Jon is a serial C-Suite aficionado with a degree in economics and finance from Bentley University who is the co-founder and CEO at Elevent - a marketplace connecting experience providers and companies to deliver unique, memorable virtual and physical experiences to build trust, and connections and just have fun, they’ve raised $5.1M in funding since their inception in September of 2020 with their most recent seed round of $2.8M happening in Q1 2022.
Jon is a serial C-Suite aficionado with a degree in economics and finance from Bentley University who is the co-founder and CEO at Elevent - a marketplace connecting experience providers and companies to deliver unique, memorable virtual and physical experiences to build trust, and connections and just have fun, they’ve raised $5.1M in funding since their inception in September of 2020 with their most recent seed round of $2.8M happening in Q1 2022.
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Narrator: 1, 2, 3, 4. Are you a founder, co-founder, aspiring entrepreneur, or just someone who loves to hear about how companies are built? Then join us as we talk with founders and CEOs who have been there and done that. Welcome to the Founders Formula Podcast. Sponsored by Hatchet Ventures. And now your host, Chet Lovegren.
Chet: Welcome one and welcome all to The Founders Formula Podcast, the show that's designed to bring you the latest and greatest stories and insights from founders Worldwide who, as we like to say, have been there and done that. My guest today is a serial C-suite aficionado with a degree in economics and finance from Bentley University.
Also, the co-founder and CEO at Elevent. Elevent is a marketplace that connects experienced providers and companies to deliver unique, memorable, virtual and physical experiences to build trust, connections, and frankly, just have fun. They've raised 5.1 million in funding since their inception in September of 2020, and their most recent seed round of 2.8 million in Q1 of 2022.
Please welcome my guest today, co-founder and CEO of Elevent Jon Conelias. Jon, welcome to the show.
Jon: Hi, Chet. Thanks for having me.
Chet: Oh, super excited. And I know we had a little bit of conversation before the show, just really about you and about Elevent and the founding story. But really Jon, we wanna learn about the company, but I know that the listeners would love to learn about you as well.
So let's take some time to kick things off. Tell us about you, tell us about your story and really your background experience that got you up to the point of founding the company.
Jon: Sure. I it's, I think it's interesting that at this point now I feel like I'm starting to become the old guy in the room, which I never was before, but this is now my fourth startup.
I, and I started out my career, I think most founders have this at some point where I started out my career in investment banking. And realized very quickly that was not necessarily what I wanted to do. And after doing the analyst program, I left and joined a startup where I was the first employee and I was the cfo and it was a company called iDevices, and we made a cooking thermometer that connects your iPhone to a cooking thermometer for your grill.
And we called it the Eye Grill. And we ended up selling it to Weber. So we launched that at the Consumer Electronic show back in 2010. It was before Internet of Things was a thing, and it was so that word wasn't even around, but we were one of the first scaled that, sold it.
After that venture joined a company called The Grommet, which was an e-commerce company. I was the VP of Operations and CFO. When I joined, we were about 15 people and we scaled that to about 100, 150 people. Ended up selling it to Rakuten, which if you don't know, is a public Japanese company.
They're like Amazon. I used to call 'em the Amazon of Japan, but now they're more well known. They did a Super Bowl commercial in the US so I feel like people know who they are. And then they sponsored the Golden State Warriors. And then we sold Grommet from Rakuten to Ace Hardware.
And so that's where Grommet ended up. And really the connection there was Grommet was an e-commerce platform slash marketplace that went out and found new and innovative products. Kind of similar products to like Etsy or Uncommon Goods. And Ace used it as a really differentiation factor to try to get more new and innovative products into their stores.
My last stop before this was at a company called Scout Exchange, which was an AI powered marketplace connecting recruiters and companies to more efficiently hire. We sold that in the summer of 2020 to Acquent.
Chet: Hmm. So a lot of exits in your experience, so you've been successful a time or two. It's safe to say.
Jon: Yeah and I think when you look in the past, in the moment you're like, Oh man, we could have made it. This massive thing. But in, in actuality, like any exit is usually a good exit. Obviously there's bigger swings but getting out just cuz the journey is always really challenging, which I'm sure a lot of other founders would agree as well.
But part of the fun is the grind and the journey and I guess that's what I'm addicted to, so I keep doing it.
Chet: Yeah. And there's gotta be, there's gotta be something to be said about being able to put your stamp on having completed that journey, right? Yeah. Yeah, maybe you could sit in it for another decade and see these, this exponential growth, but it's like at your point now you're like, Hey, I've been successful already multiple times at it. We'll just keep the game going. You know what I mean?
Jon: Yeah. I think with experience, it makes it easier You have better relationships you like, especially when we started this one. I know we haven't talked about it yet, but do you have people you can call on to say, Hey, do you wanna come work with me? So as you get older and more experienced, it does become somewhat easier.
Chet: Yeah. And that's a great segue into what we're interested in learning about Elevent. Tell me a little bit about the founding of the company. Like how did it come about? Where did you come up with this idea? How did you link up into your co-founder? Like what does that look?
Jon: Yeah, so my co-founder and I had worked together at the Grommet and we had an interesting relationship where at one point he actually reported to me at another point, he was an executive on the executive team, and I was as well. So we were, we had a kind of a a cooperative relationship in that way where we had to work together very closely to, to support the business.
And it was a little serendipitous. And so we used to joke, actually, when I was at Grommet, I'm like, Oh. We should go do something at some point on our own. And we used to just joke and it was more about joking and complaining about problems that we had at the time. But then at some point in the future we're like no, we should actually go do this.
And so it was a little bit of serendipity, like the same week we sold. Scout to Acquent. There was a shakeup at Grommet and all of a sudden my co-founder Jason found himself off for the summer and so did I. And so all of a sudden, the same week in the summer of 2020, both of us reached out to each other and be like, Hey, what are you up to?
And we're like, feeling each other out cause we hadn't talked a little bit and we're like, Oh, we should grab lunch. And my wife was like, You need to take at least four to six weeks before you do anything. Cause it was like literally my last day at Scout and I started talking to Jason like the next day.
And so we started to talk and this was a problem. The problem we're solving is a problem that I had pre covid and really, like my team at Grommet was 30, 35 people and trying to find things to do and they were hybrid, so I had some people that were remote and some people that were in office.
But trying to find things to do that was inclusive was really challenging. So either I had two options. One, we do an awkward virtual happy hour or something, or virtual coffee, which is, which always was never fun. Or I would ignore the virtual people and we'd go to the bar or go to a restaurant and even, but trying to find a bar or restaurant that like 20 people could go to was always a challenge.
So we ended up at and drinking isn't always the best thing to do with coworkers. Sometimes doing a different experience of mixing it up. But we ended up at breweries and some other things like that. And In Covid, I think it just exacerbated the problem where everyone was virtual. And so we saw the problem of how do you connect team members?
And we saw where were both of us. I'd been at two marketplace companies and he had been at Grommet. So he was at one, saw the opportunity with the marketplace to bring together the supply and the demand in a way that really corporate, I think had the biggest need that we saw. Like Airbnb experiences was filling that the individual need.
But usually if you're trying to find something to do with your friends, you get together and go figure it out. But corporate, like you're spread all over the country and , it's much harder. So we saw that opportunity, launched it in September of 20. Jason just sent me a Slack right before we got on this.
This is actually the one year anniversary of raising our first institutional round. Oh, congrats. So we, so I can't believe it's been a year. It's definitely gone by fast, but, so we are we went out and we raised a pre-seed round mostly from friends and family, and then raised our first institutional round.
So we started in September. We raised that next piece in July, and then we raised a follow on part of that in Q1 of, so this year.
Chet: That's awesome. And yeah I can attest to that yeah, the virtual happy hours, they're a blast, right? We've been told to do tons of those and they never really pan out the way you want 'em to.
But it's also interesting because when Covid really hit hard and everybody was working from home, it was like, there are tons of companies that have had people working from home for many years. Like there are solutions for this out there. People are like, What should we do?
How do we build camaraderie? All those things, yep. Which I think is really interesting. Now, do you find that the need for events and experiences like this because of Covid, obviously it's increased, the market. But do you find that there's still a big hesitation with the adoption to put money into these events?
Do you see the adoption of Hey, this is a thing you have to do, not only just for employee morale, but just to build trust and build that camaraderie. Do you see that adoption increasing at the rate that you think it should or you think we're still behind and people gotta kick their ass into gear and start realizing the importance of something like this?
Jon: I think it depends what industry you're in. So like right now, We've done events for 55 of the Fortune 100 companies, and so those companies obviously have big bottom lines and can invest in, in their employees, and that's what they're doing. And the other segment is we do a lot of marketing, like client engagement events, which I think is a slightly different use case for what we're doing but very similar.
Yeah I think the biggest way to, especially with remote teams to build those things is by having shared experiences. And the best way to have shared experiences is to facilitate it. If you're just every day getting on Slack and staring at each other You're not really creating anything unique.
And especially if you have people on your team that are younger and or even that are more introverted it's challenging. And so yeah, you need to invest time and you need to invest training and you need to be thoughtful about how you're bringing people together. And even, most of our, We just did a survey recently.
Most of our customers are doing the smallest category of events. I think I broke it in one zero to one, two to five, six to 10, and 10 plus. The two biggest ones. were Two to five and six to 10. And, but there's a lot doing 10 plus. There's, there aren't that many actually doing less than one, which was surprising to me.
Cause I figured it was like, Oh, I was thinking back to my Grommet days where I'm like, it was just such a headache to go find something. And so I would just do it once a year. I'd I would wanna do it three or four times a year, but I would just not do it. And usually I'd have to defer to somebody else on my team to be like, Go, just go find me some options.
So that was really the pain point, the use case. I think where we're going and where we want to be is our goal is to be that, that one stop shop for events. And where that starts to scale into is we needed to create a marketplace to, to get supply on and start engaging customers, but ultimately we're going to be providing an enterprise solution where you as a company can say, Okay, I want to empower my managers with these events that are company recommended.
They can book them, they can have centralized budget controls, they can have central administration and view, who likes the events, who doesn't like the events? How are the engagement levels? And start to really combine the fully returned key event solution with data to make it tied to roi, whether it's employee engagement or whether it's client engagement. Ultimately we need to be able to move the needle with the events that we have.
Chet: And then leverage eNPS on top of that. Look at how much, Exactly. Look at how much happier people are after these two things that we've done for those teams specifically.
Jon: It's funny, you're the second person that said employee NPS. To me the tagline they said right before was like, events suck was the the tagline of the campaign we're probably gonna do. And then it was like, how do we get employee nps to where we want it to be?
Chet: I love it. And then you can use some sort of PLG model there where it's let's start with the SDR team.
See how that works out. Cuz we all know how unhappy SDS can be having to work remote. It's insane.
Jon: Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. It is product like growth and so all of our energy has been spent on building the platform and now it's really changing. Really kinda, when you move through different funding rounds, there's different goals and metrics that you have to show.
And so goal like seed, the seed round was really showing that we had the ability to build an MDP platform, drive traffic to its show that there was a market show that we could create differentiation. And now it's like how are we going to go from that to kind of a step up, which is okay, how are you landing either strong retention or bigger enterprise deals?
Chet: Yeah. Yeah. And I love that. I think because there was this whole where we started to go back hybrid and then people just didn't wanna go in. And then there was all that talk about, ping pong tables and lunch are not gonna bring people back to the office.
I think companies finally learned. Hey, why don't you just survey your employees, right? Yeah. Why don't you figure out what they want before you just make assumptions. And I think that's why the eNPS thing is coming up probably more often than not for you is cause that's a real, that's a real thing on people's radar now.
Now they're like, not only do I have to worry about my customer nps, now I got eNPS. That's fantastic, you are held accountable. We love it. We gotta be , I noticed that you have a very deep financial background, right? Yep. Not only with schooling, but with some of your experiences in some of these companies that you were mentioning.
And I know your co-founder, Jason, I'm sure the two of you have different strengths. And I'd be curious as co-founders to hear from you, what are the complimenting strengths that both of you have that help you make this business the powerhouse it is. Cause I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, Hey, maybe I'm a technical co-founder and then the other person is more in like sales or operations, right? Yeah. Walk us through that relationship and what's led to the success that you've been having so far.
Jon: Yeah. And I think it goes actually beyond that to what is the broader team, Like you have to evaluate.
What you need on your team and I think. Jason and I have some overlap. Actually it's interesting cause I feel like our roles have somewhat flopped in some ways from what it used to be like at when we had worked together in the past I was the CFO, so it was very numbers, heavy driven kind of conservative financial models.
And he was the GM of one of the business units saying no, I think we can do this. These are the strategies and now that I'm CEO and he's in charge of the operational parts the roles have switched a little bit, which is funny cause I'm like, We can do this. And he's let's reel that back a little bit.
This is what I know we can do, so let's set those. So it's a good balance and I feel like it needs to be founded, and he and I talked about this early on, it needs to be founded in the sense that I think where founders get in trouble is like, if you start taking things personally, like we are going to push each other.
We've always had that relationship. That's how we make the business the best that we can do. We knew going into this that I, my financial background and my ability to fundraise, like I had just been through a lot of that before and like we don't. Like setting up HR systems, setting up accounting systems that was just mine from the start.
But he had a lot of experience on more of the marketing and sales side. Cause he was, he at Grommet, he was leading a team where they were using a CRM and they were setting up a platform. So we naturally divided and conquered it at the beginning. But we also knew that neither one of us were technical and so we had to go out and find a strong technical lead very quickly.
Yeah. And a marketing piece, So the, so like it goes beyond like we knew what our strengths were but then it went beyond that to say, Okay, what else do we need from what is essentially like a founding team? And, and that didn't come right away. It took a lot of convincing. And early on, I think you can get by, like early on what we did is we had a, we were selling out a presentations and then we had a Wix site eventually, and then eventually we were able to convince some engineers to join us and get some contractors and really start building the platform.
Chet: Yeah, that's something that I know our listeners are probably gonna be really interested in because you're starting to see more and more non-technical founders and co-founders, and I think it's because they recognize Hey, before products were built by Zuckerberg's, right?
And they had no sales operations or finance understanding, and then had to leave that up to a bunch of people and maybe it didn't go the way they wanted to, where it's like, Hey, I know sales really well. Like I've led a bunch of sales teams. If I could get this product going, we'd be off to the races.
How did that I'm curious a little bit of what you can talk about in terms of that process of finding technical leads and engineers. Was it just bootstrap cash you and Jason had to come out of pocket for, was there some sort of equity that you had to offer? What was the thing that worked for you? Two, since I'm sure that was a bit of a challenge to get up and running.
Jon: So early on, Jason and yeah we bootstrapped in the beginning, but we knew that we needed to raise capital to be able to recruit the level of people that we wanted. So we put together friends and family around and raised a couple hundred thousand dollars to really just.
Try to prove it out and if this doesn't work, it's gonna really be painful for me. Cuz literally everybody that I've ever worked for has invested in this. And so hopefully it is successful. That's obviously the goal and I think we've been relatively successful so far based on where we are, but it's I think you have to figure out where, so what I ended up doing was, we basically dual tracked it.
So we looked at what we could do off the shelf in a very simplistic way. So that was like Wix, we can set up a Wix site. There's no code required, like you can pull images off the web and do things like that. So that's where we started, but, and that was. It was what it was. It wasn't ideal. Yeah. But we were literally selling to anybody that had ever talked to us.
And so we needed to, the biggest break that I knew somebody at a company, and she was a Chief People Officer, and she signed us up to do their holiday party, and all of a sudden we're doing a party for 300 people and we're like, Oh man, are we gonna be able to do this? And it's here we go.
Let's pull it off. And we did. They had a great time. They've come back and booked a bunch. We actually had three simultaneous events going at one time. Or it was a virtual it was a virtual dumpling class, a magic show, and a pottery making class. And so they loved it and we had a great time and that really jumpstarted us and kicked us off.
So we, our first event that we did was end of November after starting the company, essentially in middle of September, early October. But as far as to get that technical founder, It was hard. We, I started to reach out to everybody that I'd worked with from a personal standpoint, and there were people that I really wanted to work with.
And then there were people that like, I wouldn't have made them, like we, we hired a VP of engineering first. That was our first role, and the person that we hired for that role fits that title for forever. Whereas there were other engineers that we may have hired where we would've brought them in just as an engineer or senior engineer.
So thinking about who you're bringing in and what their level is. Like this individual, Todd had come from The Grommet as well, and he was the director of engineering Grommet. So like I was. I had worked with him before. I was pretty confident in his abilities and what he could do and where he could take us.
But the other really powerful thing that we had to do is we actually surrounded him with some contractors that were doing UI UX that were doing engineering, both front end and back end. So he didn't have to come in and build this thing by himself. Cause it had been a while and really he could start to direct and and then we had moved to a platform that was third party.
And so like, how do we pieced it together for a while . And now we're really, now we've migrated. We just launched a new platform in March, and so we've migrated from what was that third party platform to our homegrown platform.
Chet: Yeah. And so what I'm hearing is it sounds like you having that experience and having done this before a little bit helps because you had someone that was vetted that you knew to look out for.
Cause if I went today and tried to start like a software company, I'd be like, I don't know what to look for. I'm not technical in that regard. Like I'd be flying blind, I'd be like, maybe I hire product or a guy from engineering. Where do I start? It wasn't easy. We, Started having dinner with Todd in September and didn't convince him until December.
Jon: Yeah. And so it was, it's a longer road where you're building trust and showing momentum, and I think you need to do that in a lot of ways. Like the hard part with engineering is like you're competing against, Facebook and Google where they can go get awesome salaries and have an awesome job.
And so you need to convince them that it's worth coming and joining this and we're gonna have fun and build a successful company. And yeah, luckily I did and there's a lot of serendipity in that as well. Like we had another engineer who I actually had interviewed at back at The Grommet.
And he had worked with Todd in the past and we were looking for what was our second engineering role. And I was like, Who was that? What was that guy's name? In So happens to also be Todd. We have a lot of names that are the same, but called him on a Friday and he started on Monday. We've never looked back and like those, there's just things like that just happened that fall into place sometimes.
And then there's other situations where there's things that happen. don't fall into place. Like right now, the whole venture world is upside down. Yeah. Chet, we were talking before, like some companies that have been really big success stories that are in the event space, like Hopin Vizibo just laid off 30 to 40% of their staff.
Like you asked me earlier, are people doing events in the office and we're still seeing strong event growth. But I wonder how strong are the headwinds in the market? We're still relatively small right now, but how strong are the headwinds? And where is this coming to be in six months from an economic standpoint where if you asked me that six months ago, people were just throwing capital at everybody.
Yeah. So it's a very different environment that we're living in right now and the the investors have changed probably the most where they were like growth at all costs in Q1, and then all of a sudden in Q2 they were like economics and conserve cash at all costs, and it was like, okay. Like, why can't we just find a middle ground?
Chet: Yeah. It's one or the other. I guess that's, I guess that's why they're investors though, right? Like I, I was talking about that with somebody on LinkedIn today just chatting about some of the layoffs we saw and I was like, it's crazy. Like I'm sure it's, this is hitting some companies. I don't doubt that, but it's like nuts how one day a company is just there, and then all of a sudden it's literally gone and they're like what's gonna happen to that tech? I can't recall the company, but there was a company that let go, like 800 people that had just raised a bunch of capital. I was like what happens to the tech if the company just totally dissolves?
Did you just get all this money? It's just, Hey, this is what we're doing now. But I think I think that a little bit of that for you Probably the employees winning the battle for, still working from home probably helps quite a bit too, cuz I think that's people are gonna hire remote.
Like you, you limit your ability. If I just limited my ability to Los Angeles, yeah, I'm not gonna hire the people that I need. Cuz there's not as many people in Los Angeles anymore looking for sales gigs. They live in Milwaukee, Tennessee, Omaha, Nebraska, they're all over the map. I gotta expand my reach a little bit to be competitive.
Jon: Yeah. The other thing we've done is we've started to launch in person. So we have in person events now in three cities, New York San Francisco and Austin and Boston will be out in the next week or two. So we've started to. In that survey, if you look at it, there's, I'd say 30% people are saying they just do virtual, rarely anybody's saying they're just doing in person, but then a majority of people are doing both.
So they're trying to cater to people that are local, but also be inclusive of the virtual people as well.
Chet: Do you find in person events are a bit more tough or costly to manage? Or is it all the same when it comes to the work behind it and the cost of it, so to speak?
Jon: No it's pretty similar. Frankly, like shipping stuff to everybody's location. Probably the most expensive piece of a lot of the events. I mean that versus like just having it in one place and people being able to enjoy it. A lot of, there's two different varieties of in-person events that we offer. There's ones where they'll travel to you, so bringing somebody in and doing a coffee tasting or doing or comedy show in your office is an example of that.
Or there's ones where they have a physical location and you can go there and do that. But we have, right now, we have things, especially in Austin, we have like a barbecue tour that are really unique and interesting to do with your teams. So it's not that let's just go to the bar and have more drinks.
It's like we, there's actually a purpose of the event and it's not just centered around alcohol. It's much more inclusive where you can do a tour and experience different things and try to build team bonding and team building. But then we also have other things like escape rooms and mysteries and scavenger hunts.
So we try to make it really interesting for the in-person events as well. The one thing we haven't started to get into yet is more of like venue based things. If you wanted to have a happy hour in a physical location, what would that actually look like? Yeah. And I think that's where the complexity starts to come into it. Where right now, just cuz we're really early into it, it's much more around just the simplicity.
Chet: Hosting off sites, right? That's what I've been recommending. I'm like, why do you make people go back in? Just let everybody live where they want and fly 'em all out for a big, huge hurrah once a year. Like a big, huge team retreat that's if you're trying to be a steward of capital. Since you've raised multiple rounds, right? You had some pre pre seed rounds, you have some seed rounds. I'm curious to hear from you which one was the hardest? Was it the first round, the most recent one in between which one was really the most, the hardest to raise in your opinion? And why do you think it was the hardest to raise?
Jon: The fir, I would say the first institutional round out of the three that we've raised for this company was the hardest. And I think that you need a combination of three things happening. You need a good story. And also part of the story is what are you trying to build?
So story and vision of this is what we're trying to build, This is the space. Is it, can you be defensible? You need the actual underlying economics to show that there's traction and growth. Like you can't just be like, here's. Some people can do it. I've never been able to go to investor, like pre-product and be like, Hey, give me millions of dollars and let me go build this.
Yeah. But then they need to believe in you as the CEO and founder. So you need somebody to check those three boxes and say yes. And I think we were lucky enough to do that. It wasn't easy. I got a lot of no's. And I probably, I probably. was put in front of a hundred to 150 investors.
I probably ended up talking to 60 in that first round and I probably ended up getting six yeses. So I think when you look at the stats, it's, I think I said something where it's like you have a 1% chance of closing somebody. So I think six outta 60 is pretty good, but then it didn't feel good at the moment.
So that was, I would say that. was the hardest cuz we were just coming off of a site launch. We were just starting to scale. We were pretty early on in what we were doing. And then so once actually, I mean it was last year, 4th of July, I remember. Being where I was, it was like the Saturday or Sunday we wewre like negotiating the term sheet and doing the documents.
And my wife is like, Where are you right now? And I'm not sleeping for a week. So there's definitely those inflection points that happened. I think we all go through that. The first round was a lot easier just cuz it was all personal relationships and they were investing based on the relationship.
Not based on anything, not based on economics and traction, cause there really wasn't any. Yeah. And then the third round was a lot. The third piece was a lot easier just because, and really it, it was facilitated from our existing investor group where we were, and this was the craziness of fundraising last year and Q4 where we were showing exponential growth in holiday season and everybody wanted to double down in the business.
So we were originally planning and thank God we didn't do it, planning on just raising an A round in Q2. Which would've been terrible this year, so I'm really happy we decided to do that. But that was like we, we decided to make the decision to fundraise, at the end of November, and then had multiple term sheets by December 20th.
Wow. So we didn't really run a full process. It was like, The people that we already had relationships with that we were just talking to. Yeah. So that's awesome. In hindsight though, I wish we ran, I wish it, I knew where we were going to be and started to run a process in October and could have probably raised my A round at that point. In hindsight.
Chet: Yeah. No that's that's good insight. So it's like the first one, it was more about like trust in you and your co-founder and your track record, but it was that first institutional round where it was like, we're gonna need to see a little more. Cause it wasn't the friends and family anymore. It was outside investors that you had to get that buy in from.
Jon: Yeah. And, and it's interesting how it ha, this is how I would say aggressive. You have to be like, In order to get in front of investors, you really need a, an in, like somebody to introduce you without an introduction. It's really hard.
And my initial plan was that I was gonna leverage lawyers and accountants and bankers to do that. And we tried to, but we never actually got a lot of traction. And I think part of that is that the, and I don't know this for a fact, but I think that part of that is that the VCs probably look at those people.
That they're not really giving them qualified leads. They probably won't do that for all their clients. Where really when we started to break through is I needed to go out and reach out to other CEOs that had done venture stuff and I ended up, One of the big breakthroughs was I actually ended up reaching out to a former board member who was on The Grommet.
Who had been the CEO of a large company as well and he introduced me to somebody who then introduced me to somebody who then like, and it started to just snowball and it was a small world cuz the, our lead investor in that first seed round was actually a company called Light Bank and they had invested in Groupon and done a lot of other investing.
But the person that was investing in us was actually an associate at the time at NEA, which is another VC firm. And I didn't know this at the time, but we at The Grommet were actually pitching NEA. And so we had a meeting with them in like 2015. And this individual was actually as a part of the team that was evaluating this deal.
And so they knew who I was. Which is just a small incestuous thing that kind of came out of that. But I think those things also matter at some point as well. But really, I mean it's story, I mean yourself and economics I think that are really gonna win the day. And like you can find some of those milestones, like for us, like we need to be between two and $3 million of revenue.
For us to raise our, that's where we wanna be, to raise an A round. And like for a seed round, it's probably four to 600 K a year. It sounds like you have a good game plan. I'm sure that series A is right around the corner, probably sooner than you imagine. We'll be excited to celebrate that celebrate that with you and the team.
I hope so.
Chet: Jon would love parting words. What kind of advice would you give a first time founder? Maybe an aspiring founder, or maybe somebody who's founded a company and is, wondering what's going on, what's gonna happen, and maybe shaking in their boots a little bit. What kind of advice would you give to someone right now as a founder?
Jon: I think we all have moments where we shaken our boots. I know I definitely wake up sometimes in the middle of the night sweating and be like, Okay what's happening? But I think what I've learned is you don't have to do it alone. Team is everything. Finding a really strong team that can execute makes your life a whole lot easier.
And I think I found that in my co-founder and the rest of the team and that's what makes me really confident that like I don't need to have all the, in I think some CEOs put pressure on themselves to, to have all of the answers. But there's times in the company where, You have theories and we need to go test it, and we need to try to break through.
I don't like I have ideas of how we're gonna take it to the next level. We talked about some of the enterprise stuff, but that may not pan out. And if it doesn't, we have to figure out a different way to do it. And that's part of the startup life. And I think understanding that as a CEO, that you need to constantly be, educating yourself on what's working and what's not, and then adapt based on that.
But just because something didn't work doesn't mean it's failure. It just means that was another thing that you learned.
Chet: Yeah. Testing is key, right? It is. Jon, really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. If somebody is interested in just connecting with you or even, looking at elevent and how they can get connected what's the best way.
Jon: Tell the folks if you wanna connect with Elevent, it's just book Elevent.com. If you want to connect with me, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. I get, I know I get a lot of messages, but I'm usually pretty good about sifting through them and replying to the ones that need to be replied to.
Yeah, exactly right. connect with me, but don't message me unless it's necessary. That's, I say happy to connect with anyone. Let just make sure that such thing is relevant. Yeah. Love it. To all the listeners out there, thank you for tuning into another episode of The Founder's Formula Podcast.
If you're interested in connecting with us on our various platforms, check out the show notes below, and if you're interested in learning more about Hatchet Ventures, we'll have a link in the description here of the podcast for everybody to check them out. Until next time, we'll catch you all later. Thank you, Jon.
Chet: Thanks, Chet.