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.

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 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.

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 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.

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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 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.

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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 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.

In episode 103 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Ethan Schwarzbach, co-founder of Flychain, a startup building the financial operating system for small to medium-sized healthcare providers. Ethan shares his journey from investment banking to fintech at Orchard, where insights from Square's merchant processing data inspired Flychain's initial product. He discusses how underwriting healthcare businesses revealed a critical gap in financial infrastructure, leading Flychain to build a specialized platform that replaces QuickBooks and delivers AI-powered financial insights for practices.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Bridging cashflow gaps of healthcare providers.

• Addressing financial infrastructure crisis in healthcare practices.

• Leveraging accurate EMR data for AI-driven decision-making.

• Partnering with healthcare networks to reach underserved practices.

• Positioning for value-based care and consolidation landscape shifts.

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 Jenny: Welcome, everyone, to Venture Everywhere, where we tap into the wisdom of our portfolio founders and folks from our community.

00:00:42 Jenny: Today I’m very excited that Ethan Schwarzbach, the co-founder of Flychain, is joining us. Flychain is a startup building the financial operating system for small to medium size healthcare providers.

00:00:53 Jenny: But actually the way you describe it on LinkedIn or in other material, the financial control tower for your healthcare practice. So can you tell us a little bit more about that Ethan?

00:01:05 Ethan: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Flychain’s been around for almost three years now and building, as Jenny mentioned, the financial operating system, financial control tower for small to medium sized businesses in healthcare.

00:01:16 Ethan: When we say that we think about the vendor stack in healthcare and we imagine this fictitious line where you have a line where above that line are your EMRs, practice management systems, revenue cycle management, billing, a lot of other things that go into seeing patients getting paid by insurance.

00:01:31 Ethan: Flychain sits below that line and then every healthcare business will have a payroll system and then accounting and it’s usually QuickBooks. And so what we’re going in as the entry point is to replace QuickBooks.

00:01:41 Ethan: From there, we do that to get all the data accurate, standardized. We’ll integrate to the EMRs, integrate to all the systems, which oftentimes like a QuickBooks can’t handle. It gives us a really much more granular picture of the financials of a healthcare business by piecing together all of the granular revenue to the granular expenses. And then that gives us the ability to then do a lot more with that data.

00:02:03 Ethan: We lend to a whole host of different services, but you can think about us as the financial team/CFO/accounting firm.

00:02:11 Jenny: That’s great. And I’d love to go back a little bit the way that we heard about you with some of our mutual friend Angela, who I guess you worked with at Orchard. Tell us a little bit about your background in and around the FinTech space that potentially informs where you ended up taking Flychain.

00:02:27 Ethan: Started off out of college working on a trading floor at an investment bank, especially when I graduated, it was you either did banking, consulting, law school or med school. Did that for a couple of years. I like to say I learned a fair amount about finance, but I really hated that job.

00:02:41 Ethan: I left and joined Orchard, which sat between all these non-bank lenders, consumer commercial, and the institutional investors that were funding them. So worked for Angela there.

00:02:49 Ethan: That experience, it was new to me, this whole non-bank lending universe, fintech universe. Some of the kernels of what I saw there actually informed the initial build of Flychain. Our first product was what we call advanced payment on insurance claims.

00:03:02 Ethan: When we were at Orchard, we had a really cool front row seat to Square being launched and looking at merchant processing credit card data, especially from the eyes of an institutional credit investor. It’s pretty awesome in my opinion.

00:03:15 Ethan: We took that as a first principle within healthcare, who has an equivalent to that merchant processing data. We started partnering up with billers. It was really coming from that Orchard experience and then the other FinTech background that I have. All related though just small to medium size business, lending, banking, payments, accounting.

00:03:33 Ethan: But that was the entry point for Flychain was we had this vision all along to build this financial control tower, this platform, but use that advanced payment on claims as a bit of a wedge. And I know it’s counterintuitive for a fintech company to start with lending to then build the platform.

00:03:48 Ethan: But for us, my co-founder and I, Jaime, we asked ourselves, what better way to learn what other fintech tooling we need than to solve a cashflow issue in the form of lending, but also underwrite.

00:03:58 Ethan: And by underwriting these businesses, seeing every dollar in and out, understanding how they operate, it really informed the entire rest of our build, which I’m sure we’ll get into. But that’s a combination of a lot of background experience that led us to build something new in healthcare.

00:04:14 Jenny: When I first met you, that was the primary focus. And I love that because there are all these businesses that you don’t necessarily think about what their friction point is in delivering service. And obviously if the healthcare providers have to wait to be paid, then that’s going to tie up their whole system. So that was an aha moment for me where I was like, wow, this makes a ton of sense. It’s a no brainer.

00:04:33 Jenny: So can you talk a little bit about how you started there, but then you saw this larger opportunity and some of the operating system, about the accounting and QuickBooks part?

00:04:43 Ethan: Happy to. So rewinding the clock when we first met, that was really Flychain. It was advanced payment on insurance claims. And if you looked at our fundraising deck down the slides, it said financial operating system.

00:04:54 Ethan: We had a few things like FinTech tooling that we wanted to build, didn’t know the order and if everything was even going to make it to the roadmap by doing all of these underwrites.

00:05:04 Ethan: I should also mention we started off in home healthcare and behavioral health. And they have that very unique cashflow paradigm where they have to pay their staff every week or two, all of their revenues tied up in insurance. Banks can’t lend to them because they don’t have any assets on their balance sheet. They just run for the hills.

00:05:19 Ethan: And the only folks that will lend are those sketchy merchant cash advance lenders. And so taking a first principle of, let’s just solve this cashflow issue for these home health and behavioral health businesses. It’s not because they’re bad businesses, they have good margins. It’s just wonky cashflow issues. There’s a lot of seasonality that can arise.

00:05:36 Ethan: Change Healthcare happened last year. Tricare has been a nightmare. So that was that entry point. We actually in the first year, probably underwrote about 250 businesses. We would always pull bank data and accounting data. And that was that light bulb moment that led the horse that is Flychain to water.

00:05:53 Ethan: What I mean by that is 90% of the time we pulled the accounting data, it made zero sense to us. It was either non-existent in some cases, but more often than not really lagging behind or just miscategorized. Then we took a closer look. We saw everyone’s using QuickBooks. We think QuickBooks is okay for a pizza shop or a nail salon, not a multimillion dollar, multi-location healthcare entity who have insurance claims. QuickBooks isn’t inherently HIPAA compliant.

00:06:20 Ethan: We saw the product itself not living up to what the needs of a healthcare business needs. It was actually the process too. We were like, all right, you’re fitting a square peg in a round hole, but also who’s actually doing the books to get this data accurate? Cause we know it’s not accurate so where does that problem set?

00:06:35 Ethan: It was either they were doing the books internally, then it was owners, operators that are in healthcare, very much trained to deliver care and even run a business, not the financial side. So it was a lot of garbage in, garbage out. Or they use a third party bookkeeper that works often with pizza shops, nail salons. I can’t tell you how many times it’s just the brother-in-law, sister-in-law, cousin.

00:06:55 Ethan: We said, Hey, we’re going to solve the whole problem there to get the data accurate. Now that informs all of the other things that we’ve built, but that was the first principle of let’s get the data accurate, build a replacement to QuickBooks. Bring the bookkeepers. We bring them to guarantee quality control, take it off of our customers’ plate.

00:07:12 Ethan: Now we have this very, very accurate financial data set, the source of truth, your system of record. It’s now informing and powers all of the other tooling that we’ve built on the analytics, AI CFO side of the fence.

00:07:24 Ethan: It’s been a journey for sure, but I don’t feel like we’re making up problems or making up products to solve those problems. Our customers are our best product managers in a lot of ways.

00:07:34 Jenny: It’s actually funny. My grandfather, one of them, was an accountant and he used to help everyone with their taxes. I feel like everyone has this family member who is very well-meaning, but probably not right for a healthcare system to have grandpa doing the accounting.

00:07:48 Jenny: As you mentioned, there’s so many variables and you have to have a very complicated matrix to figure out where the cash is coming in. Again, you can’t miss payroll and you can’t shop for a couple of weeks. It really is critical, especially in things like health. That’s an interesting insight.

00:08:01 Jenny: Walk us through a little bit of how you see the market. You started with one demographic, it seems like you might be going a little bit broader. So tell us the big picture of where you see Flychain going.

00:08:12 Ethan: Big picture for us is if you’re a healthcare business under $50 million in annual revenue, you should be using Flychain. Started off in home health and behavioral health and not going anywhere. That is a great market. There’s a lot of tailwinds and they desperately need the help.

00:08:26 Ethan: But in now launching the platform, having that live for 18 months or so, we’ve actually been able to expand across different healthcare verticals. How we see the market going back to that little line in the sand, as I mentioned before, we have a luxury at Flychain because we’re below that line.

00:08:42 Ethan: We’re not having to deal with the intricacies that maybe an EMR or a revenue cycle management provider will have where we’re in our view and how we see the market is usually those that are focused on a specialty, especially in our universe are the ones that I think win and the ones that do really well. And we have a front row seat who’s good and who’s not. Cause we see all their data and we know if they’re good billers, et cetera.

00:09:02 Ethan: I guess the long and short of it is we’ve seen also a lot of VC money flow into that side of the fence, like AI scribes, point solutions, credentialing. Obviously AI RCM has been huge. A lot of new EMRs, business in a box type things. Because we sit below that line, going from ADA therapy to dentistry, it’s actually pretty much the same from our end.

00:09:23 Ethan: The same value proposition. We’re onboarding them, we’re integrating. That’s the piece that will be different per specialty. But we’re not having to figure out how to bill all of these different payers, each state, each code, each payer. That’s how we see the market and our horizontal expansion across all these different healthcare verticals.

00:09:41 Ethan: We’re not handcuffed by the complexities that we see our partners, which we partner very often with EMRs, RCMs, have to deal with. Staying in our lane, really just being that financial piece of the puzzle here. That’s how we see the landscape today.

00:09:54 Jenny: It’s interesting because I was a panelist yesterday. It was AI themed. And the question was really around defensibility. I was saying, this isn’t just AI specific. I think it’s any SaaS business. If you can be hyper-verticalized and then you can go really deep, really get a lot of customer loyalty, it becomes very sticky. And then that creates its own flywheel of a community.

00:10:17 Jenny: So from niche to network is how I think about it. So obviously you can say that that distribution is your mote around AI, but it’s any SaaS business really. How are you guys thinking about other players coming in? I also love to just hear about your positioning on AI as well.

00:10:34 Ethan: I’ll first start with a lot of the AI maybe point solutions that we’ve seen. I refer to like AI scribe note taking and we’ve seen a lot of growth in that. We’ve seen other EMRs partner with those entities and then kick them out after a year or whatever, and then just build their own. Done this.

00:10:51 Ethan: From a defensibility standpoint what makes our company different is fundamentally being that source of truth and system of record. So our stickiness is pretty darn high relative to a lot of other either SaaS platforms or certainly these AI solutions.

00:11:04 Ethan: So by building that system of record, we’ve really insulated ourselves. People cancel their accounting system, bring it all over to us and then become a very, very important piece of their overall puzzle.

00:11:15 Jenny: The specificity of what you’re solving again with the HIPAA compliance with the real focus just on this vertical, a generalist can’t really provide.

00:11:24 Ethan: There’s obviously a lot we could talk about here that sets us apart and makes it different, but to really just simplify it within healthcare, all of the revenue, if you want to get granular, is actually captured within those EMRs and billing systems.

00:11:37 Ethan: For us, we have to integrate and then it’s a matter of really looking at expenses granularly and mapping them to the granular revenue so profitability by employee, by CPT code, by service line. That can only be done by liberating that data from the EMR. That’s one of the big challenges that a lot of folks that are trying to do this run into.

00:11:57 Ethan: Fortunately for us, we’ve solved the data interoperability issue for ourselves. It brings it to this piece of the puzzle. And why I say all of that is you ask, where’s AI in our business? Everyone has different opinions on this. I certainly have some strong ones.

00:12:11 Ethan: But for us, the whole obsession at Flychain was getting the data accurate. That’s why we built the platform, why we bring the bookkeepers. We silo all of the specialties into their own unique data set, standardized chart of accounts.

00:12:24 Ethan: That’s the first stage when we onboard a customer. The second is what we call peeling the onion. So that’s when we’re going into those EMRs and now doing more analytics. Now we’re fundamentally a system of record and a granular system of record at that.

00:12:36 Ethan: But the last piece of our puzzle and we’ve actually launched it internally, it’ll go live in Q1 as our AI CFO. What we mean by that is the last phase to really unlock that and have that be powerful so it’s not system of record, it’s system of action, is actually then contextualizing that granular data. It’s really around benchmarking.

00:12:55 Ethan: With each customer, we get some market data, but we’re able to benchmark and show here’s your net profit. Here’s your gross profit. Here’s what your wages for your BCBAs are versus the market. Here’s your contracted rate.

00:13:07 Ethan: Now that we have this perfectly accurate granular data set that is contextualized, when we now ask our AI CFO questions around, can I hire another clinician? It’ll tell you, yes or no, and here’s why, and here’s your break even point based on the salary and the reimbursement rates, et cetera.

00:13:24 Ethan: For us, it all comes back to that perfectly accurate data set. If we had launched, just hypothetically, our AI CFO six months ago, all of the data that we were walking into out of those underwrites was pretty incorrect or outdated. And so if you think about throwing some AI CFO on that solution, it’s not going to tell you anything valuable and it’ll just tell you wrong things if it’ll tell you anything.

0:13:47 Ethan: The calculus of our build has always been getting the data accurate, contextualize in a way that we can use that to power our forthcoming AI solution. But right now we’re just signing up customers because they are on QuickBooks and it’s just not working for them.

00:14:01 Jenny: Slap some AI on that, baby.

00:14:03 Ethan: I always joke that maybe when we fundraise, we’ll lower case Flychain and then just capitalize the AI in Flychain. We were forward thinking when we started the company.

00:14:13 Jenny: Many of us think the idea of selling into any healthcare system provider, clinic, EMR sounds really hard. So what’s your sales cycle like? How hard is it? What’s been your building credibility with these folks because they don’t seem like the easiest lot to deal with?

00:14:32 Ethan: It’s a loaded question and something that we’re constantly thinking about today. Because we’re dealing with that SME universe, distribution is always going to be paramount to us. We think of go-to-market and customers almost in two flavors. You have our partner set and then the direct interactions with our customers. And that’ll always happen no matter what.

00:14:52 Ethan: In terms of finding these businesses, I think one of the biggest things is trust where coming through some validated channel really increases our close rate. In terms of that sales cycle, I’d say 50% of all of our customers close after one 30-minute phone call. The other 50% that close requires maybe two phone calls, and those would usually be with larger organizations.

00:15:13 Ethan: So the actual sales cycle itself is quite short, but when we talk about our distribution, we partner with revenue cycle management providers. We partner with franchises, MSOs, some PE shops.

00:15:25 Ethan: For us to earn our seat at the table there, it’s really understanding the specialty that they’re in and how our product solves a lot of the problems that their customers are facing and in some cases, them as a corporate entity are facing as well.

00:15:38 Ethan: So if you’re a franchise, as an example, you’ve got all these underlying franchisees that have reporting requirements. We’ve signed a few big ones that have 300 underlying franchisees and they’re all sending different Excel files to that channel partner. It’s all apples to oranges to dog food, as we say here. That’s I think how we’re earning the trust, getting some nice more exponential growth.

00:15:59 Ethan: And then the last piece is also just a lot of content marketing for these folks. I think that’s been exciting for us to get a lot of inbounds these days from small to medium sized businesses that we’re talking about the financial challenges that they’re probably experiencing. We’re getting a lot of traction on that front too.

00:16:15 Ethan: But to tie a bow on that answer is when we get on the phone with the healthcare business owner, the biggest way we earn their trust is twofold. It’s empathy. First understanding that they probably don’t have a good grasp on this side of the fence.

00:16:29 Ethan: Meeting them where they are and simplifying that and just making sure that they feel their hand is being held through something that they have generally very little expertise on, if anything.

00:16:39 Ethan: The second though is when we’re talking to different specialties, really understanding the unique nature of that specialty. So I’ll just point to ABA. When we talk to an ABA business owner, we know seasonality.

00:16:50 Ethan: We’re in holiday season, revenues get depressed. So just talking to them and really understanding them and looking them eye to eye and saying, we understand you’re approaching deductible season. We understand the unique complexities that are in ABA versus home health versus dentistry versus primary care.

00:17:07 Ethan: That’s what really sets us apart and gives that inherent level of trust. So it’s a combination of where is the deal coming from? How are we talking to them? And what are the things that we’re mentioning in that specific conversation that solves a very unique issue that we do see across healthcare pretty pervasively.

00:17:24 Jenny: You’ve mentioned some of the challenges, but maybe talk about some of the other things that have been tough for you guys getting this business off the ground the last couple of years.

00:17:33 Ethan: There’s a lot of challenges I’m sure you can appreciate with any early stage company. Distribution, we’re solving that problem. Less and less anxiety related to that.

00:17:42 Ethan: I think some of the challenges that we’ve faced historically were really more on the operational side of the fence because we want to build a very scalable solution. In that first year when we onboarded hundred businesses, in the blocking and tackling of setting up these systems, EMR integrations, bank account, payroll, corporate cards to get this data flowing… it required a lot more work and handholding than we had initially thought.

00:18:04 Ethan: So much of what we’ve spent in 2025 was automating and setting up the right processes to just make sure the data is always streaming. It’s always getting in there accurately. If a connection to a community bank in Nebraska breaks down, how do we get that set up right really quickly again?

00:18:19 Ethan: That was actually probably the biggest problem set that we ran into. It’s those scaling challenges when we’re dealing, especially with an early stage tech company. Where do we source constraints? Where do we pick our battles in terms of integrations and things?

00:18:31 Ethan: But that’s been the biggest learning experience we’ve had as well. How do we deal with these customers and also all these disparate systems and creating a really good technical process, but also almost human in the loop process to guarantee that accuracy.

00:18:45 Ethan: Feeling much better about that now and I’m excited for 2026 because in our opinion, the limit no longer exists where eight months ago we probably couldn’t have been growing as fast.

00:18:56 Jenny: As you get closer and closer to your customers and to these healthcare practices, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing that you guys are all talking about down the road? What’s coming quickly for your community?

00:19:11 Ethan: There’s a few, and I will say it’s also specialty specific. Maybe an overarching theme would be just value-based care, generally speaking.

00:19:19 Jenny: That’s a buzzword.

00:19:20 Ethan: It certainly is. We’ve got some cool partnerships on that side that are really getting us more in the weeds on just value-based care as a whole.

00:19:28 Jenny: Give us the quick couple liners on what value-based care is.

00:19:31 Ethan: So basically you’ve got fee-for-service and value-based care. Fee-for-service is you go, the doctor sees you, they submit to insurance, you get paid for that instance of care. Value-based care takes that different approach. It’s really driven. Your compensation structure is driven based on quality.

00:19:47 Ethan: The whole goal there is by working together as a network of healthcare providers, you get a budget and hey, if you are below that budget and you can all coordinate care, reduce hospital admissions, you then get a balloon payment or a larger payment because you’ve been able to show that you brought a lot of spend out of that community of care delivers.

00:20:06 Ethan: It flips the revenue structure, the financing structure on its head a little bit. From our lens, we’re laser focused on, okay, we know how to account for it, but we also do the financing and how is that going to impact cashflow in the near to medium term? These are all things that we’re constantly thinking about just because we do see that.

00:20:23 Ethan: I will say, it is a slow trend. It’s a buzzword, for sure, but value-based care has been around for quite some time. So I think it’s just a lot of new players or established players are really, really getting a lot of traction on that side. And so we’re there piggybacking alongside a lot of those more value-based care orchestrators to fit into that.

00:20:42 Ethan: The other one, and this is interesting, depending on the specialty and depending on who you talk to, would just also be the consolidation within healthcare. So there’s a lot of roll-ups happening.

00:20:50 Ethan: I’d also say depending on who you’re talking to and what you’re reading, there’s both the rollup and then also in some cases, reversion back to independence. And so regardless of where that pendulum swings, the Flychain has a seat at that table and can work either way. But that’s just another thing.

00:21:06 Ethan: I think we’ve seen a lot of that happen in dentistry, primary care, pediatrics. It does happen in home health, ABA as well. But I think there’s also a lot of narratives out there wanting to stay independent and deliver care on your own terms and part of our… seat at that table is to provide them with the institutional-grade access to data, financial accounting, capital, et cetera. So it gives them a little bit more freedom and stability.

00:21:29 Ethan: I’m by no means a value-based care expert yet, but it’s been really cool to learn here at Flychain. Working with some of the larger players in the value-based care universe that are candidly educating us and figuring out what our roadmap will be to then solve some of those unique challenges in that specific type of construct.

00:21:47 Jenny: I think anyone who’s been to a doctor in the United States, and obviously some places are better than others, but you go and then you get some test results or whatnot and what’s next? It feels so isolated in a moment in time and just not coordinated. Even if they are part of some huge hospital system, they’re basically like, oh, yeah. Go see the other guy.

00:22:05 Jenny: But no one’s following the chain and being the follow-up. And that’s what I feel like we’re so missing in many of our systems. What is the actual end result we’re trying to solve and can we have a coordinated team on it? So one day.

00:22:19 Ethan: One day. There’s always the other side of value-based care where you pull out the budget and then you owe money. That gets scary for us, especially from a lending standpoint, as you can imagine.

00:22:27 Jenny: So what’s one idea that experts in your field, healthcare people, VCs, other founders say that you disagree with?

00:22:34 Ethan: What would have gotten a lot more pushback two years ago when we started, but the objections have maybe slowed down a little bit, but it’s really one thing that we’ve heard a million times. And I would say candidly, a lot of this does come from the VC universe.

00:22:46 Ethan: But why wouldn’t a revenue cycle management provider or an EMR build Flychain? Going back to that narrative around expansion, if you’re a revenue cycle management provider, you make a fair amount of money to grow your business, go to another specialty or go up market. And there’s just so much complexity on that side of the fence.

00:23:04 Ethan: I don’t think those entities have the financial wherewithal to do this. It’s just a fundamentally different company as far as we see it. We partner with all of those entities and there’s no real interest across all of those partners to go on this side of the fence.

00:23:19 Ethan: That’s one thing that we had heard so much, this notion of a business in a box. But at the end of the day, that business in a box does entail a whole different accounting company, a payroll company, EMRs, RCM.

00:23:30 Ethan: There’s a lot of competition on that side of the fence too. So stay in your lane is what we’re seeing those folks do. So that’s probably the biggest one that I would push back on where you don’t want your EMR doing your taxes.

00:23:41 Jenny: No. You don’t want my grandpa. You don’t want your EMR. We haven’t talked about your fabulous co-founder Jaime. So how did you guys meet? Tell us a little bit more about him.

00:23:52 Ethan: We met a while back through this guy, Bill King. He was an investor and advisor at Orchard. I got to know him pretty well over the course of that time and then just stayed in touch.

00:24:03 Ethan: When the pandemic hit, I was bored and living at home and working with Bill King on some cursory ideas of Flychain. That’s when he said, hey, you should meet Jaime. Jaime actually had a class at Stanford with Bill King. Bill moved there, did some distinguished career fellowship, and actually shared a class with Jaime. So they got to know each other shortly after I met Bill at Orchard.

00:24:26 Ethan: So then Bill and I were talking about building some version of Flychain. He said, hey, you should talk to Jaime. He’s moving back to the United States. And then he and I just got on a Zoom when he was in London. And then we said, all right, we’re going to build this company.

00:24:37 Ethan: And we both came back to New York City and kicked this whole journey off. It was really through one individual that connected us that had a lot of years of working with both of us independently and said, Hey, you guys will make a nice match.

00:24:49 Jenny: And you guys have.

00:24:50 Ethan: I like to say he’s fundamentally my better half here.

00:24:53 Jenny: Any secrets to co-founder synergies? That’s always the question that comes up is how do you meet a co-founder?

00:24:59 Ethan: I don’t think there’s ever a silver bullet answer to that necessarily, but the biggest takeaway is being wedded to the journey, not the destination. We both started saying, we’re going to build this whole company. We’re starting off with this little thing and we realized we’re probably going to wade in the dark a little bit for a couple months.

00:25:17 Ethan: When you start off the relationship with that fundamental understanding that we don’t know exactly what we’re going to build, it sets a really nice tone and you’re on the same page from day one. As the relationship grows, there’s division of labor. Who’s got your specific things that you’re really good at. You start delegating as we grow.

00:25:33 Ethan: But a lot of it, honestly, it’s also just a personality. You can see I’m like smiling, talking about Jaime. He’s one of my best friends now and we have a lot of fun too. I would put having fun really high on the list because it can be pretty daunting, annoying. You’re just running through wall after wall and having someone that has also a similar sense of humor as you actually goes a long way when you’re up at 1 a.m. trying to figure something out.

00:25:54 Jenny: But very different skill sets, which I think are complimentary. But as you said, same shared sense of the journey and the mission, which is great.

00:26:02 Ethan: We initially bonded over the mission and Jaime’s background and what he was doing. You should get him on one of these and he can tell you his background, but he was combating some predatory lending that was taking place abroad on the consumer side.

00:26:15 Ethan: I had seen it so prevalently happening in the small to medium sized business universe in the form of those merchant cash advance loan sharks. That’s where we initially bonded. We both don’t like the fact that people are taking advantage of. Let’s start with that first.

00:26:29 Jenny: What’s the one thing that’s keeping you up at night? What are you worried about?

00:26:32 Ethan: I feel like that question is more always what are the negative things that keep you up at night. Those things don’t actually keep me up. I stay up at night because I’ve had too much caffeine.

00:26:42 Ethan: Also, because honestly, we’re just so excited. What I mean by that is I don’t sleep at night because, oh, we can go to all of these health care specialties. There are all these amazing partners that we haven’t even tapped into yet. So that’s actually why I stay up at night.

00:26:55 Jenny: So next time I see him, I’m going to bring you a big bottle of magnesium, because that’s gonna help you sleep.

00:27:00 Jenny: All right. Speed round. So these are just very quick answers to a couple of fun questions. Is there a book, podcast, or some media that you are engaging in right now that you’re enjoying?

00:27:10 Ethan: Oh, I love our podcast, The Flychain Reaction.

00:27:13 Jenny: All right, little plug for the podcast. Tell us about it.

00:27:16 Ethan: I’m kidding. I don’t listen to myself. That’d be weird. But, again, a plug there. Everyone should listen to that. Honestly, a lot of the stuff that I consume is often not related to work. It’s my time away. I will say I’m a huge movie nerd. So I listen to a lot of movie podcasts and watch a lot of movies. So it’s my little escape.

00:27:34 Jenny: I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:27:38 Ethan: This is going to sound weird, but I’d like to maybe move in with one of our customers in Ohio or something.

00:27:44 Jenny: You’re supposed to say Paris or Japan or Rio. That’ll be the first time we have heard that answer.

00:27:51 Ethan: Go to like Reno or something and just hang out with customers. We’ve done a lot of boots on the ground learning. To us, the best way to learn is be side-by-side with your customers. I’m not looking to go anywhere abroad because our market is in the United States.

00:28:06 Jenny: All right. You’re a nerd, but I love it.

00:28:07 Ethan: Actually, we’re about to have a customer in Key West and we have one in Hawaii. So maybe I can pick one of those.

00:28:13 Jenny: I think bunking in with your customer in Hawaii.

00:28:16 Ethan: We have a customer in Hawaii, so I’ll change my answer to Hawaii.

00:28:20 Jenny: Actually, one of our other startups has a customer in Hawaii. We all went for an offsite there last year.

00:28:25 Ethan: There you go.

00:28:26 Jenny: It’s pretty great. Favorite productivity hack?

00:28:29 Ethan: I don’t even know if you want to call it a hack because I feel hack these days are using some AI. But I literally have a one minute stopwatch thing. For me, you’re jumping around calls all day, every day, but every now and then you find yourself with a few minutes of free time and that’s when I’ll hit the timer.

00:28:44 Ethan: If I can get something done in one minute, just go ahead and do it. So to me, it’s almost just an ability to just focus very, very specifically for one minute and you almost carve out that little piece of time to get something done.

00:28:55 Ethan: So I just always have a little one minute stopwatch thing on my desk going to make sure that I can get it done. It’s almost like a little bit of a game and a race. It’s just something I do. Granted, it’s very more personal than some tool that I actually used. It’s a very analog productivity hack.

00:29:09 Jenny: Love that about you, Ethan. And finally, where can listeners find you? Obviously your podcast. What’s the podcast called?

00:29:15 Ethan: It’s called The Flychain Reaction.

00:29:17 Jenny: Love it. And otherwise what? LinkedIn?

00:29:22 Ethan: Absolutely LinkedIn. We’re active on that. I’d also say starting to do some social media. It’s a great way to interact with our customers. But then our website, shoot me an email. We’d always love to chat with anybody, whether that’s an end customer, a partner, what have you, but we’re pretty available and all of our information’s everywhere.

00:29:39 Jenny: On that note, thank you so much, Ethan. This was really fun. I got to know a little bit more about you and your productivity hacks and other tidbits. But I’m actually excited to check out the podcast. The same people that are promoting our podcast or building our podcast, Podmachine, are doing yours, so that’s really fun. Otherwise, best of luck and can’t wait to catch up.

00:29:59 Ethan: Thanks so much for having me, Jenny.

00:30:02 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 Ethan Schwarzbach in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 102 of Venture Everywhere, the host is Lauren Makler, CEO and co-founder of Cofertility, where women freeze their eggs for free when donating half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents who need the help of an egg donor to have a baby. She chats with Lauren Berson Sugarman, CEO and co-founder of Conceive, an AI-powered full stack support platform for women navigating fertility and pregnancy. She shares how her experience investing in digital health and building community-based wellness models led her to found Conceive after her own three-year infertility journey. She discusses how Conceive transforms fertility care by delivering the continuous emotional and informational support that time-strapped providers cannot offer, helping patients feel empowered and less alone during one of life’s most challenging journeys.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In this episode, you will hear:

• Combining AI and human coaching for personalized fertility support.

• Using a B2B2C clinic partnership model for seamless patient care.

• Measuring impact through anxiety reduction and babies born.

• Creating community-based support for the emotional fertility journey.

• Addressing the three-leg stool of fertility: physical, financial, and emotional support.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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. I hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:33 Lauren M: Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Lauren Makler, CEO and co-founder of Cofertility. I’m here with my friend and fellow founder CEO, Lauren Berson-Sugarman from Conceive. Welcome, Lauren.

00:00:47 Lauren B: Hi, Lauren. I’m so excited about this.

00:00:51 Lauren M: So Lauren and I are dear friends and we did not meet until we had started our companies, both in the fertility space, both start with the letter C-O and we have the same name.

00:01:03 Lauren B: We are the Laurens.

00:01:05 Lauren M: We are the Laurens. We have very long conversations from time to time where one or both of us will go on a walk and just do what we call spilling the fertili-tea.

00:01:17 Lauren B: It’s my favorite pastime, I’ll be honest.

00:01:19 Lauren M: And so I feel like we are just inviting everyone into one of those conversations.

00:01:25 Lauren B: Yes, which is so nice and fun. What a treat for us.

00:01:28 Lauren M: I know. I think before we get into the fertili-tea, let’s quickly just tell everybody what each of our companies does so they have the context on who we are and how we’re coming into this conversation.

00:01:42 Lauren M: At Cofertility, we help women freeze their eggs for free when they donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby. And so we’re both making egg freezing more accessible while making egg donation less transactional at the same time.

00:01:58 Lauren M: Conceive plays a really nice role alongside that. And so I’ll let you explain what you do and then we’ll get into it.

00:02:06 Lauren B: Amazing. I am a happy investor in Cofertility, which makes me very happy. I just am obsessed with your model and what you’re really bringing to bear along the lines of access, which is such an important piece.

00:02:18 Lauren B: At Conceive, we’re focused both on access to care and care itself. So really redefining how women get care for fertility and pregnancy. We combine really vertical AI and patient care along those spaces and we offer a full stack fertility platform.

00:02:34 Lauren B: Really what that comes down to is everything from preconception testing, so allowing you to get blood work and diagnostics to determine whether you have things you should look into along the fertility journey, all the way through 24/7 texting with nurses and coaches.

00:02:50 Lauren B: We act as an extension of the care team of your clinic or a direct message friend for you, pairing both the beauty of coaches who’ve been in the shoes of the patient and can handle questions around the emotional part of the journey, how you talk to your mother-in-law and set a boundary when she’s asking when she’s going to have grandkids.

00:03:08 Lauren B: All the way through, help me with my IVF injections tonight. I am overwhelmed and I don’t know how to do this. And layered on top, we offer community groups. We think of ourselves as this end-to-end support system for you.

00:03:20 Lauren M: Literally for me. I should mention too that I’m a proud graduate of Conceive in the sense that I brought home my beautiful conceived baby in July. As someone who, I work in this space, I consider myself someone who’s incredibly well-versed in the world of IVF and in family building through assisted reproductive technology, I still needed and truly benefited from the support of Conceive.

00:03:52 Lauren M: When you share all the things that you guys do, it’s so clear to me, both your solving and how you’re solving it. A lot of people are great at identifying a problem, but the solution here totally works even for the people who are the most well equipped to overcome this major barrier.

00:04:11 Lauren B: That’s right. Some of our most engaged members are the most resourced and connected people out there. But the reality is care doesn’t stop in between and after appointment. There’s so much of this journey that requires research and understanding. The unknown unknowns. If you have more preparation and you don’t discover that by chance, you have a better shot at success.

00:04:34 Lauren M: What helped you fall in love with this problem as an entrepreneur?

00:04:38 Lauren B: I am beyond obsessed with this problem. I consider this my life’s work, so I feel really lucky to do that. So the passion is exactly right. I know we’re so lucky. It gives so much meaning and purpose beyond just the day to day.

00:04:51 Lauren B: But really, I came about it from my own personal journey like many, but I had had this sort of unique front row seat to digital health for a while. So it all collided. I spent a lot of time mostly in tech, building communities and products and my superpowers really connecting people to make really big impact on businesses.

00:05:08 Lauren B: I did this at startups, Google, and then had this opportunity to go over to Andreessen Horowitz over a decade ago when we spun up our first biotech and healthcare fund and started investing in digital health companies. Everything from meeting founders who were trying to cure cancer all the way through to founders who were just trying to scale the first telemedicine business.

00:05:29 B: I just had this very unique front row seat into how they were thinking about the problems they were solving and how they were actually solving them. I became fascinated at the time you had in consumer health or wellness or whatever we called it then, biohacking.

00:05:42 Lauren B: You had sleep apps and meditation apps and fitness apps and all these things were so bifurcated and fragmented. I became obsessed with like, what is the platform bringing these things together? Because you have to treat the whole human. How you eat affects how you sleep, affects how you move.

00:05:58 Lauren B: I had this opportunity to go over to Weight Watchers for a couple of years and build out their platform beyond weight loss. If you think about Weight Watchers, they really pioneered community-based and coaching-based models.

00:06:11 Lauren B: Coaching is now newly in other areas of healthcare, but they’ve been doing this for years. And then people who had success on the program became coaches, which is very much the Conceive model. That’s what I stole from my time there.

00:06:22 Lauren B: But there I built out sleep, fitness and meditation programs. I was looking at how do we expand the offering beyond just weight loss. By the way, this is before GLP-1, so if we can think back that far.

00:06:34 Lauren B: I dipped my toe and really got my hands dirty in both. How do you breed digital health products that succeed, but also how do you create safe spaces online? Because that was the thing that drew me to the company.

00:06:44 Lauren B: I was very familiar with Reddit and Twitter and other online communities where there’s a lot of negativity and trolls. I was not aware that there were these beautiful safe spaces that really didn’t even need to be monitored because people were so clear why they were there and they were there to support each other and to get support.

00:07:01 Lauren B: As I was doing that, my two things collided. I went through infertility for a very long time. It took over my life. The first time for three years and then has continued since then.

00:07:13 Lauren B: My daughter just made an appearance before we started recording this podcast. So this story ends well. She is six and she is the light of my life. She is like an angel and was worth the wait.

00:07:24 Lauren B: But all of those challenges I encountered along the way, I became obsessed with solving and initially started at this patient focus journey. How do you combat the loneliness and isolation that everyone feels the moment they enter into this shitty experience? The reality is so many people around me were going through it and they just were suffering in silence.

00:07:43 Lauren B: And then secondly, how can technology really allow for you to get the answers you need to your questions? It just felt like such a solvable problem, but I wasn’t finding one, seven, eight years ago when I was Googling.

00:07:55 Lauren B: And so started there, but realized very quickly by helping patients get the right information at their fingertips when they need it and connecting them with people who’ve been through it. We also significantly help fertility clinics and these clinic networks who are looking for efficiencies, looking for better ways to educate patients, looking for ways to better retain their patients.

00:08:18 Lauren B: We have this win-win model where by helping clinics and patients. We all win.

00:08:24 Lauren M: I remember the first time we talked about Conceive and you talked about Weight Watchers. And you talked about how this model, it has worked in other areas where people are trying to overcome something that involves their health that can feel really lonely and isolating. That tech enablement has really moved the ball forward in so many ways – And so clearly understood what you’re trying to do instantly.

00:08:50 Lauren M: It doesn’t hurt that Weight Watchers, for me, has always been a company crush. I don’t know about you, but I have company crushes. I think it’s important to know who has been through some version of what you’re trying to do ahead of you and set some North Stars in that way. So really love that.

00:09:09 Lauren M: But also I think your openness to thinking through, yes, you fall in love with this problem. That’s what every entrepreneur needs to do at the start. But realizing that the clinics as a channel to reach your member is something that is really smart and might not have been your first approach, is that the case?

00:09:32 Lauren B: It is the case. I always knew that we would somehow be an enterprise, B2B2C company. I didn’t quite know who that would be. I did know though, it wouldn’t be employers. I’ve said this a million times, but I think that’s a garbage channel for many reasons.

00:09:47 Lauren B: One of which is the engagement is just so low. And so your product gets so watered down. You’re hoping that an employer tells an employee about it at the moment that they need it and that they feel comfortable taking advantage of it within the context of their employment.

00:10:00 Lauren B: For me, I’ve seen that at Weight Watchers, my husband’s company sells to employers. I knew that wasn’t going to be an area I was focusing on. So I thought it was either going to be clinic or payer.

00:10:10 Lauren B: What we saw very quickly was that the more we got to know the clinicians. That was something I set out to do early on, and you probably did this as well Lauren, I was obsessed with why this problem hadn’t been solved yet.

00:10:21 Lauren B: You look around and there were tons of community oriented businesses that had been out there that had either failed or were struggling. I was trying to understand like, well, why? Because it feels like such an important problem.

00:10:34 Lauren B: I know I’m not alone in it. Why don’t these things take off? Part of it is that direct to consumer community orientation is great and it feels good, but there are Facebook groups and there are Reddit forums and there are kind of free spaces to get information.

00:10:48 Lauren B: And so what I realized was not only could we deliver information, but we could deliver the information that your clinic already delivered to you, but you were so overwhelmed in that appointment that it didn’t land.

00:10:59 Lauren B: We’ve all been there. For many people, this is the first time they were really involved in our healthcare system. Not that they should be an expert in fertility, but they don’t understand how things are navigated and how to get through.

00:11:11 Lauren B: You go to these appointments, half the time you expect to see your doctor, you may not, depending on what kind of clinic you’re at. There’s just so much that’s confusing and not contextual until the moment it is. And so to have someone holding your hand through it and saying, Lauren, your doctor is to do an HSG next. Here’s what that means. Here’s how to prepare. Here are some questions you might want to ask them before the next appointment.

00:11:32 Lauren B: It just helps relax the nervous system, but also helps move you through the journey quicker and get you closer to your goal of that delicious baby.

00:11:41 Lauren M: So much of what you guys are able to provide is license to advocate, not just license, but the how to advocate for yourself.

00:11:52 Lauren M: We try. For me, what I realized going through my own journey to become a parent is that for this whole thing to work, it’s a three-leg stool.

00:12:02 Lauren M: One is physical, you have to be able to like endure all of the tests and all of the treatments and everything physically. You have to be able to financially endure it. You have to be able to like, have coverage or have the means yourself to get through this full process. And then third is emotionally and mentally. Do you have the ability to get through the emotional roller coaster and the waiting that comes with fertility treatments?

00:12:33 Lauren B: The hurry up and wait. Because sometimes you’re racing, we just had a member the other day who was just so upset that she couldn’t get another cycle in before the end of the year. It just didn’t work out that way. Devastating.

00:12:45 Lauren M: The companies that are going to be the most successful in this space are the ones who are able to nail one or two of those legs on a stool. For me, in working with Conceive, I needed help on understanding the medical, physical part of what is possible with my body in this time period. How do I do it?

00:13:09 Lauren M: You guys made sense of that. And then the emotional part of just feeling like, I just got out of my appointment. If I call my husband right now, he’s not gonna have any idea what I’m talking about. And so I wanna call my coach at Conceive, who’s going to like, be excited to hear from me and understand what was just told.

00:13:24 Lauren B: We had a member the other day as well who was ready to get about an altercation with her husband. I mentioned it to my husband. I didn’t say any details, but he was like, “People tell you that stuff?” And I was like, “Yea, they do because it’s hard. It’s part of it.”

00:13:38 Lauren B: My husband is an incredible, supportive feminist. All the things that I still remember. He’s the best, but like, as is Jake, I still remember after our miscarriage, he was like, we’ll get him next time. And I was like, that is not what I needed to hear right now. Not in the least.

00:13:54 Lauren M: I love the stool analogy in this space. I think about it a lot. Those of us that are thinking about how does the thing that we’re working on just keep that stool as stable as possible for as many people as possible. That’s how you win in this space.

00:14:11 Lauren B: 100%. It is the thing that the clinicians themselves just cannot provide. Even the best, most thoughtful clinicians, and there are incredible ones. We just did the Hope and Heart Awards, which was this beautiful testament to shout out to your doctor or your nurse or your partner or your friend who’s been there with you through these challenging moments.

00:14:32 Lauren B: But they just don’t have enough time. The reality is there’s not enough supply. There’s way more demand and they can’t spend an hour on the phone talking through next steps the way that other models can and that’s why they fit nicely into each other.

00:14:47 Lauren M: It’s interesting. I do feel like I’m doing my life’s work and I think that we’re really lucky to feel that way. Just knowing how many entrepreneurs are listening to this conversation, I think a lot about the concept of ikigai. Is this something that you’re familiar with?

00:15:04 Lauren M: So ikigai is a Japanese concept that is really the reason for being. And so it’s an overlapping… is at concentric circles. I feel like you have found your ikigai. You are doing something that you love. It’s something that you’re good at. The world needs it. And hopefully it pans out and it’s something that you are paid for.

00:15:27 Lauren M: I think you are being paid for it now, but hopefully it’s something that on a large scale really is ultimately successful. And those of us that are building for-profit companies have to think about, especially with investors. But if you can nail the company you start being your ikigai, there’s nothing better than that.

00:15:46 Lauren B: Right. We talk about this and the hard moments, obviously there’s so many and they feel terrible, but they don’t feel as terrible. You just pick back up and you keep going because you’re like, I know I can get there. I think it’s a different feeling.

00:15:58 Lauren B: I imagine Lauren, you’ve seen this pan out as well. You see this in teams. We’ve been around long enough work since ‘21, ‘22 to see that first wave where it was impossible to hire. It was so competitive.

00:16:11 Lauren B: The hiring market, the job market has gone in crazy waves since we both started our companies. For us, I feel like we’re so lucky because it’s just so binary. People are either obsessed with this like we are, or they’re not.

00:16:22 Lauren B: And so it’s very different than like… no offense to SaaS problems and their SaaS companies and companies building very sexy things with AI where maybe there’s a really passion about making billions of dollars. But this is just very different. This speaks to people in a way that is insane. I mean, we have thousands of nurses who’ve applied to work for us. We have thousands of coaches who’ve applied to work for us.

00:16:44 Lauren M: One of your KPIs is literally babies born. So beyond babies born, what does success look like?

00:16:50 Lauren B: I think that the most beautiful thing you can do is bring a baby into the world. I remember back to when I started the company, there were so many parallels with Weight Watchers. I would think to investors and they would be like, but you can’t get someone pregnant. You can’t always do it. So it’s like, what does success look like?

00:17:04 Lauren B: We care a lot about a couple of things. One is babies born. We have over 160 babies, I believe so far, which is just so meaningful to me. We also measure things on the emotional side.

00:17:16 Lauren B: Part of our thesis is that when you feel more supported, when your nervous system is more calm, you can both be more productive and get more done, but you also ideally have better outcomes. This is not about stress leading to stress and things like that. That’s not what I mean by this.

00:17:33 Lauren B: But I think if you have a better support system, you can do better. It’s just common sense. And so we measure things like anxiety reduction, improvements in levels of gratitude, improvements in feelings of support. We map to the PHQ-9 on these metrics of mental health.

00:17:47 Lauren B: So when a member comes in and signs up, we check in on how anxious are they feeling, and then we check in at the end. That means a lot to us. We have marked differences there. I believe off the top of my head, 42% reduction in anxiety rates and a lot more.

00:18:01 Lauren B: The other things that we care a lot about are how are patients moving towards their goal? We ladder up to the KPIs that the clinics care about. That’s patient retention, time spent with clinicians.

00:18:14 Lauren B: We’re able to markedly reduce time spent per patient per month by upwards of three hours. We’re able to move patients through treatment faster because they have better information at their fingertips and they feel better prepared. So that’s about a 40% improvement.

00:18:28 Lauren B: So some of these things, sort of like inefficiencies at the clinic level, an industry that’s been ignored by technology forever, other than technology in the lab. We are able to do. We’re able to move them through. So those are some of the things we’re really proud of.

00:18:42 Lauren M: Before I started Cofertility, I started Uber Health at Uber, which is now emergency medical transportation for patients. We realized that if you’re trying to get someone who’s low income or elderly to take an Uber ride to the doctor, that having the doctor pay for it is actually a good idea or the health system or the hospital because they are trying to solve for their inefficiencies.

00:19:04 Lauren M: If someone misses a pre-op appointment, they can’t have the operation, which is a problem for the health system. If you try to figure out what moves the needle for the clinic, like what do they care about? How are their dollars spent and where are they trying to create efficiencies? If you solve their problems, they’ll welcome you all day long.

00:19:25 Lauren B: That’s right. And so they cover the cost to conceive for their patients, everyone wins. What do you guys measure at Cofertility? How do you measure success?

00:19:33 Lauren M: Wow. So our model is inherently a marketplace. On one side, we have intended parents who need the help of an egg donor to have a baby. They come to us looking for a match. And then on the other side, we have women who are interested in egg freezing, who are also donating eggs to those intended parents.

00:19:49 Lauren M: We care a lot about time to match on both sides of the platform. It’s important to us if an intended parent comes to us and says, I’m looking for a donor who reflects my heritage or my background, that we have that supply. And we want to make sure that we are meeting the intended parent demand. That’s really important to us, time to match.

00:20:08 Lauren M: I always think about at Uber, we were obsessed with ETAs. It’s the same thing. It’s like how quickly can we match supply and demand? We talk a lot about the time to cycle. We know that an intended parent who needs the help of an egg donor wanted a baby yesterday. They wanted a baby years ago.

00:20:26 Lauren M: For a donor to like get held up in clinical review of her medical record or for the genetic carrier screening to take a long time sucks for everybody involved. We have taken a process on one side that was over four months from start to finish is now 2.1 months from start to finish, from signature to cycle.

00:20:47 Lauren M: That makes a really big difference when these intended parents are devastated that they can’t do another cycle before the end of the year. It’s the last week of December.

00:20:54 Lauren M: Literally every day counts. And so we do our best to care deeply about what our members on both sides care about. We try to find out early, what are you indexing for? Are you indexing for speed? Are you indexing for cost? Are you indexing for the most perfect match out there on the planet? Or like, tell us the things you care about so that we can help solve that.

00:21:14 Lauren M: But I’d be lying if I said I don’t care about babies born. That to me is just the coolest. I love it. Like our Slack channel, we have a hype room Slack channel, It is the best. I think having a channel that is just a constant steady drip of your team’s wins when you are having a low-low as an entrepreneur or just a moment that feels harder, to just scroll through the hype room and have it be ultrasound photos and baby photos and announcement, It’s the best.

00:21:45 Lauren B: It’s actual magic. I remember you said to me too, how you describe to Eden, your daughter, your firstborn, what you do all day, which was so helpful actually, because we both work a lot and we love our children and we spend as much time as we can with them. But I helped make babies.

00:22:02 Lauren B: And so I adopted that for my daughter, Elle, and they also think it’s the coolest thing ever. That’s exactly it though. There’s just so much magic. I often wonder what it would feel like if our members saw the 45 people cheering every time we get a positive data.

00:22:17 Lauren M: Yeah, we’re the little elves in the background that just deeply, deeply, deeply want you to have a baby. It is wild. I mean, as someone running a company, there are days that have high highs and low lows all within an hour.

00:22:33 Lauren M: Okay. I’m curious from your perspective, why in this particular moment is what you’re building the exact thing the world needs? The first time I met you was in super early ‘22 or late ‘21. What has changed from then to now, whether it’s on the fertility side, healthcare generally, or just in the world that makes this the moment?

00:22:58 Lauren B: What’s interesting is I have very firm beliefs on consumer behavior and what people want and need and I’m always willing to change that. What we’ve seen in the last two years with AI alone to me is wild. Just the way that people are using technology to get answers to questions or to do anything, literally to do anything.

00:23:19 Lauren B: I don’t know about you, but all day long I’m doing something with ChatGPT or Gemini and it helps me be a better leader, be a faster decision maker, all the things.

00:23:27 Lauren B: I think that what’s so amazing is there’s so much information out there and there always was. There was always Google and you could go on Facebook groups and things like that. I think now there is this notion of personalization. What’s really cool is we are building the best possible answer to your question because we not only have millions and millions of chat data but we also have access to what’s called standard operating procedures at the clinic level.

00:23:52 Lauren B: And so what that means is, and this is something that is talked a lot about infertility if you’re a patient, of the varying ways that doctors will treat you, because there’s not a very clear cut plan necessarily compared with other areas of healthcare.

00:24:07 Lauren B: So if you do IVF and I do IVF, it’s not gonna be the same at all. We may have different protocol, different what they call timing opportunities. All different kinds of medications. We may be doing different numbers of cycles. And there are all of these add-ons. There’s all of these other things you can do along the way in fertility to help get you closer to your goal.

00:24:28 Lauren B: We have all the information from the clinics that we partner with about how they approach that care. What that means is you really can get in an answer in under five minutes, the answer that your doctor would give you which is, I think, the coolest thing ever.

00:24:42 Lauren B: Because in this day and age of getting answers to anything, like, help me figure out this email, help me parent my child, help me cook dinner tonight, whatever it is, to be able to get that kind of an insight is where we should be, but it’s not necessarily where technology is.

00:24:57 Lauren B: I believe that you need the best of technology and humans, and when you bring those two things together, everyone wins. And so I think now is the time for a solution like this, partly because of AI but also partly because this space has also been a bit more destigmatized and conversation around it is at the forefront, both politically with Trump’s IVF bill where we’re having a national stage in a White House press conference talk about IVF is unprecedented.

00:25:25 Lauren M: Not to interrupt you, but I think that is one of the coolest tail ends in this moment in that birth rate or the decline in birth rate is something that everybody is worried about. It is both sides of the aisle. We cannot argue that we have a declining population and we need to focus not just on incentivizing people who already have a lot of children to have more children, but instead work on increasing access for people who desperately want children.

00:25:58 Lauren B: That’s exactly what it is. It’s the technology and then it’s the political environment is really bringing us in in a way that’s completely unprecedented and is so necessary. Because I talked a little bit about access to care. I didn’t really talk about how we do it.

00:26:11 Lauren B: I’ll say this briefly, but one of the things that strikes me as wild about fertility is that high school sex ed teaches us just to like abstain or makes you think you can blink and get pregnant. Of course it’s a lot more challenging. It’s a 20% chance in your twenties every month and then continues to decline as you age. I don’t say that to be scary. I say that so that people get educated.

00:26:31 Lauren B: But the problem is we weren’t educated about this, or at least I wasn’t. And it wasn’t until my mid thirties that I found this out. I was told, try for a year and then come back, which to me is insanity, my partner could have no sperm in his semen. I could have blocked fallopian tubes. There could be all of these issues.

00:26:47 Lauren B: What we’re enabling on the access side, it’s just early testing. It sounds like such an obvious thing, but the reality is I think you should be able to get this once a year if you want. In this day and age where you can get Function Health, 100 blood biomarkers drawn in a moment. Why do you have to wait a year to find out if you could even get pregnant by trying?

00:27:06 Lauren B: And now is the time because of all of these massive underlying investments and areas of focus. It’s exciting for both of us.

00:27:14 Lauren M: Cool. Okay. Let’s move to the speed round here. So number one, what’s a book, newsletter or podcast you’re currently enjoying?

00:27:23 Lauren B: I’m going to go to what most founders don’t talk about, which is fiction novels. I just read a book, one of which was called The Safe Keep, which is set in the 1950s, 1960s. I’ll just say the twists and turns this book took were so unprecedented, just so shocking, still freaking good. I cannot recommend it more. It was a highlight.

00:27:50 Lauren M: If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:27:53 Lauren B: Oh, this is so hard. There’s so many places. I’ll give an easy answer, which is, I just got back from Costa Rica three days ago and it was just a magical place. I am not a very comfortable in the water human. And yet I did three surfing lessons. The weather was perfect every day. The food was delicious. People there were just beautiful. I met monkeys and Halloween crabs, and I’m obsessed with hermit crabs. I adored it in every which way. It’s just an absolutely beautiful country.

00:28:26 Lauren M: The next one is your favorite productivity hack.

00:28:31 Lauren B: This is an easy one too. I wish I had some magic, oh, here’s what you do. But really it’s blocking my calendar. That’s literally it. One thing that we do at Conceive is we try to the best of our ability. I know as we get bigger this will no longer be feasible, but we do try not to have team meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays.

00:28:53 Lauren B: What that means is you get blocks of work time. Now, of course, other things seep in, external meetings, things like that. It’s not realistic for that to be completely blocked. But I cannot do my best thinking on the product side, on the writing side, and I do quite a bit of writing, unless I have those open moments. And so just blocking the calendar really works.

00:29:15 Lauren M: I really like that. Sounds simple, but believe it or not, we are not all doing that. Where can listeners find you?

00:29:23 Lauren B: You can find me mostly on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter, Gamma, Instagram, although I’ve been on a little bit of a hiatus the last week, which has been nice. And then weconceive.com, most importantly. What about you, Lauren? Where can we find you?

00:29:36 Lauren M: You can find me @laurenmakler, M-A-K-L-E-R on Instagram and on LinkedIn and @cofertility as well or cofertility.com. But this was fun and perhaps this has to become a regular thing for us.

00:29:54 Lauren B: I think it must.

00:29:56 Lauren M: The Fertili-tea with Lauren and Lauren.

00:29:58 Lauren B: The Fertili-tea.

00:30:00 Lauren M: Lauren, thanks for joining us.

00:30:02 Lauren B: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Lauren.

00:30:05 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 Lauren Berson Sugarman in Founders Everywhere.

Read more from Lauren Makler in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 101 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Ryan Lupberger, founder and CEO of Cleancult, a sustainable cleaning products company revolutionizing the household cleaning category with innovative paper-based packaging that eliminates plastic waste. Ryan shares his unconventional journey from working on organic farms to discovering the largely unregulated world of cleaning product ingredients. He discusses the realities of building a sustainable CPG brand that can compete with industry giants without compromising on price or performance.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Building custom manufacturing infrastructure for liquid soap in paper cartons from scratch.

• Scaling from D2C to nationwide distribution across major retailers.

• Achieving price parity with legacy brands through volume, partnerships, and operational discipline.

• Expanding the product portfolio with innovative plastic-free formats across cleaning categories.

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 Jenny: Welcome, everyone. Today, we are very excited to have Ryan Lupberger, the founder of Cleancult. I have had the pleasure of knowing you now, Ryan, since 2018. You were actually one of the first investments that we made out of our fund, which is very meaningful for us.

00:00:51 Jenny: You’ve just had such an epic ride, lots of twists and turns along the way. But would love to kick off hearing more about why sustainable cleaning and maybe a little bit about your entrepreneurial background, because you’ve really been an entrepreneur.

00:01:05 Ryan: 8 years. It’s crazy to say that at this point. Originally I never knew I would fall in love with this. I took quite a bit of time off before university and traveled around. I worked on sheep farms and I woofed for quite a while, which is willing workers on organic farms.

00:01:21 Jenny: I did not know that you were a farming nomad. Interesting.

00:01:25 Ryan: I was a bit of a hippie for a few years. Then I worked for a company called the Unreasonable Institute when I was younger. And it’s basically Y Combinator, but for businesses that want to change the world. So it’s all impact focus and just fell in love with what business could do for big problems.

00:01:44 Ryan: So there was a big mango seed recycler that could deliver 30% cheaper chicken feed in Africa. Really successful. They basically merged profit and impact. So, went out to Babson. This was 2012, I think 2010 at that point. When I was there, I looked at the back of my bottle of laundry detergent and didn’t see any ingredients listed.

00:02:02 Ryan: And still a Boulder kid at that time. It’s like, why aren’t there any ingredients on the back of my cleaning products? I was super crunchy back then, less so now. And basically said, why? It put me into this whole journey of ingredients, ingredient regulation, carcinogens, toxicity.

00:02:18 Ryan: The industry is crazy. Right now the US cleaning industry is effectively unregulated or under-regulated. It’s not in the FDA, it’s not in the EPA, it’s not under anything because technically we’re not consuming it.

00:02:32 Ryan: That led to this whole journey. We looked at all the natural products, Meyer’s, Method, Seventh Generation, Babyganics, and they’re all covered with massive plastic packaging. For me, it was like, why hasn’t anyone figured out how to do better ingredients without the plastic packaging at scale? That’s how the idea was born early on.

00:02:48 Jenny: That’s awesome. So you’re out there and you’re like, “Better ingredients are in a lot of these things, but the packaging sucks.” You didn’t have a background in packaging or chemical. How do you even approach this?

00:03:02 Jenny: I know a lot of entrepreneurs are just people. Everyone has these ideas of how to make things better. But when it comes to physical products, it’s really different than like, okay, well, I could vibe code some software.. So how did you get started?

00:03:14 Ryan: It was, to your point, a long winding road. This is not an overnight business for us. Most people think we launched in 2019. It was a few years before that we... that we really started trying to get this off the ground.

00:03:26 Ryan: But we saw massive white space that retailers were forcing sustainable packaging. Government policy, at that time, were forcing sustainable packaging, plastic mitigation, biodegradability, but no brand was delivering on it. So we understood we really liked the category. I had a personal problem with it. I saw our niche, but then it was like, what do we do?

00:03:45 Ryan: So we tried everything. We tried concentrates, dilutables, powders, tablets, vials, glass, and nothing stuck. It was this two year winding journey. It was dilutables, changed too much behavior and people weren’t really willing to adapt it at scale. Powders were too much behavior change for the retailers and no one quite got it.

00:04:07 Ryan: Tablets were really good and we have some great, great competitors out there like Blueland who are doing great with tablets, but only if they’re not shifting behavior. So like dish tabs or laundry tablets. But no one had solved the liquid opportunity. That’s what we wanted to go after.

00:04:21 Ryan: So I had this aha moment one day. I saw Boxed Water, the brand that makes water in paper packaging and said, “Why isn’t anyone done that for cleaning products?” Overnight we went to a mock-up packaging company saying, “Hey, can you make this for us?”

00:04:34 Ryan: I brought it to an investor pitch with Dave Heath, the CEO of Bombas Socks. He was like, “This is it. This is brilliant. Let’s go after it.”

00:004:44 Ryan: So the challenging part was actually bringing that to market. It was harder than we expected, but it was like everything changed. Cause the minute we brought this mock-up in, people said, “Aha, this is it. Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” And that’s really what unlocked the idea for us.

00:04:59 Jenny: That’s interesting. Was it through Bombas’ founder that you met Katie Shea?

00:05:02 Ryan: Yes, exactly.

00:05:03 Jenny: That’s so great. I just saw Katie this week, actually. We run a women’s angel group together. So I totally forgot that she also had invested in you and Katie runs a fund called Divergent and she’s awesome.

00:05:15 Ryan: The small world. Obviously, a lot of shared investors.

00:05:18 Jenny: So from that moment, you know the direction that you’re going. Then what happens?

00:05:23 Ryan: Got the niche, got the category, have the backing, have the idea. It turned out to be brutal.

00:05:28 Jenny: Never heard that before from an entrepreneur.

00:05:31 Ryan: We really thought this was going to be a three or four month launch process. It was wildly challenging because you basically have three key problems in the industry. There’s no contract manufacturing that exists for this category or this product because you can’t run a non-food product on a food machine.

00:05:48 Ryan: All the big cart manufacturers in the world don’t run non-food products. They run juice, milk, water, you name it. So no one could touch this because if you use a non-food on a food machine, that machine can never again be used in food. Even if you clean it, there’s a bunch of regulations.

00:06:03 Ryan: Now we have to buy machinery and we’d never bought scaled machinery before. So I went on a US road tour. We set every equipment manufacturer. I was in the middle of Illinois, Arkansas, Ohio, meeting with a lot of these folks.

00:06:19 Ryan: Finally found one that worked. Long story short, bought the lines. Barely worked. So we have this now big line installed in a soap manufacturer that would take a bet on us because we’re also trying to sell them.

00:06:33 Ryan: We have no backgrounds. We have this crazy idea. Are you willing to have us install this 40 yard machine on the floor of your soap manufacturer and work through this technology with us? Super tricky.

00:06:46 Ryan: And then it was six months of just challenges. You guys did a really good article on our early days: three inches of soap in the floor, leaking everywhere, foaming everywhere. It looked like Willy Wonka with foam. Cause you just have all these really challenging technical problems.

00:07:02 Ryan: Because when you run soap through a line, you have to use what’s called a piston fill to get scaled production quickly. That piston fill foams the soap. So we had to figure out gravity filling and then the soap gets in the seal. When that happens, you have to get a much different temperature setting. And then you have to experiment with all of these different bottom seals. So it took realistically three years to get perfect cartons.

00:07:26 Jenny: So instead of three months, as you anticipated, it took three years.

00:07:31 Ryan: Took three years. The challenge, looking back, it was right during COVID. So we had a lot of demand without a perfect product. You had really challenging gross margins, a lot of custom returns, product issues, but people loved it. So revenue was scaling really quickly, but costs and losses were scaling really quickly.

00:07:51 Ryan: That was a super tricky timeline because we were building the plane as we were flying it, because the curtains weren’t perfect still. That’s why you’re out the door producing, producing, producing, but writing off and shrinkage. So it was just a very tricky balance during the 2019 to 2021 timeframe.

00:08:07 Jenny: I do remember getting a call from you when you got into your first retail. Tell us a little bit about your go-to-market strategy, direct to consumer, and then retail and then maybe pulling that back a little bit.

00:08:19 Jenny: I think that’s really interesting to listeners because, again, so many of us see things wrong in the world and if it’s something that we can solve for in software, we can get at it. But when we see these complex physical problems, I think we always think, “Well, why is it like that? Why hasn’t this been solved?” And you’ve really explained why. Three years just to get your manufacturing stack in order.

00:08:41 Ryan: It’s super tough, but I do prefer the moat. In consumer products, you can either go contract manufacturing, rip something out fairly quickly, or you could develop something really unique. And yes, of course it was hard, but no one’s done this at our price yet.

00:08:55 Ryan: Now we’re in year eight. That defensibility has born to be true, which has been really exciting. Finally, three years, we have the production, we’ve been shipping D2C. And I think it was a crazy journey because D2C was really good back then, and then it got really bad.

00:09:13 Ryan: So we thought, we founded this business thinking we could be the next billion dollar Harry’s for household cleaning products. We have a unique niche. We have a really scalable D2C model. And then the economics just broke because we’re shipping a heavy liquid carton that retails for $8, hopefully bundling and we had our subscription model.

00:09:34 Jenny: It wasn’t an off the shelf razor, which was basically already made and just put a fancy logo on it. It was heavy and bespoke.

00:09:42 Ryan: 100%. We obviously went out to the market 100% D2C. And again, 2021, we started realizing this model is broken. We always knew retail was going to be a big part of the business, but we thought we could have a true omnichannel business. Just didn’t work.

00:09:59 Ryan: The iOS update shifted our tax going up too far. Our shipping inflation during COVID went too much. Our margins were so slim on D2C that by the time all those costs and impact happened, just broke the business.

00:10:12 Ryan: So then we said, okay, we knew we needed to go retail. We had a couple retail tests going on at MYER and some smaller accounts, but we said, let’s double down. We needed to convert this business to a hundred percent wholesale. How do we do it? So then it’s been a four year business expansion to wholesale from 2022 through today.

00:10:34 Ryan: It’s been a longer model and now we’re basically distributed everywhere. We started in MYER, then we went to Walmart, then we got a test in Kroger. Now we are in Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, Costco, Target. I’m still figuring it out.

00:10:49 Jenny: I think what’s interesting about your journey is you probably look back at it and say, there’s so many things I would have done differently. But so many of the challenges that came your way… I mean, I don’t want to say black swans, but they weren’t necessarily things that you could anticipate.

00:11:03 Jenny: So the D2C channel changing was not something you would have done, but in the moment, everyone was doing that. It’s not like there was a learning there because these were new channels. And these things that happen when an algorithm changes or a channel gets shut off, you can’t anticipate that. It doesn’t matter how good an entrepreneur is.

00:11:23 Jenny: So how do you think about the business now and future proofing it and making it more resilient for the future?

00:11:31 Ryan: One of the reasons obviously we have very supportive investors. Everywhere’s great. We’ve had such a deep bench on this journey, which I’m very grateful that people believed in us through each of these crazy black swan events. That’s something we’re just very grateful for. We love our investors and just overall it’s been a really good journey.

00:11:47 Ryan: But I think the Black Swan has been interesting because they’ll keep coming up. Policy and regulation we thought was going to be a much bigger role here because you had big things coming out like SB 54 in California and the US Plastic Pack. And these big commitments coming out from Clorox, Henkel, Unilever, Target, Costco saying they need to go to 100% recyclable, refillable, biodegradable by 2025. That didn’t happen.

00:12:10 Ryan: So the way we’ve decided to future proof is before we thought we could be a premium price product because consumers and retailers would demand less plastic. Now we are the exact same price as the leading brands because everyone wants less plastic but given the economic status, given the retailer status, given the policy environment, no one is willing to pay more.

00:12:35 Ryan: So we future-proofed by can we be the mass player being just like the leading brands, but, again, without the plastic packaging. But that’s super tricky for margins. We future-proofed by betting on volume and retail expansion. But the challenge there is margin.

00:12:54 Jenny: So how do you get to price parity? What were the types of things you had to squeeze on?

00:12:59 Ryan: A lot of it’s throughput, a lot of it’s volume, a lot of it’s right supplier relationships. We’ve not been with our manufacturing partners for almost seven years and they’ve seen the growth. A lot of it’s mix. This year we’ve had a real challenge.

00:13:12 Ryan: So we have our refill hard cartons, first and only in the market. Then we launched our filled and refillable aluminum bottles to pair with those. So we tried glass, we tried a bunch of form factors, but we realized that people needed an entryway into the refills, especially in hand soap and dish soap.

00:13:26 Ryan: We got killed on tariffs this year because they are aluminum bottles and aluminum tariffs at 50%, even though we’re made 100% here in the United States. So that’s really tricky.

00:13:38 Ryan: For us, the way we’ve been able to do this is mix mostly, mix and throughput. And then it’s just being super disciplined and efficient. We’re a small team, every dollar matters. We’re so close to profitability now and will be next year and has been eight years but our margin structure makes it really tough compared to some other businesses.

00:13:58 Jenny: Talk a little bit about your customer base. The product’s called Cleancult. There are people that absolutely love this product. And so what do you do to engage that community?

00:14:10 Ryan: I think that we have a unique benefit. It’s such a different form factor on shelf that a lot of our marketing is just being so wild because no one’s ever seen a carton on a shelf. No one’s ever seen a lot of the aluminum bottles. No one’s ever seen our sheep products in categories like this.

00:14:26 Ryan: For us, a lot of it is that. Obviously it’s named, we lean into humor. We have a big TikTok campaign going on right now called Join the Cult. So it’s a lot of content creators saying, just joined a cult. Not that kind of cult. So we hopefully keep it humorous.

00:14:39 Ryan: But I still think the cleaning category is tough because it’s not in front. You’re not looking at it outside. There’s not that shareable nature of the product. It’s hidden in people’s homes. For us, it’s a little bit different of having a really almost intimate relationship in people’s homes versus something out and about that everyone looks at.

00:14:59 Ryan: We know you have a hand slip out for your guests, but then you probably have a stain killer underneath that laundry, no matter how natural you are. So it’s been, I would say, a long-term engagement. talked to our customers quite a bit. We lean into humor.

00:15:13 Jenny: The brand is really fun. I like the cartons. So I have the cartons and it reminds me of going to my grandma’s house. I think they’re really fun. I just like liquid and I think many of us have been conditioned that way, but also from a practical point of view, tablets and stuff, I use way less soap than most people.

00:15:30 Jenny: My clothes doesn’t get super dirty and I just don’t like it to get so when you have a tablet or anything that’s pre-packaged is just too much for me. So what I love about your product is really the customability.

00:15:41 Ryan: Right now it’s been like that. I could geek out about the cleaning category for too long, but basically liquid is a new phenomenon. In the 40s and 50s, this middle class boom happened after World War II and everyone bought machines and all these brands like Ajax and Dawn and Dial came out, but used to be powder. This new world of liquids is new, but it’s dominating.

00:16:02 Ryan: Right now it’s about 85% of the category is liquid, 10% pods/tablets and 5% sheets. But we need to solve the liquid. As great as tablets and sheets are, liquid is the big opportunity, both for plastic usage and also just overall. But it’s tricky. [laughs]

00:16:21 Jenny: Gosh, I feel like every year there’s this new thing. Tariffs really impacted you obviously. Take a step back and tell us a little bit more about where you guys are going. What’s the big picture for Cleancult and are there going to be new products for us to look out for?

00:16:35 Ryan: For us, we’ve gone in this journey, D2C first, then retail, because a lot of retailers are hesitant to put a carton on shelf. It’s new, it’s innovative, it’s a little bit edgy. So it’s taken a while to get a single category. We call it the wedge-in to then expand. So this year we finally have our wedge-in, usually one or two categories in almost every retailer, Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, Target, Costco, you name it.

00:17:00 Ryan: Next year, we’re really excited to say we’re expanding a lot. So the carton’s working really well on-shelf. Our mix is shifting and it’s going to be a big year for us next year. I think that’s where we want to go. We want to compete with the likes of Mrs. Meyer’s and even Tide – I know it’s a big statement, but to some extent Tide, to challenge the category.

00:17:20 Ryan: Cause 50 years ago, this business in this category looked different. There’s no reason that 50 years or even 20 years from now, it can’t again. The whole category used to be powders in a box. Now it’s this: pods, massive plastic jugs.

00:17:34 Ryan: Our vision is how could we fundamentally change the category, but do in a way that meets shoppers and retailers where they are. We’re going to do that through wholesale. We’re going to do that through a lot of humor. And we do have a lot of new products launching, some of which are confidential, but we’re launching new scents, we’re launching new expansions. So Q1 should be really fun time for the business.

00:17:55 Jenny: That’s awesome. One of the things I actually like about your scents is they’re not overpowering. Meyer’s, I love the idea of it, but I would taste it on my dishes and it was so gross. The flavor smelled good in the bottle if I smelled it, but then I didn’t want that on my dishes. I like how yours are effervescent, but they’re not overpowering.

00:18:15 Ryan: We try to split the difference. Exactly.

00:18:18 Jenny: Obviously you didn’t come from this background. You had to learn things as you were going. You mentioned the Bombas founder and some of your investors and you don’t have to give a particular name, but how did people, whether they were mentors or people that you surrounded yourself, impact your journey? Are there any examples of an inflection point where someone really helped you?

00:18:38 Ryan: A year and a half, we didn’t have any traction. It’s 2016 to 2018, we call it the dark days, humorously, but we have two dark days. Dark days one, dark days two. Dark days two was the soap leaking everywhere on the floor.

00:18:49 Jenny: That’s dark.

00:18:51 Ryan: Really hard to fundraise because we didn’t come from the background. So why would anyone take a bet on us at that time? We’re also younger founders at that point in time. For us the first year and a half, we just tried anything that could stick.

00:19:02 Ryan: We got capital from almost anywhere. We had a National Science Foundation grant because we were doing coconut ingredient research. We moved to Puerto Rico for almost a year because we had a grant with the government there and still have employees there on the island. We have funding grants from all these universities around the country for each of their entrepreneurship competitions.

00:19:25 Ryan: We had everything, every grant for two years, because we couldn’t successfully fundraise until we had the right model with the carton. In the early days, it was Dave. Dave was a big pivot point for us because he was someone in the industry that was credible, that believed in the model and believed in us. That unlocked a lot.

00:19:42 Ryan: Vanterra Capital was our lead and our seed in our Series A. Also just a great, great partner who really believed in us and we had a great Series B lead too. But I can track it all down to that one individual who took a bet first that was credible, that really unlocked the world of our investors.

00:20:01 Ryan: And then we’ve had dozens of phenomenal investors that have made retail introductions, strategic introductions, product introductions. But for two years, we, threw anything that could stick to keep this thing going.

00:20:13 Jenny: So much of what we read in TechCrunch and all that, is BS. The overnight success, that’s very rare. I think your story, eight. and a half years in is much more common. The fact that you’ve been able to grind it out through all of the headwinds is pretty impressive. What’s your secret, I guess, for staying focused and healthy and not giving up?

00:20:34 Ryan: We have really good partners. We have investors that believe in us and I know mentioned it before, but we just like working with them, which has been a real privilege on this journey.

00:20:42 Ryan: And then my favorite video talk is Scott Belsky. It’s called the Messy Middle. It is, in my opinion, the most foundational video any entrepreneur could watch because it’s the true journey of startups without the… start, without the finish. Cause that’s all the news that we ever see mostly in these journeys and it’s all endurance and optimization.

00:21:01 Ryan: He chronicles his 14 year journey in a way that very few have before actually what is this journey. He struggled on his honeymoon because he had a business issue. He lost moments in his life because of this. How do you actually do it? And he always goes back to endurance and optimization.

00:21:18 Ryan: That’s what we’ve done is, every year, let’s keep going. Let’s survive and then let’s get a little bit better. And how do we improve the product? We’ve done that every year,

00:21:26 Ryan: I could say, to be honest, our 2020 product was okay. It wasn’t world-class. And every single year we’ve gotten closer to world-class and I think we have world-class products at this point in time. So for us, it’s endurance and optimization. I got married this year.

00:21:41 Jenny: Oh, congrats. That’s awesome.

00:21:43 Ryan: Thank you. So that’s obviously nice. And then having a really good team. I love working with my team.

00:21:49 Jenny: Tell us a little more about the team. Where is everyone located? How is it you run a CPG company? I imagine you need to have distributed people.

00:21:56 Ryan: Fortunately or unfortunately, we grew quite a bit during COVID. So we hired all around the United States. It’s mixed. We have a pretty remote team. We do have our headquarters node here in New York City. We’re in the office maybe three or four days a week, but we have people in Arizona, California, Texas, Illinois, partially to visit the facilities, partially just because that’s where we hired the talent. We hate saying this, but it’s Method 2.0. 60% of our team are Method alumni.

00:22:25 Jenny: Nice recruiting there.

00:22:26 Ryan: I think so. No one is allowed to say that internally anymore because it’s too much. It was like, “Back in the Method days.” It’s been fun because it’s a very similar go to market strategy, very similar retailers with a very different timeframe, but it’s fun. They just have great stories and bring a lot of experience from a very successful business.

00:22:45 Jenny: What’s the biggest misperception people have about running a sustainable CPG company? Cause I imagine there are so many idealistic young people that are like, “I want to go run a company doing good things in the world and bringing physical product.” And you’re a bit eye rolly.

00:22:59 Ryan: The biggest one goes back to pricing is that there is not enough demand for a premium price product in sustainability generally. It’s the same for wind and solar. It’s the same for carbon capture. It’s the same for all these big technologies, including cleaning.

00:23:16 Ryan: People want to change but their behavior doesn’t match their goals typically in what they say. Solutions need to be the same price. I’ve yet to really see, outside of certain fashion brands and really niche markets, that a premium product has delivered on changing something.

00:23:34 Ryan: For me, whatever you do, it’s all going down the price. People care, but not enough to shift in mass. So I’d say that’s the biggest thing we’ve learned. You’ve got to thread the needle, which has been tricky.

00:23:46 Jenny: It’s not all bad. We encourage founders that they have to know their business inside and out, and that includes their margin, their numbers, and their participation of what could go wrong.

00:23:55 Jenny: It’s great to have a double bottom line company, but you also have to have a top line, as we said. It’s taking you a while to get to profitability, but it’s pretty awesome. What does success look like for you and Cleancult?

00:24:08 Ryan: We’re pretty open about this. This could take one of three very different routes. Route one, we get gobbled up by one of the major strategics and then they’re able to leverage that technology and put a lot of their products in it, which could lead to some really good scale and also success.

00:24:23 Ryan: Option two is we hit our real threshold of growth, which we’ve seen some other brands and we take a big growth round. And it’s like, how do we go to become the next $200, $400 billion cleaning product? Seventh Generation does $300 million in sales. Mrs. Meyer’s is now up at a billion dollars in sales. Method’s $500 million of sales. Tide is 40 billion annually. There’s a lot of room for the categories. I think that’s an option and it could be a mix of both.

00:24:50 Ryan: Success for us is how do we continue to grow this and change the category? How do we remove as much plastic as possible? And then how do we continue to innovate these really unique spaces that don’t see much innovation? But we’ll see. I like what I do. So far, so good. I’m not too burnt out. We have to see how the industry and the business evolves.

00:25:11 Jenny: What are some of the innovations in sustainable packaging or formulas that you’ve seen over the years that got you excited just more generally?

00:25:18 Ryan: Credit to BlueLand. They’ve done a really good job with launching the first wrap-free tablet. It actually works really well. So that’s been a really cool technology to see. And they’ve done a really nice job of that digitally. D2C, less retail, it’s more our industry. They’ve done a really good job digitally.

00:25:34 Ryan: Sheets are really interesting. There’s a debate right now on PVA and water solubility and it’s called polyvinyl alcohol. We believe it’s one of the most unique form factors right now to reduce plastic and it’s really effective and they carry a PVA substrate that allows all the ingredients to be on it versus a big plastic jug.

00:25:55 Ryan: So we’re really excited about sheets. We just launched sheets early 2024 and we think we have one of the most effective sheets in the market at parity with liquid detergent, which is really hard to do. So really excited about sheets.

00:26:08 Jenny: Those are dryer sheets?

00:26:10 Ryan: Laundry sheets and toilet bowl sheets. So we launched the first mass market toilet bowl sheets earlier this year at Target, and they basically dissolve right in your toilet into effectively nothing instead of having a big plastic jug. So we’re trying continue to introduce convenience.

00:26:25 Ryan: That’s actually one of the fastest growing portions of our business, but it’s still a smaller market compared to liquid. We’ll still always lead with the cartons, but obviously we want to expand.

00:26:35 Ryan: And then in carton technology, it’s tough, but there’s a lot of really unique now plant-based biodegradable substrates being tested. It’s really hard to have the soap not leak out of the carton unless it’s perfect, but we’re really starting to try to test how do we get even better. It just has a big gap from commercialization versus proof point in the lab.

00:26:56 Jenny: And what are those made out of?

00:26:59 Ryan: It depends, but basically somehow a plant based called PLA. It’s made out of corn, but now they’re adding in the germs, the bacteria that eat the plastic in the production. So if you only have a year shelf life, you can put that out and it’ll go away effectively.

00:27:16 Jenny: It’s a self-eating corn.

00:27:18 Ryan: Correct. It’s a self-eating stable corn.

00:27:23 Jenny: I mean, if that isn’t the future. I love it.

00:27:28 Ryan: Exactly. Yes, we’re optimistic. We’re excited about the category and have to see how it all evolves.

00:27:34 Jenny: That’s so awesome. So speed round, just quick answers to some fun questions. Is there a book, podcast or some media that you’re enjoying right now?

00:27:43 Ryan: Definitely Behind the Money, Financial Times. It’s really good. It’s the Journal or the Daily, but with a London spin, so it avoids some of the current politics, frankly, that we’re getting mired in right now. So that’s my favorite podcast right now. It’s on business, economics, fundraising, and the fact that they have a European perspective, it’s just a little bit clearer-eyed than some of the US reporting.

00:28:07 Jenny: You think?

00:28:09 Ryan: Yeah, exactly. So that’s my favorite. podcast right now.

00:28:12 Jenny: I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:28:17 Ryan: Definitely Spain. My wife is Spanish and we got married in Menorca, Spain this summer. I would love to live there and it’s just a matter of when.

00:28:26 Jenny: Let’s do it. I lived in Barcelona for a year. It was the best year of my life.

00:28:29 Ryan: Nice. That’s where I married my wife from.

00:28:33 Jenny: Aw. Very special place. Favorite productivity hack. You have a lot going on. So what keeps you efficient?

00:28:38 Ryan: I think this is eye-rolly, but for me, it’s still been ChatGPT, especially with business writing. It used to take quite a while to get the right language specifically, especially to some of the debt partners working capital and some of the more business heavy. I could do it so much faster now.

00:28:55 Ryan: I don’t like using ChatGPT for most of my writing because I think it still misses the personal tone. But with anything business related, I think it’s perfect. I’ve been really impressed with how fast it’s gotten. So that’s helped quite a bit.

00:29:07 Jenny: And then where can listeners find you? I will say you can go to cleancult.com.

00:29:12 Ryan: You can find us at Target, Amazon, Albertsons, or regional groceries, Costco, or our website, cleancult.com.

00:29:19 Jenny: And if people want to reach out to you, because they’ve got some partnership or LinkedIn?

00:29:23 Ryan: Or just email. So it’s just ryan@cleancult.com. Just first name @ the business.

00:29:28 Jenny: That’s pretty easy. This was super fun. Thank you so much, Ryan. We’re all inspired. It’s great holiday gifts as well. So run out and get some Cleancult.

00:29:37 Ryan: It’s been great. Thank you again for having me today.

00:29:39 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 Ryan Lupberger in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 100 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Prashanth Vijay, co-founder and CEO of Flume, a New York-based internet service provider revolutionizing last-mile fiber connectivity across urban America. Prashanth shares his journey from nuclear engineering and traditional telecom to recognizing a massive infrastructure gap where many households still rely on outdated coaxial cable from 25 years ago. He discusses how Flume is leveraging unused dark fiber assets to bridge the digital divide and bring modern internet infrastructure to underserved communities across the country.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In this episode, you will hear:

• Leveraging unused dark fiber to deliver modern internet without costly overbuilding.

• Bridging the digital divide where 85% of U.S. homes still lack fiber connectivity.

• Building intelligent network operations for the explosion of connected home devices.

• Securing government contracts to deploy fiber in underserved urban areas.

• Positioning as infrastructure for AI, robotics, and autonomous vehicle bandwidth demands.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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 managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. Super excited to be here in what may or may not be the hundredth or hundredth and first, we’ll see, episode of the podcast, Venture Everywhere.

00:00:46 Scott: I’m here with one of our portfolio CEOs, Prashanth Vijay. Prashanth is the co-founder and CEO of Flume. What Flume is really doing is last mile internet service providing via dark fiber and connecting that fiber to last mile communities across the U.S., mostly in urban centers.

00:01:05 Scott: Prior to founding Flume, Prashanth is a prolific angel investor. He’s also worked across a number of other startups and earlier in his career, was really working across national labs, background in nuclear engineering, and then working in telecom at both Pilot and Verizon. Prashanth, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:21 Prashanth: Thanks for having me, Scott. Excited to talk all things infrastructure.

00:01:26 Scott: We have some fun stories in New York. A few years back, you invited me out to a colocation data center that’s in the middle of New York city. It was a fascinating experience for me because I always had wondered what these brick buildings were in the middle of New York with zero windows and lots of antennas on the roof.

00:01:44 Scott: And you sort of say, “Is this like a place full of international spy agents or what exactly is going on here?” You enabled me to go inside and go to the roof and sort of learn about this colocation data center for streaming. It kind of gave me a tiny glimpse into the world of problems that you’re solving. So maybe you can tell everybody a little bit about your backgrounds and about the impetus for starting Flume.

00:02:06 Prashanth: My background is generally in hardware engineering and then a little bit of nuclear energy. Just viewing the world with a lot of first principles outlook. Thought that networking was a really fast growing field 15 plus years ago. Today, the broadband usage since then has 1000X per home. So I think it generally ended up being the case.

00:02:29 Prashanth: I have a traditional work at a traditional telecom company, worked in oil and gas for a little bit before that and had a very first row view of how much money gets spent on infrastructure every year in America.

00:02:45 Prashanth: About five years ago, right at the beginning of the pandemic met my co-founder who was working at a fixed wireless company, a company that was trying to solve a similar problem, but using wireless infrastructure and rooftops. We realized there’s a ton of unused assets around the US, whether it’s the data center that we toured or lots of unused cabling underground that we could use to then start our own connectivity business.

00:03:14 Prashanth: It’s been about five years now. A lot of the inspiration came from my background and the industry continues to change a ton, every year or so. It’s been really fun.

00:03:25 Scott: It’s fascinating because I think even the acronym ISP and internet service provider is a term that I remember from growing up in the Bay area and the mid nineties. I think of ISPs as how we had the modem making those funny sounds when an early dial up. And then when we got early broadband and various things.

00:03:45 Scott: So to have the foresight to be building a modern ISP in the year 2025, walk us through the observation that you had. I guess it was around the existing infrastructure that’s kind of in place and then the fact that this existing infrastructure can be forked and extended and provided to last mile communities.

00:04:04 Scott: There’s ample government incentives and subsidies and various things in the public private partnerships, but what was it that jumped out at you to start something that is a bit contrarian.

00:04:15 Scott: To think about starting an ISP in the year 2020 when everyone has their Verizon Fios and they have the main three or four that we all love to complain about when we get our internet bills every month and have upload and download speeds that don’t exactly match the promises on the websites, I would say.

00:04:31 Prashanth: The biggest question I definitely get is like, Hey, is this a solved problem? And I think if you have good internet, you don’t really realize it, but large parts of the country still don’t. That’s why a lot of these satellite internet providers are really popular right now as well.

00:04:48 Prashanth: But in the US, let’s say there’s your older cable internet, like coaxial cable and set-top box and internet that way. And then there’s the newer class of fiber internet where you can get one to five gig speeds, download a movie in five seconds and all these awesome benefits.

00:05:07 Prashanth: In the US, there’s only about 14 to 15% fiber to the home penetration. And the rest, the vast majority of countries still uses cable or coax, which like you said, that sounds weird 25 years after the fact. There’s a lot of interesting market dynamics at play as well as where the infrastructure was built that have caused this gap.

00:05:31 Prashanth: About 65 to 70% of the country has a fiber cable on its doorstep. So our goal is to kind of bridge that gap without having to go overbuild and spend thousands of dollars a home. Studying the market over five, seven years in the industry, we realized the word digital divide is thrown around a lot almost as a political term these days, but there’s really a physical infrastructure divide as well. And that’s what we have built the technology to kind of enable and take advantage of.

00:06:03 Scott: There’s a fascinating metaphor where I think of early model T Fords in the turn of the century when cars were starting to be developed and cars had thin tires and the tires didn’t have a lot of traction. There was also horses on the road and there was horse manure and cars were slipping and sliding and not getting traction. They were on dirt roads.

00:06:25 Scott: The reality was the infrastructure was built for horses and for that world. And cars were sort of a new innovation that were using old infrastructure and were not really optimized. As cars became more, more popular, the roads were obviously paved. They were built into super highways under Eisenhower. Then cars became the connection of America.

00:06:47 Scott: Similarly, when you talk about cable versus fiber, it’s almost like we’re running the internet on a set of old dirt roads. We now have modern cars and we’re still trying to drive them, slipping and sliding across these old infrastructure channels like cable because obviously coaxial cable was built not for the internet. It was built for a prior world. And then fiber, which is more like the super highway of today, is being built but still maybe isn’t totally there.

00:07:15 Scott: So it’s an interesting example. And a lot of the naysayers of the day about cars weren’t so much about the actual car not working. It was really a complaint about the infrastructure. And I imagine this same debate happens today of, oh, I don’t like streaming video. Well, the reason you probably don’t like streaming videos because you’re doing it on a dirt road. You’re doing it over infrastructure that’s maybe not optimized for that type of delivery mechanism.

00:07:40 Prashanth: The working from home really exacerbated this. A lot of the legacy networks aren’t really built for upload. Either kind of one directional, you can download or stream video decently well. But then conversations like this Zoom call involve a huge two way stream of data. We’re both uploading a lot of traffic over a set of cables through Zoom servers and then to each other. And that’s what more modern networks are built for.

00:08:09 Prashanth: When you look at other countries, even when you normalize for household density, countries like Mexico, Canada, European countries have way more fiber to the home, like 70% penetration because they didn’t build a ton of this legacy infrastructure. They went straight to the better roads. That’s the gap we want to fix across the US.

00:08:32 Scott: One of the books that is in your office and one of the books that’s on my bookshelf is a book by Andrew Blum called Tubes. This is a fun book for anybody that’s interested in the infrastructure layer of the internet and how fiber and connectivity and all these things connect together.

00:08:48 Scott: In Andrew’s book, he mentions that his internet goes out in Brooklyn and he starts to go down the rabbit hole to figure out why his internet’s out. The ISP guy comes and says, “Well, it looks like a squirrel maybe chewed through the coaxial cable or whatnot.” And he starts to realize that the internet as we know it as this digital thing, quote unquote, “in the cloud” is actually deeply physical across a number of cables, fiber networks, under the ocean.

00:09:16 Scott: If you kind of think about this Zoom call right now happening between Colorado and New York, what is happening with the data? How is it leaving my computer going into the ground, going up to space, coming back down to New York? Walk us through a little bit of the mechanics. How does the data move around?

00:09:33 Prashanth: It is crazy that to some extent you can trace a physical wire that connects my office router back to the router in your house. And that’s generally how internet is delivered everywhere today.

00:09:48 Prashanth: So from my laptop, it’s hitting a wifi access point in our office, and then we do have Flume internet here at our office. And so it travels back over a fiber cable underground in New York city, from this access point to that data center that we toured maybe a few years ago. And then from there, Flume uses transit providers.

00:10:13 Prashanth: So the internet is kind of this huge mesh of air traffic control. We’re just at the data center and handing off our packet to these long haul providers, similar to like long haul package delivery. And they’re taking it on their fiber cables that were probably built about 15 to 20 years ago between New York and Colorado.

00:10:38 Prashanth: And that could mean literally, physically directly there, in a direct transit way, or it could be going to both your packets and mine could be meeting at a Zoom server in Dallas or something in between. And that’s how each data gets exchanged.

00:10:57 Prashanth: So we have to send a packet from here to LA and back directly. We can do that in about 20 milliseconds or so. It’s very similar to sending a physical package over to your house. It’s just we’ve built out all these cables that can do it at the speed of light with fiber optics.

00:11:16 Prashanth: We tell this to investors sometimes where there’s DTC and hardware startups and Flume is maybe on the highest order of difficulty in that world because it’s like selling a DTC product into every home and connecting each home with a string in the entire network. This is all physical and the networks are expanding every single day.

00:11:39 Prashanth: So there’s thousands of network engineers out there who make sure these packets get delivered the right way. They have a lot of cyber security and security layers on them. So the internet, I think a lot of people don’t realize how complicated it is to deliver.

00:11:57 Scott: Yesterday I was in my hometown of Palo Alto. There is a building in downtown, which I didn’t really know about as a kid, but I learned about over the years. And on the side, I always thought the inscription, was P-A-I-X, was just some old Roman numerals that were etched into the side of a sandstone building.

00:12:16 Scott: But P-A-I-X actually refers to Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which was one of the early recipients with SRI and Moffett Field and MIT where the original internet connectivity and cables were connecting a few places in the entire world.

00:12:32 Scott: And thinking about where we started in the eighties and nineties and with the advent of that, and then modernizing the internet with web browsers and enabling more human ability to navigate it without technical expertise. And then obviously to where we are today with thousands of network engineers, millions upon millions of miles of fiber and all these things.

00:12:52 Scott: So thinking about the past, the current, and then the future, what do you think about space? What do you think about what’s happening with Starlink? What do you think about the whole flurry of activity and conversations?

00:13:01 Scott: And we even have investments in the space. For example, Ascendarc, which is doing geosynchronous satellites or broadband connectivity across the world, working mostly with nation states that don’t have the infrastructure or don’t have the fiber laid down and want to have quote unquote “self-sovereign platform” to be able to provide broadband to their people without being beholden to Starlink or SpaceX.

00:13:24 Scott: But walk us through how you think about where infrastructure has been, where you guys are innovating and where you want to take it and how it interplays with some of these other aspects of space and other delivery mechanisms. Cause I imagine that all of these are both necessary and collaborative and it’s not one or the other. It’s really about last mile connectivity, fiber, space, and a number of other modalities.

00:13:50 Prashanth: Every network today is what we call heterogeneous. No one uses just one physical medium to get from one point to the other, because why would you just preclude a bunch of customers from being able to connect?

00:14:05 Prashanth: So, similar to education or roads or most other infrastructure, it’s all a question of the costs to connect an individual home. And then does that individual subscriber or internet market have the subscription capability to pay you back for that cost?

00:14:23 Prashanth: We know tons of other smaller and larger fiber providers, and they all today use either point-to-point fixed wireless links or sometimes satellite links to get them to their end users. So even Flume’s, there’s certain parts of Brooklyn or upstate New York where we actually can’t find an unused fiber cable anywhere nearby. So we will look at a satellite or a wireless option to connect and then do the last mile again to our subscribers.

00:14:56 Prashanth: It’s all a question of how quickly can you get – and efficiently – from the home back to that data center. Let’s say you have Starlink at your home in Colorado, you’re still beaming up to the Starlink satellite back down to a Starlink ground station. And then that ground station is connected via fiber to the Zoom server somewhere on the ground.

00:15:20 Prashanth: One day we’ll have Zoom servers spinning around up in space. That’s a pretty hot topic right now, data centers up in space. But it’s essentially a question of how efficiently can you do it?

00:15:32 Prashanth: A LEO satellite that might be 5, 10 kilometers up in the air right now has about 25 milliseconds, 30 milliseconds of round trip leads. It’s almost very much the exact same thing. It’s just cheaper to use that for certain use cases.

00:15:50 Prashanth: For example, anything that moves is a great market – airplanes, boats, trains. I’m personally looking forward to amazing Zoom calls on all of those moving mediums where you can’t stick a physical cable along any of those.

00:16:06 Prashanth: And then the homes where their ability to subscribe and pay for internet is not enough to cover. Think about your last home in town on the farm up a hill, spending $2 million to connect their house as a provider is going to raise the costs of everybody in the town to cover it when the average cost is way less. Those are like amazing use cases for satellites and wireless networks.

00:16:35 Scott: It’s fascinating to talk about the heterogeneity of the network and how we’re basically all using many different modalities already. And we think of it as, well, I use Verizon Fios or I have Comcast or I have whatever it may be. But these networks are hopscotching their way across different infrastructure.

00:16:54 Scott: And as you mentioned, and as we talked to Chris and David Kagan from Global Star at Ascendarc, about geosynchronous satellites, which are much farther out in space and have even longer latency. There’s a need for geosynchronous LEO satellites, data centers in space, infrastructure in the ground, telecom towers with backhauling and fiber out to last mile delivery.

00:17:19 Scott: It’s fascinating because in a dense urban network where there are a thousand apartments in a given mile – well, if it’s a million dollars a mile to connect fiber, what is that per house? Oh, it’s a thousand dollars per house. Maybe we can amortize that cost over a number of years. And this makes economic sense to connect this dense area. If you’re in the rural US, even in the suburbs or exurbs of any cities, sometimes that the economics don’t make sense.

00:17:46 Scott: There’s a big push for infrastructure, government spending. Are there a lot of public private partnerships or are there a lot of ways that Flume has tapped into the city of New York and some of the expectations and desires of politicians to connect certain communities or certain parts of the city that haven’t had connectivity before?

00:18:06 Prashanth: In the last five or six years after the CARES act, which was the first set of funds that came out during the pandemic, we realized that there’s a huge need to upgrade infrastructure apolitically. Our fiber infrastructure is well behind most other countries.

00:18:24 Prashanth: Similar to the re-industrialization of manufacturing or energy, there’s this clear national need to do this. While individual users in really nice areas or class A apartment buildings have pretty good internet, the usage of the general internet is blowing up still at a very rapid rate.

00:18:45 Prashanth: Soon we’re going to have robots using the internet. We’re going to have agents, the ability to create on-demand video by just sticking in a sentence into something. These are all huge bandwidth hogs.

00:18:57 Prashanth: In some of our single-family home markets, we see people’s Teslas uploading a hundred gigs a month of data. So if you’re going to be in a world where your car might be affecting your Netflix streaming. We don’t want to make the digital experiences worse.

00:19:14 Prashanth: So the government presciently realized this and has embarked on this 10 year deployment plan to say, let’s get more fiber in certain areas. That’ll feed more satellites to the rural areas. In New York state, Flume is actually currently building an 18,000 home network with a big government contract, multimillion dollar contract.

00:19:39 Prashanth: The idea is if you build more underlying fiber into these areas, the businesses, the satellite backhaul and more data center capacity can be built on top of that. So very analogous to energy or let’s build more manufacturing fabs. We will figure out the use cases for those fabs because we all believe that they are coming.

00:20:04 Prashanth: There’s been a lot of private public work recently. A lot is talked about with rural internet and that’s where the satellite and other solutions are great. There’s about 30 to 40 million ex-urban, suburban and dense urban homes that also don’t really have connectivity. So we focus there. And there’s plenty of state initiatives that are addressing that as well.

00:20:28 Scott: It reminds me a little bit of this asymmetric growth rates of different technologies. Back in the day when we had cameras that were starting to have bigger megapixels and started to do digital photography and you would have hundreds or thousands of photos on your device or your physical camera. And then you had this small USB cable that you had to connect in to download the photos. And there was a huge asymmetry between the ability to take photos, the ability to download and save photos.

00:20:56 Scott: You’ve run out of storage on your computer and we didn’t have cloud storage yet. And you think about today, the evolution of say, self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, the data that’s in your Tesla versus the connectivity that’s maybe in your garage, it’s almost the same set of problems at larger scales over and over again.

00:21:15 Scott: But it’s really fascinating. And that leads me to my next question. You did mention one thing, which is human traffic versus machine traffic and thinking about the differences in that and the volume differences where in the early internet, it was mostly people navigating websites and various things.

00:21:31 Scott: Now, it’s a lot of web crawlers and API pings and various machines moving across these data packets. But how do you see AI altering the impact on physical infrastructure?

00:21:43 Prashanth: The data center landscape has changed a lot in the last two to three years. There’s now more data center investment than all of other commercial real estate combined.

00:21:53 Prashanth: If you listen to the latest leadership from Microsoft or CoreWeave, a lot of them are moving to more distributed campuses like WAN based AI. So wide area network AI data center campuses. A lot of these need a ton of bandwidth to do tons of inference queries or training runs between each other at low latency. So we see a lot of commercial fiber usage going to the data centers.

00:22:20 Prashanth: And similar to the original internet, this is a lot of download, like folks pulling down data from these commercial data centers and doing your own queries or inference requires reasonably quick latency. But in the next 18 months, we’ll start seeing the opposite, similar to Zoom calls on the applications and robotics proliferates. There’ll be a huge need for uplink connectivity back to the data centers and to each other as well. Tesla’s being an early use case of that.

00:22:52 Prashanth: There’s a lot of investment and thought going into the networking and optics. You hear Nvidia with NVLink or it’s really the networking that’s some of the differentiator. We see a huge spike in need for both networking infrastructure as well as know-how and engineering. It’s going to be competing for broadband use with your AI agents and your robotics.

00:23:18 Prashanth: It’s still probably 18 to 24 months away, but these things, to your camera and digital photo point, they don’t happen in nice gradual jumps. One day everyone, even in Flume networks and some of our denser apartment buildings, we see a lot of folks now buying these Matic robots, like the vacuums, and we can see the bandwidth that they use to do their image processing. It’s very cool to see the promise of IoT and devices is finally here for in-home use.

00:23:52 Scott: We like the term picks and shovels businesses, but Flume takes it to another level of literally picks and shovels underground with fiber and thinking about all these trends.

00:24:03 Scott: It’s fascinating to me too, because I had a conversation with one of our partners, Anna Barber from LA the other week, and we were talking about non-consensus or contrarian positions founders take. What we arrived at was it’s not about being non-consensus or contrarian. It’s actually about spotting consensus before it becomes consensus.

00:24:24 Scott: So thinking about the future and as you’re thinking about where you’re skating to kind of where the puck is going to be, are there ways that you’re tweaking the vision around Flume given some of these trends that you’re seeing?

00:24:38 Prashanth: Constantly watching where the market is changing is one of the funnest parts of being, startup CEO. Recently we’ve actually seen a lot of demand. So we actually sell usually to the city or to the property ownership, like a big portfolio of buildings. And they’ve seen a huge increase in demand and just usage of a variety of connectivity hogs, if you will.

00:25:01 Prashanth: So EV charging requires a lot of point of sale, network monitoring. There’s HVAC, water leak detection, smart locks. So it’s been a gradual growth, but across thousands of different types of devices. So we’ve started building a lot more features in our software.

00:25:21 Prashanth: We started off building features that allow folks to buy wholesale broadband from us and offer it to their tenants in the rent or if you’re a city in your utilities collection. Now, we’re getting a huge demand from folks saying, Hey, I have 10 point solutions. I have to pull up a smart lock portal, a HVAC sensor portal, and you guys can actually tell if everything is working or not based on if it’s transmitting traffic..

00:25:50 Prashanth: We would never offer a ton of these robotic use cases, but we can create a lot of interesting telemetry over that, showing you what’s working, what’s not, if your internet has any threats from something because it’s doing the wrong thing.

00:26:05 Prashanth: There’s a huge budding market in helping everyone manage all of these devices and websites and AIs. So as the connectivity provider, we see all these devices, they’re all unique IP addresses on our network. So we see a lot of good opportunity there.

00:26:21 Prashanth: And customers are already asking for it, which makes some of the consensus prediction a little easier on our end. But there’s going to be a world where someone’s going to have to help end users make sure a lot of these things are doing what they say they’re doing. They’re not sending you your data to certain places. I’m pretty excited about that along with growing the network to cover more homes.

00:26:45 Scott: I was just thinking of an analog within the wine world. You have different types of wines where you have estate wines, where somebody owns the physical ground and they grow the grapes and they pick the grapes and they harvest them and they make the wine.

00:26:59 Scott: And then you have others that just buy the grapes from somewhere else. Or others where they just buy the processed wine and they just do the distribution and the sticker and the label and the name of the wine. And there’s different tiers.

00:27:11 Scott: And as you think about telecom operators, I imagine there are that first bucket where there are large, large players that have all the infrastructure and the hardware and maybe 50% of it, or some percentage of it is their own hardware and their own network and their own fiber and their own satellites. And then others are piggybacking on existing infrastructure.

00:27:31 Scott: How do you see that world of the Starrys versus the Verizons versus where Flume is sitting in this ecosystem of owning your own infrastructure versus leveraging existing infrastructure?

00:27:43 Prashanth: It’s always amazing to own the infrastructure where it doesn’t exist yet. Even in New York with some of our government contracts, the goal is to build the first fiber networks, maybe using unused conduits or cables into certain areas and that’s really valuable in those areas.

00:28:02 Prashanth: But then in other areas, like we just publicly announced being available in thousands of homes in Phoenix. In the last four or five years, there’s been five fiber providers that announced new build-outs in Phoenix.

00:28:15 Prashanth: In certain markets, we view that the real value is going to be in the automated network operations, provisioning, automated customer service, as well as owning the customer relationship for like 5, 7, 10 years. Broadband’s extremely sticky business.

00:28:34 Prashanth: It’s like where there’s too many assets, maybe like an Airbnb type of model, we actually own the highest value is always going to be owning the customer relationship. So that’s how we split it up, is the truly underserved areas. There’s a huge logical business sense in owning some of these assets.

00:28:54 Prashanth: And then in the areas where there’s too much and it’s becoming a commodity, can we be this intelligence and customer service and have data center networking layer over those networks?

00:29:06 Scott: It’s really incredible. Thanks for walking us through that. It gives people visibility into the heterogeneity of not only how this market works, but even the companies that operate in this market. And it gives me just a ton of respect for what you’re building and the level of difficulty of what you’re attempting to do and the vision and mission around last mile connectivity for communities across New York and across the world.

00:29:33 Scott: Incredibly excited to be a small investor in Flume. I’ve loved getting to know you over the last number of years and for the tour of the colocation data center in New York, which gave me a totally new appreciation for how my own Verizon Firehouse worked in my Brooklyn building.

00:29:48 Scott: In quick summary and wrapping up with our speed rounds, other than Tubes, is there a book or a podcast that you’re currently reading or enjoying?

00:29:56 Prashanth: I’ve recently read and loved Abundance from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. They actually talk about a lot of this, like how regulation and permitting really impacts infrastructure and then how that impacts the application layer and technological progress.

00:30:12 Scott: If you could live anywhere in the world outside of New York City, what would be your number one?

00:30:17 Prashanth: Three or four months ago, I got engaged in Paris. My fiancee has a lot of friends there and we loved it there. It’s a magical city with food and wine and so… probably live in Provence or Paris somewhere for a year.

00:30:32 Scott: As far as your productivity hacks, as a busy guy in New York running an incredibly complicated business, anything that you can recommend as far as saving time?

00:30:41 Prashanth: I’ve started loving the use of Wispr Flow. It’s one of these AI speech to text apps. As opposed to typing, I basically just weirdly whisper into my laptop and it’s 3X to my typing speed. So I recommend.

00:30:57 Scott: Finally, where can listeners find you on the internet?

00:31:00 Prashanth: Pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn. Our office is in Madison Square. Always down to jam with entrepreneurs physically as well. Generally try to stay active in the venture and digital communities where I can.

00:31:14 Scott: Thank you so much for spending time with us today on around our 100th episode of all time. We’re incredibly excited to be small participants in the Flume journey. Thanks for spending the day with us.

00:31:25 Prashanth: Definitely. Thanks for the support. I’m one of the earliest folks who came aboard. Always love staying in touch.

00:31:33 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 Prashanth Vijay in Founders Everywhere.

In episode 99 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, chats with Kate Lambridis, co-founder of Human Health, a Sydney-based health technology company making personalized healthcare accessible to everyone. Kate shares the deeply personal story behind Human Health, born from her children’s mysterious health challenges and navigating a broken healthcare system. She discusses how Human Health is building a consumer-first platform that empowers patients to own their health data, get contextual insights, and unlock solutions for chronic diseases through personalized care.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Building a universal health app patients can use to navigate their health.

• Empowering patients to own their health data and receive personalized insights.

• Raising from investors who understand the long-term vision.

• Capturing patient-reported data that other companies don’t have access to.

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 Scott: Hi, everybody. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. I’m super excited to be here today with Kate Lambridis. Kate is the co-founder of Human Health based in Sydney, Australia.

00:00:44 Scott: Human Health is a health technology company that’s on the mission to really make personalized healthcare accessible to everyone. So really, the future of personalized medicine.

00:00:53 Scott: It was founded in 2022. What you’re really thinking about is how to reimagine health data, how it’s captured, how it’s used and how it’s applied to give people a more holistic look at their health.

00:01:05 Scott: Kate, you’ve had a full, amazing background. Originally from South Africa. Got your start in South Africa as somebody that spent a lot of time with Groupon, some of the Rocket Internet companies that were spinning up out of SA.

00:01:18 Scott: And then I want to hear all about making the move to Australia and what brought you there. Obviously rose through the ranks at Canva or on a crazy journey of a rocket ship there, rising through the growth of Canva to being a senior product manager and a group lead on all the ecosystem and product operations. So Kate, thank you so much for your time and welcome to the podcast.

00:01:40 Kate: Thanks so much, Scott. It’s so good to be here.

00:01:43 Scott: We were reminiscing. The last time that we got to meet in person was at an Indonesian restaurant in Venice Beach, California.

00:01:51 Kate: It’s so funny. I feel like we were so broad eyed and bushy tailed about being founders. But if I look back now, I feel like we knew nothing. We’ve learned so much over the last few years. It was such an early part of our journey, that first trip out to the US to meet people. The product was still very much a dream at that point. I think back very fondly on those times.

00:02:10 Scott: And you guys had a major announcement even back then with raising one of the largest pre-seed rounds in Australian history, you and Georgia, as two female founders. Incredible.

00:02:22 Kate: That’s right. We actually didn’t know that. It was interesting. We did the interview with the AFR and then they phoned us to say, “Hey, did you know that you guys raised the largest round?” And we were like, “No, we did not have a clue actually.”

00:02:37 Kate: It’s funny, we have such mixed emotions about that. I feel like on the one hand, obviously we’re really proud of that. But on the other hand, we feel sad that women get such a small amount of VC funding that that had to be considered the largest round.

00:02:49 Kate: If you compare that to the largest male round, it’s very different. Dwarfs in comparison. And so I think it was an interesting moment. We were really proud to be an example of how that can be done, but also just reminds you how much still needs to be done to really uplift women in this space.

00:03:05 Scott: The fact that there needed to even be a light shined on that. So taking a step back, walk us through your journey. This is something that many people aspire to do what you and Georgia are doing at the helm of an incredibly fast growing, successful technology startup. But how did you get to where you are today?

00:03:23 Kate: So interesting, because I think for me, I never really aspired to be a founder. I fell into startup. I lost my mom and my dad as a teenager. And so when I got to university, I studied psychology. But in South Africa, that’s a really long journey to becoming qualified to see patients.

00:03:40 Kate: And you have to go and be in these very rural, difficult environments. I worried I didn’t have the emotional support structure around me or the financial structure frankly to walk that path. So I decided to do a post-grad in marketing so that I would have some skills I could get a job with.

00:03:56 Kate: Most of the people I graduated with went into advertising agencies and I got introduced to somebody who had a startup called Twangoo. They were doing group buying in South Africa and it sounded really interesting and creative. And so I said, “Yeah, I’m in. I’m keen. Let’s give this a go.”

00:04:12 Kate: A week later, the business was bought by Rocket Internet on behalf of Groupon. And so I was thrown into the startup world overnight with suddenly getting opportunities to be trained by people in Germany and in the US that nobody else in South Africa was getting exposure to. So it was really an accident.

00:04:28 Kate: I just loved that I was really young and that my inexperience was almost a benefit. When you’re really naive, you’re willing to give anything a go because you don’t know any better. And so I think that bodes really well in startup and you can grow really fast. And so I just really loved that ability to be creative, but never really aspired to be a founder.

00:04:47 Kate: I always looked at the founders I worked for and thought, “My God, you’re crazy. You work on this one problem all the time. You’re so intense.” I can’t imagine caring about a problem enough to make my whole life about it. I loved working on it, but I didn’t want that level of ownership day-to-day.

00:05:03 Kate: Ended up working a lot in e-commerce in South Africa and working for the largest e-commerce group right before I left. It was an Aspas backed group company and was just really lucky and had amazing experiences. But after a while you start to feel a little bit like it doesn’t have a huge amount of purpose. There’s only so much you can convince yourself that the convenience of getting people products really easily is doing good in the world.

00:05:25 Kate: I started to really crave wanting to do something a little bit more purpose driven. I got introduced to the folks at Canva on a trip. I was here on holiday in Sydney and we had applied for visas for Australia. We’d been given scarce skill visas. So we were considering moving.

00:05:42 Kate: I was really just trying to put feelers out and met Georgia, who was running product at the time and just really hit it off. They had been looking for a woman to come and run ecosystems for about a year. It was just really perfect.

00:05:54 Kate: And I actually ended up waiting a couple of months to make a start because I needed to immigrate and I moved over during COVID. But really felt that, for me, Canva was such a vision driven business. I felt that there was more purpose behind it, what it was trying to do, because people could design things and really uplift their lives and their businesses using the product.

00:06:12 Kate: And so that was a foray for me into something that felt more purpose driven. But really the turning point that led to Human was my children. So in the background to my professional career, I’ve got two kids. They’re now 10 and 7. They’ve just had birthdays.

00:06:26 Kate: But when my daughter was 17 months old back in South Africa, she came up in a rash one day. She had really high temperatures. I was a first time mom. They said it’s probably something viral, nothing to worry about. But over the next two months, she effectively disintegrated.

00:06:42 Kate: She stopped sleeping. She wouldn’t eat. She stopped speaking. She stopped responding to her name and playing with her toys and it was a pretty terrifying experience. We had this experience where the doctors just threw us out. They just said, “Look, there’s something wrong with her. We don’t really understand it. She’ll probably never speak and spend her life in an institution. Try speech therapy.”

00:07:02 Kate: And initially we were obviously traumatized by that information and then decided that we should take that into our own hands and try to find a solution. We just weren’t going to accept that as her fate.

00:07:14 Kate: I started a spreadsheet. I started tracking all of her symptoms. I would spend hours on PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov and chatting to researchers and in Reddit threads and Facebook groups. And I would come up with what are potential treatments that could help her. And then I would test them and I would track whether they were helping or not. I was running little mini clinical trials in my home on my own child.

00:07:36 Kate: Slowly but surely we started to be able to get her symptoms under control. Fast forward to today, she’s 10 years old. She’s in a mainstream school. She has friends. She does homework, and she doesn’t stop talking.

00:07:47 Kate: She’s actually a really amazing singer now, which is… I always say is the best “fuck you” she could have ever have given all the doctors who said she wouldn’t amount to anything. So I had this crazy journey with her.

00:07:57 Kate: When we moved to Australia in the middle of COVID, we felt like our daughter’s going to be okay. We don’t really understand what happened, but let’s put it behind us and move on with our lives. It felt like the crescendo at the end of a movie. I was like, “Okay, new country, new job, kids are okay.”

00:08:12 Kate: And then 10 months into that immigration, the same thing happened to our son. He came up in a rash one day. I took a selfie lying in bed with him, sent it to my husband and said, “Something’s wrong with Leo. I think the same thing’s happening.” And he was like, “Don’t be ridiculous. It can’t possibly be the same thing.”

00:08:25 Kate: And it was. Our son just went downhill really quickly. In the middle of all that, Georgia and I caught up for dinner and we were talking about what I was living through. It just occurred to us why isn’t there a product for this? Your health is arguably the most important thing in your life. And yet we do not have a universal product on everyone’s phone that patients can use to navigate their health.

00:08:46 Kate: And that was really the start of building Human. So ironically, now I totally understand how founders find a problem that they care enough about to make their whole life about it. For me, it was almost the other way around. My whole life was about this problem. And then I decided to start a business out of it. That’s really the backstory as to how this all happened.

00:09:05 Scott: It’s incredible to see sitting from the perch, at this point, evaluated about 12,000 businesses over eight years, invested in close to 300 companies and I’d say the vast majority of companies, they come out of an obsession around technology that’s changing a product that somebody wants to see in the world or this empath founder of a deep problem that somebody has experienced.

00:09:28 Scott: To your point, has almost wrapped around their life enough times that they’ve said, “I’m now motivated to build and solve for this problem that I’ve seen over and over again. Nobody else out there in the world is solving it.”

00:09:40 Scott: One thing I was going to say before you went into the personal story was just around, I think what startups and different roles that you can kind of take on in your life. But as a young person, one of the benefits of coming into a startup is what you talked about, this asymmetric ability to inject yourself in the world above where you feel like you should be or even deserve to be in some ways as a 20 year old, 21 year old.

00:10:03 Scott: And thinking about for folks that are listening that want to start companies or want to be involved in startups, it’s almost like a game of shoots and ladders. You get to climb a ladder or drop down a shoot and get injected into a part of the world that you get outsized responsibilities earlier in life than in other walks of life.

00:10:19 Scott: And so that move to Canva, talk a little bit about the backdrop of where was Canva at that point when you joined with Georgia and what was that journey and what were some of the things that you learned through that rocketship experience that you’re now bringing over to Human.

00:10:33 Kate: It was really interesting. It was such a different experience to what I had seen in South Africa. Rocket Internet was one of the first businesses that came into South Africa to grow these e-commerce companies. South Africa has a very different market. There’s a massive gap between the rich and the poor. And so there’s a lot of pressure.

00:10:50 Kate: A business either has to really take off or it just will not survive. There aren’t a lot of vision driven companies because there just isn’t the capital or the time to build really big dreams. The businesses have to hit the ground running and start making money on day one. That was almost like an Amazon style company. Very aggressive numbers driven, chasing revenue companies.

00:11:15 Kate: I think Canva was so different because it’s a very dream-based environment. Mel is very inspirational and really encourages people to think outside the box, come up with a big vision and then break it down into actionable steps. It’s encouraged to dream big. And so I think for me, that was a really exciting time to join Canva.

00:11:36 Kate: There was a couple hundred people when I first joined. When I left, there was a couple thousand. It scaled really, really quickly and it was really amazing to be part of that business, just taking off. Georgia was there in the really early days when it was five people around a table figuring out a screen.

00:11:52 Kate: I came in at the point that they were scaling and starting to really grow the teams. I started off in the ecosystems team, but ended up actually in product operations, helping scale the product team and hire and get all the people in that we needed to deliver on the vision.

00:12:04 Kate: But I think probably the biggest thing that I took from that experience was the evidence that you can have a crazy dream and you can make it happen. People always say it’s impossible until it’s done. And I think that was a very strong concept at Canva. And so I don’t think before that experience, I would have had the evidence to show me that I could go and try and build something like Human.

00:12:26 Kate: It is arguably a pretty insane mission. You wouldn’t try and build this. If you were just trying to be a founder who was going to turn some revenue and sell a company off through a private equity firm, this is not what you would do.

00:12:37 Kate: I could have made a lot more money doing something else. This is an incredibly difficult business to get right because there’s a lot of complexity in healthcare. It doesn’t have to be that way, but the incentives are all very misaligned. And so building the right product that’s needed isn’t supported by the economic system that exists in health right now.

00:12:57 Kate: You have to have pretty big balls to go and say, “I’m going to go build this product that should exist because I know in the future there’s going to be a leader in the space, even though it’s not going to slip straight into the system overnight.” That was a very big lesson that I took from Canva around how that can be done.

00:13:14 Kate: To touch on what you were saying before about young people being able to come into startups and grow really quickly, I think what’s amazing about startups is you get rewarded for doing. You don’t get rewarded for thinking. A lot of companies or jobs, you get rewarded for intellectual ideas and thinking. But in startups, it doesn’t matter if you have a great idea, it’s can you execute it or not?

00:13:34 Kate: And so I think that’s another lesson I took holistically from being in startups was ideas are dime a dozen. The idea that there should be one health app to rule them all isn’t particularly unique, but how we are thinking about putting that into action and what we think that looks like and the staging of that and actually being able to pull that off, that’s where the magic happens.

00:13:53 Kate: There’s this interesting tension that I’ve taken from my experience between having a really big vision and dream, but then also having the ability to break that down and actually deliver that over time.

00:14:05 Scott: One of the stories that I often tell, it’s the lead off story of the first chapter of the book that I wrote in 2017. But it’s actually about a theater arts major who went to Y Combinator, became a digital health founder and built a large-scale health company. One of the stories that she told was auditioning on Broadway. The fact that you walk into a room with 50 people, everyone’s given the same sheet of paper, everyone’s given the same lines for the script, yet only one person gets the part.

00:14:33 Scott: And it’s so relevant to the way the world works that everybody has the idea. All 50 people in the room have the same script. Only one person gets the part because they’re the one person who can really impute those words with the most emotional resonance, with the best storytelling. They can convince the world that they are the part and they’re the ones who end up on Broadway.

00:14:54 Scott: And it’s the same thing with founders. The number of people that say, I had the idea too. It’s not about the idea, it’s about the execution of the idea, about having the dream, but then about breaking down that dream into the actionable steps, like you mentioned.

00:15:06 Scott: I was listening to a conversation from Alfred Lin, who’s now running Sequoia. Alfred Lin was talking about how early revenue could sometimes be a red herring in the sense that it can be a distraction. If you don’t yet have product market fit, you can delude yourself into the early cycles of having pilot revenue and ACD. I think we’re seeing a lot of this with early AI pilots. What is actually repeatable and when does revenue signal that you’re on the right path?

00:15:36 Scott: In some sense, starting with the South African ethos and not to lump it down, but I think in a lot of markets like Latin America, in Africa, where you maybe have thinner capital markets, you have less access to venture capital so you have to be scrappier from the beginning to run a business that’s maybe revenue positive or even profitable to stay alive.

00:15:58 Scott: Versus the big dream vision that’s probably venture backed where you can think about category creation, inventing something into the world and backing it out, how do you sequence that or how do you think about the vision that Human has long-term and build the culture and build the team and think about those waypoints in the product?

00:16:17 Scott: Cause you’re always running on this treadmill of raising money and hitting the certain KPIs that are necessary to get the next juncture of capital infusion. But as a leader, at the company and given what you’ve learned, both in South Africa and in a more of a dreamer environment with Canva, how do you balance those two things?

00:16:36 Kate: It’s probably my biggest professional challenge on a day-to-day basis is navigating that tension. When we first raised capital, we only raised from angels and we were like, “We’re not going to raise from VC. VCs are evil. They’re going to put pressure on us to build all the wrong things.” That was our very naive initial reaction.

00:16:54 Kate: We realized there are some things that you can bootstrap. People love to talk about the concept of lean startup. I don’t think that works with really large category defining companies. You need to do a fair bit of R&D to figure out product market fit. If you’re building a booking app, there are patterns for that. There are plenty of other companies that you can look at that have proved best practice that you can follow. Those are not difficult businesses to get off the ground. Marketplaces, these are things that have patterns.

00:17:23 Kate: When you are building something that is completely novel, yes, you can take inspiration from different industries that you are building the product from scratch and figuring out how is this thing going to work, what are the standards of this. We realized pretty early on, we’re going to need to raise a decent amount of capital.

00:17:38 Kate: It’s funny because with Human, it’s a consumer product, but it’s also a deeply scientific product. The amount of money that’s considered a large amount of money, if you’re raising in consumer, looks very different to the larger amount of money if you’re raising for therapeutics.

00:17:52 Kate: And one of the things that has been particularly frustrating for us is a lot of investors think in those buckets. And because we came from a Canva background, we could really build relationships with consumer investors. But the pot of money you can raise looks very different.

00:18:07 Kate: Now, we got a lot of praise around raising the largest female round. I would love to have raised a lot more money than that. If we had, we would have been able to tackle this problem a lot faster. The fact that we are doing something at the intersection of consumer and science made that difficult. I also think the fact that we’re women made that really difficult. But we realized very early on we were gonna need venture to be able to have the space and time to do the R&D to build this product correctly.

00:18:32 Kate: We had seen at Canva, in the market that Canva existed, you could raise money off of really strong consumer growth. And so one of the core tenants at Canva was build an amazing free product and don’t block people from functionality and then give them additional value in a paid product.

00:18:51 Kate: We wanted to follow a very similar pathway. That was the vision. Raise money, build an amazing free product, get product market fit, and then build revenue. Three weeks after we raised in ‘22, the Ukrainian war started and the whole market shifted. Suddenly, you were sitting in a space where consumer growth wasn’t going to cut it. You needed revenue and it created this tension.

00:19:13 Kate: We have a subscription product out in the market now. Did I want to put that out at the time that we did? Absolutely not. Did we have to because we were existing in an environment, an economic environment that required different things? Yes.

00:19:25 Kate: That’s probably one of my biggest lessons as a founder is you have to navigate the tension between the product that you know you’re trying to build that has this potential to be a massive business in the future with the economic hurdles that you have in front of you.

00:19:42 Kate: I remember my mom when I was at school. I didn’t really like school. I didn’t really like being told what to do. Just the core model didn’t really make sense to me. And I remember her saying to me, close to when she passed away because she passed away in my final year of school. I was like, “Why do I have to learn all this rubbish to pass an exam? I mean, we’re not going to use any of this information. I just didn’t understand.”

00:19:59 Kate: And she was like, “You just have to do that to get the keys to open the door to the next set of options.” And that was the first time, in my final year of school, I got straight A’s because I finally clocked that.

00:20:11 Kate: As a founder, what’s hard is to hold the tension between the product you’re trying to build for the vision in the future and then the doors you have to open and the boxes you have to tick to do that. That is such a strong tension.

00:20:25 Kate: We had heaps of investors ask us this in the beginning, “Put advertising in the product.” If we had put advertising in the product, we would have made a lot of revenue by now, but we wouldn’t have built the right product.

00:20:35 Kate: People were like, “Why don’t you build a product for insurance companies? Get reimbursement through insurance.” But we would have had to build a fundamentally different product to do that. So yes, I could generate some revenue in the short term, but I would be basically shitting on my long-term vision.

00:20:48 Kate: Same thing when it comes to building your team. Tech companies don’t have a great reputation for how they treat people. You can hire a lot of really young people with no experience and you can treat them like crap and they’ll work in your company for a year and then they’ll leave.

00:21:00 Kate: Or you can invest in hiring people with really good experience and prioritize them as people and create a good culture. You probably won’t grow as fast. But in five years, those people will probably still be in your business and you’ll probably be able to scale a lot better. But there’s a cost to that. Those are the decisions we have to make on a daily basis.

00:21:20 Kate: You see this a lot with AI companies at the moment. Some of these companies, when you speak to investors, they’re like, “Oh, they’re amazing. They’re scaling revenue so fast.” Have you played with the product? And they’re like, “No.”

00:21:30 Kate: And you’re like, “It’s crap. It’s not that good.” There’s a lot of tension in creating these metrics to show traction enough to give people confidence to keep investing in you without compromising on your mission.

00:21:43 Scott: If there’s one word, not only for this podcast, but just in general about being a leader of anything, it’s navigating these tensions.

00:21:52 Scott: It’s almost like an emulsification of inputs into the business where you’ve got your core set of values and your core beliefs of what you want to build and instantiate into the world mixed with geopolitical factors that are coming in, which has an effect on capital markets, which has an effect on your ability to fundraise, which has an effect on the demands for KPIs and proof points, to your point of getting ease to prove things out to the right stakeholders on the other side of the table.

00:22:20 Scott: You’re constantly, as a leader, this tug of war between where you want to go and what you need to prove to get those inputs to be able to get there.

00:22:29 Scott: From a tactical standpoint, for you and Georgia running a company, what do you guys do on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis? How do you think about long-term strategy and short-term tactics where you’re both listening to feedback and you’re taking input. But how do you evaluate and both hold true to your vision, but not be too stubborn in listening to market feedback, listening to good ideas from investors?

00:22:54 Kate: In the beginning, we started chatting to investors. It was incredibly overwhelming because every conversation you’d feel like you were getting pulled in that very different direction.

00:23:02 Kate: The core characteristic that Georgia and I share is that we are inherently curious. And so sometimes you hear something and you know something about that space so you can decipher for yourself if you agree with it or not. And sometimes you hear something, you’re like, “That’s a really interesting thread. I think I’m going to pull on that. I want to understand that.”

00:23:16 Kate: Insurance is a really good example of this. In the US, investors tend to be really ambitious in general, but not so much in health. It’s like our healthcare system is fucked, but don’t try to change it. You’ll fail. And so everybody was like, “You’ve got to have an insurance code.”

00:23:29 Kate: And so, we went and looked at that. We’re like, “Okay, who can we talk to?” And Georgia’s superpowers is just… she’ll message or email anyone. She’ll get hold of people we have no place getting hold of. Let’s get on the phone with five people in this space, get different perspectives and assess for ourselves. Get enough information to decide if we think this makes sense.

00:23:46 Kate: And so we looked at the insurance angle. We looked at what would be reimbursable. For example, one of the things that’s reimbursable is you can have a service as part of your business.

00:23:56 Kate: So you could connect patients with someone who is recovering from their condition. This has done a lot in addiction, for example, and you can pair them up for coaching and you can get that reimbursed. But it would make your product more expensive, which means it would make it less accessible to the average day person, which is not what we’re trying to do.

00:24:14 Kate: And you become a human services business, which has a whole bunch of quality issues that we just didn’t want. We don’t believe in that model. I don’t believe that’s the best way to get patients good care. And so you have lots of companies in that space that have made a lot of money. But when you go read the reviews from users, you’re like, “Oh.” Depending on which person you get paid with, you get a very different experience.

00:24:35 Kate: We looked at that from a lot of different angles. We looked at employer-buyer angles. There’s also a lot of things around privacy in that space. Patients don’t want their employer to have their data. And inherently this product is about empowering patients and helping them create a comprehensive medical record that they own and giving them insights off of that. And so you would be undermining that core reason for building this business at all.

00:24:57 Kate: My thinking is you can’t put blinkers on. You need to expose yourself to ideas and smart people. And then when someone says something you don’t understand, get curious and go and learn about that space. So if it’s a road you decide not to walk down, you know why. You can go like, “Okay, we’re not doing this because of X, Y, and Z.”

00:25:15 Kate: That’s something that Georgia and I’ve just done really well. And we just talk a lot and we aren’t afraid to reassess a decision and go like, “Okay, we decided not to do that, but ooh, maybe we could.”

00:25:26 Kate: As founders, I think this is one of the biggest things that irks me on LinkedIn, is people will post 10 tips to blah, blah, blah. It just doesn’t work that way, man. Sometimes what happens is there might be an economic incentive that you could link in with. So say you could go like, “Okay, we’re going to partner with insurance companies.” But do you know how many startups are trying to do that?

00:25:46 Kate: It might actually come down to who are your investors and who do they know at said insurance company and what table can you get around to actually make that happen. Sometimes people get caught up in evaluating whether an idea has merit and not evaluating whether an idea is actually something you can execute.

00:26:05 Kate: That’s something we spend a lot of time on is does this idea have merit versus our vision? And then can we actually execute on this? Is this something that’s actually we have the skills, the people, the connections to make this thing happen? Because the avenue might exist and we just may not have access to that.

00:26:21 Kate: One of things that’s been really interesting stepping into the healthcare space is understanding incentives. One of the really sad bits is they’re the people that should be most incentivized to have a product like Human, probably government.

00:26:35 Kate: When I was in London recently, I spent some time at round table with people from different innovators, a session run by the NHS. I went to a similar one in Australia in Canberra last week at parliament. And what’s crazy is governments will be going, “Oh my God. We have all these sick people. We need to figure out better ways to help them.”

00:26:50 Kate: And then they’ll go and drop a billion dollars on building a tech product through some agency that’s being managed by people in government who don’t have any technology experience. The product will eventually fall over. There aren’t incentives to partner with people in technology.

00:27:07 Kate: What we could do with that kind of money is ridiculous, but the avenue available to us is venture. There are so many barriers to working with government. That’s something that has been really interesting to learn about, which is the people who are incentivized to have your product just may not have the ability or the ways to actually link in with you and what you’re doing.

00:27:28 Kate: That’s one of the saddest things as a founder to learn is that there are a lot of amazing products in the world that should exist if only we could connect people who have the incentive for that thing to exist with the people who can do it. But because people are different, they’re scared of each other.

00:27:41 Kate: Tech people are scared of working with government because they’re like, “They’re going to slow us down and put a whole bunch of rules in our face and not let us do what we want to do.” And government people are scared of tech companies because they think tech companies are just trying to make money and they don’t trust them.

00:27:53 Kate: For Georgia and I, just to go back to your question on how do we evaluate these things, we just talk a lot. I could lay it out like we have all these perfect meetings and once a month we do this, once a week we do that. Sure, we do. We’ve learned lessons around that, but it’s mostly just a constant conversation between Georgia and I and our team to never be afraid to look at an idea, get curious. And if we decide not to do something, make sure we’re really clear on why we’re not doing that thing.

00:28:17 Scott: I think there’s a characteristic in founders that often something that it’s hard to test for, hard to ask questions around when you hire them, when you build a team and build culture. But this idea of wanting to be right or wanting to win.

00:28:29 Scott: And in the sense of having low ego, to be able to be maximally truth-seeking in the sense of listening to all feedback, all ideas, not being too stubborn and beholden to your own core set of what you think is true or what you think is right, and actually evaluating holistically and being able to pivot. Not wayward, not spineless, but really be able to listen to feedback.

00:28:51 Scott: I know you guys just raised a large round. You could talk a little bit about that and how you were able to bring in international investors like LocalGlobe from London and folks that don’t typically invest in Australia.

00:29:03 Scott: But as you move forward and continue to scale this business, one, how you were able to attract that capital, but two, where you guys are heading around precision medicine, what you see the future of that looking like.

00:29:15 Kate: It’s interesting you talk about that, sometimes you get founders who can be so stubborn and there are ideas that they’re not willing to pivot or to go in a different direction. Georgia and I use the term God complex. Sometimes founders can have a bit of a God complex. They think they know everything.

00:29:28 Kate: One of the things we did do really early on was we wrote our mission statement. We wrote our principles around the product we wanted to build and we wrote our company values. A lot of people do these things and then they forget about them. But we wrote those before we designed a single screen of the product.

00:29:43 Kate: Those are things we come back to all the time to evaluate against whether we would do something. Part of the reason Georgia and I did that was we wanted the whole team to have that from when they interview to when they join the company so that when they’re bringing forward an idea, they can use that framework to decide if this is something we would even do.

00:29:58 Kate: It almost becomes like a bit of a filter. And so that is something that we use quite a lot internally in terms of we’re not willing to change those three things. We’ll change how we get there, but we won’t change those three things.

00:30:09 Kate: That’s what’s been really helpful from a co-founder perspective to set those things up upfront, because then you don’t end up fighting about the baseline of the directions you would go in because you have set that up upfront.

00:30:20 Kate: And then to answer your second question, to speak to how we found investors or how we brought people along for the ride. In the beginning, we really only spoke to Australian investors or investors that we knew, small market. So it was pretty easy to get through everybody, have a conversation.

00:30:36 Kate: It was pretty funny because in the beginning we thought it was going to be really hard to decide on which investors to work with. We wrote criteria. We were like, “We’re going to measure investors on these five criteria.” What we realized was there are a lot of investors and I would put them in two camps and the one camp is much smaller than the other, unfortunately.

00:30:57 Kate: And I think that what I’ve learned is you can waste a lot of time talking to a lot of different people. But if you go through your own network, they will help you find other people like them. We’ve certainly learned that lesson because of the Canva Connection, we had a lot of investors reaching out to us and wanting to connect, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

00:31:15 Kate: For us, we talk about this analogy of investors who want to play poker and investors who want to play chess. So investors who want to play poker, I want to place a bunch of bets, hoping that it’d be relatively hands off and hope one of these things pays off.

00:31:28 Kate: And chess is like, I’m an investor that really wants to see the next big business happen. And I know that those businesses are probably inherently more complicated and that those businesses need to make very specific moves in a very specific order to bring a business into being and that excites them, that doesn’t scare them.

00:31:47 Kate: Those are the investors that we tried to find because you need those people. An investor who will just give you money is fine. Sometimes that’s maybe what a business has to do to get off the ground. I find one of the most useful questions to ask an investor when we meet them is who are the five people you could introduce us to that you think can make this mission happen? A lot of times they cannot answer that question.

00:32:07 Kate: And it’s like, well, you’re going to give us capital, which is maybe good and obviously if it’s a good brand name, fine. But are they actually going to help you? It also tells you how much they know about your space. Because if they can’t think of five people that they would introduce you to, they probably don’t understand what you’re doing to be able to pair with people in their network or they don’t have the network. That’s something that’s really valuable.

00:32:24 Kate: And so, we got introduced to LocalGlobe. Airtree was one of our early investors. When we did our latest round, they communicated with their LPs to see if there were any LPs who wanted to make a direct angel investment. We brought some people in through that.

00:32:40 Kate: One of those people was Eric Salama, who was the CEO of the Kantar Group in the UK. He is awesome. We were in the US. We caught up with him on a call. He was in the back of a London cab and just totally grok what we were doing straight away.

00:32:53 Kate: I feel like as well, the right investors, it’s an easy pitch. They’re in from the beginning. You know. There’s not seven calls and then suddenly they’re in. They’re in in the beginning. And anyway, he came in. He was connected to the LocalGlobe team, introduced us to Julia and Yvonne.

00:33:07 Kate: Julia Hawkins has a daughter who’s had a really complicated health journey. And when we got on the call with her and I told my story, she was like, “I know what you’re talking about. I get it.” There was a very immediate level of trust that Julia understood what I was trying to build. She understood that I have a child at home who is still navigating a health journey. That as a founder, I’m not going to be incentivized to build a different kind of company.

00:33:30 Kate: And so I felt like we had a really strong level of trust that we could build on. That’s something I’ve definitely learned is go through the people you already trust to find other people that they trust. And also look for people that have personal connection to the problem because you can’t spend your whole life as a founder explaining the problem you’re trying to solve to your investors. They have to get it. And that’s a really strong signal of whether they’re the right people for you, if they understand what you’re trying to do.

00:39:56 Scott: I love that analogy of playing poker versus playing chess. That resonates not just as a founder, but on the venture side as well. When we think about fundraising for our next fund, we think about you could maybe have the first third of the fund is inside folks that come back in, that you already have a relationship with. The second third are adjacencies to that first third. And then the third third is getting it done, however, blocking and going to the ends of the earth to get that last third.

00:34:25 Scott: But I think that that’s true in life of finding people that can help you move the chess pieces forward and help you build the business. So I love that metaphor. I think all founders listening or all folks listening, thinking about when you bring partners on board, how you really optimize for involving more people that want to play chess than want to play poker and can really help you advance those pieces. I really empathize with that.

00:34:48 Scott: In the last few minutes that we have here on the podcast, when you think about the next 10 years of the journey and now that you’ve got more and more chess players around the board with you, what is the vision? Where does success take you in the next 5 or 10 years?

00:35:01 Kate: Hopefully in the next 10 years, every person will own their own health data and they will have the ability and the tools to put it to work for them. They’ll be able to get really deeply contextual insights and recommendations of what to do to improve their health so that they can work more effectively with practitioners and researchers. We all really have fixed that system. It’s really siloed at the moment.

00:35:22 Kate: At scale, I guess, what I’m hoping we achieve is having a proven standard of care for diseases that we just don’t know what to do with. I think there is a very big misconception in the world generally that we understand a lot more about chronic disease in particular than we do.

00:35:40 Kate: Most of the time we don’t understand what causes these diseases or what to do about them. And so hopefully I would love to be able to say, we’ve helped this many patients take control of their health journey and advocate for themselves and we’ve unlocked solutions for diseases that didn’t exist through the data that we’re capturing in Human.

00:35:59 Kate: What we’ve tried to do is put the trust with patients at the center of our business. It’s why we’ve built a direct to consumer company. It’s why we haven’t partnered with insurance companies and we’re willing to play that chess game to not just hook into an incentive that would get us revenue really quickly, but stay laser focused on building the right product. I would love to feel that we were able to succeed in doing that.

00:36:25 Kate: We saw the opportunity to create a truly consumer centric healthcare company. We were able to bring the right people on board to help us make that happen, even in an economy and a system that is deeply broken and fraught.

00:36:38 Kate: And one of the books that I love at the moment is Brene Brown’s most recent book when she talks about living in uncertain times, and the types of leadership that we need. We need people who are willing to say, “I’m a smart person with skills and privilege, and I’m going to put that to work to solve hard problems. I’m not going to put that to work just to make as much money as I can as an individual.” And so hopefully in 10 years, I can look back and go, I’ve done something valuable with the difficult circumstances that I was handed.

00:37:08 Kate: One of my favorite quotes is a Viktor Frankl quote where he talks about being worthy of your suffering. And I think success to me is everybody suffers. Every human being is going to be given some God awful challenge at some point. But if you can turn that pain into something really purposeful, I think that is the challenge of being a human being. And that’s something I’d be really proud of.

00:37:29 Kate: On a personal and then on a global level, hopefully those are some of the things I can say in 10 years time.

00:37:34 Scott: I love that. So to be worthy of your own suffering. That’s a quote that we should all write down.

00:37:41 Scott: If I have time to indulge you in one final question, as you think about this ingesting data and bringing in all this information on patients, thinking about either the diagnostic side or matchmaking with the therapeutic side, I imagine with the new AI tools that are developing as you guys ingest more and more more patient data, are you starting to see abilities to more quickly identify or more quickly match on the diagnostic side and on the therapeutic side with solutions for folks?

00:38:11 Kate: Yeah. At the moment, we don’t play in diagnostics. We play more in helping patients who have a condition or symptoms that they want to work on, help them test out things that could potentially help them. But yes, and we knew this was coming. This was part of why Georgia and I started the business, was we knew that AI models were gonna get a lot smarter and a lot faster at dealing with really large sets of data.

00:38:33 Kate: The thing that we really believe in is, models are only as smart as the data you train them on. And in healthcare, we’re missing data, and we can get that data directly from patients. If you do that, the other data, EHR data, blood work, biometrics, those are things that you have context to make more sense of that data. That’s something that’s difficult to compete on.

00:38:53 Kate: Everybody, every startup can go and pull in data from Apple healthcare, it’s not hard, but can you make sense of it? And so I think AI is a great enabling tool that helps you comprehend a large set of data really quickly, but you still need to get the right data.

00:39:08 Kate: When we started this business, the R&D was all about, can we get the right data set that nobody else has? That’s really hard. Everybody’s scared to try to do that, but let’s try to do that.

00:39:17 Kate: Because then later, if you start stacking all this other data, you’re in a totally different position where you’re uniquely able to give value from that data in a way that other companies can’t. And so that’s really been how we thought about AI. It’s an enabling technology. But it doesn’t get away from the problem that you need the data to train it on.

00:39:35 Scott: Reliant on the inputs, for sure. Final speed round. If you live in two of the world’s nicest places, Cape Town and Sydney, where would you choose to live anywhere in the world?

00:39:45 Kate: Greece. Easy question. My husband’s Greek. I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece. It’s my happy place. It’s paradise, the most beautiful place in the world.

00:39:53 Scott: I’m sold on that answer. So you already mentioned the Brene Brown book that you’re reading. Any podcasts that you’re currently enjoying?

00:40:00 Kate: This is not an original answer, but Diary of a CEO. I really like the variance of the things that he talks about. He asks really interesting, compelling questions. And so I really enjoyed that as a podcast. A lot of podcasts you might find one interesting episode, but I think that’s a very reliable source of interesting, varied topics. Love that one.

00:40:21 Scott: As the mother of two and as a startup founder, what’s your go-to productivity hack other than probably waking up at 5am?

00:40:29 Kate: It’s honestly a tool that I started using recently. It’s funny because I was talking about how some of these AI products are not that good, but one of them I think is very good is Granola. I’ve been using that heaps and a lot of our teammates have started using that as well.

00:40:41 Kate: I think I really am a talker and I like to be present in conversations, but I also would say I don’t have the world’s best memory. Especially as a mom, you’re holding so much context at once. And I’ve tried so many note taking tools. They all suck. They’re all really annoying. They don’t make sense of your notes.

00:40:57 Kate: But I think the UX is very simple and it works really well. You can overlay how you want the meeting notes structured, which is really powerful. And so I’ve really been loving that. I think that’s made a huge difference in my life.

00:41:08 Kate: It just means I don’t have to hold this random information and context in my head at all times because I can go back and have this secondary brain that I can reach into. I think they’ve done an excellent job of building a really usable product.

00:41:20 Scott: Finally, where can customers find you online?

00:41:24 Kate: So I think as a brand we have TikTok and Instagram. But me, personally, on LinkedIn. I think if anybody would like to reach out and connect with what we’re doing, that’s probably the easiest way to get hold of me.

00:41:35 Scott: Wonderful. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure to see you as always. Next time we’re going to go back to the Indonesian restaurant in Venice Beach, California.

00:41:43 Kate: I’m keen. Thanks, Scott. Thanks so much.

00:41:48 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 98 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Ben Parsa, founder and CEO of CABA Design, a next-generation home furniture company reinventing how modern consumers shop for and live with their furniture. They’re building sustainable, high quality furniture brands while giving customers unparalleled choice in design through customization and modularity. Ben shares how his early years building on-demand apparel production in China gave him insights that shaped CABA’s vertically integrated approach. He also discusses how CABA’s tech-enabled, full-stack operations allow the company to deliver high-quality sofas in days—not months — setting a new standard for speed, efficiency, and customer value in the furniture industry.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Reinventing furniture through tech-enabled, vertically integrated operations

• Delivering sofas from order to home in days, not months

• Offering modular, customizable designs shaped by customer feedback

• Scaling multiple home brands on a single operational platform

• Reducing waste while improving quality, comfort, and 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.

00:00:34 Jenny: Welcome everyone to Venture Everywhere. Today we’re very excited to have CEO and founder Ben Parsa, founder of CABA and another company. He’s going to tell us a little bit about how he spends his time. You have such a long legacy of founding companies. My first question is, have you ever worked for anyone else?

00:00:53 Ben: My first business was in apparel. I did that straight out of college. Did that for a couple of years. Then I joined a company where I technically wasn’t a founder initially. I joined as the first hire outside of the founding team. And then I took on the co-founder title about a year in so technically worked for someone else. That’s correct.

00:01:11 Jenny: I love it. But you figured out how to be the co-founder. Also an interesting data point. Of those companies, maybe before you get to CABA, you can give us just a little flavor of what were maybe one or two inflection points during that, informed your journey now.

00:01:28 Ben: My background is industrial design. And weirdly I went into apparel. It was more so because I just found there’s an interesting opportunity here. I went to LA. I remember going to all the apparel mart buildings and meeting the folks that drive that industry as the sales reps and sort of the conduit in between.

00:01:45 Ben: Just my general takeaway was if you work hard, this is an interesting category. It’s a big category. There’s an opportunity here. And so that’s what made me decide to go into apparel.

00:01:56 Ben: And then the first business we really started, I went overseas. I booked a one-way ticket to China at the time. And so started doing very quick production runs, very quick sampling, like where the opportunities are in this segment. We can create samples and ship them out within a week. Extremely quick turnaround times.

00:02:13 Ben: If a big retailer would place a PO, we would produce that and we brought in-house the pattern making, the capability set around making samples and making small batches. And then we had tapped into a large extended workforce that worked for other facilities, but they would do contract work for us at home quickly and on the fly.

00:02:34 Ben: It was really like just-in-time manufacturing where we sort our own fabric. We had an extended workforce that wasn’t on our payroll. I think that actually informed a lot of what I did later in life, which is apply that to furniture and how do you build a supply chain that’s lower cost, faster pace, higher turns, all of that, which ultimately I think is critical to survival in the business.

00:02:54 Jenny: What was the year that you were doing on-demand apparel?

00:02:58 Ben: 2008, 2009.

00:03:00 Jenny: So that was even before we had a term for it. You guys were being savvy.

00:03:04 Ben: It was just understanding, we don’t have the capability to have the ownership. I went to Shanghai area. At the time, we had a tailor that used to work at a Zara facility and was like one of their head tailors. We paid him a good amount of money to come work directly for us.

00:03:19 Ben: The key thing was there were hundreds and thousands of seamstresses that were working there and he had hand selected maybe the top 50. They would do work at home outside of normal work hours.

00:03:31 Ben: And so we would cut and drop packets off in 50 locations with a van, have it all sewn up in 48 to 72 hours. Have it picked back up and then have it air freighted directly into whatever retailer was buying that product from us.

00:03:44 Ben: It was a low cost infrastructure, really high output. It was a lot of work, but it was a good couple of years for sure.

00:03:49 Jenny: That’s awesome. Aside from, obviously, being capital efficient in the way that you’re running that, what was your biggest learning from your time in China?

00:03:56 Ben: Yeah, it’s an amazing country. It’s complicated to navigate, huge opportunity but I think the cost of things. I think US consumers, and just anyone who buys anything in the US, doesn’t truly understand how low cost things can be made overseas and doesn’t understand what the drivers of those costs are.

00:04:16 Ben: A great example, you could make a pattern for, let’s say, a piece of apparel and a fabric roll is 148 inches wide. And if your pattern extends two inches past that, for whatever reason, you rotated it and your consumption went up by 40%, your waste went up by 40%.

00:04:32 Ben: And so I think one of the principles we had with CABA, ultimately, was we need to learn the true manufacturing process for the goods that we bring to market. We need to understand and do it ourselves. And we need to understand every variable of decision that drives costs.

00:04:50 Ben: So you could make a chair one inch bigger, but the material consumption and wastage could go up by 30% within that single inch. Those are the things that I think I learned early on. You only get it at a facility, at an OEM, at a factory, and you’re watching people work and you’re understanding and seeing, “Well, wait a minute, why is this being wasted?”

00:05:12 Ben: And then you understand there’s a lot of decisions that were made by a designer overseas that had zero understanding of that one extra inch and the impact that has on cost. That was a big takeaway for me.

00:05:23 Jenny: That’s cool. I was in China maybe two years after that. It was kind of as things were really opening up. And I mean, it was just such an amazing time to be there.

00:05:34 Ben: It’s considered the golden years for a lot of expats, 2010, 11, 12.

00:05:37 Jenny: So I was there. I worked for the BBC at the time. When I finally got to the country, I was just like, “This place is incredible.” And there are all these expats that had been there a few of years before that had really found their niches. And so one was opening Starbucks. It was like all these Americans.

00:05:52 Ben: My co-founder, Andy, was there before me. And he was already like the expat who’s fluent in Chinese. People are blown away at his level of language. But he did a bunch of work for Starbucks at the time actually. All their flagship stores he was designing.

00:06:06 Jenny: So let’s fast forward to CABA and what made you start this company. And I know there’ve been some twists and turns, so just talk us through CABA.

00:06:14 Ben: Prior to CABA, I’ll start there real quick. I joined a company called Dot & Bo. That was home furniture predominantly, Wayfair model, drop-ship. We had built an amazing consumer experience on the front end.

00:06:27 Ben: But when you’re beholden to a thousand drop-shippers doing their job and their OEMs and the quality and the lack of control that comes with that totality of supply chain, it ends up being a churn and burn business. It’s inevitable as Wayfair that you will disappoint a customer along the way.

00:06:45 Ben: It’s a very expensive customer to acquire. Once you disappoint them, they’re very hard to ever earn back to some extent. And so that’s an indicative problem in this category. And really it was, can you apply a design-centric model, do things in-house, be vertically integrated? And there’s a lack of innovation, I think, in the category, or has been for a long time.

00:07:06 Ben: People will bring a new silhouette, new fabric, but they’re not fundamentally looking at a piece of furniture and going, “Okay. We’ve been making this for a hundred years like this. How do you provide something that a consumer can sit on, is comfortable? How do you then throw everything that is currently in the rule book out and start from scratch? How would you do it today with production processes, material processes that we have access to that we may have not considered 30, 40, 50 years ago?”

00:07:34 Ben: And so that was really sort of what led to the category. It’s a huge category. It’s not a winner take all scenario. There’s plenty of opportunity in the category to speak.

00:07:43 Jenny: Also anyone who has bought a couch has a story.

00:07:47 Ben: Yeah. I don’t think you run into anyone who’s bought a couch who says, “That was the most amazing experience.”

00:07:52 Jenny: Every single person. I mean, you don’t buy them that often, but like everyone’s had experience. Oh, it took eight months to deliver. It was super expensive. It took three months and it wasn’t what I ordered. The fabric, it was so confusing, the sizing.

00:08:06 Ben: We give ourselves a really hard time, but we’re not too bad. Shipping in 74 hours. Not too bad.

00:08:12 Jenny: Talk a little bit about how you guys do it different. What were the things you had to change? Because there was a lot of usage change and behavioral change and obviously logistical things that you needed to do.

00:08:23 Ben: It’s been a bit of a journey, I would say. We started with this idea of mass customization and the intent and ideation round up was, first of all, let’s take an approach where we understand what consumers want within each category of furniture.

00:08:37 Ben: The only way to do that without biasing the results potentially is by saying, “Okay. We’re going to give you a million variations of a couch, you customize it, and then we see where demand actually fits and what do people want and why do they want it.”

00:08:51 Ben: And we added feature sets and we would toggle and turn on and off feature sets and really try to understand aesthetically, feature wise what people care about. That sort of started to guide our longer term thinking around what category to approach in what particular way.

00:09:08 Ben: Once we felt we had enough information, that’s when we started building these mono brands in a category that we felt really hit on a particular why buy, why buy from us, why buy now. It’s like the QVC model of communicating and keeping it simple.

00:09:21 Ben: And so along the way, it’s probably really dissecting and saying there is an aesthetic, there has to be a value that you provide the consumer, and you have to hit a certain quality benchmark within that value.

00:09:35 Ben: And so our brands operate at different values and different qualities. The key thing is that what you pay for at each brand’s level is, we can exceed those expectations. So really the core thing that we try to deliver on.

00:09:51 Ben: And then within that, how do you reduce the things that people don’t care about and how do you over deliver on the things they do? When you’re sitting on your sofa, your tactile senses are interacting with fabrics. So we go with some of the highest quality fabrics that we can get our hands on.

00:10:07 Ben: You’re interacting as a comfort perspective with the foam and the materials that are secondary to the fabric. You don’t care about the wood frame. You don’t care about a 200 pound wood frame being shipped to you. And so we stripped that away. We replaced that with a steel frame. It folds up. It’s lightweight. It’s easy to ship. So we can create cost savings on one end. We reinvest that in higher quality fabric, extremely high quality foam, nn the other hand.

00:10:33 Ben: And we deliver, ultimately, a product that you as a consumer feel really good about. It’s going to last you a long time and it’s at a value and a price point that you would otherwise not be able to find. That’s that rinse repeat, I would say, component of our design process that we adhere to.

00:10:49 Jenny: Super interesting. I never thought about the frame, but that makes a ton of sense. Those things are super heavy. What are some of the other things that people don’t care about?

00:10:57 Ben: One thing that inadvertently we fell into, because we keep our process of manufacturing as simple as we can, obviously, and we try to offer, certainly within a framework of mass customization, the ability to like swap fabrics out.

00:11:09 Ben: Within a production process, we can mass produce certain components. And we produce our fabric across 128 colors on demand to ensure that we offer that long tail of choice that other retailers can’t compete with. It’s too costly for them.

00:11:24 Ben: And so within that, we realized, “Okay. Well, people are not just buying this because they get to choose the fabric. They’re actually buying this because the fabric is removable.” That means it’s washable. It’s long-term longevity for a product.

00:11:37 Ben: If you think about why people buy a sofa, more importantly, why they get rid of it, more often than not, probably within a two, three-year window, four-year window. Those cycles have been compressing over the years. It gets soiled. It gets dirty, pets, kids, things of that nature.

00:11:50 Ben: It became pretty evident that a washable sofa is pretty critical and consumer mindset is shifting into that. And then we really started to focus on, how do we deliver that at great value? How do we make that a machine washable sofa? How do we make sure that as many layers of that are machine washable? That’s been a pretty big success for us.

00:12:11 Jenny: You guys position yourself as building the next gen of home brands powered by community and technology. Can you talk a little bit about each part of that statement? Because that’s pretty unique for a couch company.

00:12:25 Ben: Community, I think, in the sense that our product development pipeline is effectively fed by our customer sentiment feedback. We did a lot around bulk mass customization.

00:12:36 Ben: But really building these feedback groups that, ultimately, we put something out there, we’re giving you a choice, we see where the choices go, and we try to get a closed loop feedback system and quickly iterate on what is it that people want. And so leveraging that information is key for us.

00:12:53 Ben: Our backgrounds are not furniture people. We’re good at building websites, tech, software stacks. That’s our core background before starting a furniture business. And so it’s really about doing the hard work.

00:13:06 Ben: All the ERP systems that are required, the flow of information, the materials coming together, everything being just in time, these are things that historically are quite hard to do. They’re not sexy in terms of you show a great pitch deck and like people look at that and go, “That’s not that interesting.”

00:13:25 Ben: But it’s actually what drives the most value in a business like this. If you get your projections wrong, if you can’t deliver on time, if you don’t deliver fast enough, if you can’t get your inventory turns right, these are all errors in businesses that can effectively kill a company entirely.

00:13:40 Ben: And so we built a lot of that framework out and we’re pretty full stack on that. So AI customer service, we just build these things pretty rapidly and we just tack them on and we look at it as an infrastructure play over time.

00:13:52 Ben: Yes, we’re building brands. The brands sit in this category of furniture, but they sit on the same stack. Certainly over the last couple of years, we’ve seen that the cost and ability to build a brand is becoming lower and lower to us. And that flywheel is speeding up.

00:14:08 Ben: That anchors back into maybe a core thesis we had from day one, which is, is the value of brand the most important thing in today’s landscape of commerce and e-comm and digital commerce in particular? Or is the ability to build brands at scale and have that flywheel and rinse repeat that more important?

00:14:29 Ben: Our bet was 20 years ago in retail in one category, there were 5 or 10 options. Today there’s probably 2000 options. And so consumers can’t just keep up with brands and the many, many options they have today. They’re going to become less and less loyal to brands because there’s just so many choices.

00:14:48 Ben: If that’s the case, then is it important to have one great brand in furniture or is it more valuable to have the flywheel that can build brands and build the next 50 brands in furniture? That’s the thinking around and ultimately what we’re aiming to build over time.

00:15:02 Jenny: Okay. That was my next question was like, “Where do things go? What’s the big vision?” But that is a big vision, spawning these brands that have the same core in how they deliver to customers and how you architect them.

00:15:16 Jenny: Just so everyone knows, I actually might be interested in a couch. So for anyone that wants to buy a couch, what’s the experience? I go to the CABA website. And then what’s my experience from then to getting to my living room?

00:15:28 Ben: So the brands we offer under CABA, you can find them, anabei.com, chicoryhome.com. So there’s a variety of brands. We have half a dozen today. Anabei.com, it’s free shipping, free returns, free swatches. So you can, generally speaking, get a free swatch set shipped to you that will arrive probably within two to three days at the most, depending on where you are in the US. When you place an order, we have Quickhship that ships in 72 hours. Pretty much you can have a sofa in your living room by end of week.

00:15:58 Jenny: That’s insane. I mean, most places, literally to pick a fabric, it’s going to be minimum 12, but mostly six months.

00:16:07 Ben: And so any configuration, it’s modular in nature. So two, three, four, five seater, any configuration you want to pick, you can select and any fabric. It gets delivered to your front door. We go UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. You can assemble the product. It’s probably, I want to say 5 or 10 minutes per seat to assemble.

00:16:26 Jenny: Your customers actually assemble everything themselves?

00:16:29 Ben: They assemble it themselves, but it’s extremely easy. You basically expand the frame. You put four screws down. You click two things in place. And then you put the foam and you put the covers on and that’s it. And so, very easy to assemble.

00:16:41 Ben: Once you’ve done that, you also know how to disassemble it and you can move it easily. It’s lightweight. You can get the covers off. We have our own product here at my house. We have two small kids and so they will mark things up on our white couch. Once every two months, pull the covers off, throw them in the washing machine, put them back on and we’re done. And so it’s just an ease of mind and mindset of not caring too much about this high-end purchase that is going to get destroyed otherwise.

00:17:04 Jenny: I feel like that’s even easier than IKEA products, which always take some assembling.

00:17:11 Ben: It wasn’t always the case, I would say. So we came a long way in terms of just understanding how do you design flat pack furniture. And things that seemed very easy to us in 2019, we’re like, “Oh, this is great. Everybody’s going to love this.” And then you see the real world feedback. I can’t assemble this. And then you’re like, “Oh, okay. Maybe it’s not that great.”

00:17:28 Ben: And so definitely an evolution over time to just understand how easy does it have to be for it to be really palatable across a broad spectrum of people. Yeah, that took a couple years of trial and error, I would say.

00:17:42 Jenny: So shifting gears because I’m still fascinated by your background. When I got into investing, I knew nothing about investing, really. I was an entrepreneur and fell into the investing side. I remember having a lot of supporters and cheerleaders, but not really mentorship. And so I kind of had to learn by doing. Were there any experiences along the way with people that helped you get where you are today? Because you are very much self taught.

00:18:11 Jenny: And so I’ll give you a fun anecdote for me. When I joined Techstars in 2014, I had been a founder before and I remember I had all these companies, 10 companies, 50 people moving into our office and I was running this program. And I remember saying to the founders of Techstars the day before the cohort started, “Well, are you guys like gonna come and make sure I’m doing it right?”

00:18:32 Jenny: And they were like, “Um No. Just don’t kill anyone and you’ll be fine, Jenny.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s fascinating.” So it really was trial by fire. I was just in it and I had to figure it out myself. It was hard, but in a way, just very rewarding. They were very there and very supportive. We’d have weekly calls and all of that. But what were your experiences figuring out how to manage people or any of these things? Was there anything that sticks out?

00:19:01 Ben: Definitely some trial by fire. Thinking back, there’s always these experiences that shape your thinking about certain things. I would say, at Dot & Bo, one of the first companies I joined, just realizing very quickly that e-comm... narrow margins. You have to be extremely focused on every single penny.

00:19:19 Ben: There was one very comical scene that I remember, which was at the time our CEO saw somebody throw a pen in the garbage and picked it up and said, “Why did you just throw this 25 cent pen out? This is perfectly fine.” And I was like, “Hmm, okay. That’s good.” That was one of those interesting experiences for me.

00:19:38 Ben: But it’s hard to say. Help with managing people, I think a lot of it is self taught. A lot of it is just pattern recognition around what works and what doesn’t work over time. Over the years, managing different people in different categories, creative folks versus operations versus engineering, I think everything requires a little bit of a different touch. That’s, I would say, the easy answer.

00:20:00 Ben: The other piece is probably just feedback. Like what I mentioned before, you put something out there and it can be humbling to see what the feedback is. And then you go, “Okay, well, we’re going to have to do a lot better than that.” And so that’s always been a big part of it for us.

00:20:14 Jenny: What are some of the trends in home design or consumer behaviors that you’re excited about right now? Are consumers moving in the right direction, you’d say? And how is AI or the world we’re living in impacting it?

00:20:27 Ben: Consumers are becoming a lot more aware in terms of sustainable materials and things in their home that are going to be healthy for them. In that sense, things are definitely moving in right direction.

00:20:39 Ben: We care a lot about sort of our eco footprint wastage. Again, we have to. Meaning as a company, if we want to offer extraordinary value to our customers, we need to find ways to minimize waste and consumption and the shipping cost and reduce the weight. And so we do a lot of that inherently because we’re always driving to optimize value.

00:21:01 Ben: But I think that categorically people are going in that direction. Hopefully, that creates less waste. The washable sofa for us is an important one because we also think that people throw product out way too early in its product life cycle because of the cosmetic sort of appearance of that product.

00:21:17 Ben: Even if the fabrics don’t hold up after five years, you can buy a new set of fabric from us and you can get another five years out of your sofa. I think we’re moving in that direction. Certainly there’s other people copying that concept slowly and surely and that’s good. That is actually going to make everyone hold on to their product a little bit longer. In that sense, we’re seeing sort of positive trends.

00:21:36 Ben: In terms of AI and how consumer shopping behavior is, it’s been interesting. We’ve experimented with a lot of these things. They’re incrementally interesting. Some shoppers, I would say single digit percentages, find some value. But I think in the end, this is a category where tactile touch and sense matter. Can you replicate some percentage of that with AR in-room visualization? Perhaps.

00:22:02 Ben: But the most important piece, delivering on a great experience in a timely manner and with good value and letting the customer decide, if I don’t like it, I can return it and I’m not going to get penalized for that. That I think drives more value ultimately for us.

00:22:18 Jenny: I feel like the ability to wash cushions… it used to be like they said you could do it, but it was very hard to get them off and you had to dry clean them. Now, I feel like there has been some good innovation.

00:22:29 Jenny: One of my close friends, she has four kids and she was redoing her living room. When I walked in, it was all white. And I was like, “Not really what I would have chosen for those four rugrats.” She’s like, “No, you just, you know, you can just wash it.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” That’s great.

00:22:43 Ben: The material sciences have come a long way too. So you can achieve those things now with the type of weaving you do with the fabric, both make it stain resistant, make it machine washable. These are all things that otherwise would have complicated that user journey quite a bit.

00:22:57 Jenny: On a personal note, what’s one piece of furniture in your home that means the most to you?

00:23:02 Ben: One, as a designer and over time, you design something and then you look back at your previous design, your V1, and you’re always underwhelmed by it. You do that for a couple of decades and you go, I can’t get attached to V1 or V14 because there will always be a 16 or an 18. And so I don’t know how attached I can be to stuff like that.

00:23:22 Ben: But our couch in the living room, it’s one of our sofas. I think what I like about that product is we did one without a frame, it’s all foam. We have two small kids that dive into the couch and it’s all great, enjoyable, and we don’t have to stress out about it. So that’s probably one that I certainly enjoyed their interaction with it, less more so my own.

00:23:40 Jenny: Okay. Well, this was so fun. We’re going to do a quick speed round before we wrap up. So just one sentence answers or the like. Is there a book you’re reading, a podcast or some media that you’re enjoying right now?

00:23:51 Ben: Amp It Up.

00:23:52 Jenny: If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:23:56 Ben: Tokyo.

00:23:56 Jenny: Favorite productivity hack?

00:23:58 Ben: Loom internal meetings and then replay them at 2x.

00:24:02 Jenny: I love it. 3x for me. And where can listeners find you?

00:24:05 Ben: LinkedIn.com/benparsa.

00:24:08 Jenny: Well, this was so fun, Ben. Great to learn a little more about your history and we’re super excited for CABA and all the brands that you’re launching.

00:24:16 Ben: Awesome. Thanks.

00:24:19 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 Ben Parsa in Founders Everywhere.