Venture Everywhere Podcast: Jennifer Brisman with Scott Hartley
Jennifer Brisman, the co-founder and CEO of VOW, chats with Scott Hartley, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 89: The VOW Factor in Live Events.
In episode 88 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Jennifer Brisman, co-founder and CEO of VOW — an AI-enabled platform transforming guest management for live events. Drawing on two decades as a live event producer, Jennifer discusses how she built VOW to replace the broken spreadsheets behind every event and reimagine how organizers, sponsors, and guests connect. Jennifer also shares VOW’s journey, unifying the fragmented live event ecosystem into a seamless end-to-end platform, and building trust around AI in a high-stakes, human-first industry.
In this episode, you will hear:
VOW’s real-time seating, guest lists, and ticketing to sync across devices
Balances human strategy with AI automation to power high-stakes live experiences
Scales effortlessly from intimate gatherings to high-profile global events
Empowers organizers, sponsors, and partners with shared visibility and control
Delivering the first guest-facing event assistant in every attendee’s hand
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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 Scott: Hi everybody, I'm Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures. I'm super excited to be here today with Jennifer Brisman. Jennifer's a long time friend and the co-founder and CEO of a company called VOW.
00:00:45 Scott: VOW is basically AI enabled technology platform for guest management for premium live experiences. If you think about all the bells and whistles and complexity that goes into hosting with hundreds of people, dynamically changing seating, needing all these different things, VOW is really building a technology solution for that.
00:01:02 Scott: So Jennifer, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here. Tell us a little bit more about this platform that you've been building for the last couple of years.
00:01:09 Jennifer: I love it. Well, first of all, thank you, Scott. And so appreciative to have Everywhere Ventures and before that The FundXX in our corner. Certainly set us up for success and just really proud to be in your ecosystem.
00:01:22 Jennifer: In a way, you and Jenny have grown the network and more broadly supporting the earliest stage founders and that you guys continue to grow. So thank you for that. And thanks for asking the question.
00:01:32 Jennifer: The way I think about it today is we are giving live events a brain. We're actually asking ourselves that question as a product, as a development team every day: what if your event had a brain? It's a really different question and thought process around how do we support the live event ecosystem, how do we disrupt, what are the tools people need?
00:01:56 Jennifer: And so ultimately we're taking a highly, highly fragmented landscape that we call live events, which is lacquered with shuffling between multiple apps. So behind every great event, you have a broken spreadsheet. You have email and you have SMS. You have seating. You have ticketing. You have fan engagement. You have pen. You have paper. You have lanyards. You have check-in teams. You have all the things.
00:02:23 Jennifer: We're ultimately taking that fragmentation and eliminating it. We're creating the most hyper-connected tool for any vertical in live events. Whether it is a concert or a fashion show, whether it's a corporate event or a summit, we are creating an all-in-one tool that gives superpowers to event professionals and gives guests, attendees, and fans the first guest-facing assistant right in the palm of their hand. So we're giving everybody superpowers.
00:02:57 Jennifer: But I think what's also interesting about what we're doing is because event data is so dynamic, it's ever-changing. It's very much like NASDAQ. Your health data about you might change every minute, but the health data stored in your doctor's office does not. Most of our data is not dynamic, but VOW’s is. And so it's creating this unbelievable all-in-one platform, not just across features, but across stakeholders.
00:03:26 Jennifer: So we're giving event professionals superpowers. We're giving the end users, the event goers superpowers. But we're doing it in a way that gives all stakeholders across the live event journey a lens into live data at any point in time. And we're doing it always from a place of trust.
00:03:44 Jennifer: It's where we start, it's where we end. So that's the long way of saying, yes, we have a powerful tool but we're really reimagining ways to give more power to people than just on screen, what they're looking at, what they're staring at every day.
00:04:00 Scott: It's so interesting because it seems like in other domains, in flight planning, for example, there are detailed seating charts of every major airline, every flight type, whether it's an Airbus A380 or a Boeing 787. And you know where the plugs are, you know where the TVs are.
00:04:17 Scott: There's such dynamic or understanding of optimizing human movement from A to B on planes. But yet, as you say, the status quo for events has been this highly fragmented market.
00:04:30 Scott: Are there learnings that you took out of playbooks from other sectors or other experiences? And maybe walk us through the origin of the problem. We tend to back what we call the empath founders that have a deep understanding or rooted in the problem space. Not necessarily somebody that's just coming up with an idea and looking for a problem to solve but somebody who's deeply understood it and lived that experience themselves.
00:04:52 Scott: So maybe walk us through the genesis of what was it in your background that led you to want to solve this problem? And then maybe what parallels did you look to harvest ideas from to help bring a solution to a market that was a bit stale?
00:05:06 Jennifer: Yeah, and I'm a great founder to do that because as a live event producer, I lived the pain for 20 years. The first iteration of pain was just at a communication level. I would work on things a decade, two decades ago on my computer.
00:05:20 Jennifer: The only way to share it with anyone, a stakeholder or a client, was to ship it via email or fax or pen and paper. By the time it hit them, the data was changed. And so everybody was always looking at stale data, even like venues and vendors.
00:05:35 Jennifer: So as an event planner, you're a contractor. You aggregate a fleet of experts to do different things and bring it to life, to have this one spontaneous moment. And even if it's rinse and repeat, somebody's having quarterly investor conferences, or you're at Yelp and you're having business events every month or you're Apple and you're having hundreds of experiential events a year. Everything's dynamic. And as the people come together, it's spontaneous.
00:06:04 Jennifer: So the first problem I had was communication and collaboration. Google Docs only got things so far. So I really did iterate a way to bring together all sides of the market on and around 2004. We built a bit of a universal CRM meets Marketplace. It was built in C++ Microsoft Visual Basic and a few other tools.
00:06:24 Jennifer: But you had to have people who were willing to log in and use it. And it was so early in market, nobody was willing to log in and use it. And so came back in 2019. And I would say, to your point about what other solutions I looked at at market, the first solution I looked at was really Slack and Yammer.
00:06:42 Jennifer: David Sacks had built Yammer at that point. Slack, then Basecamp came along. These are really early stage communication and collaboration tools. And what was cool about Slack is that you were communicating in threads.
00:06:55 Jennifer: If I'm an event producer, I am globally part of many threads. But you can't really thread the world together on emails, certainly not the right way. I'm on a thread with different types of emails and then in those clients, I'm on different types of communication.
00:07:12 Jennifer: So the first product I had really built was meant to emulate really hyper-focused communication channels that you add information and event details to, but also need to extract.
00:07:23 Jennifer: Again, super, super hard to get all the fleets of experts to do their part and come into that ecosystem. Getting a client to come in is one thing, but getting fleets of experts. And so as the world evolved, some of that pain got solved for and some of it shifted.
00:07:41 Jennifer: What I saw happen during and after the pandemic was really a hyper focus on the guest experience. So the B2B was super strong and many people had come at how do we support event professionals in any vertical.
00:07:58 Jennifer: We absolutely did look at how people move through plane. I always say, it's one big event. You're moving everybody in the same direction. It's a perfect example. We also looked at things on the sports side, things in fan engagement.
00:08:11 Jennifer: What we found was that everything that became about a guest really became about cannibalizing that guest's data. So when we think about what a guest is, I think about the guest as the gold. It's just a button to see whether you call someone a guest, an attendee, a fan, a participant, they're really a button to see their top line revenue.
00:08:34 Jennifer: And really for us, the guest experience became the focus of the last few years and it certainly is today in part because event organizers are one to one of many. You have an event organizer in-house, any brand or any agency, they're planning dozens of events.
00:08:52 Jennifer: Those dozens of events across a year could be representative of 100,000 guests. And if you're touching a guest 10 times with emails and tickets and communication, you could be having a quarter of a million touch points across just a few organizers.
00:09:09 Jennifer: So the ability to give organizers superpowers at scale that then touch essentially thousands of consumers, thousands of eyeballs, really became representative in the market today in terms of transactions converting them whether you walk into a stadium or South by Southwest, knowing your behavior, what you're buying, where you're going, how you're transacting, looking at your credit card receipts.
00:09:33 Jennifer: For us, it became about really more of the guest experience, which was giving Scott a better experience. So today, if you go into any stadium, you buy two kids sweatshirts, the next day you're going to have Disney on Ice in your inbox.
00:09:47 Jennifer: For us, it's really thinking about, Scott, that last week you went to South by Southwest, the week before that you went to Uber's Investor Day, maybe you went to a wedding, maybe you went to an opening night, and taking that more broad data we have on you and giving you a better end-to-end experience for the next event you go to.
00:10:06 Jennifer: And so we're really thinking about the B2B side, but also the B2C side, and absolutely looking at tangential markets over the years of what not to do, but also what to do.
00:10:18 Jennifer: But I think where we soar today is in ensuring that all stakeholders across the live event journey have real-time data at their fingertips across any device and very cool integrations, real-time integrations across really unique features that organizers tackle everywhere, every day.
00:10:43 Jennifer: So being able to have your guest list, talk to your seating map, your seating map talk to your tickets, and also have all of your sponsors, corporate partners, groups working in VOW today in real time.
00:10:54 Jennifer: We have the bones of just an incredibly deep, pain-free platform, but we are also thinking on the daily, how do we give event organizers superpowers? How do we give events a brain?
00:11:07 Scott: Maybe talk to people a little bit about just market size, number one. And then also just around playing against the grain.
00:11:14 Scott: Obviously you are founding effectively a platform for live events coming out of an era of COVID when there were no live events. It's so easy to have seen investors with that knee-jerk reaction of how is this possibly a big enough market.
00:11:30 Scott: Or we've seen this in the wedding space or we've seen this in other spaces, where people map you onto things that you don't find are relevant to the vision and the scale of the opportunity that you see. How did you combat that as a founder?
00:11:42 Scott: I know that you've just closed $2.5 million, oversubscribed round. You have turned the corner of convincing that exterior investor set of the scale of this market opportunity, but it hasn't been easy. And I know that often the best companies are born out of moments of adversity or born out of moments where they are a square peg in a round hole.
00:12:02 Scott: And in many ways, building a live events company out of the ashes of COVID, speaks to you as a gritty founder and somebody who's been able to persevere against those early headwinds.
00:12:14 Scott: But also I think it speaks to the scale of the opportunity and the fact that nobody else or very, very few people are doing what you're doing. Which when we look back at the genesis of Uber and Airbnb and things coming out of 2008 financial crisis, it's because many people weren't jumping into the deep end like they were.
00:12:32 Scott: So maybe walk us through some of those moments on the early part of the journey and how you told the narrative or combated some of those early headwinds.
00:12:39 Jennifer: During the pandemic, when live events were shut down, I definitely took a hard look at the market. So it's a $2 trillion market. You can't play everywhere. What I noticed was a few key things.
00:12:51 Jennifer: One, it was hyper verticalized. Everybody had a B2B software for different types of events, whether it's exhibition trade shows, whether it was marketing events. Everybody had a different type of platform.
00:13:05 Jennifer: The other thing was they left the consumer out. So to that point before the pandemic, most consumers didn't want to put apps on their phones. The pandemic forced us all to. During live events, as they came back at the end of the pandemic, this was really the inflection point for VOW.
00:13:24 Jennifer: So we had supported live events with a COVID screening platform during the pandemic, which meant everybody had to have a cleared pass on their phone. What we were able to do was really interact with guests, attendees, and fans to better understand what would or wouldn't be their motivation.
00:13:43 Jennifer: Right now today, the only real true massive comp in the market is a ticketing platform, the Ticketmasters and SeatGeeks. You can't get into any stadium without your ticket. There's transactions around that ticket for you, Scott, but there's no real experience. We call it the fan experience because it's just driving you further to engage as a fan. But it's really just fandom.
00:14:06 Jennifer: So how I really thought about it is why wasn't the market able to be dominated by another player? What I saw in my thesis was that the consumer was left out. So the majority of players were B2B instead of B2B2C.
00:14:23 Jennifer: And there's another important player, which was corporate hosts. They're like a bubble of guests. It's like one to many and two themselves. And corporate hosts are what drives so much revenue. Corporate partners, we call them sponsors. And so this was really the inflection point for us.
00:14:40 Jennifer: We felt that if we were able to touch these larger ecosystems, the corporate sponsors, the partners, and we were able to touch the guest and do so from a place of trust – not cannibalizing their data, not messing with their data, but just really aggregating them around the event, that this would be a huge win.
00:14:58 Jennifer: And it was a really different way of thinking. It's what our event organizers, what the biggest brands in the world depend on us for. Otherwise, if you're working B2B with your team, you then still have to shuffle around emails and other forms of communications, platforms and apps.
00:15:14 Jennifer: So that's really how we differ in terms of how we think about market size. If you just look at it B2B, it's unfortunately a little bit too small. But if you look at it as B2B2C and more than that, now the world opens up.
00:15:29 Scott: So for people that maybe go to events like I might that's a concert, you book on StubHub or on SeatGeek or Ticketmaster. It's a wedding and a table arrangement with either a fish or a meat dish.
00:15:43 Scott: I remember it was mind blowing when you first told me about some of the events at the scale of say the MET Gala where there really are an extreme number of moving pieces, corporate sponsorships that are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars; the need for depth of understanding about the guest list when you have live TV involved, the shuffling of guests behind the scenes to fill seats so they're not empty at things like the Tony’s or the Oscar’s.
00:16:08 Scott: Walk us through at the extreme end of event planning, what some of these moving pieces are. Cause I think that your platform, it's so much more than buy a ticket, or a wedding event where it's just about veg or non veg at the end of the table and then go dance.
00:16:23 Scott: But there's a level of complexity. There's a level of dollar flows across corporate sponsorships. There's a frequency of events, as you mentioned, with corporates like say Apple or somebody who's doing major events on a high cadence.
00:16:37 Scott: So maybe walk us through the depth of the complexity that I think that this platform has and also that the market has that people don't often see what's the knee-jerk reaction of, oh, another ticketing platform. We've seen those for 10, 20 years, which I don't think you guys are at all.
00:16:51 Jennifer: Organizers play a game of Tetris around seating for the biggest events in the world. That doesn't mean every event has seating, but the vast majority of customers that come to us have complexity around seating from 200 to 20,000 people.
00:17:06 Jennifer: And usually if you make a change on a seating map, there are a series of manual, repetitive tasks. You got to change it on a spreadsheet. You got to let a sponsor know. You got to let five people on your team know. VOW actually has a seating map that talks to a guest list. It also talks to a ticket, all in real time.
00:17:30 Jennifer: So Everywhere Ventures could have an allocation of 50 seats at a stadium and Scott says, I want our best portfolio of founders to sit in the front row and our LPs are going to sit in the second row. And that LP calls and he says, I just gave Everywhere Ventures a half a million dollars. I want to sit in the front row. And Scott goes in and makes changes.
00:17:50 Jennifer: You don't have to shuffle around tickets. You don't have to alert people on your team. You don't have to alert the venue. A change in one place is a change in all the places and in real time across all devices.
00:18:06 Jennifer: So our platform knows how to manage version control and race conditions and all these fun things that at the most simple level just give the organizer or the host, who's controlling a subset of seats or a table at a fundraiser or a conference room, the ability for all the parties to make any seating changes, knowing that when I look at a guest list or my guest tickets will all be updated in real time.
00:18:34 Jennifer: So we built that trifecta of features so that everybody could stop shuffling between multiple platforms. Typically, if I'm an event organizer, I might have a PDF of a room on one side or seating software, as they call it. I might then have a spreadsheet and every time I make a change, I got to let my team know on email or Slack or phone or walking over to their desk. Now it's all in one breath, one click, real time.
00:19:02 Jennifer: And where we have customers that have thousands of corporate partners, typically what would happen is if you are the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, you might have 300, 400, 500 tables. Maybe Amazon has one table, maybe Verizon has another table, maybe UBS has another table, and you would go back and forth with emails, with guest lists in there.
00:19:24 Jennifer: And every time a corporate sponsor wanted a change, you'd have to change it on the spreadsheet. You'd have to let someone on the team know. You'd have to add more tickets and send them more QR codes. Now, a corporate sponsor working in VOW can add all of their guests, manage their guests in real time, who gets what ticket type.
00:19:44 Jennifer: Everything jumps into the main organizer's dashboard all in real time. And anybody makes a change to a ticket, it makes a change everywhere. So it's just this incredible looking glass. It's a very different way of working and thinking. We had to build a lot of trust around it.
00:19:59 Jennifer: I would say to your original question which is what were other comps in the market, for me as a founder, it was Figma. It was really how Figma won the market, which was making all of design across web and social and UX and UI, could be content and messaging, live in one place.
00:20:20 Jennifer: Now as they go to the developer side and more, it's really testament to how important these files are, which are reused, reimagined, redefined. And a change in one place, has to be a change in all the places with version control, and very clear who's doing what. So that was my first comp in terms of what I looked at that I thought was a real hero.
00:20:42 Scott: It's interesting because in the description of the company and as you tell the narrative and pitch to investors, also on the hiring side, as you tell people about what you're building to look to expand the team now post-raise with a lot more cash on the balance sheet, we see the ways that people describe companies in many ways. The way you're talking about your business is as a verticalized communications and design platform for holistic event management.
00:21:08 Scott: And it's really the comps being Slack, the comps being Figma, the comps being maybe in a more verticalized capacity than those tools. But really it's so fascinating because the comps that you're giving are distinct from how I think back to that headwinds question of pitching a lot of investors that will have a knee jerk pattern matching reaction to say, well, seats in a chair means ticketing. Ticketing means I saw this company 17 years ago that didn't work. Therefore, I'm not interested.
00:21:37 Scott: And thinking about all of the ways in which AI enablement and optimizing these rote and routine tasks where now with agentic workforces in ways, that we're even using within Everywhere Ventures, if you have a repeatable task that you do five or six or seven times over, can you programmatically build that out so that you're saving the human time?
00:21:56 Scott: And I guess on that theme, how do you think about this mix of human in the loop? Obviously events as an IRL, very in-person, real life human endeavor of getting people together mixed with this deep AI driven platform for event management. How do you think of these two sides of techie and human and balancing those two?
00:22:16 Jennifer: Because live events bring together humans, they'll always be strategized, protected and serviced by humans. So we are not removing humans in the loop. We are merely giving them superpowers to eliminate manual tasks and really delight them and take them into the future.
00:22:35 Jennifer: What I like to say is behind every great event is one or more broken spreadsheets. They are perfected, but they are broken. We all have them. It does not matter what brand you're working for. You have multiple spreadsheets governing whatever live experiences you're doing in a stadium, in a ballroom, in a conference center, in a theater. It's absolutely happening.
00:22:57 Jennifer: What I like to say about VOW and what we're doing with AI is from a place of trust, we are creating an event brain. We are creating a world in which Scott can say, hey, VOW, Everywhere Ventures is having its LP summit. Can I give you my guest list? Sure, Scott.
00:23:17 Jennifer: You would click and drag it in. It will not only auto-populate the data, it will auto-populate it in a dashboard that feels like your Excel spreadsheet on steroids, but one better than that.
00:23:29 Jennifer: You don't realize when you upload that list, you're an event producer. And that list isn't a list of data. You probably think about it as first name, last name, email, cell phone. It's actually reflective of how you think about that event. Words, whether it's tickets or passes. I bet you if it says Vice President of Sales, it's not a wedding.
00:23:51 Jennifer: And so behind every broken spreadsheet is just a treasure map of information that VOW can extrapolate and begin really a dialogue, a conversation, a breathless one, by phone, by simply a, “Hey, VOW,” to set up your event and execute it.
00:24:10 Jennifer: And being able to have conversations like, hey, VOW, Jenny and I are getting ready for our LP summit. Which of our LPs didn't submit their guest names? Well, Scott. These 11 didn't. Do you want me to send reminders? Absolutely. Do you want me to tone it like your last reminder? Yeah. Based on my research with Scott, here's how I would tighten that up. There's an onscreen confirmation you're able to scroll through that you send and go.
00:24:33 Jennifer: What's remarkable about you as an event producer, which you wouldn't label yourself, we all work the same way. I don't care what you're planning. It doesn't matter if it's a VIP experience for the NBA. It doesn't matter if it's a wedding. There is a subset of no more than 50 to 20 things that every producer does a little bit more of this, a little bit more of that.
00:24:55 Jennifer: And so the learnings more broadly, without ever touching guest data, without ever touching personal data, are remarkable. And so the platform learns from everybody and is able to move through things better to the point where do I think that VOW will be able to in an automated, a human hands-off way be able to execute things?
00:25:15 Jennifer: Yes. The difference is that live events are high stakes. They’re a reputational risk. And so ultimately, there's a way in which we think about those workflows as something that has to become trusted and you'll always have an onscreen confirmation.
00:25:30 Jennifer: But really just being able to help you set up the event, get out the door, take more global professional learnings and get what you need so you can do more, really make more money and take a ton of time back across you and your team.
00:25:44 Scott: As you think about the sales pipeline and all these different stakeholders, as you talk about the diversity of events, is there a through line? As you mentioned, the congressional caucus that's pitching to a number of different corporate sponsors, perhaps Amazon buying tables at many different events over the course of the year, are you starting to feel that platform flywheel around certain vectors?
00:26:07 Scott: And how did you build those beachheads as you thought about these different stakeholders, a multi-sided marketplace in some sense? The more pull you have from say corporate sponsors, then the more push there is for event producers to use VOW because they're hearing about it from Amazon, they're hearing about it from Apple, they're hearing about it from somebody else.
00:26:24 Scott: But maybe walk us through the sales dynamic and where you found these beachheads and how you've built across these different stakeholders.
00:26:31 Jennifer: In terms of sales, typically I've tried to pull back from eating my own dog food. And so I get us out the door as a 20-year producer, but we're surrounded by incredible customers and advisors. We do run ideas by them.
00:26:43 Jennifer: For us, the real time communication and collaboration with corporate partners and sponsors is super real for us. I think in terms of AI automating things, we, right now, B2B staying with the organizers, because that's where you build trust.
00:26:58 Jennifer: If you just flick on AI, at an enterprise level, there's a series of InfoSec red bells that go off. So we have to be thoughtful about where we plug it in. So we have a very strong thesis on where we start today.
00:27:12 Jennifer: But I think what you're asking just in terms of the corporate partners is right now for us, it's just about delighting them in platform. So delighting and building that trust.
00:27:21 Jennifer: We don't retain right now that corporate partner guest data. In the future, they can be offered as such. We can ask them if they want to add new names in, and we can delight them further. So we will absolutely move on that track.
00:27:34 Jennifer: We see AI as moving it in more delightful ways to make just general tasks easier without touching guest data. Then we'll move into essentially the corporate partner host. Then we'll move into the guest. And then we'll move into the data space, but we're moving slowly from a place of trust.
00:27:53 Scott: Amazing. Well, shifting gears to the last couple of minutes of our podcast here: the lightning round, the speed round. I know that when I asked you before, Hey, what are your favorite podcasts other than Venture Everywhere, of course, and what books are you reading, you said I'm heads down building a company. I don't have time for books. But is there something on your shelf that has maybe inspired you in the past or is a favorite read of yours?
00:28:15 Jennifer: I admittedly, I had just done a long out of town drive and I did listen to The Let Them Theory. For me, I actually listened to it because I am a mom of two teenage daughters.
00:28:27 Jennifer: So I did listen to it from the perspective of getting a new lens and a new vibe on some of the things that you counsel your kids on and some of the everyday stresses. And I liked the flavor and the tone of it and just really championing yourself and not worrying about the noise. I took a lot away from that as well.
00:28:47 Jennifer: But we've been really heads down in hiring, so I haven't had as much time. And then before that, I did rewatch all six seasons of The West Wing, which is my favorite TV show. So that was my summer treat. That's what I did.
00:29:00 Scott: So if you could live anywhere in the world outside of New York City or southern New Jersey at the beach, where would you pick?
00:29:05 Jennifer: Oh my God, I think I would pick Paris. I think I would pick France where they're moving in terms of their prowess across live events and sports. What they just did with the Olympics has really resonated with leaving them with some of the best and really most incredible venues in the world and I think a new found love for live events.
00:29:25 Jennifer: They're really growing over there. Europe on the whole is a couple years behind the U.S. in terms of how we think about things and we do things. But that would be incredibly exciting.
00:29:35 Jennifer: And obviously the UAE is plugging so much money and so much energy into live experience as well. So that would be a lot of fun to be in either of those places for a period of time.
00:29:46 Scott: Fascinating. What about your productivity hack? As a busy CEO, mother of two teenagers, how do you keep all the balls in the air?
00:29:54 Jennifer: Oh my God. Do less. I came out of our raise and you want to just tackle the world and you think you can – and if you're an amazing CEO who's gotten something to market, anybody who's gotten anything to market, God bless them, you're so used to wearing so many hats.
00:30:11 Jennifer: If you're hiring, spend the week just on hiring so that you're not shuffling platforms and people and tasks within your organization. If you're working on a financial model or a business model, the more heads down you can stay in that one thing. So I would say my productivity hack is that 80-20 rule.
00:30:28 Jennifer: For 80% of my day, I really, really have tried to do just one thing, which when I went to fundraise really tripped my whole team out because I just said this is the only thing I'm doing. The only thing I'm focused on.
00:30:43 Jennifer: Even if I had a smidge of time, I didn't shift gears to stuff that would shift my way of thinking or the energy I brought to that fundraising room. I really limited a lot. So I would say doing less. Thinking about your work day or work week, if you can, in sprints, and just picking one thing at a time to be a hero at.
00:31:02 Jennifer: Otherwise, you end up with five or six things that are 65% done, and you feel good til you get to 50%. And you're like, “Damn, I'm just not getting this across the finish line.” So for me, that's what's helped and not adding more tools.
00:31:15 Jennifer: I won't let the team add more tools. I add them to my work day, just in terms of AI and other infrastructure I work through. But you don't add more tools day one, which is the inclination. Let's build a bigger framework. Let's build a bigger system. It's much more helpful if you don't, I think.
00:31:31 Scott: And finally, working listeners find you online.
00:31:34 Jennifer: Oh, you can visit VOW, vow.app, and you can check us out and you can reach out to me. Come in for demo. We'd love to show you the world.
00:31:43 Scott: Amazing. Well, Jennifer, thanks so much for spending the time with us. Congratulations on closing the new round and on the platform, which is looking amazing.
00:31:51 Scott: Go to the website and poke around because I think for the listeners, you'll really understand the level and depth and complexity of what they're building in this communications platform for live events and all things related to humans getting together in real life, which an amazing theme that we need more of. So Jennifer, thank you so much.
00:32:09 Jennifer: Thank you. I appreciate it.
00:32:12 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, 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 Jennifer Brisman in Founders Everywhere.