Venture Everywhere Podcast: Eric Wimer with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures chats with Eric Wimer, co-founder and CEO of Sway on episode 84: Built to Sway.
In episode 84 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Eric Wimer, founder and CEO of Sway, a next-generation delivery and returns platform reinventing the post-purchase experience for ecommerce. Eric shares Sway’s evolution from a simple idea into a full-stack logistics solution built to streamline delivery and reduce return fraud. Eric also discusses how Sway is scaling by focusing on high-density markets, leveraging partner networks to expand efficiently, and building a culture-first team to power its logistics and tech operations.
In this episode, you will hear:
Sway’s tech-driven approach to returns using doorstep pickups and gig-based logistics.
Creative, capital-efficient strategies Sway is using to expand its national footprint.
Partnering with brands to improve post-purchase experience and loyalty.
The role of network density and demand-side growth in scaling a logistics platform.
Culture and decision frameworks that foster autonomous, mission-driven teams.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 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. Super excited to be here today with my neighbor, my friend, Eric Wimer. Eric is the founder and CEO of Sway, formerly Returnmates, which is giving white glove service around the returns experience for B2B companies, primarily in the ecommerce space and retail.
00:00:55 Scott: Eric, welcome to the podcast. I want to dig into lots of things, including your amazing DJ ability, your history across Uber. I know you were a really early Uber employee, running Philadelphia launch as a young guy and then Uber Eats across the New York and Las Vegas ecosystems. I'm sure you have tons of battle stories and early learnings from being in the trenches that you're now bringing to Sway. Welcome to the podcast.
00:01:20 Eric: Thanks so much for having me.
00:01:22 Scott: Take us through the early journey of your career, how that led to this interest in logistics, in real nuts and bolts businesses. Not just completely digital native, only for the AI world, but things that are brick and mortar and actually have hands and real touch points with the real world. That's something that we love in our portfolio and something that you're really good at.
00:01:40 Eric: At Uber, we called it the bits and atoms, combining the software and the physical world. One thing that a lot of people don't know about me is after college, I actually went and worked at Goldman Sachs for about nine months. I was in a middle office role there and ultimately just didn't feel like it was the right fit for me longer term.
00:01:59 Eric: Everything that I was doing was going into a line item in a report at the end of the month. And so I started doing some research on startups. A friend of mine told me about Uber. I checked them out. I ended up sending a cold email to the head of operations at the time. He got back to me. We jumped on a call early one morning.
00:02:18 Eric: The next thing I knew a couple weeks later I was packing my bags in New York to move to Philadelphia to help launch the business there. That was where my career really felt like it started. It was a lot of responsibility at a very young age to get thrown into this fast growing startup where my main goal was essentially to get the business operational in Philadelphia.
00:02:44 Eric: So for me that was going out and pitching limo companies on why they should take an iPhone from us and use this app called Uber to make money during their downtime. That led me on this path with Uber where I was jumping into multiple cities, eventually different products, like you mentioned with Uber Eats, but that really kicked off the ride.
00:03:06 Scott: It's incredible that flip from being a cog in the wheel, a line item in a big class of analysts in a huge organization like Goldman, as amazing an organization as it is, to jump out and be in the wild west so quickly. I bet that's trial by fire, but incredibly fun.
00:03:22 Scott: It resonates with me. Always feeling like I was the black sheep within large organizations until I've had the self confidence to self identify as more of an entrepreneur and kind of realize, actually, I do belong out in the wilds. Because I certainly don't fit in these cookie cutter boxes over here.
00:03:39 Eric: I can relate to that. The interesting thing was at Goldman, everything was so structured. You went from this incredibly structured environment to essentially complete chaos with zero structure where you're having to create that structure for yourself.
00:03:55 Eric: Early on in my career I remember that being very difficult. How are you managing your time? Where are you spending your time? What are the activities that are actually going to make the most impact? That was really tough.
00:04:08 Eric: I remember nights where I'd be sitting in the office just programming iPhones for hours and then thinking to myself, is this the highest impact activity that I can be doing? But ultimately, at some level it was because you needed to get more drivers on the road for the product to work. But it was very difficult early on to really figure out what to prioritize and why.
00:04:31 Scott: There is a metaphor. One of our portfolio CEOs, Sam Coxe. She's the founder of a company called Flaus, but was previously a Skadden lawyer. Her analogy was a lot of people have a lot of movement, but no momentum or no velocity. She called them rocking horses.
00:04:47 Scott: Within large organizations, you can get away with being a rocking horse where you're constantly moving, you're constantly stressed, you're constantly spending energy, but you're not really going anywhere.
00:04:56 Scott: And when you get into a startup environment, especially like early days of Uber or where you are at Sway, you've got to generate momentum. You've got to have velocity, you got to have people not just spinning their wheels going back and forth, back and forth like a rocking horse.
00:05:10 Scott: But that prioritization is super difficult. How did you think through in those early days setting structure for yourself where you don't yet have best practices, so to speak? I mean, there's some really interesting frameworks I know from Harvard Business Review talking about when you have simple environments or if you can reduce things down to simplicity, you can create best practices.
00:05:30 Scott: The job of a manager, the job of an executive is often to take a chaotic situation, like being on the battlefield if you're a Navy Seal, and reduce it down where it's no longer chaotic, but it's complicated. It’s a system of order of operations. There's a rubric. And then within that, maybe there's a series of best practices for solving against.
00:05:49 Scott: So it's the job of reducing from chaos and complexity down to complicated and simple. But early days of the trenches, how did you fight through that? Was it just trial and error or did you learn any shortcuts?
00:06:01 Eric: In the beginning, it manifested as stress. It was very chaotic. It wasn't that I wasn't executing. I was executing at a high level, but you could argue that it wasn't the most efficient execution.
00:06:16 Eric: I can remember since I was a kid having a to-do list every day. I think it was because my mom always had her to-do list of all the errands she was going to run and all the things she needed to do. So I constantly had that list. I would just try to list out the top three or four things that I knew I had to get done that day that would make the largest impact.
00:06:35 Eric: What's that John Doerr book, Measure What Matters where you think about what are the metrics that you need to focus on that are really going to push the business forward.
00:06:45 Eric: I understood at Uber that getting more driver supply on the road was basically the unlock for growth for that business. Because think about it. If you had five cars on the road, there were only so many trips you were going to be able to complete. Assuming that there's demand, which there was demand.
00:07:01 Eric: People in Philadelphia knew about the product before it was even launched. We had people opening the application. So for us, all the activity was really focused around how do we get more cars out there so that the demand could really build into the supply to ultimately grow the business overall.
00:07:21 Eric: I focused a lot of my energy on how do we reduce the friction to just get more cars on the road. And to your point, I'm simplifying it. There's obviously a lot that went into that. But we had this saying called “more cars” that everyone would rally around because that was ultimately what we had to do.
00:07:38 Scott: That's fascinating. Just getting down to the raw simplicity of it. More cars. I love that as a motto. You guys were very fortunate in a two sided marketplace to have one side of that marketplace basically be unlimited demand called product market fit. People just need to be able to move more freely.
00:07:55 Scott: I still remember it. I'm sure you hear this story from every last person that tells you their initial Uber story, but mine was in San Francisco. I was tired of using the bus. I couldn't figure out how to get across town. I pushed this Uber taxi button. A black S-class Mercedes pulled up. The guy drove me right to where I needed to go. And I said, oh my god. I'm going to use this every single day.
00:08:16 Scott: It was a complete game changer in the city like San Francisco that has completely horrible public transportation. You guys had the benefit of a ton of demand on one side and this unlock of rate limited by number of cars. So you've really focused on that side of the marketplace. Talk us through the nuts and bolts of what Sway does and what some of the challenges are.
00:08:35 Eric: It's interestingly almost the opposite phenomenon with Sway. What we're building at Sway is a next-generation delivery and returns platform. The cool thing is it's all powered by a gig marketplace. So taking a lot of the learnings and the years in the trenches at Uber and applying it to parcel delivery and return pickups.
00:08:56 Eric: Ultimately what that results in is a better experience for customers that's analogous to rideshare and food delivery, cheaper shipping costs for brands, and a positive impact to the environment given we're batching all these routes together in a local neighborhood.
00:09:15 Eric: We have a gig marketplace. These drivers will choose routes for the next day. 40 to 50 stops in a neighborhood. Then they'll show up at one of our warehouse facilities where they pick up all the packages they're going to deliver. And then when they're out on the road, they're dropping packages off and they're picking returns up. So that's our special sauce.
00:09:37 Eric: But when you think about how you grow this business, the big catalyst for us, the thing that creates this virality loop is more sales. So as we bring more brands onto the platform and we increase the density in our markets, it creates this critical flywheel of more volume equals lower driver costs for us, which equals higher margins, which drives the company to profitability faster.
00:10:09 Eric: Uber was the same way. As the demand continued to pick up and up, Uber was able to get to profitability and start generating a lot of free cash flow.
00:10:19 Eric: Interestingly, the demand side is the side that we spend a lot of our time on. Not to say the supply side isn't important, but a lot of that has already been figured out and is productized. And so we spend a lot of our energy on really getting more brand customers onto our platform.
00:10:38 Scott: In the journey of finding this market and this problem to work on, what brought your attention to this set of problems? Was it the explosion of ecommerce, the fact that people order three pairs of shoes for every one that they keep and they return two? And I know this hurts the bottom line of a ton of businesses, managing the after purchase experience. But what was it about this that really piqued your interest, or how did you find your way into building Sway?
00:11:04 Eric: Yeah. We fell into it. My co-founder Kristian and I were on a bad trip to the post office. I don't know that there's ever a good trip.
00:11:12 Scott: I don't think so.
00:11:13 Eric: So I was in there for thirty minutes. It was during COVID, and I asked him if he wanted to take a walk. I was walking down the street with my little package and he had no idea what I was doing.
00:11:22 Eric: So I went in. Thirty minutes later, I came out and he just said, what were you doing for so long? And I told him, I was sending back a return. I didn't have any tape so I had to barter with the post office worker for tape and figure the whole thing out. He just looked at me and said that's exactly why I don't shop online. He said I would never go through what you just went through.
00:11:43 Eric: I'm the opposite by the way. I've basically got a fulfillment center or reverse logistics center running out of my apartment constantly sending things back. So that was really what triggered it and it shined a light on this issue which is the returns process is just so broken.
00:12:00 Eric: When you think about delivery, generally people have done a decent job at delivery, at getting packages to you. But then as soon as you need to send something back, you're jumping through all these hoops.
00:12:11 Eric: You're printing labels. You're having to find a box. You're driving to UPS, FedEx, or the post office to send it back. You're waiting a really long time for your refund. You lose a lot of visibility in the process. And then on top of that for the brands, a quarter of returns go into a landfill. So they're spending all this money to get product back for it to never go back on the shelf. It is just fundamentally broken.
00:12:36 Eric: So day by day, we got more and more excited about the opportunity to solve that problem, which is really what led us to Returnmates, which was the consumer version of the business that we have today. The reason we rebranded to Sway is because now we do both deliveries and returns. So Sway was the forward and backward logistics motion.
00:12:58 Scott: Oh, I love that. That's cool. It's funny. A quick anecdote to your point of returns being such a part of people's lives. My sister and her husband have a closet with a large table where there's inbound packages, outbound packages with a whole wall of tape, a whole wall of scissors, a whole wall of things. They've literally dedicated a corner of their home to inbound and outbound logistics of ecommerce.
00:13:23 Scott: It makes our family laugh because, one, it's how organized they are as a couple. But, two, it speaks to the level of this problem in people's lives, especially with young babies and you're ordering things and you're doing things online.
00:13:34 Scott: But brands obviously feel this in their bottom line. I know this is another issue as people actually send back things that aren't even the item. They're getting the money back, but not actually returning the item at hand. I know that return fraud is an issue as well.
00:13:49 Eric: Totally. It was about 10% of returns last year were fraud. Think about that for a second. People are sending back damaged items that can't go back on the shelf. They're sending back the wrong items.
00:14:02 Eric: So as we've been processing returns over the last five years, we've gotten everything from a can of tomato soup in a PS3 box. We've gotten all sorts of things. The reason people do that is because no one's checking the item until it gets all the way back to the warehouse. And so it's a much more impersonal experience.
00:14:23 Eric: Whereas when we come to the door and pick something up, they know a driver is coming to grab the item and then we actually look at the items in our warehouse. So we basically eliminate fraud with our product because there's eyes on it before we would send it back. So we can let the brand know, hey, we've got a can of tomato soup. I'm sure you don't want us to charge you $6 to send this back to your warehouse, that type of thing. So we become a really critical piece of the process to prevent fraud.
00:14:56 Scott: That's fascinating. When you think of the scalability of a logistics business, how do you guys think about scale, and how do you think about this network density like you mentioned? Were you guys hyper focused?
00:15:08 Scott: Because obviously, you go after brands that have distribution to clients that could be a lot of places. This dynamic of brands and returns being lots of places, but needing to build that network density specifically in locations where you can get drivers and you can get that warehouse density and all those things, how do you navigate those two sides of the equation?
00:15:30 Eric: You just described the biggest challenge of this business. The thing we spend the most time thinking about is this chicken or the egg problem. It's been like that since day one.
00:15:40 Eric: So, when we launched, we were just in Los Angeles. So in theory, we could really only service distribution centers that were in Los Angeles for deliveries or consumers who were in Los Angeles for returns because the returns are obviously starting with the consumer versus the distribution center.
00:16:00 Eric: Sales were really difficult in the early days but we were able to convert some brands and sell them on the dream of what we were going to build. Today we cover about 20% of the U.S. population with our Sway network. Meaning, the drivers that we onboard onto our platform to do the deliveries and the returns.
00:16:18 Eric: But we've actually gotten really creative. We acquired a company called Swyft Technologies a couple years ago. And that technology that we have now enables us to leverage other carriers in parts of the country where we don't currently have a physical footprint.
00:16:35 Eric: I'll give you an example. In Chicago, we have a great partner there that is delivering packages on a daily basis with a Sway label on them. The consumers are getting text messages from us, getting notifications about the delivery.
00:16:50 Eric: The one challenge with that model is we're adding another party into the mix. So our margin gets compressed a bit, but it lets us build up that density before we would set up our footprint. So it's a hyper capital efficient way to scale.
00:17:07 Eric: That network gets us closer to 40% to 50% U.S. population coverage. That's been a hack that we've deployed to build up density in these places before we actually go and set up our footprint.
00:17:21 Scott: That's fascinating. As you guys have iterated over the last few years, you guys have raised around $20,000,000 or a bit more to date. What's it been like to go from scrappy couple guys with an idea to having raised and managed large teams, large amounts of money? I know that you had to do that as a GM at Uber, but how has it been different, or what have the learnings been in running Sway over these last few years?
00:17:45 Eric: Building any type of company is hard, for sure. The one thing about Sway is given this mix of bits and atoms, you have a high reliance on people and their ability to execute, plus the technology that you have to build to orchestrate everything and make it all work. And so the biggest challenge for us and what we've learned over the years is hiring is just very, very difficult.
00:18:16 Eric: Making key hires and putting the right people in the right seats is arguably one of the most important things, especially with a logistics business where, again, it's this combination of technology and what we call the dirty work. Actually physically dropping a package off, bringing a return back to the warehouse and taking a look at it and making sure the item gets repurposed.
00:18:42 Eric: The biggest learnings that we've had is better identifying talent and better matching them to the responsibilities of the role. What I've learned is when you're growing quickly, you want to hire quickly. But in reality, you should spend the most time on that hiring process to make sure you have the right people because those decisions ultimately end up being so expensive.
00:19:07 Eric: When you hire the wrong person, the true costs of that are just incredible. And so spending more time upfront, being more thoughtful about the hiring process have been a couple of things that we've learned the hard way. But we're a lot better at it now than we were a couple years ago.
00:19:26 Scott: I say this often, but HR gets shunned to the side of organizations sometimes. It's really such a central function to building team building culture. Just to your point, the cost or the ramifications of not only the time you spend to build pipeline, interview, hire, onboard, train, and then potentially need to also manage out performance improvement plans and do it in the right way according to employment law and all of the ramifications in and around that.
00:19:56 Scott: But that whole journey is such an important decision. You think of the way that people do their homework to adopt a SaaS tool. They might dig into 20 different SaaS tools, compare and contrast them, run a whole internal set of meetings and analysis to spend $500 a month on a tool versus dropping 5 or 10 grand a month on a hire, you do it in a weekend in a blitz, the tool is actually capable of just unsubscribing. You can't quite do that with an employee.
00:20:24 Scott: I think it's something that we've learned as well and a lot of organizations have to come to terms with is hiring and building culture. What kinds of stylistic things about culture or work ethic maybe did you learn at Uber that help you guys drive the train at Sway, good and bad?
00:20:42 Scott: There's a line about culture, that culture is what happens when you leave the room, when Eric goes home and you're not there, you're not the boss cracking the whip. Culture is the ethos that you've developed, the hires that you've created, the managers, the in between. How do you create culture, and what did you learn at Uber to do that effectively at Sway?
00:21:00 Eric: Culture is one of those things. It's never too early to be thinking about it or to start incorporating it. It is basically a day zero activity. Whether you know it or not, you have a culture.
00:21:14 Eric: Uber was interesting because it was very much this unspoken culture for a period of time when I first started there. Travis was amazing at identifying exactly what that was and setting up a batch of cultural values, which another way that I think about culture is just how do you make decisions? Because that's ultimately what's happening. It's the behaviors. It's the decision making.
00:21:40 Eric: And so very early on, we set up three or four initial cultural values because we wanted to keep it tight. We wanted them to be things that people remember, we ended up adding one over time.
00:21:53 Eric: One of the coolest experiences, and I described this to some of my friends about a week ago and as we were just talking about the businesses, I got onto a call. I didn't have to say a word. And the team got to the same decision that Kristian and I would have gotten to.
00:22:10 Eric: It wasn't one of those obvious decisions. There was a lot of thoughtfulness involved. There was deep conversation. That to me was one of the most rewarding moments I can remember as a founder at the company because it means that we got the culture right.
00:22:26 Eric: It means that the culture has been embedded into the organization, and they are now behaving the way that we would behave in a tough decision making process. And so to your point, it's something that you have to have it. Because if you're not thoughtful about it, it will just steer in a direction that you may not want it to steer in.
00:22:48 Scott: You got to lead from the front. I learned this as a interim COO for a buddy of mine a decade back where we had a stand up every single day. If you were two minutes late to the daily stand up, you were called out, there was a culture around being on time, being there. And it didn't matter if the train was late. It didn't matter. He was there on time. He really drove culture from the top of the organization.
00:23:11 Scott: But it's so rewarding, it's incredible that experience, that moment that you just talked about where you realize that you've done it right in many ways, that you've been able to instill these values. You can take your hands off the wheel, and the organization is operating according to the values and according to the goals that you guys have set forth over the last three or four years.
00:23:32 Scott: The holy grail experience of ecommerce returns where you would love to take Sway and provide this experience to some of your clients, what does that look like?
00:23:41 Eric: Like I said, delivery today is not bad. It could still be better, but it's not a terrible experience. UPS, FedEx, all these large players, they've been delivering packages the same way for the last fifty to a hundred years since those companies have been around.
00:24:00 Eric: And so when I think about what's the future of the post purchase experience, one is when you're going into checkout, you know exactly when your package is going to show up and you know how you're going to get your return back if it doesn't work out. So having that peace of mind because that peace of mind will enable more people to shop online, it will encourage them to convert and get through that funnel.
00:24:27 Eric: But then once the package is out for delivery and coming to their door, we want to provide an option for the customer to send a return back, to ship a package that they just sold on a marketplace. And we can handle all of that at the same time.
00:24:46 Eric: The way I like to describe it is think about bringing the UPS store to the doorstep where we could handle anything related to shipping at the same time. And the reason that's so important is because for each incremental package you're adding at the door, you're making the economics even better for that trip.
00:25:09 Eric: Because if you think about it today, you look out your window, there's an Amazon truck, there's a FedEx truck, there's UPS, there's someone in a Prius dropping off a package. Our belief is that all that can eventually be batched more together where we're delivering maybe a package from Nordstrom and then we're picking up Amazon and Revolve returns from the same doorstep. That's where reducing miles on the road and all of these opportunities to make an environmental impact come into play as well.
00:25:40 Scott: There's got to be some positive environmental impact as somebody like yourself that orders lots of stuff online. Some things I will literally stop ordering because the packaging itself drives me nuts. I'd rather get in the car and drive a mile down the street and not have 15 boxes go into landfill.
00:25:57 Scott: I love the fact that you guys have this green climate angle as well. As you optimize logistics, as you optimize this consumer experience with businesses on the front end driving that, it has all these knock on effects for climate and fewer miles on the road.
00:26:13 Scott: Going back to your metaphor of the bits and atoms, with all the rapid fire changes in AI, how are you guys thinking about the automation stack, leveraging some of these new tools? When you adopt something deep into the stack of the organization, there obviously is some adoption risk or some platform reliance on some of these tools.
00:26:31 Scott: But how do you think of this wild west that we're in of just AI and automation and how it starts to impact what you guys do?
00:26:38 Eric: It's pretty cool. I can imagine that this is very similar to the launch of the Internet, just with regards to how quickly people are adopting this type of stuff, the world's more interconnected now. So adoption levels with ChatGPT and a lot of these consumer tools is just astronomical.
00:26:58 Eric: But it's something I'm using every day. Everyone at the company, I'm encouraging them to use it on a daily basis for anything that may have taken them a lot of time before from an administrative standpoint. It's great for research.
00:27:14 Eric: But the ways that we've started to incorporate this into our product roadmap… so we have a photo auditing tool. Envision this. A driver drops a package off. They take a few pictures. They take a picture of the label, of the door, and of the number of the address.
00:27:32 Eric: That flows into a system and measures whether it's a safe delivery or not. So imagine if somebody left the package on the sidewalk and took a picture of it. This would flag it. It sends a text message to the driver to notify them to go back and correct the delivery.
00:27:48 Eric: What that's resulted in for us is we lose one third the packages that the national carriers lose. And that data comes straight from the brands that we work with. That's one small application. Machine learning, viewing photos.
00:28:04 Eric: Another really good application for us is going to be customer support. There's a lot of questions that we get like where's my package that you don't need a human to answer. They can auto populate the links to the tracking page. There's a lot of things that AI can help with there.
00:28:20 Eric: But generally, my view on AI is it's just changing the way we build at the end of the day. Every company is going to be using it if they're not already. So it is just going to become to us what these other legacy systems were ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. It's just accelerating the pace at which we can do things. Generally, you can do things with fewer resources now.
00:28:46 Scott: It's pretty incredible. It's interesting that the wrappers around some of these terms have changed. Like AI agents, I think of it as now a slightly more complex series of tasks, like If This Then That, or Zapier were doing ten years ago.
00:29:00 Scott: What we've learned in adopting some of these tools internally at Everywhere, we use one of our portfolio companies which is called Mixus AI. It enables you, with natural language build and generate an agent that can perform a set of complex tasks.
00:29:13 Scott: But whereas Zapier might be off the shelf and get stuck with the modern tools, you can now say, hey, go to Google's APIs, read the documentation, come up with a way to query our inbox more frequently, and it can learn those tasks.
00:29:27 Scott: So to your point, these automation flows, the tip of the iceberg as far as building internal systems and tools that enable your employees to level up from the human side and do some of these rote and routine tasks a bit more efficiency using AI. It's such a fascinating time to be building like you said.
00:29:43 Scott: In the last moments of the podcast, we have a little speed round, a little lightning round. What's a favorite book or newsletter, or podcast you're digging into currently?
00:29:52 Eric: One of the books that I always go back to is The Power of the Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. In a nutshell, it talks about how you're basically just creating your reality subconsciously. Everything you think becomes reality.
00:30:10 Eric: It's focusing in on everything from, hey, if you're sick, you've had that thought of being sick at some point in the past and it's eventually manifested or whether you become wealthy over time. It takes this repeated pattern of positive thinking in order to realize those things.
00:30:31 Eric: I always come back to it. There's an abridged version that they do it in thirty minutes, I listen to that once a week just as a reminder of just how much you need to focus on what you're actually thinking to create those realities. So that's a good one.
00:30:46 Scott: Is that something that you do through mindfulness or meditation as well? Or is that something that you incorporate into your practice?
00:30:53 Eric: Yeah. I have a life coach I've been working with for four years, this woman, Lauren Zander. She's amazing. She's always recommending things that I listen to. I'll do everything from recording the design of my day into my phone and then listening to that when I meditate so I can really center around these things that I want to accomplish in a day or perhaps really ambitious goals that I'm inching closer towards.
00:31:18 Eric: So all those types of things. I guess it sounds super Venice-y but those are the mindfulness practices that have really helped me. It keeps me centered. Also helps relieve stress, all those types of things. You know how it goes. As a founder, every day is a bit of a roller coaster. So it's good to have that opportunity to level out.
00:31:35 Scott: Yeah. As somebody who loves living in Venice near you, if you couldn't live here and you had to live somewhere else on the planet, where would that be?
00:31:44 Eric: I did this thing last year where I spent about six weeks in Aspen. One of my goals with that was to just snowboard essentially every day. It was because I wanted to get really good at it, I was definitely insanely improved by the end.
00:32:01 Eric: And so if I had to go somewhere for a year, one place that comes to mind is Costa Rica. Probably a beach there whether it's Santa Teresa or Nosara. The reason I would want to do that is similar. I'd want to just get in the water every single day to surf where there's much better waves than there are in Southern California. And it's a lot warmer. The water's 90 degrees. I think I would just really enjoy that and would definitely dramatically improve the surfing.
00:32:30 Scott: You've already answered my next question, which was what do you do to unwind when you're stressed? Sounds like snowboard, surf, meditation, Gold's Gym maybe.
00:32:38 Eric: And music. Music is the other big one. Really like to play music. I've started dabbling with some production. It's very therapeutic for me. It has always been a big part of my life. And so I've just found that as a good outlet. I think anyone who starts a company, you're tied to that company every second of every day. It's essentially a child.
00:32:59 Eric: It's really critical that you have outlets that you can go into to get different perspective, refresh your mind, work your brain in a different way. Those activities that you listed are those things for me.
00:33:12 Scott: It's fun. I know that you have a passion for electronic music. I was at an event with a friend a few weeks back and thinking about beats and listening to a specific cadence or note and being able to pattern match that to a song. I started calling it music bingo.
00:33:27 Scott: But the first note of a song would play, and I'd say, oh, it's this one. It's that one. And he said, oh my god. How are you picking up on this? And I was thinking about this in the context of pattern matching and venture and startups. Being able to listen for a specific note, a specific beat, and kind of being able to pattern match that like music bingo.
00:33:44 Scott: But I know that you spend a lot of time DJ-ing and have an incredible talent for that. So you have to let our listeners know when your next trip is going to be in Ibiza or some place.
00:33:53 Eric: Oh, I love that. No. That's awesome. That's a really cool analogy. There are so many technical components of it. The parallels that I see with music and startups is it's a totally blank canvas.
00:34:06 Eric: There are an unlimited number of possibilities of the directions that you go in, it's not dissimilar than what you see every day at a startup where you have to get comfortable in that chaos, in that unknown, beautiful things can happen from it. But it's an acquired skill for sure.
00:34:25 Scott: The incredible thing as you're up there on the decks, you've got your USB stick. You're playing music. It's coming out of the speakers. It's real time. You're on the frontier of if you make a mistake or you don't match or you don't do the right thing, people are going to hear it and there’s some consequences.
00:34:40 Scott: There’s an intensity to that which is like running a company. You don't quite know where you're going. You're really on the frontier and people are going to know when you mess up.
00:34:49 Eric: 100%.
00:34:50 Scott: There's something about that that's both invigorating, but also scary as hell.
00:34:53 Eric: I completely agree. A really funny realization that I had. My life coach very much points things out that should have been very obvious to me. And one of them when I got into DJ-ing was she recognized very quickly that I love the adrenaline.
00:35:08 Eric: I love the adrenaline. That's why I build companies. That's why I get so excited about being a founder and I love sales and I love fundraising and the whole process around it. She's like, “It's adrenaline.” That's what you love. So I like the pressure. I like the opportunity to overcome the pressure.
00:35:26 Scott: That's amazing. Where can listeners find you? I assume the website, but then also on Spotify?
00:35:31 Eric: Yeah. LinkedIn, just Eric Wimer, my name on LinkedIn. Wimes on Instagram. I have some of my music stuff on there, but those are probably the two easiest places.
00:35:40 Scott: Incredible. Thanks so much for everything you're doing with Sway. We're super stoked to be a small part of the journey, early investor in the company and watching the journey over the last four or five years, a neighbor or friend. Thanks for being on the podcast with us.
00:35:54 Eric: Thanks for having me, and thank you guys for the support. You guys were day zeros. We appreciate it.
00:35:59 Scott: Awesome. Thanks, Eric.
00:36:02 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 two fifty 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.