with it. So I like the mission.

00:04:05 Jenny: But I remember even in those early days, you always had a bigger idea and mission. It’s one of the things I really admire about you, Allison, wherever you are today, you’re always thinking about the next thing.

00:04:17 Jenny: Even though it was a pivot, maybe something you hadn’t anticipated, I do remember in the early days, you kind of architecting where this could go beyond the consumer measuring and whatnot. Talk a little bit about the transition and, obviously, you kind of went from consumer to more B2B and what that was like.

00:04:36 Allison: I feel like with the consumer, it’s a very interesting challenge because like you’re relying on the brands to market it. And like we still believe that that’s a new consumer movement. I think Gen Z’s are craving even more personalization.

00:04:48 Allison: Also, how does like this D2C brands compete with dupe brands and like Shein’s and Temu’s now? You have to really think about what’s the elevated experience I’m giving to my own consumers to protect my most valuable assets. So that angle of, “Hey, let’s make sure we’re maximizing the sales within your season.”

00:05:07 Allison: Once you kind of see a lot of product market fit around that, then you think about what’s the other application of your current product that you have already built. A lot of the volume actually comes from the B2B-owned inventory so we really want to think about getting into that. We just didn’t really didn’t know what the angle was until we saw them using our portal in a very specific way.

00:05:29 Allison: I do believe that having the right P.O.V. or hypotheses of wanting to expand and wanting to like go into different application of the software that you have built already. But I don’t think we would have figured out this damages thing is the right angle unless we’re watching the users really closely.

00:05:48 Allison: But we think about Hemster and like now we call this Atelier to make it more elevated. If Atelier is really good at maximizing in-season sales, then brands still have to think about like, “Well, there are still things that didn’t sell during in-season that I’m dealing with.” Those are two big buckets of items of damages or excess inventory.

00:06:10 Allison: Excess inventory is perfectly good quality, but it’s like the final extra large that no one wanted or the color people didn’t want. Then we thought how do I also help brands for those two additional buckets sales.

00:06:23 Allison: The Revive came to life because the damages, we should refurbish it and restock it so you can sell even more in the full season price situation. But also on the liquidation side, that’s where our resale on the live streaming and live commerce is really growing quickly. It’s like the same idea of wanting to help brands, but we’re expanding into different product lines.

00:06:46 Jenny: Super interesting. So now you’re a supply chain company. Can you talk about the supply chain gap that Revive is solving that many brands underestimate? They don’t necessarily come to you day one like they have this pain point and then they’re like, “Oh, shoot. Allison, I need help.”

00:07:02 Allison: When you think about what’s the brand’s current blocker, I think it’s tech and logistics. Both of those two things come together. So if you’re thinking about how the brands are set up, their system doesn’t think about item at an item level. They think like, “Oh, there’s a SKU and quantity.”

00:07:20 Allison: So they know that I have 2000 of this SKU. But when you’re dealing with returns and damages and things that didn’t sell, you actually need to go layer deeper and think like, yes, there’s 2000 items that got damaged out, but you don’t understand why individually were the problems.

00:07:41 Allison: So there is this huge tech and system gap that brands are feeling today. A lot of the brands, because they outsource their logistics already, it’s so hard for them to like train a third party logistics person to really care about the ROI and inventory value for you.

00:08:00 Allison: So they’re like, “Ah, it’s a very binary instructions that I have to give them.” It’s like either the 3PLs will handle everything and charge every single item $20. So like service them or they don’t do anything.

00:08:14 Allison: So you’re sort of like, “Yeah, but only some items are worth it for me like to incur this additional $20 fee.” So how would a 3PL think about it in the same lens that brands are? So I think that’s the gap that we’re closing.

00:08:28 Allison: It’s like, first of all, let me build you a system that actually looks at every single item and make this idea of like, is this item worth it or not? Because even if it’s the same SKU, you’re like, “This one just has a minor stain.” That’s a different story than like, this thing has blood on it. Like, you should really not try to fix this. And that decision point right now is impossible to make. That’s the proprietary system that we built first.

00:08:55 Allison: And then, we also come with physical humans and warehouses who are trained to use our system to actually follow the SOP that we give them. Because that’s the other side that I have seen from SaaS companies. Like, sure, you can plug in the data and give recommendations.

00:09:12 Allison: But I find that when you’re dealing with physical goods clients, they need physical help more than data help. So they’re like, “Can you just do it also? If you’re going to recommend it, can you do it, too?” So we have really built both of those things together to go to market.

00:09:29 Jenny: And once you develop that trust, there’s a lot you can do for these customers.

00:09:33 Allison: For sure. And that’s how we win over their resale business on the liquidation side of like, showing them that, “Look, we are really good at making decisions to understand which specific items you should restock versus not.”

00:09:47 Allison: Then the natural next conversation is they’re like, “So what should I do with all the non-restocked items? Do you have a solution for us?” Initially, we started to sell on static third-party platforms like eBay, Poshmark Bestie or Depop, ThredUp, where you’re posting the prices.

00:10:05 Allison: We were watching the Gen Z and resale trend and we have observed this emerging platform coming up. That’s this live commerce on like the Whatnot, eBay Live, TikTok Live, Instagram Live, all these live selling environment is actually a lot more coherent to how Gen Zs grew up.

00:10:25 Allison: Because if you’re thinking about how they’re interacting with their content and their entertainment, the static e-commerce listings feel really boring to those Gen Zers. You actually need to hook them and get them interacting with the brands in a more interesting way.

00:10:39 Allison: And I think those are that Whatnot platform where you’re watching the host, you’re looking at the specific item and this feels like it’s a game and you’re interacting like through this like bidding exercise. We have seen that environment grow 20X.

00:10:55 Allison: The year over year growth was insane. So now we’re tripling down to like think about how do I get brands to participate in this new shopper behavior that without us as an infrastructure, it’s literally impossible for a brand to do so.

00:11:12 Jenny: Taking a step back, can you tell us what typically happens to these garments today? Holistically, what did you notice was happening to the garments and why is that system so broken?

00:11:23 Allison: We sort of talked about items to sell. That’s great. But there’s this bunch of things that just don’t sell and don’t get restocked. There’s two major buckets of why that’s happening.

00:11:33 Allison: One is that quality is bad because there was stain, there was deodorant things. You need to do something to fix this. That’s very different from like the true quality is fine, but people didn’t want it, which is the excess inventory.

00:11:46 Allison: Usually, we have seen brands engage in three different ways. Brands who don’t have their shit together treat the damages and excess inventory as same. And they’re like, “Oh, it doesn’t even matter if it’s a problem with the quality or problem with the consumer signal. I’m just going to like recycle the whole thing or donate the whole thing or try to sell it into like offshore liquidator.”

00:12:09 Allison: So like, you’re taking on all the losses because you’ve already paid for the manufacturing and shipping. But you’re sort of saying, “Ah, it’s fine. I’m just going to take the loss and move it out all at the same time.”

00:12:21 Allison: Some more sophisticated brands are like, “Wait a second. These are two different consumer signals. If the quality is fine, I can still sell it.” Then they will try to find liquidators or jobbers or that’s how the items end up in sample sale. It’s still 80 to 90 percent off.

00:12:38 Jenny: That’s how we get the sample sale. That’s fascinating. I always wondered about that.

00:12:42 Allison: You’re like, “How does this work? Or like how the units end up in TJ Maxx,” is because they’re building out their own bulk buyers. They’re also taking loss when this happens. They’re like, “Yep, I’m not even going to recover my COGS on this.” But it’s still better than getting even less recovery on this offshore liquidators. So they’re like a domestic liquidator/the sample sale situation going on.

00:13:04 Allison: However, if it’s second quality damages, you can’t even sell it to domestic liquidators because they won’t take anything that’s not a sellable quality from day one. So that’s where this damages actually end up in this like donation or recycle bucket or just straight up destruction for some of these brands. And they are not expected to recover any value on those.

00:13:28 Allison: But it’s ironic because the best sizes and SKUs are actually in the damages and not even in the liquidation. We’re like, “Oh, you should actually fix it and then you can restock it and sell yourself or we can sell it for you on these different resale channels.” That’s how we’re entering the market on the damages side because it has the least expected recovery, but the most consumer signals on that specific type of inventory.

00:13:55 Jenny: Fascinating. Well, now I have to ask what type of damages are most commonly recoverable?

00:14:01 Allison: It’s wild because I think brands enter into this like, “Unless it’s perfect, it’s damages.” Things that are totally fixable end up in this damage bin. It could be like really wrinkled. It could be like dog hairs on the sweater. It could be deodorant stains.

00:14:20 Allison: 95% of those units actually become sellable quality by the time we’re done with them. And then we work with the brands to say like, “Hey, out of this 95%, which of the units do you actually want to restock versus not?” And then we’ll work through the ROI exercise with them.

00:14:36 Allison: But a lot of the damages are actually not that damaged because it’s not like someone really owned it and wore it. It’s not really second life. It’s really just second quality from the brand’s perspective. We find these guys to be very, very minimally damaged. It’s just that there’s not a way to really handle the damages at a volume today.

00:15:00 Jenny: So interesting. Can we get a little peek behind the scenes of how you integrate into the brand’s existing returns or warehouse operations or whatever it is? How do you make that seamless and simple for your customers?

00:15:14 Allison: We have found that this really depends on like the brand’s supply chain set up today. For example, we know that they eventually have to ship out all their damages out of either their stores or their e-comm. There are two ways for us to intercept that quickly.

00:15:29 Allison: We’re like, “What’s the point for your stores to ship their damages into your 3PL if nothing’s going to happen to them anyway and you’re just shipping them out somewhere else? Let us intercept all the store damages first.” That’s how we work with Michael Kors today. All of their stores before Revive used to ship their damages to their aggregated 3PL, but now it actually comes to one of our three hubs.

00:15:53 Allison: And then we’ll get like a bulk return shipment from their warehouses, too. We’re sort of like, “Just change the address on these shipping boxes. So instead of going into like your 3PL, it just comes to our 3PL now.” And that’s been the easiest way for us to like integrate into their supply chain because it doesn’t take that much of training or the actual data integration side.

00:16:16 Allison: We also have found that the less you ask the brands to do, faster the deal will go so we have really tried to make it as turnkey as possible. Now we’re like, “Just physically route the units to us and we will literally look at every single item for you.”

00:16:32 Jenny: Interesting. Now that you’re deep in supply chain, can you talk about some of the unique challenges or even opportunities that you see in the industry? We’ve seen supply chain be unsexy and then sexy and then unsexy. So, with things around tariffs and moving goods, like, there’s some macro that you have to deal with as well. Talk about some of the challenges over the years and then what are the bright spots?

00:16:57 Allison: This unpredictability in the supply chain as whole has actually made more opportunities viable for like the newcomers or like the B2B vendors to come thrive. Especially because the brands that we’re dealing with, they’re typically very legacy brands so they’re very risk averse. The only time they will entertain a new solution is if it’s sink or swim moments. Recently, it has been sink or swim.

00:17:22 Allison: I don’t even know if my warehouses in Mexico is going to survive. So then they’re actually starting to like evaluate outside resources, which doesn’t happen very often. This is actually like a huge opportunity for like all the vendors to really go win their business, especially within this risk averse clientele.

00:17:42 Allison: The other thing, though, that we have noticed, I find that tech alone is not enough, especially when it comes to supply chain solutions. If you’re dealing with CPG apparel and for our cases, you have to be able to support their physical logistics too, which actually means then the tech product that you’re developing have to be not just AI.

00:18:07 Allison: It has to have human in the loop and you need to have this expected error rate baked into it. That’s a little bit different from like designing a true AI or like data solutions. That was my biggest learning process, just because my background is very much of like deep tech, data integration. And you’re like, “Cool.”

00:18:25 Allison: 99% of the data should be clean, but I have really found that that’s not necessarily the product journey when you’re dealing with the supply chain problem. We’re really excited about all the advancements that AI is making.

00:18:39 Allison: And then we’re just trying to figure out, like, what’s the right application and the expectation we should have with the AI tools. It can’t be 100%, I think. It has to be something that we augment to humans, but not replace the humans.

00:18:53 Jenny: I also think that that is potentially what makes Revive more defensible, is this human in the loop element. Can you unpack that a little bit more for everyone else listening, how that works with Revive?

00:19:07 Allison: We really think about the partnership between the product that we design with the users and operators. We’re actually using it to get the work done. We deploy our technology, but also our operational playbook to our 3PL partners.

00:19:24 Allison: What they are learning is like, “Oh, this is actually a new skill set.” They never had to think about item level inspection or services. So they’re sort of like, “How do I make sure humans can use the system that we have designed to efficiently process these units in a new way?”

00:19:42 Allison: We think about like, “Hmm, there are recommendations that we can give to the humans.” For example, when we scan in the item, the AI can think like, “Oh, in a similar SKUs like this, we have seen this type of damages. Is that right?”

00:19:57 Allison: We can like sure of the suggestions, but the actual confirmation and inspection needs to happen through humans. That’s where you have to design a system around operators and let them have the final say versus just pushing the decisions through like the AI LLM all the time.

00:20:17 Allison: That has been a very intricate balance that you’re playing between how fast can I make this item go versus what are still some steps humans have to take. And that’s like area that we thought about automation, too.

00:20:32 Allison: Of course, in the future, everyone’s like, “It would be so cool if the whole thing was automated,” but I’m actually not convinced that that would be faster than us using human in the loop. Because if you’re like, “Oh, can just do an image recognition, take a photo and like try to diagnose the images,” it’s actually not as accurate and takes a longer time.

00:20:55 Allison: So, for example, sweater comes in. You can take one photo outside, but you need to take one photo front, in the back, inside out. So, humans are already touching it to move around these items. So then might as well just get them to inspect too. It’s literally faster than image recognition. That’s where we’re accepting some portion of the tech and AI side, but not all of it.

00:21:20 Jenny: You’ve heard it here first, folks. Humans are not completely obsolete yet. Allison says the human race has a moment. I love it. People listen to this podcast. They love to hear the human element. You’re someone that works harder than anyone I know. You’re always on the road. You’re always pushing.

00:21:38 Jenny: Can you talk about some of the challenges that you’ve had along the way? You’ve had some pivots, you’ve been around for seven years. How do you get through those hard moments? What’s your support?

00:21:49 Allison: In the beginning, it was more so that I totally had the chip on my shoulder. I was usually the only woman in the room. Even when I was working at Silicon Valley before I started my own company, I remember I was usually the only person that looked like me in the room, trying to like fight for my strategy.

00:22:09 Allison: It felt like I couldn’t be another founder that gave up on her idea because people were sort of looking at me as like, “Oh, interesting. She raised $5 million doing tailoring.”

00:22:21 Allison: So I felt like it… it was like weird burden for me to like show people that like, “Hey, the supply chain could work. Even though human in the loop, it could work, it could get scalable.” So it was a little bit of proving to myself and to the industry that like, “This is a real business, you guys.”

00:22:38 Allison: Now it’s less of that. I think I’ve healed emotionally that I don’t need to prove myself so much. But I think now it’s more of like building the team and really having a strong team near you. It does add the new energy.

00:22:56 Allison: This human in the loop idea, it’s not just me. You know, it’s my VP of Product and Data. We really believe in this product strategy. And I think that’s what makes it really fun is to have people around you that have the same vision and courage to challenge what we’re hearing from the market and saying, “No, AI is not going to be end all, be all, and we’re going to create our own world here.” That’s been my new and healthier way of coping through the ups and downs.

00:23:24 Jenny: Looking ahead, what are some of the goals and aspirations that you have for the company? Tell us what we can look forward to with Revive and the future.

00:23:34 Allison: Liquidation, donation, recycling, these are not financially viable solutions for brands to really think about their asset that they have already invested to create. Our goal always has been like, “How do I set a new industry standard to really empower the brands to maximize their asset value and not having to live with like, fine, I’ll write it off and try to get 3% back?”

00:24:00 Allison: I think that’s not a good answer to these problems. The reason why we’re doing a lot of marketing and roadshow right now is really trying to educate the market that this new solution exists and we don’t have to be okay with the status quo anymore.

00:24:16 Allison: That’s our near-term and long-term goal is, how do I make sure we become the industry standard but also continue to build out our infrastructure so we can add even more value throughout the life cycle of a garment.

00:24:29 Jenny: What does success look like for you and for the company?

00:24:33 Allison: It’s a little bit of two parts. I mean, we think about it from the B2B side and D2C side. B2B side is like, if brands have anything unsellable, I want them to call me. If that behavior happens, I’ll sort of know that like we have become the gold standard of dealing with unsellable items.”

00:24:50 Allison: But on the D2C side, because now we’re trying to create this new category of how do you buy refurbished soft goods, right now, there’s not really a way. You have to either buy new or you have to buy thrifted. We’re actually giving the consumers the third category of like you can actually buy in-season items but refurbished at a discount.

00:25:11 Allison: If the consumers actually check if we have it before they go to other channels, I’ll also know that we are becoming the new industry standards for like new Gen Z shoppers to think about their shopping behavior in a different way. Our success is more in how are we impacting the industry behaviors and can we be like a market leader in that.

00:25:36 Jenny: What does success look like for you, Allison, who started this podcast talking about how you had a chip on the shoulder when you got started?

00:25:44 Allison: I feel that I’m already successful. I think maybe that’s what healed my chip on my shoulder is because before I was like, “Oh, yes. I need to like chase this thing. I need to raise more. I need to like build this team.”

00:25:57 Allison: Like, I think I didn’t think I was already there and that’s what drives you. And right now, I’m kind of like, “You know, I feel like we already have this really strong product market fit.” I want to go execute well, of course. But internally, I feel already successful. I’m like, “Oh, I just need to go do it now.” Maybe that’s my like coming around the corner moment.

00:26:22 Jenny: I love that answer. We are all very blessed and very successful and you certainly are. There’s obviously more great things to come, but I love that answer.

00:26:31 Jenny: All right. Well, we’re just at the end. We’re going to do what’s called the speed round. So these are just very quick one or two word answers and we’ll start. Is there a book you’re reading, podcast or some type of media that you’re enjoying right now?

00:26:43 Allison: I am pregnant, so I’m reading a lot of like baby books. The book that I have to read, it’s an exercise that I do with my partner. It’s How to Raise a Good Human. It’s helpful because it actually makes you think about your own relationship with your parents. So I’m like, “Okay. This is helpful for me,” but it’s not business related at all.

00:27:03 Jenny: Okay. First time we’ve gotten a baby book recommendation on the pod. I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:27:11 Allison: Maybe Korea, just so I can be closer to my parents.

00:27:15 Jenny: Aw!

00:27:16 Allison: Yeah.

00:27:17 Jenny: Favorite productivity hack?

00:27:19 Allison: I start my day in New York time. It does really help to have that three hours in the morning. It’s probably my favorite thing where I’m like, “Turn off Slack. Turn off everything.” I just get so much done in the mornings.

00:27:32 Jenny: All right. Well, everyone, you can email her at 5 a.m. It’s fine. Where can listeners find you? What’s the best way to connect with Revive?

00:27:40 Allison: We are revamping our social media strategy, but LinkedIn is usually our favorite place.

00:27:46 Jenny: That’s great. Well, this was so fun. It’s always amazing to catch up with you, Allison. There’s never enough time. We’re thrilled for all of your success and everything that’s to come. We’ll miss you in New York, but also wishing you the best with your new addition. So congrats.

00:28:01 Allison: Thank you so much, Jenny. Let’s definitely catch up when I’m back in New York.

00:28:05 Jenny: For sure.

00:28:07 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 Allison Lee in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 111 of Venture Everywhere, the host is Matthew Brimer, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures and co-founder of ZZ Driggs, a furniture and design company serving the real estate and hospitality industry. He talks with Helle Jeppsson, co-founder and CEO of SCAPE, a wellness tech platform delivering on-demand spa services across Latin America. Helle shares her path from opening physical spas in the U.S. and Mexico to building an alternative after COVID exposed how hard it is to make brick-and-mortar wellness scale. She discusses how SCAPE pivoted from a B2C consumer brand into a white-label spa product for hotels and businesses, converting a traditional loss-center amenity into a profit center for properties that can’t justify the overhead of a full spa operation.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Building on-demand wellness infrastructure across Latin America.

• Pivoting from B2C to B2B after spotting organic demand from the hotel industry.

• Using consumer brand recognition to break into corporate wellness.

• Creating better work conditions and higher earnings for women therapists in Latin America.

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 Matthew: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. We have the latest episode here for you. My name is Matthew Brimer. I am a serial entrepreneur and also co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, who produces this podcast.

00:00:46 Matthew: I’m here with the amazing Helle Jeppsson. I’m excited for this conversation as two founders getting into the weeds and sharing what life and work is like on the front lines.

00:00:55 Matthew: I won’t go too long on my own background, but just a little bit of context. Serial entrepreneur, real estate developer, investor, designer, community builder. I’m probably curious about too many things, but it has navigated my career in interesting ways.

00:01:09 Matthew: Currently the co-founder of a furniture and design company that works with the real estate and hospitality industry called ZZ Driggs. Also co-founded a company called Special Address, which is a boutique luxury hospitality brand with short-term stay properties in upstate New York and the island of Jamaica.

00:01:23 Matthew: Prior to all of that, co-founded a global education company called General Assembly. And also along the way, after coming back from Burning Man about 14 years ago or something like that, was inspired to start something called Daybreaker, which is a completely sober early morning dance party and wellness movement that has spread around the world.

00:01:41 Matthew: But today we are here. Helle is the co-founder and CEO of SCAPE, which is the leader of wellness on-demand experiences in Latin America.

00:01:51 Helle: Hi, thank you, Matthew. I think your background is so interesting. I read your bio. I was like, it must be five of you to have done all of that. But thank you for the interview.

00:02:03 Helle: So I’m Helle Jeppsson. As you mentioned, I co-founded SCAPE, which is a wellness tech platform in Latin America. Before that… I’m Swedish background, but lived in Mexico for 13 years. I started in the wellness industry about 17 years ago, opening physical spas in the U.S.

00:02:22 Helle: So I’ve been in the industry for quite some years and done a lot of different things. Worked in corporate for many years, but now focusing on growing SCAPE.

00:02:31 Matthew: Take yourself back to being in corporate world. What made you decide to leave the whole thing? What was the need or the passion or the driver for you to say, I’m going to start my own thing?

00:02:42 Helle: I’ve had two moments of change in that sense. The first one was I worked in D.C. I worked at the World Bank and took a step leaving the World Bank to pursue starting a spa company. So it was quite a big leap and at an early age also.

00:02:59 Helle: What made it happen was that my dream was actually to work within development. But a lot of times you have these ideals of what you think work is going to look like. I was doing both things at the same time.

00:03:12 Helle: One morning I just woke up and said, “When I wake up in the morning, when I do startup versus when the morning I wake up, when I have to go to the World Bank, I’m so much happier doing startup.” But in the end, life is short. So you have to pursue what makes you happy, really. It all boils down to that.

00:03:31 Helle: And then I did it again. I worked as the CEO of a very large European company in Mexico and had worked very hard to get there. I think also for a woman in Latin America, it’s not as easy to get jobs at that level. And then the idea of SCAPE started and I did it again. I jumped up, but I haven’t regretted it.

00:03:52 Matthew: So multiple corporate escapes to start things.

00:03:56 Helle: I’m interested to hear about you also, how you’ve been changing so many times. How have you done so many different things?

00:04:04 Matthew: Like you, I think fulfillment and the level of happiness and pursuing this thing called purpose, it can never be totally defined, we’re all chasing it and seeking it and wanting to align with a lot. I think that has always been such a big driver for me. My whole career thus far, at least I’ve managed to avoid doing the corporate thing.

00:04:23 Matthew: I went to Yale for undergrad. And so my junior year, I started this social gaming startup with a few Yale friends, and it was called GoCrossCampus. This was 2007. We started right before even the first iPhone came out.

00:04:36 Matthew: And so we were building these massively multiplayer online social casual games where we were enabling students to play out their school rivalries, whether between residential colleges at Yale or between the whole Ivy League buying these online games, the main one being Risk.

00:04:53 Matthew: So imagine the board game Risk, and instead of a map of the world, you’re trying to take over your college campus. All the Ivy League students trying to take over New England.

00:05:02 Matthew: And so then we expanded to a whole bunch of different sports divisions and basically just leveraged college rivalries and other affinity groups eventually to create these fun team-based online game experiences.

00:05:13 Matthew: That was my first startup. That was in college, doing the entrepreneurial thing while also being a Yale student, getting a degree in sociology and all of it. So it was a very interesting extracurricular.

00:05:22 Matthew: And this is a time when entrepreneurship and being a founder was not common for college students. Right now, it’s very common. It’s every student’s dream. But this was a more limited set of us who were doing this thing.

00:05:35 Helle: It’s a different world. Yesterday, I was with my daughters. It was Women’s Day. So it was… Lovable, the Swedish app, that platform that you can build. So yesterday, my two daughters built their first company. Today I think the world has changed in that sense.

00:05:50 Matthew: Totally. There was no Claude Code in 2007 to just one-shot an app into existence. It was a lot more effort. So coming out of Yale, senior year the next year, and all my friends were applying to all different jobs. a lot of people doing the corporate thing or the non-profit thing or grad school.

00:06:09 Matthew: But I was like, “Okay, I have this startup that I co-founded.” We raised some money as well. So great. I’m going to graduate and go to work as a full-time co-founder of my own startup. That sounds great. I can avoid the corporate thing altogether.

00:06:19 Matthew: But then basically we ran out of cash. We couldn’t raise any more money. We could never figure out how to really generate any revenue, which apparently is important for running a business, so they say.

00:06:29 Matthew: So all of this is happening right when I was graduating. And so we shut the company down the summer 2009 when I graduated. And I was like, “Well, okay, that full-time entrepreneur thing, now that opportunity is no longer. It evaporated. So what am I going to do?”

00:06:42 Matthew: But I moved to New York and was bringing income by doing just freelance web design, web development and just threw myself and immerse myself into the startup and tech ecosystem in New York in 2009 through 2010, which was this underdog rag tag, but burgeoning and exciting ecosystem to be in.

00:07:00 Matthew: And then out of that, ended up starting General Assembly. And we can get more into the tales from there. But it was just following my nose in a way, which maybe you can relate to.

00:07:08 Helle: I lived in New York the same year. So we might have crossed each other.

00:07:12 Matthew: Were you ever at General Assembly in those early years?

00:07:15 Helle: I don’t know, maybe. But I lived there for six years.

00:07:21 Matthew: I’m curious, how has it been being from Sweden, living in Mexico and building a company there for Latin America, but being an expat? I’m sure that’s got to be challenging. But does it give you a fresh perspective that natives don’t get or how has that been?

00:07:35 Helle: The thing is that in my case, I’m half Swedish, half Norwegian, but most of my childhood, I grew up in Spain. So I have the language barrier, which I think it’s usually one of the big barriers when you move to a new country.

00:07:48 Helle: At some point I met a Mexican that is today my husband. So I moved to Mexico because of that. I integrated into the country, I would say really quickly. So I’ve almost felt Mexican from the day I came there. So even if I’m obviously a foreigner, but I have never really

felt like I was a foreigner in Mexico. I felt I understood the culture quite quickly.

00:08:14 Helle: And there’s so many opportunities. I think that’s what happens in Latin America. The opportunities are huge because there’s so much need for so many different products that if you take a risk and build in countries where there is more need, usually the upside is much larger.

00:08:31 Helle: And now, today, it’s such a huge startup community. There’s a lot of digital nomads from the US and other countries that have started, even if they don’t build their companies for LATAM, a lot of them sit in Mexico and build for other countries.

00:08:48 Helle: Plus for me, it brings back what I wanted to do, which was to work with something that has an impact. That’s been so important for me since I was little. When you see the company, you might not see that angle of it but SCAPE has a huge impact on women in the region, especially therapists.

00:09:08 Helle: The largest population of therapists in the world is in Latin America and 92% are women. Usually the work conditions for therapists in the region are quite tough. For a lot of women, they work six days a week, 10, 12 hour shifts. That means they don’t have that much time to spend with their kids, for example.

00:09:30 Helle: They usually make six to seven times the money they made before entering SCAPE. And they have flex hours, which means that they can now earn much more, work in a much safer way and have time with their children. So you don’t lose out on that.

00:09:46 Helle: So for me, that’s my biggest purpose with the company. That is amazing because in Latin America and the opportunities to have that impact are there.

00:09:56 Matthew: For you, thinking about the inception of SCAPE, your wedge into this, was it about wellness and wellness being a very important part of your life and what you wanted to bring to other people? Was it more about empowering women and providing economic opportunity, safety, lifestyle improvements?

00:10:14 Helle: Sometimes you end up in things just by random opportunities. I’ve always been that type of person that are always open to new ideas, opportunities. I end up saying yes to too many things. But I started in wellness a bit randomly. It was a project my sister had and she couldn’t do it. So then I ended up opening the company, running a spa company in the US.

00:10:37 Helle: But I owned and operated physical spas in Mexico. And what happened was that after COVID, the physical spa world crashed and the demand for wellness increased a lot. And what happened for me and for the spa industry as a whole, is that it’s hard to make a physical spa profitable because usually you have a lot of dead hour space.

00:11:00 Helle: So if you look around worldwide, there are not that many large spa companies if they’re not franchise companies. I wanted to build something large and saw that the opportunity to scale in the physical space was tough.

00:11:14 Helle: But people really were demanding wellness services. I saw the opportunity and saw a need for it in the market. Let’s build something that will bring wellness easier into people’s homes. So I started a B2C company. So we became the Uber for spas in Latin America.

00:11:31 Helle: And then after that, we saw the opportunity to go into B2B. That’s where we’re focusing today, especially in the hotel industry. That’s where we’re growing the most. It’s becoming a white label product for the spa industry. We are an on-demand spa product for hotels.

00:11:48 Matthew: I see. Cool. So they don’t even need to have their own facilities. It’s an amenity offering that can be bolted onto an existing hotel and then guests can request services and it shows up.

00:11:58 Helle: Exactly. Because for hotels today, before COVID and around COVID, the number one search word when people were booking hotels, the first amenity was gym. And today the first amenity is wellness. That’s what people are looking for. So a lot of hotels need to have a wellness component to be able to book their rooms.

00:12:15 Helle: But a huge percentage of hotels, their spas are unprofitable. What they do is they allocate the loss per room. By using a system like ours, they will be able to offer wellness services, but they don’t have a cost structure onto it.

00:12:29 Helle: Plus in our model, they build a 40-50% percentage margin on top of our price. So they also now not only have a loss center, they have a profit center. That’s been a really good solution to the industry. So we’re very focused on that segment right now.

00:12:46 Matthew: That makes sense… starting with a B2C kind of perspective, honing the product and being close to the end customer. I feel like a lot of companies, including some of my own, will do that. And then once you’re in it, then you realize, actually, this is good. We have a product that is resonating with consumers and that they love.

00:13:04 Matthew: But ultimately, it may not be a big enough market. Acquisition might be expensive, et cetera. Many examples where then founders broaden their horizons in terms of marketing. Actually, we have a product that really works well with consumers, but the opportunity is more in a B2B direction.

00:13:21 Matthew: But I guess in your case, it’s B2B2C in a sense. You’re still serving the end consumer, but partnering with and doing deals with offices, hotels, et cetera, to get there.

00:13:31 Helle: Exactly. The hotel is my client, but obviously it’s an end consumer. But you’ve been in the hospitality industry. You’ve been everywhere.

00:13:41 Matthew: At General Assembly, we were very B2C focused, offering classes, workshops, community, co-working in the early years for individuals and for startups.

00:13:50 Matthew: But our educational programs, especially, were for folks who were looking to transform their careers, level up their careers, gain 21st Century skills, and have opportunities in their life. And that was working, but then we started dabbling in… well, would enterprises and larger companies be interested in what we were doing?

00:14:09 Matthew: It was something that I experimented with and got started in GA’s early days. It was very untested right when we were doing it, but we managed to get introductions to some digital transformation leads, innovation leads at like Amex and GE and some cool companies who were interested in what we were doing and decided to take a flyer on us and cobbled together various components of our consumer programs.

00:14:34 Matthew: We’re like, “Okay, we can make a week-long executive education week. We call these different components of what we’re already doing for consumers and put it all together. We’ll call it enterprise education.” There’s this MVP version 0.1 of our corporate training and everything.

00:14:49 Matthew: But it started to work and the businesses appreciated that we were really resonating with consumers, first and foremost. They loved our brand. They loved that our educational products were really resonating with consumers.

00:14:59 Matthew: I think that made us cooler, sexier, something more attractive to these big companies because it made it more attractive strategically, experientially, et cetera.

00:15:09 Matthew: Then we had to figure out how do we serve the Fortune 1000 when we’ve been serving individuals looking to fund their career. And then eventually, our enterprise offering became the biggest part of General Assembly revenue-wise.

00:15:23 Helle: For us, it’s happened a bit… not similar, but the entry to corporate, because we do corporate wellness. So now we have large enterprise clients. Amex, for example, it’s a client right now. Last week it was like, “Oh, wow.” Now they’re in Mexico, for example, in Amex rewards. There are only seven companies that sell gift certificates like Uber, Amazon, Spotify, and us.

00:15:47 Matthew: Got some good BD right there.

00:15:49 Helle: But it’s been interesting, the selling into corporate, because since we started out as a B2C company and we became very much an influencer brand in the region. So we became a brand, a lot of people will actually say, have you got them? Have you booked a SCAPE? Instead of saying, have you booked a massage? So we became a bit of a brand name.

00:16:08 Matthew: You became a noun.

00:16:10 Helle: It’s been much easier to knock on doors in companies because a lot of the end users know us from the B2C. So that’s made the entry to corporate much easier.

00:16:21 Matthew: I see. Employees already maybe use your services are very familiar and so it’s relevant. It’s a cool strategy. It’s funny. We actually did something similar for Daybreaker.

00:16:31 Matthew: As we were growing and we were looking to work with sponsors and work with brands and integrate them into what we’re doing, provide additional revenue streams, we would find who had attended a Daybreaker experience from a certain company, certain brand that we were targeting. And then we were able to reach out to those people.

00:16:49 Matthew: One day we had a whole bunch of people from brand X who all went to Daybreaker as a team. And so we emailed them, reach out. “Hey, should we talk? Maybe we should get your company involved.” And because the actual employees went to the experience and loved it, like, “Oh, yeah, our company should definitely partner with Daybreaker.”

00:17:04 Matthew: And so in advertising, we didn’t have to hire a whole sales team to do that. It was just the individuals came to the thing, loved it. So it seems like you’ve had some success doing the same thing.

00:17:15 Helle: We’ve used that strategy. And then for companies, it’s been fun. Sometimes I talk to a client the other day and she’s like, “No, we love it. But also we love it because our employees post photos of the experience on their LinkedIn and Instagram, everything. So it gives good corporate image.” And I was like, “Yeah, of course, once you have a brand, you can actually use that. So sometimes I feel they hire us for the Instagram posts.

00:17:41 Helle: But corporate wellness, it has also grown so much. I think that we have had a huge advantage there because we are a real product. A lot of employees don’t want digital products for wellness. They actually want something more tangible.

00:17:55 Helle: And then, since we have national presence in most countries in Latin America where we are, we’ve become a very popular employee gifting for bonus programs and stuff like that. Gifting is not as big in Latin America so digital gifting has been really interesting for us to step into.

00:18:14 Matthew: What has been surprising along the journey that you wouldn’t have expected? Looking back, I always find it always makes more sense looking back than looking forward.

00:18:21 Helle: I think probably for us, the largest surprise that it wasn’t as a strategy. Since I had had physical spas, the hotel strategy was never really a strategy in the first place. It was more my wanting to still have contact with the hospitality industry because I had spas within hotels and things like that.

00:18:41 Helle: So having all of a sudden a product that’s completely technological and you don’t have a physical space, I missed that experience. So that’s been a surprise for us that it was a bit of an “aha” moment for me.

00:18:53 Helle: Our B2B director one day sat me down and said, “Helle, have you actually looked at the numbers? We are closing one to two hotels a day and we have not one salesperson.” This is the channel.

00:19:07 Matthew: It was organically happening, whether you wanted it or not.

00:19:10 Helle: But I was telling everyone that, “Oh, I love this part. It’s not really part of the business, but I love doing the hospitality thing,” until someone told me, “Listen, you really have to look at the numbers. This is not your hobby anymore. This is where the business is going.” So that was a little bit of a surprise. But I think you have surprises every day when you’re an entrepreneur. It’s…

00:19:30 Matthew: Never ending.

00:19:31 Helle: Never ending.

00:19:32 Matthew: What would you say if you had to point what has brought you the most joy in building SCAPE?

00:19:37 Helle: There’s a lot of things. Obviously my team is a big part, but really what brings me joy is the change of lives for therapists. When I get these messages from the therapist that will tell me, “I’ve been able to do this and I’ve been able to put my kid through college. Thanks to SCAPE.”

00:19:53 Helle: And I had one call, Christmas on Zoom two years ago. All your teams, you have to do Zoom with other teams. All the therapists were listening and some were interfering. And all of a sudden, I heard a little voice that said, “Can I say something?” A seven-year-old boy. He’s like, “I just want to thank SCAPE because after my mom started with SCAPE, I now see her every day.”

00:20:16 Matthew: Oh, I get chills. That’s amazing.

00:20:19 Helle: That really brings me joy.

00:20:20 Matthew: I respect that a lot. Looking back at my own entrepreneurial journey, I think I also have to say that knowing and feeling and witnessing and being humbled by the impact of the things I’ve built on how they’ve changed people’s lives…

00:20:35 Matthew: And to hear those stories, even though I haven’t been involved in the day-to-day General Assembly, for example, for several years now, but regularly, people will tell me, when they meet them, “Oh, my cousin was doing this totally random thing and was struggling to figure out their path and their purpose or whatever.”

00:20:50 Matthew: “And now as a senior engineer at this amazing company and moved to this other city. He’s supporting his family and better off than he was before.” And those stories always resonate. Those just make me feel the best.

00:21:05 Matthew: Doing this thing, I’m just one guy, but with the team and our community instructors and everything, it has transformed so many people’s lives for the better in fundamental ways.

00:21:13 Matthew: And so what you’ve been doing, those stories, it’s amazing. You’ve really impacted so many people’s lives and it’s not making people’s lives just more convenient. There’s plenty of things, products and startups, now this thing is slightly more convenient or whatever.

00:21:26 Matthew: But it’s such a deeper sense of meaning, which is something you can relate to as a founder, when you’re now making people’s lives more convenient, especially for the therapists. You’re changing the trajectory of their life and providing fulfillment and opportunity for that. That’s the best way to feel joy, is to bring meaning and joy to other people.

00:21:44 Helle: 100%.

00:21:45 Matthew: Before we go with the speed round, there’s a lot of advice out there. But if you had to share some advice that, say, could not easily be found on the internet, some non-traditional, atypical advice that you feel you want to get across here, what comes to mind?

00:21:59 Helle: You can give a lot of advice, but I think – and it’s not something atypical – I always say is resilience and consistency is really the trick to everything.

00:22:08 Helle: It sounds so boring, but really, you can always tell at least 95% of founders that make something happen. There’s always that other 5% that is a different bucket, but it’s consistency and putting every day, doing a little bit. And consistency is the key for anything to be successful. So I always say that.

00:22:32 Matthew: Yeah, the resilience is critical. You gotta live on to fight another day every day. Would you say the driver, the motivating force behind the resilience and consistency, is it pursuit of creating something big, making a lot of money, being very successful, or is it the purpose and the impact that your company is making on people?

00:22:51 Helle: I think if you don’t have a purpose, a real purpose, things are never gonna work because, at least for me, making a lot of money, it’s a hopeful side effect. But really to put in so much work and so much passion and effort, you really have to have a little bit of a larger purpose in what you’re doing.

00:23:10 Helle: Each person might have a different purpose because it’s not all highs. There is a lot of lows also in entrepreneurship so you really have to have that drive and purpose, otherwise it’s gonna be tough. That’s a must.

00:23:22 Matthew: Yeah, I agree. Or else you won’t have the resilience. You won’t make it through the trenches if you’re just in it for a big payout. That’s not motivating enough. It has to be deeper. It has to be far deeper to carry you through.

00:23:33 Matthew: Now we’re gonna move into the speed round. So what’s a book, newsletter, or podcast that you love and you’re not allowed to say, the Venture Everywhere podcast?

00:23:43 Helle: Oh, that was exactly what I was gonna say. A book that I always recommend because it actually talks about this, how you need to be consistent, is Good to Great by Jim Collins. I think that’s a very good book for anyone that wants to start a real idea of what is needed.

00:24:00 Helle: And then a podcast, I always try to recommend a Latin one so that they listen to Latin podcasts in Spanish. There is a guy in Mexico called Oso Trava that he has a podcast called Cracks and he interviews founders, but he also interviews very interesting people across. And I think that’s a very interesting way to listen to Latin American different personalities. So I would recommend that.

00:24:25 Matthew: This question is funny because you’ve already lived many places around the world. You’re already doing this, but if you could live anywhere in the world for one year, let’s say that you haven’t lived yet, where would it be?

00:24:35 Helle: So I’ve actually been here, but I would love to stay longer. I would love to live a year in New Zealand because there’s so good skiing. I love skiing. So I would love to live there for a year.

00:24:49 Matthew: Amazing. What’s your favorite productivity hack?

00:24:51 Helle: I would say massage. It sounds strange, but today there’s very few times where you’re conscious, but disconnected. It sounds strange, but some of my best thinking processes have been during a massage.

00:25:06 Matthew: I believe it.

00:25:07 Helle: It’s a very good way of getting clarity and I think that’s a good productivity hack, even if it don’t sound common.

00:25:16 Matthew: I think it’s wise. Also when you’re getting a massage, you can’t get distracted and go do something else. You can’t stop doing it. It’s happening to you.

00:25:22 Helle: Yeah, you actually are with yourself and your head for an hour, but you’re awake. I think for a lot of people, it’s similar to a stage of meditation, but you’re actually thinking.

00:25:34 Helle: So there’s a time between where you’re at high stress, you go down to down stress. And in those 10, 15 minutes between one stage to the other, the clarity of thinking is fantastic. If you use that for productivity, it’s great. I’ve had a lot of my better ideas for developing in massage.

00:25:55 Matthew: Wow, cool. Neck, limb and all space between brainwaves.

00:25:59 Helle: So try it.

00:26:00 Matthew: I feel like number four, you have the same answer, but if you had to give a different one, a habit or practice that you swear by.

00:26:06 Helle: Another thing that also helps me think really clearly is swimming, but not swimming, like doing a lot of different exercises. Doing lap swimming for a full hour. It also gives you a lot of clarity.

00:26:20 Helle: I usually have a book in my bag. As soon as I get out of swimming, I write down all the ideas I had while swimming because you get really clear headed while you swim. So I think that’s another one I would suggest.

00:26:34 Matthew: Like that. And good for de-stressing too. Before we wrap up, where can listeners find you on the interwebs?

00:26:40 Helle: Obviously on LinkedIn under Helle Jeppsson or they can find us on Instagram as SCAPE Wellness or me on Instagram as Helle Jeppsson, but it’s better to find SCAPE. Where can they find you?

00:26:53 Matthew: LinkedIn. My handle is mobrimer. And then on Instagram it’s just brimer. B-R-I-M-E-R.

00:27:01 Matthew: This is a pleasure. Thanks for your thoughts and stories and shares. I think we could have gone on for much longer. So maybe we’ll do a part two at some point. But so cool to hear what you’re building and the impact it’s having in hospitality, on actual consumers and guests and for their own wellness and well-being.

00:27:17 Matthew: But I think, even maybe most powerfully, in how it’s elevating and empowering and supporting women and their families and allowing them to live the lives and build the professions that they want and make more income doing so and that they could see their families more. Rock on to that. I’m impressed. Keep doing that.

00:27:33 Helle: I love it. I don’t want to do anything else right now.

00:27:36 Matthew: Yeah, super inspiring. Well, thank you, Helle. Appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time.

00:27:41 Helle: Thank you so much.

00:27:43 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 Helle Jeppsson in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 110 of Venture Everywhere, Michael Barone, analyst at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Chris Priebe, founder and CEO of Zelt — an all-in-one workforce management platform consolidating the fragmented tools companies rely on to manage their people. Chris shares how years in private equity watching acquired companies struggle to untangle messy, unintegrated employee systems revealed a gap no modern vendor was solving. He discusses how Zelt challenges the industry consensus that fragmented HR stacks are simply the cost of doing business, instead unifying employee data into one system where org chart logic, payroll, and expenses all speak the same language.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Replacing fragmented HR, payroll, and IT stacks with a single workforce management platform.

• Scaling go-to-market with a focused geo strategy after expanding to 40+ countries.

• Balancing product depth and ease of use across growing markets and customer segments.

• Embedding AI into Zelt to simplify access to a feature-rich platform.

• Overcoming change management when introducing a new system to resistant teams.

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 Michael: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Michael Barone, an analyst on the Everywhere team. I have the pleasure of being joined by one of our portfolio CEOs, Chris Priebe from Zelt. Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast, Chris.

00:00:47 Chris: Hi, Michael. Hi, everyone. It’s great to be here.

00:00:49 Michael: Awesome. So for people who aren’t familiar with Zelt yet, maybe you can explain what you’re building.

00:00:54 Chris: Zelt is an all-in-one HR platform. Actually, it’s more like a workforce management platform. That means that you can manage your employees and contractors from onboarding to offboarding in one place.

00:01:05 Chris: That means things like holiday management, tracking, performance management, payroll, benefits, all those kinds of things that you need to do when you have employees, whether you like it or not.

00:01:15 Michael: Absolutely. And maybe to rewind a little bit, I want to ask about your entrepreneurial journey to Zelt from TA Associates to then venture investing. What prompted your shift from more in the investor seat to then being an operator?

00:01:29 Chris: Just a quick overview of my journey in general. I was more of an engineer scientist before I went into finance. I studied physics in Germany. Always was more of like a builder, nerdy type of person. Was never really interested in like economics and that kind of stuff. And I realized at university, I did some lab work that I definitely want to stay very far away from any lab when I graduate.

00:01:49 Chris: And that’s how I went into more general business type. I did an MBA in Cambridge and then was recruited by an investment bank. That’s how I fell into finance and that led me to investing.

00:01:59 Chris: I spent some time at Global Founders Capital and TA Associates and there you get exposure to a lot of different software markets. So that’s where I learned about HR software and payroll software and everything that is in that space.

00:02:12 Chris: I’ll say generally, so my entire memory, my parents never had a job. My dad was quite old and my mom was a housewife since having children. And so I never actually was tied to the idea of, okay, you need to have a job or like that career is important.

00:02:25 Chris: My dad was always more of a builder, buying houses and then flipping them, developing them, always did our own thing. And then that also always just resonated to me more. Climbing a career ladder wasn’t really that appealing to me.

00:02:36 Chris: The combination of that kind of background, the idea that I’m not so interested in, let’s say, traditional career progression. I’m more of a builder type myself in terms of what interests me.

00:02:48 Chris: And then COVID also happened where a lot of people took a step back to just reassess where do you want to position yourself. I took a decision that I think there’ll be something that I’d like to dedicate my time to in the next 5 to 10 years or maybe 10 to 15 years, hopefully.

00:03:01 Michael: I definitely resonate. I started off as an engineer and then I segued to finding the intersection of engineering, finance, working with startups. So I definitely understand where your head was there.

00:03:12 Michael: Was there anything specifically in your previous roles that inspired you or you really identified there is a pain point maybe on the intersection or the siloed systems for HR software, payroll and IT?

00:03:24 Chris: It’s mainly two points. One is, if you look at employee data, it’s probably one of the most scattered within the company. In your customer space, you also have quite a lot of tools. You have maybe CRM and an email system, advertising systems.

00:03:37 Chris: But if you counted up all the CRM related really core systems and all the workforce related systems, they’re actually a lot more employee facing systems, a good dozen system that a mature midsize company would have. And most of them are very much unintegrated.

00:03:52 Chris: In private equity and at TA would usually acquire companies and you want to drive efficiency when we grow the company, we don’t want to also hire a bunch of ops teams to do things manually. We’d usually re-platform companies because all these systems that they accumulate over the years would almost never be properly integrated.

00:04:09 Chris: I felt like in the HR space, that was a particularly interesting opportunity because the general vendors in the space are quite aging. There’s not a lot of investment that has gone into that in the last 20 years. There’s some great companies in the CRM space like Salesforce and maybe Workday on the HR side, but even that is a very aging system now.

00:04:28 Chris: A combination of a very aging tech stack and very old school, aging legacy vendors with the problem of a really scattered data landscape and being able to bring those things together, I built a new system that is nicer to use, but then also helps you solve this data mess that was a problem that was big enough and also difficult enough. It’s a very difficult product to build.

00:04:51 Chris: In hindsight, would I want to pick a very difficult product again? That’s debatable, but I am an engineer by mindset and nature. I want to pick something that’s hard to build, not easy to build. So that felt exciting to me.

00:05:01 Michael: It’s just an ever so relevant trend of, even with AI, all these data silos, whether it’s across HR or other verticals, it’s finding a way to integrate in a cohesive way. That’s exactly what you’ve built at Zelt. It feels like a true command center. Simple, clean, but so incredibly rich. Is there anything you can talk about around the perfect customer experience inside of Zelt?

00:05:24 Chris: Actually, you can have a whole debate of who’s actually a customer. So obviously there’s the people that pay us, which is usually one person, a company that signs an order form and wires the money. But actually there’s a lot of different stakeholders involved even within the admin side of a system.

00:05:37 Chris: There’s the HR team, there’s the payroll team, there’s people focusing on onboarding and people doing expense management. There’s even more people on the employee side.

00:05:46 Chris: By the way, the interests are not always aligned either. So there’s even little conflicts of interest even within the platform sometimes. When you think about anonymous surveys, for example, the ideal experience is that it’s easy to use, which is more difficult to be done than said.

00:06:02 Chris: Because the downside of an all-in-one system is there’s so much stuff in it, how are we even supposed to know what is in it? So it’s more of a pull system where as an employee, you need to do something it kind of tells you. You’ve been paid. Here’s a pay slip, a little push notification.

00:06:15 Chris: From the administrator side to this, it’s ideally easy to understand and self-service. If you get those two things right, you are doing very well. That’s harder to be implemented than to be said.

00:06:25 Chris: Of course, we’re adding more and more features, so balancing the ability to add more configurations and more features and more settings, which is required as you want to serve a wide customer base across different markets and sizes, but then also making that usable. Those are really the two. It’s like a scale. It’s very hard to keep those things in balance.

00:06:41 Michael: And so as you try to find that balance of the plug-and-wait and pulling from different data sources and resources, how are you positioned against these legacy HR systems that, like you said, a company might have been using something like this for years, but Zelt comes in and can provide something more efficient and just easier to use in general?

00:06:58 Chris: Think of it as like your iPhone. Most of the interactions happen on that first screen. I don’t know how many apps it fits. I think 12, maybe. I think three by four grid and maybe if you have like a little widget there, then you only have nine.

00:07:08 Chris: For B2B software, it’s similar. There’s only so many apps that are front of mind that you can use without forgetting about them. If you have too many tools, people just don’t know what’s what, and they all have their different names.

00:07:20 Chris: With Expensify, maybe you know that that’s expenses. It’s obvious. But if it’s called then Pleo, for example, which is also an expense tool, it’s not obvious that your expenses are happening there.

00:07:30 Chris: There’s a lot of communication and education needed for employees to even understand what’s where and to get people to actually adopt it. And to download all these apps and sign in, that’s pretty annoying. So if you bring that all into one place, the whole adoption and onboarding issue, is much simplified.

00:07:45 Chris: And then the other thing is there’s usually quite a heavy reliance or dependency in the back end between those apps. An example of expenses, I make an expense request, even who should approve, it usually depends on where you sit in the organization. Let’s say a client entertainment expense, it should be maybe approved by the head of sales. And maybe if it’s below a certain value, maybe the other person below them.

00:08:05 Chris: These are all org chart related logics. Usually these tools don’t have the concept of org charts, certainly not in the level of detail that an HR platform would have. But that’s on the user level.

00:08:16 Chris: But then if you think about paying this out, expenses you may want to payroll so they could automatically add to a payslip, that means somehow this information has to get into your payroll system. Ultimately, all this has to go in your accounting system.

00:08:28 Chris: Without these being integrated, it’s really quite painful and a very manual process that you have to do over and over again. And once you bring that together, things just natively integrate, it just ripples through.

00:08:39 Chris: Login expense, the relevant person auto approved it by quickly clicking a button on the app. They already have the app because when you onboard somebody on Zelt, it’s usually on the mobile phone. By default, people are already on the system and they can receive push notifications.

00:08:52 Chris: If your head of finance or head of payroll later runs payroll, they don’t even need to know what happens now with the approvals and who did what expense. It just shows up as a pay item on the payroll.

00:09:02 Chris: It removes a lot of the manual processes that otherwise exist between the systems between what normally you would have separately in an HR software and a performance management software and payroll software. And it just becomes one and it simplifies a lot of things.

00:09:17 Michael: It’s becoming the nervous system of a company. You’re describing as integrating across org charts, removing the tedious, I would say, manual tasks that are required for cross departmental work. As AI reshapes teams and tool stacks, how has that maybe repositioned Zelt with your customer base as teams get leaner, as maybe more tools are being used?

00:09:40 Chris: The dependency of functional teams, an HR team or finance team, for example, on IT, in my view, is going down. Even in very formal procurement processes, IT is just sitting there making sure that you have a GDPR compliance and ISO compliance. They’re not really involved anymore.

00:09:56 Chris: I feel like teams have accumulated the expertise and experience over the last decade or two to really be able to make good decisions of what tools they want to use and adopt it and make the most out of them.

00:10:08 Chris: I think AI is another enabler to use tools. In that example that I mentioned earlier, there’s a ton of functionality in Zelt. How do you even know what’s in it? Of course, AI is great for this, because then I can just ask it, “Hey, what can I all do in Zelt?” It will just list it for you. You can use it as an interface to do things.

00:10:23 Chris: Things like question answer type communications are much simplified once the AI has access to the database. There’s a whole debate now to be had how much access should it have, etc. But in theory, it’s not that difficult to solve.

00:10:36 Chris: Keep in mind, the ratio between an HR professional and employees in the company is anything between 1 to 50 to 1 to 200. Any percentage of friction reduction, so much that you free up time that you can use on either being more lean or just spend time on more value adding things.

00:10:53 Chris: There’s a lot of time that you can spend on things that maybe are not automatable. And the things that are very manual, they suck time that you can invest on those more important things.

00:11:02 Michael: That’s the real benefit of what a platform like Zelt can provide is automating not only these cross departmental processes, but the manual workflows that now allow employees and departments to focus on something that’s more important.

00:11:15 Michael: One of the most remarkable shifts we’re seeing is how AI is democratizing access to tools and new companies are being formed in geographies that didn’t have the same infrastructure resources. As Zelt expands internationally, are you seeing that dynamic play out with your customer base?

00:11:32 Chris: I would say that the adoption of AI or the availability of AI has increased the interest in doing things in a smarter way or even just having data accessible. Previously, you could argue having the data in the database, it’s a nice-to-have. If you have it stuck in PDFs, that’s fine. You can just look it up when you need it to.

00:11:50 Chris: I think that is a wrong view on looking at things. But you could argue, if when you have AI, it does make sense to invest in your data more and keep your data clean and centralize it so that you can then leverage the benefits that you have from putting an AI lever on top of that.

00:12:05 Chris: That does increase the systems-based thinking. Any new technology that forces people to think about technology increases the level of, let’s say, not being scared of adopting technology, that is something not to underestimate. It can be a blocker of adopting HR system in the first place, because there’s still companies running on paper these days, believe it or not.

00:12:23 Chris: It’s helping with the adoption. Of course, the AI company is now born in all kinds of verticals and markets, the ones maybe that are built as a top layer to read out the data, particularly in the Middle East and the Gulf region. A big interest in investing into enterprise technology, particularly on the HR side, also on the CRM and ERP side.

00:12:40 Chris: So there we actually see ourselves coming up to more like the SAP and Oracle type, more enterprise-y, larger vendors. In those more up and coming or less mature markets, you would compete against a very different set of vendors.

00:12:53 Michael: That’s also true in most industries. But maybe specific to the human capital management, HR software, payroll, how do you see that evolving over the next five years? And is there a contrarian opinion or hot take you might have around the subject?

00:13:07 Chris: There’s two different views. Are there going to be now AI-native systems that are completely rebuilt and you don’t need SaaS anymore? Or somebody could just write an HR system in 24 hours with some vibe coding?

00:13:18 Chris: I saw a video from David Sachs, yesterday or two days ago. I think he summarized it quite well. With Salesforce, for example, it’s really an incredibly complicated system that’s been built over 20 years. There’s probably a million bug reports from customers or little feedbacks that were implemented from engineers over time.

00:13:35 Chris: An AI that just writes code based on something that makes sense is never going to be as close in terms of the quality of the product that’s built based on real people’s feedback, on real problems rather than hypothetical, probable outcomes.

00:13:47 Chris: There’s a lower risk of someone just vibe coding the HR system. There’s just so much logic that goes into it. Oftentimes the logic is very specific. It has to work in a certain way based on your country’s requirements or payroll requirements. So just approximating it isn’t good enough. In maybe other applications that would be. In anything HR and payroll, it isn’t.

00:14:07 Chris: The other thing is how do you now access that data. Should we, in Zelt, we be the AI layer that accesses the Zelt’s data or should you access it by Claude or OpenAI and use another tool that now sucks in the data from Zelt into your global AI model?

00:14:22 Chris: Both are possible outcomes. We, of course, are investing in our own AI layer. Ultimately, this tool is something that does need to be used by people. Users do live in that system. It’s not just a information gathering system. There’s processes that are running inside of it. So that is not being replaced by AI or can’t actually be replaced by AI. That’s kind of the point that people are subject to it.

00:14:43 Chris: But who will be able to cross sell on that AI add-on? Is it going to be the HR vendor or maybe Claude? That is still up for debate. But I think it also depends on the quality of AI that is available in the tool.

00:14:54 Chris: If it’s a really crappy one, then maybe you prefer that you access it by Claude. If it’s a really good one that maybe is specifically trained on that particular use case, context aware of what’s happening there, then it’s better to run it within the boundary of the HR system.

00:15:06 Michael: I think just how you’re describing it shows that you obviously come from an engineering background and think through these intricate systems and how that’s going to play out in the future. But how has your mindset changed from originally an engineering school, then being in finance and now an operator?

00:15:21 Chris: I used to think that things like physics and math are hard and difficult. Turns out people are way more difficult. Engineers may be underappreciated. And you can see that also when you think about the difference of when we started, we thought, hey, why do we even have a designer and a front-end engineer as separate people? Let’s just hire one that can do both.

00:15:36 Chris: Probably you’ll find some people in the world that can do both things very well but they are so rare because they’re just such different skills and such different mentalities. Understanding people and empathy and like things like change management, I never understood. What does change management actually mean?

00:15:49 Chris: As an engineer, you’d write that off as something trivial and stupid and why does it even exist. But it’s actually so difficult to get people to change how they do things. We are confronted with that now because when we introduce a new system, when we sell Zelt, maybe the HR director and the finance director really loved what they were seeing, in theory that all makes sense. But there’s a group of people that really doesn’t agree with this at all for good reason or bad reason.

00:16:13 Chris: But if they do disagree with it, that’s a fact. You have to somehow deal with that. Being able to get people on your side and get their buy-in and to change, that’s something that I didn’t really appreciate before actually being confronted with it. And maybe also something that the average engineer doesn’t quite understand until you actually have to deal with real users in the open wild rather than in a code base.

00:16:32 Michael: I think people are the real enigma, maybe not so much the processes that appear to be complex on the engineering side. But if you’re willing to share, it’d be great to hear what’s on the horizon for Zelt in the near future.

00:16:42 Chris: Right now, building out our go-to-market function. We’re hiring a bunch of salespeople. Kind of have an SDR, kind of AE two-level setup that seems to be working very well.

00:16:52 Chris: Then in terms of geos, we used to go super wide in the first few days to just collect a lot of feedback from lots of different countries and markets. We have customers in 40 or 45 or so different countries. We are now focusing a bit more on a select few because the market is just so huge. There’s no real need to be selling everywhere.

00:17:10 Chris: Also as you mature, you kind of gain that confidence to understand what is actually our market and being able to focus on that is a good thing rather than having to feel like you need to sell everywhere and to everyone. A bit more focus on that end.

00:17:22 Chris: And then just making the product better. Part of that is just listening to customers. Of course, we have more and more customers, it gets more difficult over time, being able to filter out noise and the things that are really valuable.

00:17:32 Chris: And then also, as we build out the team, instill that also into the team to understand what is the really important stuff and the somewhat important and not important at all.

00:17:40 Chris: We want to, of course, be also at the forefront of AI and being able to apply that and invest in both the traditional part of the platform, making sure that the core processes and the core systems, payroll calculation, that just works.

00:17:53 Chris: But then also adding this new type of AI based query on top of that for ease of access and ease of use. Then also just to automate some of the processes that aren’t just the output of a formula, but for interpreting a performance review based on peer feedback from 10,000 responses.

00:18:10 Chris: HR folks don’t have that time to read through that. So using that where AI really is placed to help better than maybe some algorithm that you would have had to use in the past, identifying those use cases where AI is really best placed and then embedding them in a smart way into the system.

00:18:25 Michael: Amazing. And to wrap up, I do have a few speed round questions to ask. I’ll start off with if you want to share a superpower that you have or something you’re known for.

00:18:36 Chris: I can zoom in to the lowest level of detail into a thousand levels. It’s also a weakness. I have problems going very broad, very quickly. So I think my superpower is more super narrow, super detailed, super deep.

00:18:47 Michael: Is there a book, newsletter, podcast, piece of media you’ve been enjoying recently?

00:18:52 Chris: There’s very few newsletters that I actually read. One maybe is Matt Lerner. That’s a great one. Then I have the JooBee’s newsletter. She’s an HR influencer in the space. I think those two.

00:19:02 Michael: It’s hard, even as an investor to focus and block out the noise of some things, but pick your sources that you really love. At least internally at Everywhere, we’re continuously tinkering and being exposed to new workflows. I’m just curious, have you discovered a productivity hack in this age where every day there seems to be a new platform rolled out?

00:19:20 Chris: As I mentioned, my superpower is zooming in on the things that are important. For me, the most important thing is filtering out the stuff that don’t matter. Structuring my inbox has been super important.

00:19:30 Chris: I have multiple email aliases, for example. Most of these sales databases, they guess the email based on your name. I have all those and they all go into a certain folder. That’s just one example so I can actually do the things that I need to do.

00:19:42 Chris: And of course I use Claude. We recently switched from ChatGPT to Claude. I’m not sure yet what’s better. But I leverage quite a lot for writing texts, but also some easy coding when I need to change something on the website and I don’t have an engineer right now that can help me.

00:19:54 Chris: Just being able to focus on the things that I really want to do rather than getting pulled into 15 different directions. I think it’s the case for most people. As a CEO, it holds the same.

00:20:02 Michael: That’s such a skill of identifying which platform or which product is going to be the most useful because there’s so much out there and so much information that’s being flooded into our inboxes. So it’s such a great skill to have. And so Chris, for our listeners, where can we find you?

00:20:16 Chris: On LinkedIn. If you want to reach out there, feel free to connect with me, Chris Priebe. There are not that many so you should find me there and send me an email. I’ll give you my real one now. It’s ckp@zelt.app, (not chris@zelt.app, straight to the bin). Probably Everywhere Ventures’ community as well. So you can drop me a message there as well.

00:20:34 Michael: Thank you so much, Chris. It was such a pleasure chatting and learning more about what you’ve built and accomplished in Zelt.

00:20:39 Chris: Thank you. It was great to be here.

00:20:42 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 Chris Priebe in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 109 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Etienne Louvet, founder and CEO of Iona Drones — a drone logistics company reimagining delivery for the world’s most remote and underserved communities. Etienne shares how COVID lockdowns in rural Brittany, watching his elderly grandmother unable to access basic goods without a car, led him to uncover a massive gap in the global logistics system. He discusses how Iona challenges the industry consensus that light cargo delivery must rely on traditional vans, instead building a tilt-rotor drone from scratch and delivering shipments of 20 parcels or fewer faster and more cost-efficiently than existing solutions.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Building a tilt-rotor drone optimized for light cargo delivery in remote and underserved communities.

• Delivering strong results with a lean funding base.

• Creating a new logistics category for shipments of 20 parcels or fewer.

• Leveraging energy efficiency as a core competitive advantage over traditional delivery vans.

• Expanding into the US market with a proven drone platform and regulatory certifications already in hand.

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 we speak with amazing founders from across our ecosystem. Today we are very lucky to have Etienne, who’s the founder and CEO of Iona Drones, a company that’s reimagining logistics for the world’s most remote and underserved communities. So welcome.

00:00:50 Etienne: Thank you very much and it’s a pleasure to speak about what we do a bit more, especially as we’re opening the US.

00:00:56 Jenny: Amazing. Well, good timing all around. Let’s go back a little bit. Tell us, before you were thinking about startups, what was your background and how did you even get interested in robotics and drone technology? People usually have a good story around that. So why don’t you give us your background a bit?

00:01:16 Etienne: I was always a bit of a geek, so mixing that with a slight sense of business. As long as I remember I was thinking about startups. It’s just that it was not necessarily the startup wording in my head but I was looking at the cool companies when I was 10, 12, 13.

00:01:32 Etienne: I think over time. I started to develop more and more of an interest in autonomous systems. We’re talking about systemic analysis, we’re talking about the environment, we’re talking about in general, how do we make innovation progress and not only just reinventing the wheel for the sake of reinventing the wheel.

00:01:50 Etienne: So, looking at this, autonomous systems have a tremendous potential. There is a bit of a punchline that I use very often, but it’s autonomous systems have a marginal cost that tends towards the marginal cost of energy because you remove the other labor aspect and also the CapEx is amortized over a much better period of time.

00:02:12 Etienne: When you say that it seems a bit barbaric at first, but what it means is theoretically you have a journey or a ride that will go towards just $1, $2, $3 maybe, and that completely changes the unit economics for a number of industries.

00:02:29 Etienne: What we do specifically at Iona, it’s about the autonomous systems. When I explain this energy efficiency aspect, what it means is that energy efficiency is not only to be sustainable, it’s to be competitive. The more energy efficient a system is, the better you’re gonna be able to amortize, the more competitive you’re gonna be.

00:02:47 Etienne: And on that, road vehicles on a number of use cases are actually very suboptimal because you need to move a person which is 70 kilos or 120 pounds, maybe 40, or just a few parcels, and it doesn’t really make sense for a number of use cases.

00:03:06 Etienne: That said, drones are a great way to complement a fleet of delivery van or trucks with something more granular, something that will help you transport very fast something, so emergency medical. Transport things in less dense places.

00:03:24 Etienne: If you use a delivery van, you will need 400 parcels, minimum. If you want something that is for 20 parcels in that case drones can be a very good alternative. Long story short, but this is what we started to build in 2021.

00:03:38 Jenny: Okay, we’re gonna get there, but I wanted to start at the beginning. You were a geek growing up, and then what happened? I imagine from your name you are French, but I also hear some British accent. Tell me where did you grow up and then what led you in your path.

00:03:54 Etienne: Definitely French, a hundred percent actually. Went in the UK for almost six years now.

00:03:59 Jenny: You’re picking up some of the accent.

00:04:03 Etienne: Yeah, great joy actually. I don’t want to be only French, so it’s amazing. I’ve been in the UK for six years now. I created a company there after London Business school. I was working at Verizon before I worked also as a strategy consultant on a number of autonomous systems.

00:04:19 Etienne: And then, I needed to create something on my own. I think it’s always this delusion also from any entrepreneurs. I was likely skeptic about some of the technologies out there. I saw that we were maybe paying too much attention to the flying cars and the things that we dream about because we’re still kids inside? But sometimes they are very, very good use cases that are underlooked. And Iona was definitely one of those.

00:04:44 Jenny: That’s the inspiration that you wanted to look at underserved markets, not necessarily just the flying cars. And then what was that moment where you’re like, oh, this is the idea? I feel like that’s always a really interesting moment for an entrepreneur.

00:04:58 Etienne: It was a mix, but I would say that something that played a major role is COVID. I went back to live with my family in the west of France, to Brittany. I was very lucky for the COVID lockdown, to be honest, because I had access to the outside and it was a nice environment.

00:05:15 Etienne: The difficult aspect is that it’s very rural, very, very rural. The village is about 800 inhabitants. Everything is car dependent for anything so any grocery or shopping, anything like that is dependent on your car. It made me acutely aware that thankfully we were cousins and family around to also help my late grandmother then. Because it’s just impossible and a number of people in those villages and places are quite old and she couldn’t drive.

00:05:43 Etienne: It just made me aware. For a time, I was working on a number of autonomous systems and optimizing what already works to make it work slightly and marginally better.

00:05:53 Etienne: Maybe there is a very good economic and societal impact that I could have if I can make things work for things that are actually not working at all, at the moment. The alternatives are, you have to drive and that’s it. You don’t have Deliveroo, Uber, all the services that we got used to in most big cities now.

00:06:15 Jenny: Well, I love that Grandma was the inspiration. More entrepreneurs need to have that inspiration. I think that’s really cool. Okay. So you realized your grandma can’t get her groceries. You’re lucky ‘cause you guys are nearby, but you take this moment to think like, okay. There’s gotta be a better way for many people and for society. So tell us about V1 of Iona and maybe some of the ideas you had at the beginning that were proved out either way.

00:06:43 Etienne: 2021, one of the first realization, and that was the V1, is that we had to build the hardware. I’m not an aerospace engineer by background. I love to fly things around, and I’m a civilian skydiver, so of course I have a slight interest in anything that is in the air, but nothing specifically around drones.

00:07:04 Etienne: And the reason for that is there is this amazing regulatory framework that is released in 2021 in Europe, which is a good thing, even if regulations are scary for many industries because it gives us certainty. It gives us what we need to build a product.

00:07:20 Etienne: And so we build a product based on that regulatory framework. That framework, if you want to pass the marketing stunt, like the, oh, we flew a drone from there to there and it’s cool, you need repeatable operations. The only way to get there, without getting too much in the jargon, it’s called an LUC in Europe and it’s called an OC in the US.

00:07:43 Etienne: And when you need to do that, you need a full stack. You need the end-to-end encapsulation of the risk, to demonstrate to the aviation authority because we have to comply with a extremely high level of safety, that we’re doing things the right way and that it’s completely safe and that you can use it.

00:08:01 Etienne: We had to go into hardware. The question is what type of hardware? A number of drones that people may think about are multicopters, the stereotypical propellers facing up, pushing off the ground, DGI style. That really doesn’t work past the short range.

00:08:19 Etienne: We built a very specific aircraft called a tilt rotter. Again, sorry for the jargon. But it takes off vertically for the convenience because unfortunately, not everyone has an airstrip at home and it transitions to horizontal flight, so the propellers are switching, and then it becomes a plane.

00:08:36 Etienne: The reason for that, even if it’s a bit more complex, is that it’s much more energy efficient and much more modular. We don’t have any dead weight, so we can stay quite light, which reduces the risk. But we also increase the performance and the capacity of the drone.

00:08:52 Etienne: And so over time we have this energy efficiency advantage where first, a better density of battery is gonna benefit us more than the others because we’re gonna use the kilowatt better. But on top of that, we’re reducing the cost because we can use lighter components. We’re reducing the maintenance cost and so on and so forth. So it’s a very positive flywheel. And we had a number of iterations.

00:09:16 Jenny: Surprise, surprise, surprise. Hardware, many iterations. Love it.

00:09:20 Etienne: Like many startups, we started from a perspective of if it’s completely novel, it has to be groundbreaking and everything, and we iterated on a number of designs. I’m the person doing the safety and ground checks, because does it make sense? Is it cool looking? Yes. Great. But it makes sense.

00:09:38 Etienne: And a number of designs and engineers, getting excited, were very, very efficient on one very specific use case, but it wasn’t covering everything. So the novel aspect was a tilt. We have probably 25 patents in the pipe and granted and so on. So quite deep tech.

00:09:55 Etienne: We did that with less than 5 million in fundings when some companies had raised a hundred million for tilt routers and never achieved it. We were really, really proud of this. But we had to be very specific on what was the use case and the use case was light cargo.

00:10:12 Etienne: Every aspect of the product was based on this. Does it make sense for light cargo? Light cargo is also something that we invented. Actually, it’s not an official segment in logistics. Light cargo is whenever you have 20 parcels or less. People at the moment sometimes refer to that as last mile but it’s much more than this.

00:10:30 Etienne: Because last mile is indeed when you end up with less than 20 parcels, but it also happens in reverse logistics when you return a product, which is 30% of the deliveries at the moment, and any other emergency medical and so on.

00:10:43 Etienne: Light cargo is the fastest growing segment with e-commerce. It’s also gonna grow even more because people expect same day, next day delivery and everything. But it’s also the most difficult to operate.

00:10:55 Jenny: In New York, they expect 15 minute delivery.

00:11:00 Etienne: We realized the traditional logistics system was based on something that was a century old and the way we are expecting our parcels and deliveries nowadays, it has nothing to do with what we were doing a hundred years ago.

00:11:13 Etienne: We have to change the system, and this is the positive aspect. The vision for the company is what if we could move things around unrestricted. And in that case, it changes everything for the economy and society.

00:11:25 Jenny: Going from V1to V2, was that just a natural evolution or was it a pivot where you’re like, oh, wow. We actually think that this opportunity is going to be a faster path to market, or we learned this? What was the moment where you go from one iteration to the next?

00:11:42 Etienne: Not a surprise also, but as a startup, we lived a number of difficult times. This was one of the first. What really made us switch is realizing that we had just a few months to demonstrate a lot. I started to have the feeling that we were going in the wrong direction. I like this analogy of one-way door, two-way doors. That was a one-way.

00:12:06 Etienne: We had to be extremely sure about this. We had a tail sitter design. It’s a drone that sits on its back, so it takes off vertically as well, but the wing are facing up and then it transitions and everything. It’s clever but it doesn’t scale. It doesn’t scale past a few parcels. So it’s something that works for a light aircraft but as you get into the regulations, it’s more and more difficult.

00:12:29 Etienne: I didn’t want to be blind with that. So we had some very difficult conversations with the team. Same with a document on a Word or anything like that, sometimes you just need to start from scratch. And we had worked for two or three months on the previous one.

00:12:45 Etienne: We knew that we had roughly another three months if we wanted to demonstrate something tangible and interesting. It was just a better solution just to accept that we were going in the wrong direction and to go with the new learning and this new understanding much faster in the other way. And this is what we did.

00:13:05 Jenny: Nice. So then what happens? I know hardware takes a lot of money, takes a pretty experienced team. Talk to me a little bit about what happens next. I’ve invested in a lot of hardware companies and it’s never just a linear journey of up until the right.

00:13:19 Jenny: There’s a lot of ups and downs. And even when things are going up, there’s bumps along the road or there’s things you need to negotiate because it’s physical product. I always find the timing for raising money, bringing the right team on, everything is this perfect storm. What happens after 2021?

00:13:36 Etienne: I really hope that no one in your audience thinks about starting a hardware startup, because I might be very discouraging. Anyway, the first two years and a half of Iona were really difficult. Really, really difficult.

00:13:52 Etienne: First, because I had the brilliant idea of starting a company in the middle of a startup downturn, which was not exactly the best timing, especially if you’re doing hardware. For the first two years and a half, we were raising on a few months of runway, a few weeks of runway sometimes.

00:14:08 Etienne: I was sending an investor update every week. Just as a way to say like, I promised that last week. We did that and let’s move on. And this is also what made us very strong as a team. Because clearly the people were not there for the cool salary or the cool name on the door because we had very little, so it built a very, very strong team.

00:14:27 Etienne: We had to demonstrate everything, matching small grants. And we were in the UK so unfortunately we didn’t have access to the SBIR and things like that in the US. So we were getting 20K from the University of Nottingham and then we were matching that with another 5, 10K check from an angel.

00:14:45 Etienne: We were using that to get a month and a half of runway building a prototype basically. This is what we did. Up to the point that we had a prototype and a working prototype and we were starting to demonstrate more and we got accepted to Techstars LA.

00:15:02 Etienne: And for us, it was a way to really achieve something because at the pace at which we were going, we had so many cost opportunities, so many delays due to the fact that we were mostly trying to survive and then this remaining 30% percent of the time, we could actually work. So it was insanely hard.

00:15:19 Etienne: And using Techstars LA, it was a way to get into the US, understand a bit better the network there, raise a bit more money and then get things going and deal with less than this. Long story short, in hardware you always have this problem. You have more money. But at the end of the day, you still have this problem but for the next step.

00:15:37 Etienne: We raised a bit more. We developed the full V1 of the drone. We now demonstrated the full V1 of the drone with customers. We have a number of patents, patents in the pipe, but granted ones as well. And in a way, it’s going very well.

00:15:52 Etienne: But to any entrepreneurs listening or future entrepreneur listening, it’s actually good to have lived this trade off for that long, in the journey because I think it made us extremely cost efficient. I see a number of friends and founders that are struggling sometimes to let go someone, to cut costs on something that is not a super high priority because it’s just an uncomfortable situation you have. And we’re really not like that.

00:16:19 Etienne: And we’re not like that not because I’m a dictator and doing crazy things all the time, but just because the entire team understands that and it’s in our DNA now. I have people sometimes coming back to me just to save a few bucks on the component or something like that.

00:16:33 Etienne: We’re still dealing with minimum order quantity on a number of things because what we built is carbon fiber, quite complex. I have people in my team practically reaching out saying like, Hey, if we do that this way, it’s gonna save us 50 quids. Yeah, that’s good.

00:16:47 Jenny: Love it. So now tell us about scaling into the US. That’s obviously a big step. You’ve been running the company in the UK, but I imagine you have people around the world that are helping you, supporting you, investors around the world. Tell us about this moment, ‘cause that sounds pretty big.

00:17:04 Etienne: It is. After Techstars LA, we did another round of funding. We flipped the company to the US. We have a Delaware C Corp. I have a UK branch and an Irish branch. Software and manufacturing, and a bit of operation is in Ireland and the rest is in the UK, so aerospace and robotics mostly.

00:17:23 Etienne: The reason for that is a bit what we call the R&D cycles and iterative machine. It’s a bit similar to what Stripe did and they regulated in Ireland first because it’s just a faster turnaround time for any paperwork, exercise, or anything like that.

00:17:37 Etienne: This is exactly what we have in Ireland. So we’re guaranteed 30 days on a number of documents that we have to submit with the aviation authority instead of sometimes six months in the US or in some countries in Europe. So very useful.

00:17:55 Etienne: That gives us the R&D aspects. The market is, of course, in the US because it’s much faster and the market is opening up because Part 108, which is the equivalent of the framework that we’re using in Europe, was drafted last year. The draft was released and it’s implemented this year. The timing is very good.

00:18:12 Etienne: I just got my own Visa. I actually wear the hoodie of Extraordinary, the agency that did that. We’re gonna really push the US in the coming months because we know the timing is right and we know that we have this unique technology that we demonstrated already, and it gives us a headstart.

00:18:29 Etienne: And if we want to achieve this ambition and this ambition that the team has to become a global leader and to really make an impact, we have to be in the US. So to anyone listening, I’m going to travel around the US in the next months. I have a few trips already planned for Texas, Oklahoma, potentially Maine, Montana.

00:18:51 Etienne: If you’re in the area, you just tell me. Keen to grab a coffee to meet people. It’s super exciting in general because I really think that we’re starting to see that society overall is starting to understand the impact and the potential of autonomous systems like drones.

00:19:07 Jenny: Well, welcome. We’re lucky to have you spending time here and we’re glad that the current environment has not dissuaded you in any way because we need amazing entrepreneurs like you, always, to be coming to the US and not feeling dissuaded by anything that you’re hearing or any of the policies, because that really is our future. So that is exciting.

00:19:29 Jenny: Just looking inwards for a minute as we get towards the end of this, you grew up in a small town in Brittany. I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time in Brittany, bizarrely, and you get yourself to the London Business School and now you’re getting yourself to the US. So I’d love to know where does that inner drive come from?

00:19:46 Jenny: I imagine not a lot of your family members are charting the same path as you. So where did that inspiration, that encouragement, all of that come from? Because it’s very unique and it’s impressive.

00:19:57 Etienne: That’s a bit more deep. I spent a lot of time in Paris as well. My family is in between so I had access to this more globalized and international world. But I didn’t really fit in this either. A lot of people I met over the years, especially founders and entrepreneurs, we tend to think that we want to achieve something because we want to understand society better and we want to be part of it.

00:20:21 Etienne: I have this feeling that now it’s much easier for me. And of course, I’m living amazing adventures and I meet amazing people all the time. But I think the drive, to answer your question, is likely coming from trying to fit in, trying to understand this world around me.

00:20:39 Etienne: This is also what strategy is about, trying to understand what’s going on around me, trying to understand why the world works this way, where could I play a part. A striking example, when I was in Paris, because I probably didn’t fit in reality with some of the people I was hanging out with.

00:20:54 Etienne: But potentially not exactly the same background, same financial means also. And so you feel slightly disconnected. You feel that there is a world that you don’t understand. And this world that I didn’t understand was especially international people, because I didn’t have three passports. I didn’t speak three languages natively at home and everything. It was fascinating.

00:21:15 Etienne: I had a few of my friends that were binational that were multicultural in many aspects. The first thing I wanted to do as soon as I graduated from high school was travel the world as much as possible.

00:21:27 Etienne: I chose my Bachelor because this was a very specific track. It was also sponsored, so I had a scholarship. And on top of that, I was traveling the world, spending over four years, one year in each country. I lived in Singapore, Morocco and everything. And I really wanted to discover the world this way.

00:21:46 Etienne: Curiosity is the main drive. And then, from curiosity, you start to connect the dots and you start to realize that like, oh, there is a lot of value if you connect that dot to that dot. And this is potentially what an entrepreneur is doing.

00:21:59 Jenny: So great. I love that story and definitely resonates with me. I have a similar story, although I did grow up in New York City. A lot of my friends and my family, everyone was here, and I was very curious about the world beyond. And so I’ve spent the last 20 years just trekking around the world and have built communities, friends, entrepreneurs around the world, sharing a similar sentiment to you of like, wow. There’s so much to explore and learn.

00:22:24 Jenny: All right, so we’re gonna wrap it up in a few minutes, but any person along the way, you don’t have to say their name, or any group or something that really supported you? I mean, you’re building hardware, even if you’re living in London. Wasn’t a huge community when you started.

00:22:40 Jenny: So who are the support systems that you leaned on? Because a lot of folks in the audience are entrepreneurs. And they’re thinking about doing things a little bit against the grain and trying to get support. Obviously if you live in Silicon Valley, it’s a lot easier, but when you’re building hardware in a place like the UK, maybe a little bit harder. So where did you get that support?

00:23:01 Etienne: I think the first lesson, it works especially well when you’re in a country that you don’t have any connections to, try to build a network. Techstars also learned that, during the first two weeks of the Mentor Madness, it was really about meeting as many people as possible. You end up with like 14, 16 meetings per day pitching to random people.

00:23:20 Etienne: You don’t even remember your name at the end of the day, but it works. It’s not a perfect strategy. You have to put yourself where it happens. So I think location and geography and creating opportunities is really important. And the only way to do that is just to take the shot every time you can.

00:23:37 Etienne: So the first thing is, especially when I started, so in the UK, I was meeting everyone all the time, never declined a meeting which happens to me now. But never declined a meeting. Went to random places in the UK. I think I know rural England much better than France.

00:23:57 Etienne: I ended up living amazing experience because I was in a Scottish festival in Aviemore with 30 people dancing on a Scottish dance that I never heard about before. I created connections and friends there that told me about their struggles here and there and everything. So I think it’s really about creating the opportunity.

00:24:16 Etienne: And then when you do that more specifically and potentially in a more tangible way, we got supported by some universities. So I mentioned the University of Nottingham that had aerospace UP.

00:24:28 Etienne: I think with AI nowadays, every entrepreneur that is starting should look online what are the universities, what are the talent pool, what are the research hubs in the area that I could potentially access. The academia, they’re much more accessible than the famous entrepreneur or the famous investor when you don’t have a network to start with.

00:24:46 Etienne: I leaned on connections like the universities, Cranfield University, Nottingham, Coventry University. We did some work with the National Composite Center in Bristol. We did also some work with the University of Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh, and all of them had very specific expertise.

00:25:05 Etienne: In Scotland for instance, it was robotics and the composites in Bristol and so on. And the people are really keen to speak with people thinking about new ideas, startup, iterated, everything. So it’s a great resource.

00:25:19 Etienne: And then sometimes they tell you about this small grant, small opportunities. You have to make yourself visible. A number of small tickets and grants that saved us are coming from people who like shot an email saying like, you should maybe apply and this is the way it works.

00:25:37 Etienne: And then over time it gets more specialized. Something that I think not that many people do is things like the forwardable. I realized that even for the people that are actually quite experienced now, many people don’t have a forwardable. They don’t offer to just like, can you connect me with three people in New York that I should meet with?

00:25:55 Etienne: Sometimes people don’t have time and it’s okay, but if they do connect you with at least one person, and that every time you’re going somewhere, you meet with a few interesting people, it makes a massive difference over time. It’s a compounding effect.

00:26:09 Jenny: I love that. All right, we’re gonna wrap up just with a little speed round. So what’s a favorite book or podcast or show or something that you’re enjoying right now?

00:26:18 Etienne: My favorite book of all time is Viktor Frankl, Man Search for Meaning. It’s about, again, in a very difficult time, of course, because it was the Holocaust. But the research of meaning and the research curiosity driving the people, what drives, at the end of the day, humans on earth. I think that’s fascinating.

00:26:36 Etienne: More specifically recently, I’m fascinated by where is the value gonna be created in technology now that software is becoming a commodity. So it turns out that one of my best friends is also an investor at CAROLINE, in B2B SaaS.

00:26:53 Jenny: Lots of discussions there.

00:26:55 Etienne: A number of interesting thoughts on that. For instance, another all time, top three books in my life is [The Almanack of] Naval Ravikant. I guess I’m not the only one.

00:27:05 Etienne: But he’s talking already about what is technology. Technology is when it doesn’t really work. So it’s a sliding definition and you’re going to the next frontier and the next frontier and everything. So really like that.

00:27:17 Jenny: That’s good. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be? That’s an exciting question to ask you ‘cause you have traveled pretty extensively.

00:27:26 Etienne: I ticked a few of the boxes already. I would say New York but New York I would stay probably more than a year. If it was just for one year, actually I would pick Australia.

00:27:35 Jenny: Nice. Good pick. Favorite productivity hack?

00:27:40 Etienne: Wispr Flow and AI agents. So Wispr Flow, which is encapsulating the Wispr model from open AI so speech to text. And then you have that when you prompt agents and LLMs so that you give much more context.

00:27:57 Etienne: You switch everything to deep sync, deep search and everything, syncing mode extended. And you always use the goal role warning context method on prompting. And then in context, you brain dump everything that you have in your head by just creating a vocal note of it, which gives maximum context to the task, and the outcome is amazing.

00:28:22 Jenny: All right. I love it. Final question. Where can listeners find you?

00:28:26 Etienne: On a plane at the moment.

00:28:28 Jenny: Well, how can they reach you? Is it best LinkedIn, Twitter, email?

00:28:35 Etienne: LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably the best.

00:28:37 Jenny: LinkedIn. Okay, great. All right, well this was super fun. Always great to learn about different journeys, especially yours. Very unique and thanks so much for joining us.

00:28:46 Etienne: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

00:28:50 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 five 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 Etienne Louvet in Founders Everywhere.

The host of episode 108 of Venture Everywhere is Harm-Julian Schumacher, founder and CEO of OneLot—a financing platform for used car dealers in the Philippines. He talks with Reto Bolliger, co-founder and CEO of Chaiz, an online marketplace for extended vehicle warranties. Reto shares how climbing Kilimanjaro led him to build a travel company, and how an investor in that business introduced him to the surprisingly profitable world of extended car warranties. He discusses how Chaiz challenges the industry consensus that warranties “must be sold” through aggressive tactics, instead building trust through transparency and offering consumers prices up to 40% cheaper than dealerships.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Building the first online marketplace to compare and buy extended car warranties.

• Offering dealership products at 40% lower prices through digital channels.

• Replacing aggressive sales tactics with transparency and education.

• Leveraging AI for customer support and AI search optimization.

• Embedding warranty APIs for cross-selling through partner platforms.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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.

RSS Link

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 Harm-Julian: Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Julian. I’m the founder and CEO of OneLot. We are a financing platform for used car dealers in the Philippines. We are building around the used car dealers who are the backbone of the market and support them with credit solutions, software and data.

00:00:53 Harm-Julian: Today, I’m here with Reto, the co-founder and CEO of Chaiz. They are a marketplace for extended vehicle protection. Reto, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

00:01:05 Reto: Thank you very much, Julian, for the introduction. It’s nice to be here on the Venture Everywhere podcast. As a brief introduction, my name is Reto, as Julian mentioned. I’m from Switzerland, traveled the world for about 15 years, built multiple companies. My latest venture is called Chaiz. It’s an online marketplace for consumers to buy extended car warranties.

00:01:30 Reto: Traditionally, extended car warranties have only been sold at dealerships. We built the first online marketplace where you can buy exactly the same product, but you can compare them, buy them online. We are on average about 40% cheaper if you buy them directly online rather than at dealerships.

00:01:49 Harm-Julian: Thanks so much, Reto. Let’s start with your background. You have been very entrepreneurial, but you did stuff in the travel space, in music, and now you’re in the car industry. Tell a little bit about that and how you came to do Chaiz now.

00:02:04 Reto: I had indeed a bit of a back and forth in my CV. As you mentioned, I actually started studying classical music then got into finance. I worked for Goldman Sachs for six years in London, but I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

00:02:17 Reto: While I was working at Goldman Sachs, I was climbing Kilimanjaro with a few friends. I liked that experience so much that I started my own Kilimanjaro operator. So I quit banking and built an adventure travel company, which was my first successful company.

00:02:35 Reto: One of the investors in the travel business, his name is Dan. He is an entrepreneur himself and he owns car dealerships in the US. Through him, I got in the car industry. I figured out that car dealers actually make more money with selling F&I products like car warranties than they do with selling cars. That piqued my interest.

00:02:56 Reto: That was about seven or eight years ago. It was the trigger to dig more into the industry. Generally, I’m just very excited about new industries and digging to learn new things. That was part of the reason why I always look for new things to dive into head first.

00:03:13 Harm-Julian: You said you always wanted to be entrepreneurial. I see some overlaps with myself. I always had that, but I also started off on a corporate track. I did Bain in the beginning to then eventually down the entrepreneurial road. You talked, your first successful business was a Kilimanjaro tour operator. Where was this entrepreneurial drive coming from?

00:03:32 Reto: I don’t know, actually, but I have a lot of ideas. A lot of them are not good ideas, but I just love to test ideas in reality, I’m very convinced that they’re good. And then I just want to go in and execute.

00:03:45 Reto: The Kilimanjaro was one of these examples. We were climbing the mountain and we thought we can do that better. We just started it and then figured it out along the way. What triggered yourself to make the move if you always wanted to be an entrepreneur or it’s like one big opportunity that prompted you?

00:04:01 Harm-Julian: Very family driven, where we have a few entrepreneurs in the family. Also from young age, always liked work, tried out ideas, selling things at school. During university, I co-founded a conference there, like a recruiting company.

00:04:17 Harm-Julian: I felt like before starting something, I want to learn the craft. Then that was for me like Bain, learned that. And then I felt more confident to actually start something. One thing you said, which I find quite interesting, you have a lot of ideas, but not all of them are good ones. What you hear in the industry is ideas are easy to come by. It’s not about the idea.

00:04:38 Harm-Julian: I actually disagree. It’s not easy to find a really great idea and especially a venture, scalable one. Around the example of Chaiz, you said you got introduced by your investor. How did you go by to validating this idea and doubling down on dedicating the next 5 to 10 years of your life to that?

00:04:57 Reto: I would agree with premise, an idea is not a business in particular. I made that experience myself. The travel business is the perfect example that you can’t venture scale a Kilimanjaro operator.

00:05:08 Reto: Back then when I started digging into the extended car warranty business, I took a lot of the learnings on board from my previous venture company that I’ve built, looking at the idea with more of a business eye. You look at does the idea scale?

00:05:24 Reto: The problem with travel, for instance, it’s very driven by local operations, whereas an extended car warranty is like a financial product. So once your funnel works, if you sell one contract or a million contracts, marginal costs are very limited.

00:05:40 Reto: So I approached it very differently and I did way more research. So before I founded the business, I interviewed all the stakeholders in the industry, like car dealerships, looked at the call center sellers. I spoke with the providers of the plan.

00:05:53 Reto: My friend was very helpful there as well to make that introductions and learn and understand, is this a business that can reach venture scale? And then at some point I decided, yes, it actually can. And only then I pulled the trigger.

00:06:07 Harm-Julian: How do you then approach the first year? Did you go like, Hey, this is a total market and I want to immediately tackle that fully, or did you solve one very small specific problem? Tied to that, the question for a marketplace is also this demand and supply problem. Talk us through there in the beginning. What was the problem you solved or did you go directly after everything? And was it more hard to get demand or supply?

00:06:30 Reto: For the supply side of the marketplace, for them, we are just another seller. The only difference is we’re not a car dealership, so we do sell it digitally. For them to say, yes, I want to be on the marketplace, even though there might not be immediate customer flow from day one, there was a pitch that we were able to make.

00:06:52 Reto: The first few were difficult, first five, just to convince them that this is where the world is moving, that people start buying more things digitally, the industry will get more transparent. So they had to buy into this hypothesis.

00:07:07 Reto: Once we had the first five and we launched, it was really just about how to get customers on board. That was the main challenge. At some point it even flipped. At the moment we do have a waiting list of providers that want to be listed on the marketplace, and we can just onboard maybe one a quarter.

00:07:25 Reto: This is an interesting thing that we observed. More and more of these providers understood that just selling through dealerships might, in five years time, be different or might not be all that is in the industry. A lot of them realized that they have to be more transparent. They have to be able to sell digitally as well. So I think that triggered the shift, which we’re in a lucky position that the supply side now is really easy to scale.

00:07:52 Reto: But the demand is the tricky part. Every consumer business knows it’s difficult to just go grow 3x, 5x year over year on a B2C level, or there’s usually not a clear script how to do that.

00:08:06 Harm-Julian: As I understand the market, traditionally these extended warranties were sold by the dealer at the point of sale of the car. Then you had a next wave coming in, which was more outbound call center, calling consumer and over the phone trying to sell those, which really backfired at one point and created some negative consumer reaction because those got too aggressive.

00:08:26 Harm-Julian: Now you are trying to solve this by… digitally, consumers who are actually looking, capturing their demand and channeling them into your business.

00:08:36 Harm-Julian: I just find that very interesting because it’s similar for us. We really focus on the dealer. You are actually focusing more on your own channels, moving things away from the dealer. How do you see this evolving between the three different channels?

00:08:48 Reto: If you carve out just the extended warranty part of it, it’s an industry that is going to evolve similar to other industries with some differences, but car insurance could be an example with the difference that car insurance is mandatory and warranties are not. In a car insurance, you have digital sellers. And then at some point the marketplaces came up. Nowadays, most people do comparison shopping online.

00:09:12 Reto: What you will see is more and more business will move online. That’s a trend that’s probably not too controversial to say. What we do is in the first instance, we’re not really going out there convincing people that they have to buy the warranty.

00:09:28 Reto: So we have to tailwind from call centers and dealerships that tell people you should buy this product. It’s a good product. We basically just show them, Hey, there’s a better way to buy. It’s ultimately a $3,000 contract or even more. Every purchase that is in a high ticket item, you should do some research and compare different offers.

00:09:47 Reto: We just plug in when people already know they want to buy the product. Over time, this will evolve. At a certain scale, we will be able to influence the narrative and the reputation of the industry more. That comes back to what you said that some of these call centers had some negative impact on the reputation.

00:10:05 Reto: Once we dominate the inbound part, we’ll have enough firepower to start controlling the narrative more and explain to people that it’s actually a really useful product as long as you buy it at the right price. That’s how I see the car warranty industry evolving, including us as an agent in there.

00:10:23 Harm-Julian: So at the moment it’s very focused on, Hey, there’s a clear intent to buy. A used car dealer told me this is good, but since it’s quite expensive, I’m going online and comparing anything and this is like where you’re capturing the demand. Interesting.

00:10:37 Harm-Julian: Let’s look ahead a little bit. You touch upon that one already to do more education around car warranties. This is a useful product. What are other goals or aspirations for the future? How do you plan to achieve them?

00:10:52 Reto: The overarching mission is really to reform the car warranty market. I believe it’s an extremely useful product. A lot of people in the US don’t have savings. If the car breaks down, they’re basically in debt. But it hasn’t been sold the right way. If we manage, in five years time, that most people actually have protection on their vehicle and they bought it at the right price, that would be a great achievement.

00:11:16 Reto: Beyond that, there is a lot of SaaS enabled opportunity in the industry as well. So we have all the supply on our marketplace and there’s tons of products we can build to make their life easier or like talking about claim handling rates, pulling all these types of things.

00:11:33 Reto: On the front end, being a household brand that explained to consumers that this is a great product, if bought at the right price, that would be the success. And then further in the industry, there’s a lot of blank canvas to paint on when it comes to building new technologies and giving new tools. It’s a very antiquated industry with almost no working APIs.

00:11:54 Harm-Julian: I can definitely relate to that. In particular, also the used car dealers, in my experience, they’re not the most tech savvy guys. Our process is evolving around enabling them on the ground even more because they are the ones who are like very much own the entire industry. They’re the backbone. They are the ones buying cars, fixing them, making them look nice, selling them again. A lot of consumer to dealer to consumer transactions.

00:12:19 Harm-Julian: We are also thinking about AI agentic use cases where we can meet them in their natural channels. This might be, instead of giving them a website or a digital form or an app, which they have to fill out, meet them in WhatsApp because these are the natural messaging tools they use anyways. That is a big hypothesis we are working on to make usability higher, increased conversions, increased demand.

00:12:46 Harm-Julian: Particularly looking at your technology, you said that it’s a traditional industry. How do you think about the technology or like the new AI use cases? What are really the applications you see and how is it changing the industry?

00:13:00 Reto: For us, what we keep the closest eye on in terms of AI, I think probably every consumer business should do that is the AI search and AI commerce like how consumer behavior changes, how they discover products.

00:13:14 Reto: An example, Google search on SEO was the big thing 5, 10 years ago. Now a lot of content marketing strategies are eaten up by AI. So people go search and research in ChatGPT and other tools. That for us, a very important driver that we constantly monitor. As soon as there’s potential to advertise in AI tools, et cetera, as a consumer business, we need to be quick to check things like that out.

00:13:42 Reto: On the more backend type for our industry, the straightest line is probably in customer support. We still handle the customer relationships. So even after the sale, we still have customers calling in. If they have questions about 30% of our sales are assisted. So someone calls in, asks a question.

00:13:59 Reto: Voice AI is kind of starting to work now-ish. There’s still to be seen which are the main players that are going to win the race. We haven’t implemented yet. We wait to see which is the right tool to use. But I think in the next few months, a lot of customer support can be automated.

00:14:16 Reto: The right strategy is you need to focus on your data. Have like a really good structured data set with all the information and then how you present the information via different tools to the consumer, be it via voice AI, via chatbot, via email automation.

00:14:32 Reto: You can just stack the tools that exist over the data if you have a really clean data structure. That’s currently how we think about it. Operational efficiency for us, plus how consumer discover product, are the main ones.

00:14:46 Harm-Julian: For us, the use case are a bit different, especially on the financing side. We actually believe that leads you are getting via the dealers directly versus the leads you acquire purely online have different quality. It’s like, who’s the customer you want?

00:15:04 Harm-Julian: Is it the customer who’s like, “Hey, I want to have this car.” And then as a secondary motive, I’m like solving financing because while that’s not a big problem for me, there’s someone who’s going online and actively looking for loans and then think about the car. So you have different qualities there, which why customer discovery for us, less relevant. That is coming lead generation via the dealers.

00:15:25 Harm-Julian: But then how do we serve the dealers? And there’s more touching upon your customer support point. That is absolutely correct that you’re like, well, they can just chat. They don’t have to push the information to any structured way.

00:15:36 Harm-Julian: You can then read it out always on, always available, fast response times, but at the same time also make sure these data points, regardless if they type it out or take a picture and send it, are being processed in a way which gives you a high data accuracy and at the same time levels up the productivity of your team. Really around the customer experience in that sense and what they like instead of forcing them into use cases of apps, which is not something they really easily do.

00:16:07 Harm-Julian: I have this one question. Chaiz technology can be embedded across multiple verticals? Tell us about the technology and different use cases.

00:16:14 Reto: We started as a pure B2C company. Over time, we got a lot of inbound demand for other players that wanted to sell or cross sell warranties. As one example, we launched with an insurance agency or insurance marketplace. They sell car insurance.

00:16:32 Reto: They now use our API to pull warranty quotes and the agents now cross sell warranties, so they would sell car insurance quote and then if the customer buys, they say, do you also want a warranty on top? And then they use, through our API, the quoting, the contracting, all that things, so that’s the embedded angle to it. So it’s for distribution partners.

00:16:52 Harm-Julian: So this is completely unrelated to your own front end and customer facing. This is really the backend you’re giving as a service to other brokers, marketplaces, who do it more in an offline way. It’s probably a bit of a stretch now for everyone to like go from that into that.

00:17:10 Reto: It’s just another distribution strategy where people embed our technology, sometimes also in car marketplaces or platforms where they transact cars.

00:17:19 Harm-Julian: You have been talking about consumer trends and one thing you emphasized was also discovery, how that is influenced by the new AI tools, how people using it to educate themselves. Talk in general about consumer trends, the AI topic and maybe other things you are closely watching at the moment.

00:17:39 Reto: What we noticed is a lot of Google traffic is now lost to AI tools. Probably everyone that is in a consumer space knows that. So the question is, what is the new SEO? Then a lot of people talk about AI search optimization.

00:17:53 Reto: In the next years it will crystallize what this actually means. I don’t think anyone has the perfect definition. There’s a few hypotheses or ideas that work and one of them works, regardless if it works on AI search. What I mean by that is having a strong brand, consumer business is even more important than it used to be.

00:18:15 Reto The AI models have a consensus probabilistic approach. They’re not going to suggest a very long tail result. They always go with, if everyone else says it’s good, then it’s good. The question for you as a brand is, how do I make AI models perceive my brand as the best brand? That usually goes in hand by you just build a good brand.

00:18:38 Reto: For us, collecting reviews from customers that really enjoy what we’re doing, being patient, building the brand, it’s the right thing from a business perspective and will also in the long run be a winning strategy on AI. That’s one example that we have a very strong focus on.

00:18:54 Harm-Julian: Building the brand. I think every consumer founder agrees with that. But now in particular with the AI models, what does it exactly mean? If you would recommend three things to a founder who’s thinking about that, what would that be to get visibility in those models?

00:19:10 Reto: It’s important that your brand is also visible in the online marketplace. If you do the right thing, make sure that your consumers actually write a review for you on Trustpilot, Google, or they talk about you on Reddit. Reddit is famously used for training models.

00:19:27 Reto: Make sure that other publishers talk about you in a positive light. The more touch points you throw out in the digital world, the more signal the AI gets. So building the brand, but then also making sure that it’s talked about. These two ingredients are important.

00:19:44 Harm-Julian: Thanks. That’s helpful. You just said it, this is….. understanding and searching is moving away from Google and shifting more into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whatever it is, not super controversial.

00:19:57 Harm-Julian: At the same time, you are saying about yourself, you gravitate towards contrarian ideas. Share one example of where such a contrarian belief has really helped you. Where does it really impact your journey as an entrepreneur?

00:20:12 Reto: In the car warranty industry, in the initial interviews that we did with call centers, dealers. Everyone just used exactly the same tagline, and that’s always a sign. Everyone said, “Warranties have to be sold.” And by sold, they usually meant car dealer, call center type of selling, scare tactics, being pushy, chasing people. Everyone in the industry agreed with that.

00:20:38 Reto: There is probably some element of selling because the product is not mandatory as opposed to insurance. If you have to have insurance, the drive to buy it is different so there has to be an element of selling. But selling doesn’t necessarily mean hounding people over the phone and chasing them until they buy.

00:20:56 Reto: Selling can also mean explaining the value of the product, showing them that they actually get a good deal, make them trust you, show them transparently what’s in the plan and what’s not. So we thought about the wholesaling process from a more first principle basis. That laid the foundation of the company.

00:21:15 Reto: Contrarian can be good or bad. Sometimes people are just contrarian for the sake of it. A lot of times the ideas that seem contrarian become the new norm oftentimes. Not always. Sometimes it’s really just about questioning the status quo, but I think it’s necessary.

00:21:30 Reto: If you go with the consensus, you’re probably right 9 out of 10 times. But the one time where the contrarians are right, this can be the 10X, 100X outcomes. I think that’s the beauty about startups and venture world as well.

00:21:43 Harm-Julian: Thanks so much, Reto. Let’s do a quick speed round. What’s a book you’re reading or a podcast you’re enjoying?

00:21:51 Reto: More of a podcast guy. If anyone wants to hear a very bullish version of the future, I can recommend the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis. So if you like to dream about flying cars and robots in two years, that’s the way to go.

00:22:05 Harm-Julian: Cool. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:22:11 Reto: Japan. Had that on my travel list for a long time, but never managed to go there. So I would go to Japan.

00:22:16 Harm-Julian: Japan is awesome. I’ve been there the first time also recently. Great food, great culture, everything works. Great metro system. For me, it would actually be South Africa, where you are now. What’s your favorite productivity hack?

00:22:31 Reto: With the massive margin, probably fix your sleep. If you have good sleep, the quality of output and decisions is extremely high.

00:22:40 Harm-Julian: Lastly, where can listeners find you and follow you?

00:22:44 Reto: I’m just active on LinkedIn, so always love to connect with new folks, like founders, investors, et cetera. So LinkedIn is my favorite platform. Are you on LinkedIn as well, mostly?

00:22:55 Harm-Julian: Yeah. I deactivated all social media. I’m doing LinkedIn and X still for consuming information and getting views.

00:23:05 Reto: Why did you delete everything else?

00:23:07 Harm-Julian: That’s my productivity hack. I’m actually thinking social media might even be an overall net negative for society. I decided two years ago to sign off and haven’t looked back since.

00:23:21 Reto: Yeah, I tend to agree.

00:23:23 Harm-Julian: Thanks, Reto.

00:23:24 Reto Thank you very much.

00:23:26 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 Reto Bolliger in Founders Everywhere.

The host of episode 107 of Venture Everywhere is Hugh Dixson, CEO and founder of Switchboard, a platform that integrates enterprise IT systems in supply chains and automates manual processes. He talks with Ali Gara, founder and CEO of MagicPort, a software platform bringing intelligence and automation to shipping operations. Ali shares his journey from private equity in Asia to founding MagicPort in Singapore, where he saw an opportunity to modernize the inefficient, manual processes around port calls. He discusses how MagicPort provides maritime intelligence and an operating system for port call management, helping shipping companies leverage data for business development, optimize operations, and streamline collaboration across the fragmented industry.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Replacing Excel and email with an integrated operating system for port calls.

• Leveraging AI and automation to deliver immediate customer value.

• Aggregating data from sources for real-time vessel and port intelligence.

• Driving adoption in a change-resistant, fragmented shipping industry.

• Building trusted networks on smart platforms for efficient global trade.

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.

RSS Link

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 Hugh: Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Hugh Dixson, I’m the founder and CEO of Switchboard. We integrate the various enterprise IT systems in supply chains and order manual handling of supply chain processes.

00:00:46 Hugh: I’m here today with Ali Gara, the founder and CEO of MagicPort. Ali, great to have you on. Do you want to introduce yourself?

00:00:53 Ali: Hi, Hugh. Thanks for the opportunity. Yes, I founded MagicPort. Our focus is on shipping. What we do actually is quite similar to what you are doing in the broader supply chain.

00:01:06 Ali: We are trying to bring more intelligence and automation to shipping operations, specifically port calls. Shipping is a critical infrastructure for global trade, for the global economy.

00:01:17 Ali: There are a lot of manual works, inefficiencies because people don’t have the data or information they need. Most companies, they use different systems or they don’t use any system at all. I thought that this is such a big industry and if we fix some of these problems, it can be so much better, more efficient. This is what we are trying to do.

00:01:37 Hugh: Why don’t we go back to the beginning. Tell me about a bit about your background and how you ended up in shipping specifically and how you found yourself starting MagicPort.

00:01:47 Ali: So actually I have a generalist background. Before shipping, I was in finance, I was in private equity investing. So I started in the United States, but came to Asia because my work was Asia focused. I was in an emerging Asia fund. We were investing in Asian companies.

00:02:04 Ali: After about seven years there, I thought that I could take the risk. I can start something. This was something also shaped by my own experience. Before this, I worked in big companies. I also worked in public service.

00:02:20 Ali: But through that experience, I came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to have the maximum impact, the private sector is the place. This is why I decided to go to business school.

00:02:31 Ali: After the business school, I only had a big amount of debt. I didn’t have any great ideas. So I went to work in finance. It was great because we worked with a lot of inspiring entrepreneurs. That experience actually is quite useful now that I have to work with funding sources, investors.

00:02:50 Ali: But there came a time when I was thinking that, okay, I can now take the risk. I have some savings. I have, I think, good experience. That happened to be when I was in Asia. So I was in Singapore.

00:03:01 Ali: Because of this generalist background, I thought actually trade is an interesting place to go. It’s the foundation of prosperity. You have division of labor, you go do different things, they trade. That’s how we got to where we are today.

00:03:15 Ali: This idea that global trade, it can be better, more efficient, was interesting for me. Singapore is a shipping hub. The whole history of the city is about shipping.

00:03:24 Ali: Somehow I ended up in the very guts of this whole system, which is, we are focusing today mostly on ship operations, like what happens when the ship comes to the port. But that’s a place where we start. There is a lot to do there. But as we build and grow, it’s a big journey. We will be touching more aspects of trade in the future.

00:03:46 Hugh: Interesting. You’re right. Singapore is such a big shipping town. I remember every time I’ve been, whenever you’re staying in one of the hotels or whatever, you can look out the window and all you see is ships on the horizon. So I can fully appreciate how you catch the bug, living in Singapore.

00:04:02 Hugh: Tell us a little more now about the tool itself, so MagicPort. What is the product that you’re producing for your customers? How does it solve the pain points you’re addressing in the shipping industry?

00:04:14 Ali: As you know, shipping is a huge industry. It’s a trillion dollar industry. It’s truly global. There are many aspects of it. You have commercial operations and technical operations.

00:04:25 Ali: I thought there is a lot of waste of time and resources and money when the ship comes to the port, when typically a lot of companies have to work with each other because obviously things happen only when the ship is at the port.

00:04:40 Ali: Actually, they often say that there are maybe 20 plus bilateral transactions between different companies when there is a cargo operation, when the ship is docking and doing something at the port.

00:04:50 Ali: What are these problems? One, you have the element of trust, having a network of companies that you can work with. Then the second one is there are jobs to be done and you need a system to do them. Or if you don’t have a system, you do it on email or Excel.

00:05:03 Ali: But then beyond how you do it yourself, you have to work with your customers, your vendors. There is a lot of collaboration, coordination, transactions between entities. Given that everyone uses different systems, this is not ideal.

00:05:18 Ali: And then the data, everyone can use data in customer support, business development, operations, but it’s very limited what can be done and what’s being done today. There is also opportunity for even financial transactions at some point because these are all global payments and transactions. There’s very limited working capital.

00:05:38 Ali: This is the big problem set, what you can touch in this space. We wanted to start from some fundamental parts of it, which was, can we provide data to people so that they can use it in their business?

00:05:50 Ali: So one pillar we have is we provide maritime intelligence. Companies need information on vessels, ports, different companies. They use this either in business development or operations or customer support. So that’s one of our key products.

00:06:05 Ali: We also provide an operating system for port call management. It means it’s a job management solution that you can create jobs and add your services, manage your communication with your vendors and customers, and also create your invoices and things like that.

00:06:21 Ali: When you have a system like this, you can have access to analytics, KPIs, reports, etc. These are the two core products that we are providing for our customers to make port calls more efficient.

00:06:34 Hugh: It sounds really interesting. Having experience in some similar fields, I’m sure there’s an enormous amount of complexity that sits underneath that process with all those different parties and the different types of transactions that are going on, on your platform.

00:06:51 Hugh: Could you give us a bit of a flavor, a couple of examples maybe of the types of interactions that you’re managing on your platform?

00:06:59 Ali: For sure. I give example actually for each product. Our maritime intelligence solution, we have data about vessels, shipping companies, ports, how all these data relate to each other. For example, someone may want to keep an eye on a particular port, someone wants to keep an eye on a particular fleet, or someone just wants to keep an eye on their own fleet.

00:07:22 Ali: That is a general purpose product, which if you are in shipping, you need industry data. This is a product that you can use. We have customers from all segments of shipping. Where customers use this is either business development, operations or customer support.

00:07:37 Ali: If I were to give an example, if you are keeping an eye on a port, let’s say you provide services in this port, and you want to know all the port calls happening in this port, which are the shipping companies that come here, their contact information, where else are they going. Because if you want to engage with them, it’s easier when you have an understanding of your potential customer.

00:08:00 Ali: A lot of companies use this data and product for business development. It can integrate with your CRM. For example, some of our customers, they just connect their CRM data, which accounts they have, and what vessels these accounts have. They want to keep an eye on these things globally. This is just another example of business development/customer support.

00:08:22 Ali: Or let’s say in some of the large companies, they may be dealing with an account, but they are missing some of the opportunities because they don’t keep an eye on what other vessels that belong to this company actually comes to our port.

00:08:34 Ali: Operations-wise, optimization can mean you are going to service a vessel and you want to know when it’s arriving, is there a delay, you want to get a smart notification. These are the many, many use cases you can get from the first product.

00:08:48 Ali: The second product, which is synergistic with the first one is… let’s say you usually are serving a ship coming to your port. When this ship comes, you will have 20, 30 different line items, different services, which will have orders going to your sub vendors.

00:09:03 Ali: Before you do this, you first send a pro-forma invoice to your customer. Once they approve it, then you create all these services, you assign them to sub vendors. Then once all these things are done, and while they are being done, you have to keep an eye on everything. You need to have that visibility. You need to collect all the documents and create a final invoice and keep tabs on how much they paid, how much they settled and what’s the balance.

00:09:27 Ali: Our software does all these things for our customers. They create a job, they create invoices, they deal with their vendors, their customers, generate their reports. So it’s a complete operating system for job management, for port calls.

00:09:42 Hugh: Thanks for going through that Ali, it sounds really interesting. Sitting here and listening to you describe it, I can think of a couple of conversations that I’ve been in over the last months, year or so, where people have asked me about both those parts, about intelligence on ports and vessels, but also streamlining shipping operations. So I can fully appreciate the pain that you’re solving and the importance and complexity for your clients. So that’s really exciting.

00:10:09 Ali: I have a question for you. I know that what we do, there are some similarities and one of the important services we discovered that we need to have is integrations as well.

00:10:19 Ali: Many companies don’t have solutions, but many others do. When they have it and they want to get your solution, they want a complete end product that will solve their problems. It means you have to integrate many things.

00:10:31 Ali: You are also on this journey. I think in your portfolio, you have automation of workflows, you have integrations. How was your journey? Did you start with integrations and come to workflows or did you start with workflows and then come to integrations? How do you think it will evolve?

00:10:47 Hugh: Integrations are our core product, and that is what we’ve always done. We built a software product that allows us to build and deploy these integrations, which are exactly as you discovered, they can be pretty nuanced and they can be pretty big software tasks to connect these big systems and that have lots of data fields and lots of complexity in them.

00:11:10 Hugh: We started out by focusing on that and building out more generic standard integrations. As we developed as a business, our capabilities grew as we worked with more systems and we started doing more complex and compounded integrations and workflows.

00:11:26 Hugh: Now we offer a full suite of integration service and automation services so we can connect up those systems, exactly like you’re describing, to provide the plumbing or the pipes between those systems that we came to maintain.

00:11:39 Hugh: We can manage any type of data and send it to any system. Also, whether that data comes through a system integration, we can also ingest it through PDFs and emails and various other things too. That’s how we came into it and that’s the space that we play in. So similar, I suppose, but we’re a part of your broader journey.

00:11:58 Hugh: Ali, prior to doing Switchboard in the integrations business, I ran a road, freight and transport company in Australia. And so I know a little bit about this industry and it’s a tough one to drive change in. What have you found about the maritime shipping industry as you’ve been launching and running your product over the time? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in the industry?

00:12:19 Ali: Definitely it’s not an easy industry from the point of view, “I’m going to build and sell software or data.” It is very fragmented industry. The bigger companies, they have their solutions. Smaller companies, your competition is most likely Excel and email. But it’s very hard to change people or convince them that they need something.

00:12:38 Ali: It is going to change. We are in the middle of this big revolution, what’s happening with AI and automation and intelligence, what can be done. There are more opportunities for doing things faster, delivering value. Things are going to change, but it’s going to be a long journey. I don’t expect that it’s going to be very fast.

00:12:57 Ali: The key, I think is, can we give people value fast so that they feel the potential and they want to use the software. I have definitely felt the difficulty, especially operating system, giving people operating system and convincing them to change things. I think it’s very difficult.

00:13:18 Ali: How we are thinking to solve this, within our own team is, how can we add more intelligence and automation into our products? How can we speed up our development so that we can provide customers more immediate value? That can be our hook. If they see something that makes a big difference for them in their life, that can be the starting point.

00:13:41 Hugh: I think it makes a lot of sense. So tell me about this vision. You talk about the future and the industry is very manual and very email and Excel heavy at the moment, which I 100% agree with. That’s definitely true across the broader supply chain industry, across all modes.

00:13:56 Hugh: And so tell me, what does it look like for you? When you connect the carriers, the ship owners, the terminals, service providers, what does this smart and efficient shipping actually look like in practice?

00:14:08 Ali: I have a vision which makes sense to me and I think it is how things should be. But we have to figure out how we can get there. A big long journey, how can we get to this place? We have to be open-minded and learn on the way.

00:14:22 Ali: How I envision the industry being more efficient is that first of all, there is more trust, which means you have a network of trusted, reliable companies. They are working on, ideally, a smart platform or smart software that in itself has a lot of intelligence and automation, but since people use the same thing, it works as one platform.

00:14:45 Ali: So you don’t have to send a lot of emails and things like that. People have access to the data so that they can use it in their operations to improve their business. Potentially in all businesses like this, you usually have the key financial services that people need for their business on the platform.

00:15:03 Ali: So this is how I envision how MagicPort can become a very big business. But you start from zero and towards that destination, you have to solve many problems and figure out what’s the right sequence of things.

00:15:17 Ali: I don’t think there’s any fast route. We are just trying things that make sense. Some of them, they work. Some of them, they don’t. It’s an experiment. It’s okay. We move to the next one, these small steps toward that vision.

00:15:31 Ali: But you also have to be very mindful that as a startup, you have a very limited bandwidth and capacity. You have to be super focused. So we take it very serious and we cannot jump on different things randomly. That’s why I say you have to be at peace that it’s a long journey. Today, people typically don’t have patience.

00:15:51 Hugh: Very true. But it certainly is a long journey and full of ups and downs. That’s for sure. I want to talk for a few minutes about their intelligence because I find it really interesting. Start at the beginning. For the listeners, the intelligence, how is it used by customers?

00:16:07 Ali: Just like I was describing, I see three use cases among our customers: business development, optimizing your operations or customer service. Customers are using this data on vessels, ports, shipping companies to reach up to new potential customers, new accounts. When they do the reach outs, they want to make it smarter so that they can show to their customer that they understand what they are doing.

00:16:30 Ali: For optimization, there are a lot of use cases. So like your vessel is coming to the port. To start with, you want to know the ETA, to get updates if there’s a delay, to be able to plan your operations, whatever you need to know from this perspective.

00:16:44 Ali: You can go into even more advanced cases where if I’m running a few tugboats, how do I position them? How do I optimize them? So that’s the optimization and operations area.

00:16:54 Ali: And then the last one, customer support. If you connect your CRM data with your asset data, which is like I have these accounts and I know what vessels these accounts are on and where they go, when they are coming to my port, and how do I make sure that I never miss them. I get certain reports from the system. These are a few use cases of how intelligence can be used for business development, improving operations or customer support.

00:17:20 Hugh: Well, how do you maintain this information? How does it stay current? That’s a lot of data. Where does it come from? And how does the background of it work?

00:17:29 Ali: We have invested a lot into this capability. So we have a team that’s in charge of MagicPort’s maritime intelligence product. Today, we get data from 100 plus different sources. It comes from public databases. It comes from private data sources that we buy and have a process to establish a source of truth at any given time, like what are the vessels in the world at this moment?

00:17:57 Ali: It’s not easy. There are a lot of hairy issues here and there. I would say we are constantly improving. Right now we are in the middle of a major internal initiative where we are trying to improve this whole process so that the data quality increases. It’s a long iterative journey. You have to just work on it, keep investing and build that capability internally.

00:18:19 Hugh: Wow. It’s even more complex than I had imagined. That sounds very significant. Must have taken a long time to build that capability even to where it is today.

00:18:29 Ali: We have been working on this more than three years now. It’s definitely three plus years of work. The experience, we accumulate because you keep learning.

00:18:39 Hugh: Thinking about your founder journey and what you’ve experienced over the years, how have you seen yourself change and grow over the time you’ve been running MagicPort? What have been some of your own personal lessons?

00:18:55 Ali: Building something from zero, it’s just so difficult and hard. It’s exciting. But when I look back, it was so hard. It never crossed my mind that, oh, I want to give up or I would give up or that it’s not going to work.

00:19:10 Ali: Maybe that’s why you’re also a founder. Maybe that’s something that we have. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but its those type of people that take such risks.

00:19:20 Ali: When I look back, it’s like drinking from a firehose. So many things you have to do and we don’t have a lot of resources so everything you have to figure out. You have to figure out how to put together a team that can develop a digital product, which people ignore it.

00:19:35 Ali: In a startup, they don’t talk about product development cycle or how exactly this thing is going to work, because it’s technical, not interesting details. But you have to get it right. You have to have the right people, the right process. And then you have to figure out how to sell. You have to figure out how we are going to hire the right people, deal with investors or find resources.

00:19:55 Ali: It’s interesting that we have to learn all these things. But you make mistakes and it’s painful because you waste time, you waste money. It’s people’s trust that they gave us to build something.

00:20:05 Ali: It is very painful. I am hoping that through all this experience, now I have a little bit better judgment. I can make better decisions, but it’s a constant work. I try to work on it every day. Like how can I build it better today? It is a lot of painful work, but it’s fun.

00:20:23 Hugh: It is hard. I completely agree. I know exactly what you mean. I’m sure startups in all industries are difficult, but I can definitely say that the ones in supply chain have a lot of challenges to overcome. That’s for sure. So I’m very sympathetic.

00:20:40 Hugh: Ali, it’s been really nice talking to you today. I think this is such an interesting solution and I can really personally clearly see the need for it and the benefit for both the products. I’m really impressed by the depth you had to go to, to build that intelligence product. That’s amazing.

00:20:56 Hugh: We have a speed round, so I’m going to whip through four questions very quickly. What’s a book and newsletter or podcast that you recommend?

00:21:05 Ali: I walk every morning and listen to podcasts. I think they’re a great resource. If I were to pick one, I think Lenny’s Podcast is great. It’s about product management and product development. I really like it.

00:21:17 Ali: On books, there are so many great books, but the two recent ones that I’ve read, I recommend. One is A Little History of the World by Gombrich. And then the second one, Silk Roads by Frankopan. It’s just the whole world history. They just try to summarize it in one book.

00:21:35 Ali: But what stands out in both books is how all the humans and human history, societies are all connected. It was really eye-opening for me, just to remember that, how ideas and civilization itself has formed through interactions between all of us.

00:21:53 Hugh: Okay, what is your favorite productivity hack?

00:21:56 Ali: Now, I think especially important at this stage in our company to be really productive. I am trying to focus on my habits, and it comes down to simple things. What time do you need to sleep? When do you wake up? When do you sit down to start working? Taking breaks and trying to meditate a little bit. Just healthy things. Or don’t always check your emails. Just check it only regular times.

00:22:20 Ali: I know we all know these things, but I guess what I’m trying to do differently is just focus on the habit angle that, okay, I just need to try to make these habits, and around that structure, I can be more productive. So this is one big goal I have set for myself this year. Let’s see how it goes.

00:22:40 Hugh: I like it a lot. I’m definitely guilty of being in my inbox too often, so definitely something for me to learn there as well. Where can listeners find you, Ali?

00:22:51 Ali: I’m posting on LinkedIn. In terms of social media, that’s the only place where I regularly post. If you search Ali Gara, MagicPort, I’m sure you will find me.

00:23:03 Hugh: I’m Hugh Dixson, also on LinkedIn. Hugh Dixson, Switchboard. You can find me. Perfect. Thank you very much, Ali. It’s been really nice talking with you today.

00:23:13 Ali: Yeah, Hugh. Thanks so much.

00:23:16 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.

Read more from Ali Gara in Founders Everywhere.

Read more from Hugh Dixson in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 106 of Venture Everywhere, Pau Sabria, co-founder of Remotely.works—a platform helping companies hire software engineers in Latin America—talks with Helaine Knapp, founder and former CEO of CityRow, a rowing fitness franchise that was acquired. Helaine reflects on how her career in tech startups at Buddy Media and Olapic gave her the foundation to build a brick-and-mortar fitness business. She discusses writing Making Waves, using brutal honesty to tell the entrepreneurial story most founders won’t share, and navigating the in-between as host of Step Into Next, a podcast about walking together from what was to what’s next.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Adapting startup playbooks to the physical fitness business model

• Insights into the rise and fall of Connected Fitness, and lessons learned

• The power of honest storytelling during a company’s challenging exit

• The real challenges of entrepreneurship: navigating legal battles and team dynamics

• Reimagining success and personal growth while transitioning between ventures

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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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 Pau: Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Pau Sabria. I’m one of the founders of Remotely.works, where we help companies get software engineers in Latin America. And I’m here with Helaine Knapp, welcome.

00:00:45 Helaine: Thank you so much for having me. What an exciting conversation we’re about to have.

00:00:51 Pau: I’ve personally known Helaine for a very long time, and I’m very happy to have her today on the podcast. This will serve as a personal catch up, so it will be great to know what you’ve been up to as of late.

00:01:03 Helaine: Brief introduction before we take it 15, almost 20 years back. I am the founder and CEO of a company called CITYROW in the fitness space. Had a really, really awesome 10-year build that I’ll talk about in a little bit. I’m currently in between projects, which is really interesting.

00:01:23 Pau: You’re currently living in Austin, Texas, but you’re originally from New York. Tell us about your background and growing up and how you got to meet the best founder ever, aka me.

00:01:34 Helaine: Honestly, it was definitely the highlight of my career. I’m a New Yorker. I started my career actually in magazine publishing. I was one of those infamous Conde Nast interns that was worked to the bone for $28,000 a year.

00:01:50 Helaine: Learned a bit about the ad sales world before finding my way into tech startups and was really fortunate enough to be at the forefront of helping brands understand social media.

00:02:02 Helaine: 2010 is when I first got into the space. I joined a company called Buddy Media, one of the fastest growing tech companies in New York at the time. I got to wear a bunch of different hats from project management to accounts and watch that industry grow and really was at the forefront of social media marketing, Buddy Media was.

00:02:25 Helaine: I was there for two and a half years. It was an insane ride. We sold to Salesforce.com in summer of 2012. It was an unbelievable exit. It was such a fun ride, but we all know with acquisitions, things don’t always work out perfectly for the team. I lasted six days at Salesforce.com.

00:02:45 Helaine: I was a youngie with a ton of energy. I went to a mutual friend of ours, a boss, a mentor of mine, Dan Reich. And I was like, Dan, I’m not going to make it at Salesforce, what do I do? He’s like, I’d love for you to meet these three guys that just got out of Columbia Business School. They have something really cool.

00:03:02 Pau: You then went into Olapic, into my company, and you did a fantastic run. I remember talking to Cabo, one of my co-founders, and saying, I don’t know how we pulled this off, but we just hired someone awesome.

00:03:14 Pau: What a lot of people have later come to me and asked, why did you build in New York and so on and so forth? I think that a big chunk of the success of companies comes from recycling people that have seen it before.

00:03:27 Pau: We implemented tons of things. I would go to you and say, “hey, Helaine, what should we do here?” And then you said, “well, at Buddy Media, we did this, this, this.” “That sounds like a great idea.” And so you then decided at some point to leave us. What triggered that itch?

00:03:43 Helaine: It was never something that I was actively exploring. I actually was really happy in my career. I love sales and client services for tech companies. I’ll play this game all day long. I think we were in the hottest industry ever at the time.

00:03:56 Helaine: Pau’s being very humble right now, but Olapic was really cool. For me, coming from a company that had tons of bells and whistles and probably the best PR of any company I’d ever been a part of… and I still think that what they did at Buddy Media was some of the best PR ever.

00:04:12 Helaine: But then you start to peel back the layers of the business and there were challenges from a technology perspective. The second I saw Olapic, I was like, well, this is beautiful. I was like, if you’re telling me you put this technology on the product detail page of every single company, we can’t get out.

00:04:27 Helaine: I fell in love with, not only the stickiness, but the vision. You were just such a fun, collaborative CEO that I think one of the things, you are very self-aware and you had a very clear understanding of what you knew and more importantly, what you didn’t know.

00:04:41 Helaine: You really allowed me to come in and help be a part of shaping Olapic’s future. It was really, really, really fun. I remember coming over to your desk multiple times, you being like, “so how did you do this?” That story resonates very clearly for me.

00:04:55 Helaine: On the personal front and how I ended up starting CITYROW is by complete happenstance. I became a big fitness junkie, working out a lot. I was a bit of a chubbier kid growing up so fitness became something that was really important to me.

00:05:08 Helaine: After being in that space for a while, I found myself very injured. I was confused about it. When Pau first hired me, I think I had a back brace for a while.

00:05:19 Pau: You had a personal affinity towards the company, which then pushed you into this inner feeling of I have to do this and it’s now or never or something like that?

00:05:30 Helaine: Exactly. I actually felt like the timing was terrible because Olapic was on this insane upward trajectory. I had just brought on board some of the people that would follow me everywhere. All of a sudden, I was at this moment where I was like, I have to do this thing now, the moment in time in the industry.

00:05:46 Helaine: But at the same time, I remember my dad being like, “what are you doing? You have this amazing career ahead of you in enterprise SaaS.” He was finally like, I got this kid off the payroll and now you’re going to go open a brick and mortar location in fitness and you know nothing about it.

00:06:01 Helaine: But, I had one of those moments where I was like, you know what? I think I could always go back here and I have to try this thing or I’ll regret it forever. So I think I quit probably 12 years to the day today.

00:06:16 Pau: At least I know from on my end, when I went into starting Olapic, I had all these visions of grandeur. Like, oh, this is going to be amazing and all the things. Then life hits you in the face big time.

00:06:27 Pau: I went into entrepreneurship having no clue whatsoever about anything, whereas you at least had the experience of having seen other companies scale to some degree, obviously with Buddy Media with a very, very big degree and a very big exit. How was it for you building the company? What surprised you of the path of CITYROW?

00:06:47 Helaine: There were surprises at every turn. There’s a part of me that wonders what it would have been like if my first entrepreneurship journey was in the tech space, because that I think I knew very well. And as a result of that, I actually applied a lot of tech rules to a brick and mortar business that didn’t always make sense.

00:07:05 Helaine: But it’s what I knew, even the fundraising and thinking about the cap table and the payback. It would have made a lot more sense if it was actually structured kind of like a restaurant in the beginning, in that first entity.

00:07:17 Helaine: It gave me the confidence in some way. I think working in all these startups to know that I could wear a lot of different hats and that I was a bit of a jack of all trades. I could bet on myself to problem solve because I’d seen myself do that over time. And so it really gave me that foundation.

00:07:31 Helaine: But man, was it a total shit show at every turn. It was so insane. And I felt like there actually weren’t enough people talking about how hard it was that I wrote a book, Making Waves, about the CITYROW journey, because people need to be able to see with a little bit of a deeper level of vulnerability how hard it is.

00:07:53 Helaine: Everything from lawsuits to people that you thought were good friends suing you, to challenging investor conversations, to telling the board that you’ve run out of money and you have to shut down, to throwing Hail Marys, to learning crazy structures.

00:08:09 Helaine: We got hit with some crazy winds, particularly as COVID hit an emerging brick and mortar fitness franchise that also had a Peloton-like business to it. I think back and I’m like, how was I building all those businesses at the same time? And also, how did I survive?

00:08:29 Helaine: But it was a crazy journey. I told the story in a book because it was cathartic for me. It was the ride of a lifetime.

00:08:36 Pau: In that catharsis, I guess that you were thinking about the next phase. The beginning of the podcast, you were talking about you’re in this in-between phase. Was there, to the book, something more than just a venting out or was it more about a stepping stone toward what you may be doing next?

00:08:54 Pau: You, Helaine, have been one of the people that I’ve known that have this always positive energy. Everything was energetic. I can see how someone faces that, gets punched in the face, stands up and then goes back at it again.

00:09:05 Pau: Even throughout the different struggles that you’ve shared with me about building a company, you always found a way to pick yourself up and just go against it when a lot of people would have quit. What are you trying to do with this?

00:09:17 Pau: Which, by the way, I find it super amazing. Put yourself out there again with a book, which is, again, difficult to write. You have to promote. Then this is the hyper competitiveness. But business books without an audience necessarily, it’s hard to pull off. So what was that like?

00:09:35 Helaine: The resilience is definitely there. When it comes to the book, the initial impetus was COVID and I was really bored. I had someone working for me that was an author and she got to know me really well. She was also a fellow fitness founder.

00:09:53 Helaine: She was like, you have amazing stories. Let’s tell the stories. She’s like, you’re also a really good storyteller. I think it’s time to write your book. I was bored. We were all in lockdown. I was like, okay. Fine. If you want to listen to my stories, I love talking. Let’s go.

00:10:07 Helaine: I wanted to tell the story of CITYROW right before we had raised our series A because I thought that I read so many books and I listened to so many podcasts of How I Built This, that when you’re telling this story after the event, things are jaded.

00:10:26 Helaine: I knew so many founders that had gone through an exit and things were either they had golden handcuffs, they hated the company or they were fatigued on it. And also the second half of the story always got a little bit more spotlight. And I thought it was important to tell the early sides of the story. I was like, okay, that’s cool.

00:10:45 Pau: The scrambling at the beginning.

00:10:47 Helaine: Yeah, those are interesting. That scrappiness, I thought was always really fun and it was much more creative. So I was like, let’s tell a story. Startup to series A from the perspective of a founder that hasn’t made it yet, but probably will… was the initial impetus.

00:11:02 Helaine: And then as COVID started destroying our business and negatively impacting every single aspect from employees to franchisees to our subscription model, to our investors, I actually pulled the book and I was like, this is a dark book.

00:11:18 Helaine: We’re going to go dark. I want to tell the underbelly. I want to talk about the board meetings where I cried. These are the things that actually are happening. If I’m going to tell the real story, I want to cry and tell people about it because that’s actually what happens and no one’s telling that story.

00:11:34 Helaine: Then to your point, I actually started writing the book almost in real time. We already built out the first framework of, okay, here’s the initial story. I was able to tell what was happening in real time to my book collaborator.

00:11:47 Helaine: That was cathartic to be able to process in real time and then weeks or months later go back and be prompted to be like, well, how did you feel in that moment? I was like, that was horrible. It was one of the worst moments of all time.

00:11:58 Pau: It’s interesting because… well, for one is when people ask me what it was like, I tend to remember more of the struggles than the part where it was more like the… more repetitive. Your brain smooths it out all as a big chunk of just going to the office.

00:12:14 Pau: Whereas at the beginning, when you’re really, really struggling and you have to come up with creative solutions for things, those are the things that you remember. The team is smaller. You remember the people. You can tell the story much better.

00:12:26 Pau: It seems like in your case, it was throughout the company was like that. It was at the beginning, maybe because it was fun. You were creating something from scratch. But then as COVID was making your company implode, it stayed that way in terms of uniqueness of the situation.

00:12:41 Pau: After you published the book, have people come back and pointed their fingers at you for things that you said about crying in a board meeting? Has there been a consequence to that or did you think about that? And if I go out and publish these things, will people come after me somehow after?

00:12:57 Helaine: It was definitely something I was worried about, particularly with certain partners. Everyone was painted in a fair way, but I was very worried about it. I definitely had a lawyer read it for libel.

00:13:08 Helaine: There are stories that did not make it in. There are stories that involved legal that I was not allowed to talk about that I think were really important. For instance… we’ve all had this, the disgruntled employee who was fired, thinks they shouldn’t have and comes after you.

00:13:23 Helaine: So that was one of the worst experiences I had as a CEO. Couldn’t talk about that. Couldn’t talk about intercompany relationship that shouldn’t have happened. Couldn’t talk about that. Couldn’t talk about the lawsuits with landlords. And so I really did pull those things out.

00:13:40 Helaine: But I was worried about it. At the same time, one, not everyone’s going to read your book. It was hard. I even thought about you guys. I was definitely working both jobs for a little while and I was worried. I had so much guilt about even the nights and weekends that I was working on CITYROW while working for you.

00:13:58 Helaine: Now, that’s a little bit of a me issue. I also knew at the same time that I was doing a fantastic job. But there was a lot of emotion that went into a lot of different pieces to it. And yes, I was afraid of what people might think.

00:14:09 Helaine: But at the same time, I felt stronger that people were going to resonate with the story. That kept me going alongside what you were getting to earlier, which is that subconsciously the book project gave me a beacon of light to look forward to when I knew that CITYROW was going to end.

00:14:30 Helaine: CITYROW threw us for an insane curveball. It basically killed all of our franchisees. We had sold 70 and opened 11 in the… three months before COVID hit. Our digital business, it was booming. But Peloton, that was at an $8 billion market cap. There was a massive Connected Fitness hangover. We hit the same tailwinds.

00:14:51 Helaine: I knew that it was going to end and that I could be depressed. So I think that the book was a project that I kept at. One, a lot easier than I thought to write a book. But then the CITYROW landing of the plane took a ridiculously long time. Our acquirer pulled out after six months of Latham and Watkins on the closing call.

00:15:11 Helaine: I had to email my publisher being like, hey, I have a material change to the end of book. She was like, you can change these three pages. I was like, okay, but the book coming out five months after the actual acquisition, sure. This is a tragedy, the story of CITYROW in a lot of ways.

00:15:28 Helaine: But I think the book kept me from going into a depression. It gave me a project that I probably subconsciously kept going, knowing that it was something to celebrate. I remember when I decided for myself a book launch party, I had this duality and I know this is not true. I recognize this.

00:15:46 Helaine: But there is a natural feeling of a failure when the thing that you’ve been working on for over a decade does not succeed in the way that you thought it would. I had a lot of issues with that because I very much stand by my word. I told people that this was going to be successful. And then it wasn’t. That was very, very hard for me to grapple with.

00:16:04 Helaine: I forced myself to celebrate the book as a bit of a relaunch. And it really, really helped prevent a depression.

00:16:12 Pau: And now you have a podcast. Are you building a media company? Is that the new Helaine? Are you coming up? Was the CITYROW your cocoon? Is this now the new blossoming of a new flower? Is that what your strategy is? It’s like going through the dark ages and coming out on the other end?

00:16:29 Helaine: Yes. I launched a podcast last year. It’s called Step Into Next. It talks about the liminal space in between when something really big ended and the next thing hasn’t yet started. We want to normalize what it feels like to be in that space before you step into what’s next.

00:16:44 Helaine: I definitely plan on coming out of the other end. I think maybe I already have. I’m actually not even sure I went into the dark ages. Part of what I’ve been trying to do is just keep myself interesting and interested during this period of time.

00:17:00 Helaine: It is so much harder than I thought it would be to be in between things, especially when the thing that I did for a decade, I was really proud of. I loved answering the question, what do you do? It was interesting. It was engaging. I had agency. I could use my creativity.

00:17:17 Helaine: And then all of a sudden I’m thrown out into the real world and have to start from scratch. It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. In some ways, harder than CITYROW.

00:17:27 Pau: It’s funny, because when you say about it, I remember having this conversation with Luis and Cabo, my co-founders of Olapic. Part of our worry after the acquisition was, what are we going to tell our kids that we do now? It is part of the drive that pushed me into building other things. And so how are you tackling the ”what’s next” now?

00:17:48 Helaine: I didn’t have the luxury of waiting or thinking because, spoiler alert, CITYROW was not a win. I put everything I had into it. When I asked investors to throw the Hail Mary and put their last 25K in, I put my last 25K in.

00:18:04 Helaine: So I had to very quickly turn around and make sure that I had some consulting work to pay bills. That was just a forced entrance into consulting that I didn’t have a choice. I was like, okay, what can I do? What are my market values?

00:18:20 Helaine: I ended up doing a lot of consulting with friends and stepping into roles that I knew I could do in my sleep because I was really burnt out. I gravitated towards people that were building cool things that I could be supportive in. I learned what I didn’t want to be doing.

00:18:35 Helaine: I know I probably can’t work for that many people. I learned that I need to be with other A players. I don’t like being the smartest person in the room. That’s for sure. You can get paid to do that. But I don’t love it.

00:18:49 Helaine: I don’t think I’m necessarily building a media company, but I do think that I’m trying to surrender to what’s coming my way and why. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen yet, but I don’t have the idea yet. The CITYROW idea came to me by accident. So I’m not going to try and force something. In the meantime, I’m dabbling.

00:19:11 Pau: For what it’s worth, maybe it’s the European approach to it, but I decided that I think that ideas need to grow over time. What you need is to create a field in which you can plant a few things and water them from time to time and see and take a much more patient approach. The ones that grow and compound in your head then magically get better the more you look at them from different lenses.

00:19:34 Pau: Those are the ones that eventually self-select themselves into being pursuable ideas. It’s something that when I force the machine, like saying, “oh, this now,” especially hurried, those tend not to work as much.

00:19:50 Pau: I see the podcast, the book as a way of not only keeping yourself busy, but at the same time, putting yourself out there to maximize serendipity and create an audience. All of those are pillars that you’ll for sure use in some way or fashion when that idea comes back into life.

00:20:13 Helaine: You’re spot on. That narrative of patience and nurturing the ideas is something that I wish I saw more of out there in the world. I think it’s part of why you’ve been so successful, is that you’re methodical as a founder. I actually think it’s a very rare quality.

00:20:32 Helaine: A lot of us are a little bit more like Cabo. We run a million miles a minute. You always had a slightly different energy, which I think made you very unique as an early stage founder and CEO.

00:20:44 Pau: I think you need that nuclear engine of an energy. I’m more of a sloth. I move with very few movements but those have intent.

00:20:52 Helaine: Totally. I could wear a little bit of that hat, like I have a very high EQ. I can be patient. I can listen. It’s an interesting place to be in that post exit, whatever the exit looked like. Any one of our fellow founders who’ve been through it have probably a lot to say.

00:21:08 Helaine: I think for me, given how CITYROW ended, it’s taken a long time for me to thaw out. I don’t think it was until this past summer, which was a year and a half after the final handoff, that I was like, oh, am I bored? That’s so interesting.

00:21:24 Helaine: And then, you know, there’s this recalibration of like, okay, well, what are my best gifts out there into the world? Then there’s a retraction of just like, well, a random company doesn’t just get me. I’m like eight people. I can have eight jobs. I was like, do I just take multiple CEO jobs kind of like Dan Reich and see what happens?

00:21:44 Helaine: So there’s a lot that goes on in the post founder CEO conversation with yourself about what to do. Then there’s this element of like, well, if I just got a real job, am I failing? Am I settling?

00:21:57 Helaine: I’m going to probably offend people when I say this. But is that boring to get a real job? I was like, should I go work for like Sequoia and do investing? I want to talk about that, though, because I think it needs to be.

00:22:08 Pau: It’s great someone is bringing those types of conversations and authenticity. It was already true back in the age of user generated content that we proved that authenticity was good. Now with AI, it does feel like every day, is this really true?

00:22:21 Helaine: Should we run Olapic back? Is it time for a resurgence?

00:22:24 Pau: Maybe. It’s great that you’re taking these steps. As a former investor of CITYROW, I’m happy to see you alive and kicking and giving a second chapter to Helaine Knapp.

00:22:37 Pau: We’re going to end with a speed round of questions. What book you’re reading or podcast that you’re enjoying?

00:22:45 Helaine: I love the Surrender Experiment. I can’t listen to that enough. If you have not read or listened to that by Michael Singer, I thought it was the most life changing book that I read in the past year. I’m also obsessed with the Acquired podcast. It’s just four to five hours of learning crazy things. Coca-Cola, Trader Joe’s episodes. Can’t get enough.

00:23:05 Pau: If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:23:09 Helaine: I’d probably live on the beach in Tel Aviv.

00:23:12 Pau: Favorite productivity hack?

00:23:14 Helaine: I’m obsessed with Wispr Flow.

00:23:16 Pau: Me too. I started last week. I stopped typing. I just yell at my phone.

00:23:21 Helaine: Me too. I DM the CEO being like, “Yo, we’re onto something. Do you want to hire me?”

00:23:26 Pau: I’m going to make sure that the show notes have my referral code.

00:23:29 Helaine: My referral code too. They can choose. We’ll see who did a better job based on the referral codes.

00:23:34 Pau: Where can listeners find you?

00:23:36 Helaine: I’m all over. Helaine Knapp on Instagram, LinkedIn. My book Making Waves is available on Amazon. I also narrated the audio version if you just can’t get enough of my voice.

00:23:48 Pau: So we’ll end the episode with probably the most weird ending anyone has ever heard in this show, which is I’m going to dedicate the last few minutes to Helaine’s mom. When Helaine was my employee, I would send report cards to Susan telling her how much of a great job Helaine was doing. I’m going to tell Susan that Helaine is doing fantastic and that I’m very proud of her and that she should be too.

00:24:18 Helaine: That’s adorable. Thank you, Pau. This is awesome.

00:24:23 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.

Listen to more from Pau Sabria on the Venure Everywhere Podcast episode 31: Remotely Engineered.

In episode 105 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding and Scott Hartley, co-founders and general partners at Everywhere Ventures, announce that Anna Barber is joining the firm as a third general partner. Anna brings extensive experience as a founder, former managing director at Techstars LA, and most recently a partner at M13, a multibillion-dollar West Coast fund. Anna shares her journey from the dot-com era at petstore.com through founding Scribble Press to becoming an investor. She explains how Everywhere’s community-driven platform of founders supporting founders is uniquely positioned for the AI era, where shortened learning cycles and human relationships outweigh pure technology infrastructure.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Venture’s evolution from dot-com to mobile/cloud to AI-driven startups.

• Why insight and relationships matter more than ever.

• Shift to founder-led community platforms over traditional venture funds.

• Human judgment and personal connections in identifying exceptional founders.

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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FULL 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 Scott: Today is a very special day. We have not only Jenny Fielding and myself, Scott Hartley, on the podcast here with Everywhere Ventures, but we’re really, really excited to make a big announcement, which is that we have a third person joining the team, Anna Barber.

00:00:48 Scott: Anna is somebody we’ve known for many, many years. Anna played a central role in helping scale what was The Fund New York to The Fund Los Angeles and broadening us out of our initial box in New York, helping us scale into the West Coast and Los Angeles.

00:01:05 Scott: Anna has a storied background as a founder. She’s also run Techstars LA and was most recently a partner at M13, which is a multibillion-dollar West Coast fund. Anna, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the team. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit more about yourself?

00:01:21 Jenny: Yay. Welcome, Anna.

00:01:24 Anna: Yay. Thanks, Jenny. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for that nice introduction. I could not be more excited to be joining you guys.

00:01:32 Anna: As Scott said, I’ve known Jenny and Scott since before they started Everywhere Ventures. My history with Jenny goes back 10 years when I joined Techstars and she was already a managing director there.

00:01:43 Anna: It’s a really rare opportunity in life to get to work with people with whom you’re so culturally aligned, share the same values, and see the world in the same way. I’m just incredibly excited for this opportunity and what we’re going to be able to do together.

00:02:00 Anna: I’ll talk about my background, but also where we see the world going and what that means for how we’ll be investing.

00:02:05 Jenny: Anna is no stranger to the Everywhere family, though, because we’ve worked with her for many years. She really helped us broaden our vision and our footprint around the world. It’s more of like a homecoming for us.

00:02:17 Jenny: Could not be more excited. And feel that the community that we’ve built is all about supporting founders and them supporting us. This feels very aligned with that mission. Take us back a little bit. Tell us your founder journey and how you went from founder to investor.

00:02:34 Anna: I got into the startup world actually in 1999. I worked at a venture-backed company in 1999, petstore.com. I left McKinsey to join PetStore. That was, of course, dot-com 1.0. There was this giant sucking sound of people leaving McKinsey and banking to go work in San Francisco at startups. I got hooked on startups and ended up staying in startups and early-stage for a long time.

00:03:18 Anna: I had some weird twists and turns. I was a talent manager in Hollywood for six years. I think you know a little of this story because I co-founded the U.S. Air Guitar Championships, which is always my fun fact whenever anyone asks you for a fun fact.

00:03:31 Jenny: Random and so good.

00:03:32 Scott: I think that beats anything that we could come up with.

00:03:34 Jenny: Pretty much.

00:03:35 Anna: I also slept in an igloo for 30 days, so take your pick. But in 2006, I met a woman on an airplane. She became my business partner in the last company I founded, which was Scribble Press, which is a kids’ education company.

00:03:47 Anna: That was a really interesting and fun journey for about six years of building both a retail and a digital platform and then selling the company in a very complicated transaction. I wasn’t planning on becoming an investor, but what I really wanted to do was help CEOs and founders become the best versions of themselves in order to scale their companies.

00:04:06 Anna: I had struggled myself as a CEO a bit with thinking my job was to have all the answers. I was very closed off to outside input that kept me from a lot of learning cycles that would have strengthened the company.

00:04:18 Anna: So figuring out how to engage founders with those high-velocity learning cycles was something I became really passionate about. I was going to do that through executive coaching.

00:04:30 Anna: But I got the opportunity to join Techstars. It seemed like a perfect vehicle for both supporting founders with capital, but also being able to roll up your sleeves and really work with them and for them in those critical early stages to help them build.

00:04:43 Jenny: I remember talking to founders that had gone through your Techstars program and I always remember that line, “Anna believed in me when others didn’t.” Talk a little bit about what it’s like to write that first check and follow that.

00:04:57 Jenny: There’s obviously a lot of disappointment because a lot of the companies that we invest in don’t work out, but there’s a lot of love and deep bonds, which is very special.

00:05:07 Anna: When you join with someone’s mission that early, it does create a really special relationship. I didn’t have a really strong thesis at that time 10 years ago, so I was very focused on quality founders. For me, quality was extreme founder market fit and unreasonable drive and ability to punch through walls.

00:05:27 Anna: One that really stands out to me was when I met Jing Gao, who founded Fly By Jing. She just had this crisp vision for what she wanted to create and how she wanted to transform the identity of Chinese cuisine in America.

00:05:40 Anna: She had an amazing product, but it was really about her vision that really attracted me. To have watched her do that over the past six years has been amazing. But you wouldn’t think of that as being a standard venture investment. But there was something about the combination of that interesting market that she saw really differently and her as just this incredibly gritty founder that really appealed.

00:06:02 Jenny: I actually love that example because I remember clearly when you told me about the company and I had some snarky response like you’re investing in a soy sauce company and you kind of rolled your eyes.

00:06:12 Jenny: But it does speak to your ability to find gems and not just chase what’s obvious. Obviously now that company is hugely successful.

00:06:19 Anna: And then you actually brought me one of my favorite companies in my Techstars program, which was theCut. You introduced me to Obi and Kush, who founded theCut. theCut is an operating platform for barbershops that involves marketing, booking, and billing, all in one platform.

00:06:34 Anna: And they’ve grown that into an amazing business where they own almost 20% of their market segment. But at the time they were really kids coming out of college. But you saw something in them.

00:06:45 Anna: What really is special about that team and what makes them very spiky is their intellectual rigor around their learning. They would run tests and if something wasn’t working, they would cancel it immediately.

00:06:57 Anna: They iterated and learned their way into a great business. So good at it that I had them teach other people how to do that. But you saw the same thing I did. One thing I love is we see the world the same way and we understand how important founders are in this whole equation.

00:07:13 Scott: We’ve all been investing for 10, 15, 20 years, been in tech for 20, 25 years. As venture investors, we have to zag when the world zigs and think about, to your point of Fly By Jing, things that are accretive, that are not getting funded in the market that you see something.

00:07:29 Scott: Not just being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but future leading consensus. Believing in something so much that you almost predict where consensus is going to be in one year, two years, five years.

00:07:41 Scott: In your experience over these last 20-something years in tech, what are the consistent points that you’ve seen through the through-line for some of your successful investments?

00:07:51 Anna: I started looking at being part of the venture ecosystem, as you said, in 1999. Since then, we’ve really had three waves. That was the dot-com wave, then we had that mobile cloud wave, and now we’re in the AI wave.

00:08:03 Anna: Through all those periods, some of the things that have remained consistent is, as you said about, not to be contrarian for its own sake, but imagining where consensus will emerge in the future but hasn’t yet, and then investing behind those waves. That remains important, whether we’re in an up cycle or a down cycle.

00:08:21 Anna: The other important thing about that is to continue investing and deploying capital steadily, paying attention to where you think the world is going, and ignoring a bit those up and down wild swings that you see around you in the market.

00:08:35 Anna: There’s a tendency when everything feels really hot to want to invest more, and when everything feels really cold and depressing to want to invest less. The best strategy is to continue investing.

00:08:44 Anna: I do think our world has changed in a structural way in the last five years. A lot of people have written about the consolidation of capital and the fact that the largest venture funds really aren’t venture funds anymore, they’re asset allocators. And that has had a really big effect on the overall market and what we do.

00:09:03 Anna: We think the path forward for a successful, smaller, earlier, high conviction firm is very clear, but judgment matters more. The ability to support your companies matters more. Velocity matters more, the ability to make a quick decision in a low information environment.

00:09:22 Anna: One thing I think is really interesting and exciting is the fact that you guys have built a platform that, to me, perfectly positions us to be able to invest that way.

00:09:32 Jenny: It’s been really fun to watch you at M13. Your role there has changed. You’ve had some incredible investments. Seeing you go from a first check investor to being able to invest in, write some chunky checks.

00:09:44 Jenny: I remember you calling me and being like, I’m putting a $10 million check in. I’m like, oh my goodness. What was that like? How do you see the continuum of venture from early stage through Series A?

00:09:55 Anna: The first time I wrote a big lead check, I was terrified. As an earlier stage investor at Techstars and through angel investing and other platforms, I’d been writing checks, $25, $100, $200K, something like that. The first one I wrote, there was a $6 million lead check. I was breaking out in a cold sweat a bit.

00:10:13 Anna: But getting all those reps out at M13 and sitting in that investment committee for five years with a group of people that had been writing those checks and getting to parse and talk through deals in that setting with them, I built my own confidence in my own taste, my own ability to really understand the story and the why behind writing a big check from 360 degrees and then to be able to confidently go out and lead.

00:10:38 Anna: And then win those deals. It’s not just the deciding. It’s the process of winning the lead when you’re writing that term sheet. There’s a sweet spot of being able to make a real high conviction bet in the form of leading a round.

00:10:52 Anna: But maybe at an earlier stage that I think is really appealing about what we get to do at Everywhere, there’s a nice middle ground here between what I’ve been doing at M13 and what you guys are doing, where I think we’ll be able to play well. We write sometimes 20-page memos. I don’t see doing that, but I think that level of depth of analysis can be valuable.

00:11:16 Scott: It’s cool. I think there’s almost two symbiotic learnings between those many, many experiences that you’ve had from Yale Law School to McKinsey to dot.com boom and bust to Techstars to M13 and now to Everywhere.

00:11:28 Scott: But thinking about just the lessons between Techstars and M13, what Techstars teaches both of you guys is that muscle of rinse, repeat and deploying capital steadily through the ups and downs. There’s always the next cohort no matter what’s happening in the macro environment. It trains that muscle of steady deployment.

00:11:45 Scott: And then the M13, in my limited experience at Mohr Davidow, just thinking about the rock and the tumbler and being in those meetings where you have 8 or 10 smart people poking holes in a business, whether it’s from a technical standpoint, a go to market standpoint, a founder archetype standpoint, a legal standpoint, you’re seeing the world from 8 or 10 viewpoints.

00:12:04 Scott: Even if you’re not vocalizing a rebuttal or you’re nodding yes to a deal, you’re kind of learning all those different hard edges and the rock and the tumbler being in those meetings for five years.

00:12:16 Scott: Seems like you really have a comprehensive set of experiences across being a founder, the steady muscle of Techstars, and then wearing down those edges and coming to your own conviction around writing bigger checks with M13.

00:12:28 Anna: I try to always practice strong opinions loosely held, like I say this to founders and it’s how I try to invest is like you have to have a very strong point of view about a deal.

00:12:38 Anna: One of the most humbling things about being an investor is the lack of feedback. We don’t know if a particular investment decision is going to turn out to pay off for sometimes 7 to 10 years. We have to look for feedback and learning feedback from other places.

00:12:53 Anna: It’s feedback from our peers, feedback from the market. Does it turn out the way we expect in the near term? I’m a learner. I am a sponge. If I’m not learning, I’m not growing. I’m not getting better. I want to get better every day.

00:13:06 Anna: I am never at the point where I feel like I know it all, I know what I’m doing and I’m ready to stop learning. Surrounding myself with people who are deep thinkers, whose opinion I respect, who can help me dig into things is essential to me to doing this job well.

00:13:20 Anna: I’ve had that at M13. It’s been great. I have that with you guys too. I feel we have really rich conversations around deals and where the market’s going that make us all better.

00:13:29 Jenny: Are you saying I’m a deep thinker?

00:13:33 Anna: She’s definitely a spicy thinker.

00:13:34 Jenny: There we go.

00:13:35 Anna: But yeah, you’re also a deep thinker.

00:13:37 Jenny: On that point, aside from the fact that we all have worked together, we love working together, talk about how you see our complementary skills. I’d love to hear it from you how this trio is going to work.

00:13:48 Anna: Oh, yeah. I feel like we’re superheroes. We’re coming together as the Justice League.

00:13:53 Jenny: Are we going to save venture?

00:13:57 Anna: We all need capes and we all have superpowers. But in all seriousness, Jenny, your ability to connect with people and draw people in and speak to an audience in a very authentic way is incredibly powerful. Founders just resonate with you so deeply. That’s not just your brand, that’s who you are. And that’s what makes it so powerful.

00:14:17 Anna: Scott’s just one of the smartest thinkers I know. I was just reading back through a lot of the work that you’ve written over the past few years about the market. It’s not just the great ideas, because I do think you have great ideas and frameworks. It’s the way you communicate them. Storytelling is the absolute most important skill for anyone. You’re absolutely brilliant at that.

00:14:36 Anna: I love to do deals. I was a corporate lawyer. I did outsourced corporate development for a while. I’ve invested in over 100 companies. I’ve really built a muscle of understanding deal dynamics, understanding how to put down a term sheet and win the deal.

00:14:51 Anna: And then I think a lot about portfolio construction and management strategically. I think about myself as a closer, or a strategic financial architect of how to create value. As obviously reductive, we’re all so much more than that. But I do think we have these interesting spikes that together make an amazing team.

00:15:10 Scott: Jenny and I have often said over the last seven or eight years, we really want to build a firm, not a fund. A firm means a full platform suite of offerings to founders at various stages.

00:15:21 Scott: What Jenny and I have been developing over a number of years has been a pre-seed platform where we’ve written 300 pre-seed checks. The opportunity is that those companies have been very successful and gone on to raise about three and a half billion dollars of follow on capital.

00:15:36 Scott: And even with our beloved friends at AngelList, putting up with us running over 100 SPVs, we’ve only been able to deploy about 15 or 20 million dollars into those subsequent opportunities.

00:15:46 Scott: Talking about the platform and Jenny, you could go into how we envision this platform evolving in two directions, both going earlier and partnering with founders at day zero and going a little bit later into the seed stage and how we think about supporting some of the breakout portfolio companies that we’ve invested in.

00:16:03 Anna: I think every VC firm says they have a platform. What you guys have that’s really special is it’s a platform, a network and a community. Choose the word that you want that works because the people in it actually show up for each other.

00:16:17 Anna: I’ve seen that come to life when someone in the Slack community needs an intro to their cloud provider because they’re having a problem with their billing and got an intro immediately to the CEO from someone else that they might not know. But just that has a strong affinity for the Everywhere community that you guys have built.

00:16:36 Anna: In this day and age, capital feels very commoditized. Founders are able to grow their companies more quickly using AI tools and rounds are happening faster. Everything has sped up.

00:16:49 Anna: The differentiator isn’t going to be access to information. AI workflows can do that for you. It’s not going to necessarily be capital. People are the differentiator and the ability to connect you to the right people who’s either been through what you’re going through, has the right introduction, can help you with what your specific problem is.

00:17:06 Anna: I just see that every day. I’ve been part of this community since you guys started it eight years ago and I see it working.

00:17:12 Anna: When we think about the future and what that could look like, there’s a lot of different ways to expand that in service of those founders and that existing portfolio company that you guys have built of 300 amazing companies all around the world.

00:17:27 Jenny: When you meet a special person, you want to be part of that journey as long and for as much as you can. The form and shape that that takes, we’ll see, but ultimately, we want to be supporting founders even earlier. We have in the works planning and building out a residency.

00:17:44 Jenny: And then keep on supporting them as we do with SPVs and all kinds of other side vehicles. Can we build that and make that even stronger is what’s exciting for me.

00:17:55 Anna: Same.

00:17:56 Scott: When you think of the history and evolution of venture, one of the things that Jenny and I talk about a lot is multiple waves of how the model has evolved.

00:18:03 Scott: Wave one in the seventies, eighties, nineties was the very formal GPLP structure. ERISA changing where retirement money could come into alternative assets like venture, changed the fundraising environment in the eighties and nineties.

00:18:16 Scott: Then you saw the advent of what Andreessen built around 2010, bringing to some of your experience, the Hollywood model out of CAA and WME to provide 360 degree support to founders and building these large platforms that were doing marketing and BD and hiring and all sorts of adjacencies to building a business, which is what Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen always talked about wanting as founders back in the day.

00:18:40 Scott: And then this evolution of what we tried to kick off in 2017, 2018, which at the time was forward thinking, which was founder driven venture capital, where we could provide commensurate support for founders, but in a much more lean way by having founders as LPs and building a platform of founders supporting founders.

00:18:58 Scott: And what Jenny and I often talk about is for founders, by founders. Looking back over the last 30 or 40 years of venture, it’s been interesting to see those various waves. We’ve been a real participant or maybe even leader in this community-driven approach of for founders, by founders. But what is the future venture fund look like? How do we build it?

00:19:17 Anna: The answer to that partly lies in what venture capital is for. In those early days of venture capital, you needed it because you were building hardware. It took a lot of investment.

00:19:26 Anna: When we first started building software through venture, you needed it because… the first website I built in 1989 at petstore.com, it cost a million dollars to launch an e-commerce website, and it took six months to get it out the door.

00:19:39 Anna: That’s not true anymore. You don’t need venture capital to build a product. You need an afternoon and Claude Code. So what is venture for? That is really the answer about where venture is going.

00:19:50 Anna: Venture is about shortening your learning cycles, giving you access to quicker feedback, helping you unlock expertise. There’s some capital involved, sure, but the capital is not the main thing anymore. Capital on its own is not differentiated.

00:20:06 Anna: That’s where I think venture is going. And this community model of by founders, for founders and operators supporting each other is really the key to unlocking what’s valuable today in an environment where you don’t just need capital to fund a huge engineering team to build a product anymore.

00:20:25 Anna: What you need is insight. You need insight more quickly. You need access to customers more quickly. You need people to help you shorten your learning cycles and reduce your time to market, your time to product-market fit, your time to scale.

00:20:38 Jenny: What the industry does not need is more AI sourcing and using AI to enable better sourcing, selecting, all of that stuff. I see a lot of other funds or GPs talking about that, their stack. To me, that’s a little bit of old news.

00:20:58 Jenny: We didn’t have Claude Code in 2018 when we started, but we’re automating a lot of things and tried to make this the firm of the future from the beginning, whether that was doing things async or using modern tech tools. I don’t think the firm of the future is about technology. I think it does go back to people and relationships.

00:21:15 Anna: I totally agree with you. The technology you guys have already built is pretty impressive. It actually works. It’s giving you great scale. But it’s all in service of you understand who you’re serving, what your mission is, what kind of people you’re interested in investing in, and the technology just supports that. It doesn’t replace it.

00:21:33 Anna: A lot of these talk about… somehow AI is going to be able to find a better investment. I just think at the earliest stages, we all agree as a fundamental principle that the founders are really the most important element. I just don’t think you’re going to be able to find that with AI. That’s about human judgment, relationships and being in the right place at the right time.

00:21:52 Jenny: It’s like your book, Scott. It’s all coming back.

00:21:55 Scott: It’s all coming back. 2017, 2016. I know. On that note, 2026, maybe the year that I try to put pen to paper again. But we’ll see.

00:22:04 Anna: See, that’s it. Scott Hartley, always ahead of the curve with his ideas.

00:22:09 Jenny: All right. We are almost out of time. So Anna, we always ask our guests a few questions. First question, if you could live anywhere for one year, where would it be?

00:22:19 Anna: I would probably move to London at this point. Just need a change. Want a fresh perspective. Love listening to the accents.

00:22:30 Scott: It’s a good reason enough.

00:22:32 Jenny: What keeps you super efficient and moving fast in your work?

00:22:37 Anna: Right now, my ChatGPT co-pilot does a lot of my work for me. The thing that worries me about this, though, I know I’m not supposed to annotate the question, but what happens is we move up our productivity goals when we have these tools. It’s like Scott’s idea of Strong vs. Skinny. I expect more from myself because I have more tools. But I’m doing a lot more with ChatGPT.

00:23:00 Jenny: All right. I’ll answer the last question for you. Where can viewers find you? And I’ll say anna@everywhere.vc.

00:23:08 Anna: Oh, my gosh. It’s my new email. I’m so excited.

00:23:11 Jenny: It’s official.

00:23:13 Anna: Thanks, guys, for literally recording this on the first day of this exciting new chapter. I couldn’t be more thrilled. Thanks.

00:23:19 Scott: We couldn’t be more thrilled as well. Thanks for joining us today on the podcast.

00:23:24 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Anna Barber.

In episode 104 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Kat Garcia, co-founder and CEO of Ground, a startup building the AI revenue system for autonomous revenue generation and retention. Kat shares how she left BCG Digital Ventures to work for free with B2C companies, uncovering that operators didn’t need more productivity tools—they needed technology that could autonomously generate revenue on their behalf. She discusses how Ground’s opinionated AI ontology transforms static metrics into actions that drive up to 10% more top-line revenue, moving companies from dashboards to agentic commerce.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Unlocking unrealized revenue potential in fragmented tech stacks.

• Autonomous revenue generation beyond productivity tools.

• Real-time commerce ontology that learns and acts.

• Proving autonomous systems in high-churn e-commerce.

• Democratizing enterprise capabilities for mid-size brands.

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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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 Scott: Hi everybody, I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. I’m super excited to have Kat Garcia on the podcast today with us. Kat is the co-founder and CEO of Ground, which is building out agentic AI revenue generation and retention.

00:00:49 Scott: Ground is now based between Silicon Valley and New York. Kat brings with her a number of cool experiences, having been at BCG Digital Ventures before where she served as the head of growth for multiple companies, helped take Amex’s first debit card to market, and also launched Spin by OXXO. OXXO is the Venmo of Latin America.

00:01:10 Scott: Fun fact, Kat has a background in entertainment, was a film actress, and a number of other fun things we can get into. Kat, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:17 Kat: Thank you so much for having me, Scott. I’m excited.

00:01:20 Scott: I want to take a step back. Go-to market is a broad-based term, but what we’re really talking about is the top of the funnel revenue generation and revenue retention for companies, and how this is moving to a more automated self-driving approach. Walk people through the high-level problem that Ground is solving.

00:01:40 Kat: When I think about Ground, we’re the leading AI revenue system. We generate, we manage, we compound growth. And a lot of that is incremental revenue. And we do that autonomously.

00:1:52 Kat: When we sat down and we were thinking about, okay, how do we help companies achieve their own potential? That’s really the mission. How do we elevate businesses and make sure that they’re reaching their potential, and in many ways, their growth potential with their offerings, with what they’re building?

00:02:11 Kat: A lot of the gap that we found was that there’s an unrealized potential that is hidden in a business because of the way that tools or even technologies have been created or designed.

00:02:26 Kat: A lot of these technologies, when we think about go-to market, when we think about growth, it’s been to support people and teams, to help them be more productive and be more efficient. But it hasn’t really solved for the problem of, oh, now I can actually grow my business and there is impact.

00:02:46 Kat: For the last 20 years, we’ve thought of software as this thing that it’s like, okay, software is saving the world. It’s going to help me achieve my goals and I’m going to, maybe, end the year at a certain point in revenue and it’s going to be helpful.

00:02:59 Kat: But when we were thinking about the problem and a lot of the fragmentation across the tech stack, we sat down and we started working for free. I was a head of growth. I left my job at BCG Digital Ventures and I started working for free as a head of growth for a lot of B2C companies, products primarily.

00:03:18 Kat: And the COOs, the CROs, the CEOs, even go-to-market teams specifically and operators were like, please do not build a productivity tool. I don’t need to be more productive. If AI is really here, we’re in the AI era and we’re in the agentic era, then you should be able to have a technology that can understand my business in real time and just communicate to itself and generate the revenue. Can you just generate revenue for me on my behalf?

00:03:48 Kat: At the time, we laughed. Because it was a joke. But that was an important need that we took seriously because we’re like, well, what if we were to do this? What if we could actually have a measurable impact where you don’t need to guess anymore and you can actually achieve the full potential of your business day-after-day, month-over-month, year-after-year autonomously?

00:04:13 Kat: That’s essentially what we set out to build. That’s why we’re here.

00:04:17 Scott: It’s funny when you say that because it’s such a direct action, but effectively when you have companies myopically building for one problem or another, they get lost in the weeds sometimes.

00:04:30 Scott: The ultimate goal of a company is to solve customer pain points and sell more of whatever they’re selling. To your point, the number of tools and systems that have been built don’t necessarily have a direct impact on that bottom line and that end objective.

00:04:47 Scott: If you think about the inputs, you’ve got humans, you’ve got technology. And the ultimate goal is to generate more bottom line for the business, which then enables the business to reinvest in product and reinvest in tools and become more productive and compound over time.

00:05:02 Scott: What you guys are doing is really trying to streamline that in some ways, bringing the agentic AI era in a more direct way to just generate bottom line for the businesses. Is that correct?

00:05:14 Kat: That’s exactly it. It’s been amazing to be building in the space where it’s instant product market fit because the demand is always going to be there. It’s an evergreen problem, but it’s more so… well, does the product work? Do you actually have AI models that are able to guarantee revenue?

00:05:34 Kat: It’s been great to see that on average, across all of our companies and clients, we’re able to add up to 10% more top line revenue to the business after not much work. It doesn’t really matter the size of the company, whether you’re making 5 million a year in GMV or if you’re doing a billion in sales online, we’re able to install Ground in 15 minutes.

00:06:00 Kat: The onboarding is very simple for businesses. And the ontology or that opinionated AI model or revenue system across your business continuously gets built and it’s able to drive that incrementality.

00:06:15 Kat: I also think about why did we decide to go the route of B2C. This is great for enterprise. But when I look back at the behaviors and the needs, it’s reminiscent of Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Waymo, where what a lot of companies in this AI era have been getting wrong is, is to think about AI as for go-to-market, as software, as a service again, with the idea that it’s all about workflows and productivity rather than having a direct impact on a business.

00:06:51 Kat: Because a lot of AI companies are approaching building as, oh, I’m going to build a faster car and better features, faster features. But at Ground, we’ve always approached it as we want to build Waymo. We want to build a car that drives itself and that helps you get to your end destination.

00:07:08 Kat: When we think about why that’s a huge impact on the entire market for B2C companies, it’s that Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Waymo, they were building, and in many ways, democratizing their solutions for the middle class. They gave the middle class what the elite had.

00:07:29 Kat: Uber, the elite, they have private drivers. Airbnb, they have access to villas around the world. DoorDash, they have private chefs. Waymo, same thing as Uber.

00:07:41 Kat: But when we think about it and compare that to our industry, enterprises also have access. They don’t need autonomous revenue, but there’s a new class of companies that is emerging that need this. And they want their companies to be self-driving. While many AI companies are approaching the landscape from productivity and better workflows, I want to help midsize brands have outsized outcomes.

00:08:08 Scott: It’s a great metaphor to think about this idea of autonomous vehicles, autonomous revenue, agentic revenue. When you get down to the brass tacks of how that operates, is the problem that people have top of funnel and scraping new leads? Is it management of data that exists in these silos like Salesforce or Databricks or Snowflake?

00:08:29 Scott: Because ultimately you’re trying to meet the customer where the customer is and speak to them in the most authentic way.

00:08:36 Kat: For us, our wedge or sandbox in many ways has been e-commerce so B2C. The reason for that is because the funnel is very similar to B2C across experiences and services, for example, travel or hotels like hospitality, healthcare, entertainment, as well as B2B.

00:09:02 Kat: However, e-commerce is something where if you can build and if it works for e-commerce, it works anywhere. It has the highest churn. It’s the most competitive go-to-market environment because of how fragmented the stack is, how competitive it is.

00:09:21 Kat: Also teams are not digitally native. They’re operator-led. They’re not engineering-led. You need to do a lot of convincing. So your technology needs to have measurable ROI to say my technology or my AI agents drove that incremental revenue that otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to see.

00:09:40 Kat: From day zero, we built Ground to be full funnel. We’re able to be a part of anything before transactions all the way to actually helping you get those transactions through.

00:09:54 Kat: We’re able to generate new leads. If I were to compare B2B to B2C, it’s like if someone is coming from different sources, from different channels, for example, paid ads, UGC, that’s typically the main ways that you’re able to generate top of funnel for B2C.

00:10:11 Kat: A lot of these channels do not communicate to each other and go-to-market teams have a lot of work to do in terms of understanding the source, the creatives. How do I get a new visitor to give me their information? And then how do I get them to make a first purchase? We have Greet AI as one of our AI agents that does that.

00:10:32 Kat: We also are able to support the middle of the funnel. 70% of revenue decisions, they lie in abandonment. So understanding customer intent and fragmentation, where you have a layer that is able to identify these people in a way where it’s privacy first, you need to have a technology that stitches everything together. That’s ReCartify for us.

00:10:56 Kat: Finally, retention is really important because you may have a lot of customers that you’re trying to understand and use regression models or past data to be like, when is this person going to come back? When are they going to buy again? What do they need? How do I drive more LTV without affecting my CAC? And that’s really our ReBeat AI model that is able to drive usually three to seven times more repeat purchase revenue.

00:11:23 Scott: It’s amazing. Basically it’s a set of agents optimized for a few different tasks within that funnel. So one might be attribution back to the initial inroad for that particular client. As you mentioned in B2C and e-commerce, typically that’s attribution to a specific creative or a user generated content or ad profile.

00:11:46 Scott: And then there’s a middle zone, which is helping activate and figure out what the specific hangups or reasons for people not making a purchase. The third bucket is looking at past data and signals to figure out what the leading indicators might be for somebody repurchasing or coming back. That’s on the retention part of the funnel.

00:12:09 Kat: Exactly. More importantly, it’s the ability to take all those insights, predictive patterns, outcomes, and also your existing first party data, and then making sure that we’re generating the revenue so that way you’re not left with a bunch of data or dashboards or tools. It’s doing it for you.

00:12:33 Kat: It knows at different points in time, in real-time across all of your channels, all of your tech stack, executing the right actions in order for you to actually get those dollars in your business. That’s why we’re able to say on average, 10% more top line revenue is because of Ground.

00:12:53 Scott: It’s a great point because I think that’s the move to agentic versus dashboards and data that existed five years ago, is that delineation between not just knowing. But being able to know and acts and have an agent that performs an action or an intervention on behalf of the company to nudge that user in one way or another, which generates bottom line revenue for the business.

00:13:19 Kat: Exactly. That is what is so exciting about all of this because it’s for the first time that this is possible. More importantly, it’s not just the technology, it’s the behaviors. That’s why I go back to, for example, enterprises, maybe the behavior isn’t there yet, but for future enterprises. That’s really where the mid-size market is. They want this.

00:13:47 Kat: Agentic first companies, they’re the ones that are generating dozens or a couple hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And they’re like, we want to be able to manage these different agents, as well as having a system that does it for us. So that way we’re not guessing, and we’re not out here at the end of the year being like, did we hit our goals? Did we actually do everything that we needed to do in order to drive revenue?

00:14:15 Scott: One thing that we’ve noticed at Everywhere the last three or four years, initially there was pushback to AI companies or wrappers that were using off-the-shelf larger language models or LLMs to then integrate into a really specific workflow, like what Ground does, specifically around go-to-market.

00:14:34 Scott: Do you now see that the moats that you’ve been able to create with Ground and the stickiness of the product have to do more with integration into workflow tools for these companies?

00:14:43 Scott: Or is it also that you’re starting to collect and build your own models based on the data signals that you’re seeing for these specific agentic actions, where you’re now backward integrating into having datasets and your own models that maybe were bootstrapped using LLMs, but are now bespoke to just Ground.

00:15:05 Scott: I would imagine you’re starting to see more stickiness and more moat as you guys have been in this market now for a number of years and generated a lot of data and bespoke understanding that you have around these really specific actions and pain points. Do you think that’s a fair characterization of the market over the last few years?

00:15:26 Kat: I would say so. We took the ladder approach, where from the very beginning we built our own models. But over time, they’ve definitely gotten a lot better. Even with our own clients, we have different revenue agents across different parts of the funnel that I had just shared.

00:15:43 Kat: When I think about, for example, the incrementality and the lift that we’re able to provide… like Greet AI, if you want to get more first-time customers in the door and first-time customer revenue, it used to be that the average was Ground can add maybe 20% more. And 20% was like, whoa. You’re adding 20% more first-time customers to the business. Amazing.

00:16:06 Kat: But now we’re seeing where it could be as high as 80%. That’s because when we think about the models that we have, one thing is that they’re able to learn over time because of all the customer data. We’re able to have a surface level that is connected to all of your channels.

00:16:26 Kat: So if you’re using Meta, it’s learning on your Meta. If you have TikTok, it’s learning on TikTok. It’s learning on Shopify or your homegrown site, Klaviyo, all of your different systems. But when you look under the hood, what we’re building is an ontology and it’s an opinion of commerce. It’s an opinion of your business.

00:16:48 Kat: So instead of it just being random clicks or metrics or hovers and actions or ads, all of those things, back in the day, it was just metrics. But being able now to have micro mini LLMs or different agents that operate in different ways, you now have an opinion that has been built just for you that is training over time to take those actions. It’s able to take those actions and learn in real time, which is the magic.

00:17:19 Scott: That’s a really important distinction in the evolution of agentic commerce and in where AI is going is taking static metrics that you used to have in a dashboard and, as you said with Ground, being able to generate an ontology, which is just a mapping of those different signals with an output, with an opinion about what the action should be given those inputs.

00:17:44 Scott: And so it’s really more about this opinionated mapping of KPIs and turning that into actual actions. Now being multi-years into the journey as an AI founder, your background, you didn’t come from a world of AI. None of us did more than a few years ago.

00:18:01 Scott: Walk us through some of those experiences that you had in the past or what was it that you learned at BCG Digital Ventures or in your experience with OXXO in LATAM that really gave you the experience or the confidence to dive headfirst into this market?

00:18:16 Scott: Because now as one of the category leaders, it’s pretty incredible to see the ways in which you’ve reinvented yourself and the ways in which you’ve really generated pole position in a market that’s very fast moving.

00:18:28 Kat: A lot of it has been my subject matter expertise in growing companies. I understand B2B funnels really well, but I also understand B2C, like how do you grow a consumer-facing business, whether that is product company like a Sephora beauty company, or if it’s Equinox, Four Seasons, NFL+ streaming service.

00:18:52 Kat: There’s so many different types of businesses and having had the opportunity at BCG Digital Ventures to incubate companies and be the interim head of growth and launch all of these companies and understanding at different phases how do you do 0 to 10 million ARR in 12 months?

00:19:10 Kat: And then how do you do that and scale it from 10 to a hundred? How do you work with Fortune 500 companies? And all of those growth questions are very different across all those stages of growth, the types of companies as well as their customer base.

00:19:29 Kat: I never really approached it from technology or the solution. It was like, wait a second, I know that the growth playbook is dead. There’s so many technological shifts that are happening where the next Glossier is not going to be built in the same way that Glossier was built in 2010 or Casper, Warby Parker.

00:19:50 Kat: I always approached it from a curiosity lens. And then being able to sit down with CEOs and their teams and work for free and essentially tell them, give me all of your problems and them giving us their data and being like, yeah, this is everything. Here’s my QuickBooks. Here’s my retention problems. I don’t know how to get first time customers in the door. This is how much I’m spending here.

00:20:15 Kat: Being able to have access to that and really just think about it from a first principles thinking and say, okay, this is how we would solve for it manually. And then I’m very thankful for my co-founders, my CTO and co-founder Antonio. He was doing his PhD in AI and machine learning a long, long time ago and dropped out to build within AI and machine learning startups.

00:20:37 Kat: I would always explain to him, this is how I think about this problem manually from a growth marketing standpoint. Now, how would you think about it from an AI machine learning standpoint? Can we automate this? You tell me.

00:20:51 Kat: It was a collective effort by mixing subject matter expertise and then saying, how can we use technology to make this better and drive this outcome? But a lot of it beyond that is education.

00:21:06 Kat: The reason for why we are the leading AI revenue system and why this market, we’ve been working with all these incredible nine-figure businesses so quickly is because we have spent the time to educate people on the importance of AI and demystify how scary it can be.

00:21:28 Scott: One of the things that we used to say at Google and I think is an industry standard at this point was eating your own dog food. As a company that’s leading the charge in AI-driven go-to-market, how do you take a step back and reflect on the lessons that you’re pitching to clients in how you grow Ground itself?

00:21:49 Scott: What are the learnings or what are the ways in which you’re able to grow your own business based on the problem that you’re solving for your clients? Have you adopted internally at Ground that’s been a learning of something that you were providing to a client?

00:22:04 Kat: It’s baked in inside of our DNA and how we’ve been able to grow because our business model is outcome-based. Our business model is one where we have a platform fee, but we also do revenue share.

00:22:18 Kat: The more revenue that Ground generates, the better for the client and the business, but also the better for us. We’re incentivized to have the models work as best as possible to generate as much revenue and growth for all of our clients.

00:22:34 Kat: That has pushed us to innovate and think about, okay, well, if Greet AI is working really well, how do we expand that agent? It’s not about, oh, now we’re going to build new things and we’re going to hope that it has an impact or people want to buy it.

00:22:51 Kat: It’s more like, well, wait a second, we can make this AI agent a lot more powerful if we were to expose it to other channels. If it’s working with Meta, now let’s work with Google ads. Let’s work with TikTok.

00:23:05 Kat: Oh, great. We’re touching online commerce, but then how are we helping our brands make as much revenue as possible on LLMs now with ChatGPT and Shopify? How are they showing up in Perplexity and how can we help them generate more revenue there? The marketing is expanding rapidly and that has pushed us to innovate and think outside the box every day.

00:23:30 Scott: When you think about the future of Ground and the future of the business, looking forward to 2030, what do you see as the undercurrents? Or what do you see taking the business in developing more of these hyper-specific agentic problem solvers for different injection points in the journey?

00:23:49 Scott: Do you see it as going deeper with the ones that you have or building more agents? Where do you see the opportunities in the future of the business and what you could see ultimately as a really successful platform for Ground?

00:24:00 Kat: I love this question. The way that I view it is we have been really focused on our AI agents since inception and making them work better in order to drive as much revenue. But in many ways, the AI revenue system that we’ve built is a control plane.

00:24:18 Kat: While today we’re focused on how revenue should be generated, we also want to think more so around management. How are those transactions being managed across both online or the internet and then now LLMs? And then how are we able to reinvest those dollars into your business in a way that makes sense?

00:24:41 Kat: Because we now have the ontology in which the agents are able to drive revenue and they know how to do that as best as possible given your channels and your tech stack. But over time, you need to also understand autonomously how to reinvest all those profits so that they’re not just going back to the same channels, hoping that you’re doing your best across channel mix.

00:25:07 Kat: We should also have the ability to better manage your business’s financial health. That’s really where we want to go and where we’re thinking.

00:25:16 Scott: It’s almost like another metaphor you often talk about is quant trading. Thinking about the last 20 years as a number of different siloed systems and tools to optimize people and dashboards and KPIs moving from that static siloed system to a more integrated AI driven opinionated ontology of the inputs that your business is generating, whether it’s from ad attributions or customer signals, moving that into this quant trading metaphor.

00:25:48 Scott: Giving people the ability to not set it and forget it, but really set it and have it perform more automated actions than have happened in the past. Is that accurate?

00:25:57 Kat: That’s exactly it. Quantum trading is a perfect analogy. I think that for AI, it’s that a new category should exist and it should emerge. Having an AI revenue system reminds me of Stripe, Klaviyo, Gong, and Shopify.

00:26:14 Kat: Stripe showed that transactions can be managed, but it doesn’t create the demand. Klaviyo showed that customer data, first party data can drive outcomes, but it still relies on manual analysis and past analysis as well.

00:26:30 Kat: Gong showed that AI can create those patterns. It can understand, predict outcomes, but it doesn’t take those actions. And then Shopify showed that if you own the point of purchase, that creates massive leverage, but it’s still very verticalized.

00:26:46 Kat: What’s missing is that control plane that is able to generate all those outcomes based off of those patterns that it understands, and then actually manage those transactions and put it back into the company.

00:27:00 Scott: It’s really a system of dials. And you can develop with Ground this control plane where you can even dial up some of those outcomes by 5% or 10% across the stack. That really compounds into an advantage of acquisition, retention, expansion, modernization. It’s really a holistic AI native operating system.

00:27:23 Kat: Yes, exactly. I love that. It’s funny because even when we were doing our 2026 planning with our CTO and my co-CEO, Antonio and Shahriar, we visualized almost these dials.

00:27:36 Kat: Maybe our dashboard can look more like dials where larger companies, enterprises, the ones of today, they want to have more control. So go-to-market teams, they want to have dials to play around with stuff. And so how do you build for a world that is autonomous, but also you do need specific guardrails? So that’s a really nice visual.

00:27:59 Scott: One thing that Jenny and I talk about a lot with one of our venture partners, Anna Barber, is it’s not necessarily about being contrarian, but it is about predicting consensus and figuring out where the market is going and leading into future consensus in some ways.

00:28:15 Scott: So part of that is having a worldview and an opinion about where you think the world’s going. What is one idea within the sector that experts or putative experts say or often state and believe that you disagree with?

00:28:30 Scott: Where do you think the world is moving if you’re going to predict this consensus? It may be contrarian in the moment, but it’s really about being at the consensus where the market is going ahead of everyone else. What’s one viewpoint that you disagree with where you put your stake in the ground?

00:28:47 Kat: I spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and last year I kept hearing this, which is that foundational models like OpenAI are going to win all of agentic commerce, and that websites are going to go away. Forget the internet. Who cares about B2C funnels, especially top of the funnel?

00:29:09 Kat: I think that is incredibly flawed, especially because we kept saying the same things 20 years ago. It’s like, oh, e-commerce is going to take over. Websites are here. No one is going to shop in real life. That’s going to go away.

00:29:25 Kat: But 10 to 20 years later, retails… it accounts for 84%, whereas e-comm is only 16%. So offline is still four times bigger than online commerce. It’s really a missed opportunity if you’re thinking that now you have to put all of your eggs in one basket. You need to understand where the expansion is, but you need to build for both, and you need to be hybrid.

00:29:50 Kat: Foundational models, they cannot do everything. Google didn’t win everything. Then we wouldn’t really have venture as a whole industry, nor would we have startups and different technologies that have emerged and have IPO’d. So I think foundational models are important for the infrastructure, but we have a very long way to go.

00:30:10 Scott: It’s funny. Thinking back to 2011, my old venture fund, we had a whole future of retail thesis when the world was all moving online and everybody said, e-commerce is the future. Retail is dead. We took a contrarian approach and invested in a lot of optimization for brick and mortar. 15 years on, as you said, 84% of commerce happens offline. So it is a good lesson to remember that you have to build for a hybrid environment.

00:30:37 Scott: And so just when the world is running after LLMs, and obviously you guys are leaning heavily into agentic commerce, there is still this need to optimize across all these different inputs and tool stacks. I think you’re doing a great job of that. I totally agree with that viewpoint. Sometimes you got to push back on the San Francisco consensus a little bit.

00:30:56 Kat: Definitely. As builders, you understand where the behaviors are and where they’re going to be and where they’re not. It’s really important to be able to build for today and tomorrow and not get so stuck on how exciting the technology is.

00:31:12 Kat: That’s been the beauty of building for B2C. When you’re in B2B and you’re stuck on those funnels, the way that you grow a B2B company typically is more engineering led. So you’re going to be faced with ICPs that are incredibly digitally native and they just want to test.

00:31:29 Kat: They just want all of that fun stuff, even though it provides no value. So it’s been really helpful to have to prove value from day one and to scale with folks that are naturally skeptic.

00:31:43 Scott: I have about a hundred more questions I want to ask you, but in the interest of time, we’re running short here. I wanted to laser in on one part of your background, which is just so unique and fun to ask questions about, which is your background in entertainment.

00:31:55 Scott: The lead off story of a book that I wrote in 2017 was about a theater arts major who became a YC founder and built a healthcare company and really attributed her ability to hire and sell based on her experience as an actress.

00:32:11 Scott: She was talking about how when you go to audition on Broadway, 50 people show up in the room, 50 people get the exact same words on the script, one person gets the part. And the one person who gets the part is the one who can imbue the story with the most authenticity, the most meaning, fit the role the best.

00:32:30 Scott: What is one thing that you learned in that prior life experience in entertainment that you’ve taken on as a CEO that has helped you build to where you are today?

00:32:41 Kat: It’s funny because when I was doing founder led sales, it really reminded me of my acting days because for 99 or a hundred auditions, I got one part and it’s not like it was easy either.

00:32:57 Kat: I controlled the outcomes. I never took no for an answer, even though I wasn’t allowed to. I had an agent. There’s casting directors. It’s a very hierarchical industry. It’s incredibly difficult. I would say it’s harder than startups because in startups you can control a lot of those rooms.

00:33:16 Kat: When it came down to the audition process, I always did something that you weren’t supposed to do, which was I would find out the casting directors’ information. I would find out their DNS records of their website and who had created their websites.

00:33:33 Kat: Usually their phone numbers were listed there and I would call them and send them my cover letter of why I would be the best person for the job. I got every part because I did that.

00:33:47 Kat: I recall one of the films that I did, it was a short film that premiered at Cannes. I’ll never forget. I got a call from the casting director who said, hey, Kat. I’m calling you and you’re going to get the part of Molly.

00:34:02 Kat: And I just want to let you know that you were not the best. You were not the best actress, but I’m going to hire you anyway because you’re annoying and you kept calling our office. We got your CD with your demo. And look, you’re relentless and you’re going to work really hard. And that’s also something that the character would have done. So congratulations. That’s it. That’s just how sales is done.

00:34:26 Scott: That is so parallel to founder-led sales. That persistence, that grit, the perseverance, but also the orthogonal thinking, thinking what are the other ways in which I could gain an advantage.

00:34:39 Scott: I love that example of looking up the DNS records, finding the addresses and listings of phone numbers on public databases to back your way into roles. I think that’s so indicative of the grit and persistence that we’ve seen in you as a CEO in the portfolio over the last few years. Thanks for sharing that story. That’s awesome.

00:34:59 Kat: Thank you.

00:35:00 Scott: So really quickly and wrap up, we’re going to do our speed round. So I want to know, what’s a book or podcast that you’re currently enjoying?

00:35:08 Kat: 21 Days Countdown to Riches by Rhonda Byrne. She’s the author of The Secret or The Law of Attraction. This one is more about financial wealth.

00:35:19 Scott: Very cool. I’m going to add that to my Kindle list. If you could live anywhere in the world other than on an airplane between Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, where would you pick?

00:35:29 Kat: I’ve been dreaming of a very specific home in Cartagena, Colombia. There’s these really gorgeous old colonial homes that have been redone with gorgeous pools. There’s this one villa that I would love to buy and have it be my home.

00:35:47 Scott: That sounds fantastic. I know exactly those old pools that you swim through, an arcade under an old wall with plant foliage and all that. I had a wonderful experience the one time that I was in Cartagena for a wedding. What’s your favorite productivity hack?

00:36:03 Kat: Ooh. Okay. My favorite productivity hack, and this is something that I did a couple years ago, is I really turned off a lot of social media, the noise. I created different profiles for myself on Instagram, Twitter, that have nothing to do with work, that just actually give me a lot of joy. Even Pinterest.

00:36:22 Kat: I have alternative accounts across all of my digital channels for social, and then even for ChatGPT, that are a lot more abundance-oriented that don’t really stress me out. Because it’s not like a bubble where I need to compete. I’m in my own zone. The algorithms have been trained to be with things that just give me peace.

00:36:45 Scott: That’s a great idea. Finally, I guess, across those platforms, where can listeners find you if they look for you online?

00:36:51 Kat: @katgarciaonline across anything. I’m most active on Instagram and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is really where I spend most of my days.

00:37:01 Kat: For Ground, we just redid our Instagram. You can find us there, @joinground. And then we also have a podcast with some of our clients and the ecosystem called Grounded Insights.

00:37:13 Scott: I love that. Well, Kat, thank you so much for being with us today. Congratulations on leading the charge at the forefront of the AI-driven commerce. Thank you for everything that you’ve been building with us.

00:37:25 Kat: Thank you. This was fun.

00:37:28 Scott: Super fun.

00:37:30 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.