#73: John Wetzel, Alex Hilleary, Brooks Sime (Gather — Acquired by ChartHop)

John Wetzel, Alex Hilleary, Brooks Sime — Co-Founders of Gather — on building a company oriented around a future of work that puts people first and streamlines workflows for People Operations teams, and their journey from inception to acquisition by ChartUp.

Show Notes

Our conversation today is with John Wetzel, Alex Hilleary, and Brooks Sime — Co-Founders of Gather (acquired by ChartHop in March, 2022) — on building a company oriented around a future of work that puts people first and streamlines workflows for People Operations teams.

Alex is the former COO of Gather where he led sales and marketing. John is the former CEO of Gather where he led product, design customer experience, and operations. Brooks is the former CTO of Gather and led all engineering efforts. As we cover in our conversation, Alex and John previously worked at BoxCast together here in Cleveland prior to working on Gather and separately, Brooks worked across several industries as a startup engineer in New Orleans.

After successfully navigating Gather to their new home at ChartHop, Alex is going back to his roots, building out a community marketing channel leveraging the assets he established at Gather while John is a now a senior product manager overseeing ChartHop's Employee Experience product and Brooks is a lead software engineer.

In our conversation, which all three founders would like to dedicate to Ari Kedoin and Emily Armando, the Venture for America fellows who joined the Gather team here in Cleveland last summer and who have also now joined the ChartHop Team — we cover the full story of Gather, from inception through to acquisition and learnings along the way – please enjoy!

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Learn more about Gather
Learn more about ChartHop
Connect with John Wetzel on LinkedIn or on Twitter @John__Wetzel
Connect with Brooks Sime on LinkedIn or on Twitter @BrooksSime
Connect with Alex Hilleary on LinkedIn or on Twitter @alex_hilleary

Creators & Guests

Host

Jeffrey Stern

What is Lay of The Land?

Telling the stories of entrepreneurship and builders in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. Every Thursday, Jeffrey Stern helps map the Cleveland/NEO business ecosystem by talking to founders, investors, and community builders to learn what makes Cleveland/NEO special.

Brooks Sime [00:00:00]:
How are we going to live and breathe the things that we were advising other companies to do? Because I think a large part of our product was not only helping people set up automation around key parts in the employee journey, but also just educating folks who were new to people ops or maybe had done it for a while, but wanted to feel like they were keeping up with how it was changing. Being able to cogently speak about that meant that we also had to live it, And I wanted to make sure that I felt like that from every every second that we worked there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:31]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Lane podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today is really a special episode. I had the true pleasure today of sitting down with 3 extraordinary guests, Alex Hilary, John Wetzel, and Brooke Semay, who collectively are the founders of Gather, a company oriented around a future of work that puts people first and streamlines workflows for people operations teams. Gather was recently acquired by ChartHop in March of 2022. Alex is the former CEO of Gather, where he led sales and marketing. John is the former CEO of Gather, where he led product, design, customer experience, and operations.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:29]:
And Brooks is the former CTO of Gather, where he led all engineering efforts. As we cover in our conversation, Alex and John previously worked at BoxCast together here in Cleveland prior to working on Gather. And separately, Brooks worked across several industries as a start up engineer in New Orleans before coming here to Cleveland. After successfully navigating Gather to their new home at ChartHop, Alex is going back to his roots building out a community marketing channel leveraging the assets he had established at Gather while John is now a senior product manager overseeing chart hops employee experience And Brooks is a lead software engineer. In our conversation, which all 3 founders would like to dedicate to Ari Kedouin and Emily Armando, the Venture For America Fellows, who joined the Gather team here in Cleveland last summer and who also have now joined ChartHop as well. We cover the full story of Gather from inception through to acquisition and the learnings along the way. As a brief aside before we hop in and in the spirit of disclaimers, it is worth calling out that I was an investor in Gather and had the real privilege of seeing Alex, John, and Brooks, who all are dear friends of mine and also 2 of whom were and are my roommates over the past 2 years, take gather from a fledgling idea into a full blown company. With that aside, back to the real story.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:01]:
So when I when I started Lay of the Land and I was thinking about who was going to eventually make their way onto the podcast. Of my first thoughts were, oh, obviously, the gather crew will be coming on to share their story as it unfolds, and today is that day. So this this is a a special episode that I have been looking forward to ultimately for many years now, having shadowed the the 3 of you and your journey since inception as roommates, as friends, as fellow Venture for America Fellows, as an investor in Gather, you know, from the humble beginnings of of ideation to your new home at at ChartHop. It is a story I've been looking forward to memorializing and sharing. So I wanted to thank you all for for coming on today to talk about it.

John Wetzel [00:03:55]:
Delighted to finally be here, Jeff.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:58]:
Yeah. So this is also the first time where there are 3 guests on the show. And so I I think it might be helpful just to start with the 3 of you as as individuals. If you'd like to do a a brief introduction and and just introduce yourselves here to to the folks listening in.

John Wetzel [00:04:15]:
I can kick us off. I'm John. I am the former CEO of Gather and now a senior product manager at ChartHop.

Alex Hilleary [00:04:24]:
Hi. I'm Alex. I am Jeff's roommate, former COO of Gather. Now I have joined the, the ChartHop Marketing team. And really at Gather, I did more of, like, head of growth sort of role, but officially a COO.

Brooks Sime [00:04:40]:
And I'm Brooks, former roommate, friend of Jeff, and now at ChartHop. I am a lead engineer. I was the CTO at Gather before we got acquired.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:50]:
Amazing. Alright. So we set the stage, and I think like like all of these conversations, it's it's interesting and helpful just to to kind of follow the the arc of your careers and interests and ultimately what kind of drew you together in this space. So take us a little bit through your your paths, respectively, through and to entrepreneurship, and we'll work our way towards towards the other.

John Wetzel [00:05:12]:
Yeah. So all of us originally met through Venture For America, which, Jeff, I know you're very familiar with, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners are as well. But it's a fellowship program for recent college grads. All of us had various entrepreneurial experiences kind of leading up into that. But Alex and I were working together here at BoxCast, which is I know you've had Gordon on the podcast before, and, one of the great gems of the Cleveland startup ecosystem. So we were working together there, and that's where we met. And then, when we started working on Gather, we pulled up Brooks, who is, Brooks, I'll I'll pass that to you to tell your your part of that story.

Brooks Sime [00:05:50]:
Sure. As John was saying, I did my Venture for America Fellowship in New Orleans. Had a very different experience, I think, from the 2 of them here in Cleveland. But they somehow were able to convince me to leave the warm, beautiful weather of, the Gulf South and come up with Raven's work on this idea mostly because you could tell we were on to something. Work was always gonna change. Little did we know how dramatically it would and how quickly it would.

Alex Hilleary [00:06:17]:
And I think we all kinda came in with, with different mindsets here. I know I remember, like, back to our early days, like, John was saying, like, after box cast, I'm gonna start my own thing immediately. I was like, I don't need to do that, but I would like to at some point in the 1st 10 years of my career. I remember, Brooks, you were saying you're like, I did not envision this as my my next step. So we're kinda all over the place, but kinda rallied around this vision, which at the time period was, like, a fairly weak vision of just, like, we're interested in this future of work, remote work. This sort of thing was, like, interesting, like, future that we were excited about, and we liked working together. So I think that's, like, really how stuff got started. I remember back at at BoxCast, John had, like, been working on some side projects, and, like, we had worked together at work a lot.

Alex Hilleary [00:07:08]:
And I liked working with John a ton. And I just remember coming to him and I'm like, hey. Like, can we, like, work on this thing? Then in Vintra for America, we have these validation challenges, which is, like, a very specific, like, 2 weeks sprint time period for, like, working on a side interest. And I was like, John, like, we're both interested in remote work. Like, what if we just, like, take this on together? And, you know, he'd been working on some other stuff, but, like, brought me on anyway. And, we kinda ended up just studying remote work. Like, we didn't really even come up with a product. We just, like, talked to, I think, it was, like, 40 different people in the, like, people operation space to, like, get their understanding of remote work.

Alex Hilleary [00:07:48]:
And, of course, that became our eventual market. But that's kind of, like, how things got started. It was, like, very casual side project. Like, we were just out there talking to people.

John Wetzel [00:07:57]:
Yeah. And this is 2018. So this is pre pandemic. Remote work was not really a thing. It was the very kind of fringe companies that were even allowing it at all. So it was a pretty interesting time for for that world.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:09]:
You guys were were prescient in your in your vision there. Absolutely.

Brooks Sime [00:08:14]:
I wanna highlight something really quickly that Alex called out, which was, I think one of the main reasons despite us having very different reasons for deciding to become founders. One of the big things I like is we just like working together. Never, cannot be, stated enough that that's, I think, one of the better reasons to get into a founder real founder founder founder relationship. It is it is so much like a marriage, and I'm so glad that it was with you all that I like spending time with.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:44]:
I I think it's it is pretty interesting because I think your path is is somewhat deviant from the other paths that I've seen as just a pattern where it's often much more tied to some, like, conviction, very strong upfront about a particular problem that that someone is looking to solve. Whereas, I remember these conversations that that you were having with these people is really an exercise in learning and understanding and trying to figure out what the problems to solve even were. And so maybe kinda take us through, you know, what were the questions you were asking? What were you interested in learning? And and what did you ultimately learn in those early days that kinda brought you to the the founding insights for for Gather?

John Wetzel [00:09:30]:
I come from a design background. And so I think about it through a designer's lens of, like, discovering going through problem discovery and sort of a design thinking process for those of the people who are familiar with that. But it's really about asking kind of why and getting at the root causes of their their actual problems that they were having. And so I feel like a lot of it was, a, helping us understand what these people were doing day to day, and then understanding their problems, understanding the, like, why and the root cause of those problems, and seeing if there was a an opportunity to tackle some of those.

Alex Hilleary [00:10:05]:
Yeah. And I think, you know, what this really looks like was, like, we, I mean, I think on paper don't have great, like, founder market fit in this space. We were, like, really excited about it. And the second we started talking to, you know, really progressive people ops folks, like, we were excited about the work that they were doing, wanted to be a part of it. But, like, we did not know them, like, intimately as a persona, like, as a buyer. So, like, very much so, like, this is a different path than, like, your usual founder path. And what that required on our end was just, like, tons of conversations that were, like, not really targeted. It wasn't vetting out, like, you know, can we, like, build this product that we have in mind in the back of our mind and, like, ask them questions, like, go down the mom test route.

Alex Hilleary [00:10:49]:
But it was more of just, like, we wanna know, like, everything about your job and, like, what you're thinking about when it relates to remote work. And we don't have another agenda in mind, but we're just trying to, like, learn more about what you're doing and how you approach things. And, like, we've poked on a lot of different problems, like, wildly different problems in these conversations because, like, we didn't really have a great insight into, like, what we were gonna be solving. And, I think taking John's design lens, like, we truly took all these conversations, had a giant air table of every conversation and every question we asked, Then we took post it notes, put them up on a on a wall, and I think we identified this was, like, over a several month period and, like, like, truly hundreds of conversations at this point. And, identified, like, 10 different kind of pain points that that were, like, patterns that had come up. And then we were like, well, you know, this pain point, like, not really interesting to us. Like, this one, I remember one we were thinking about at the time. And, again, this was, like, the Dons Point 2018, like, before pandemic and everything.

Alex Hilleary [00:11:49]:
It was, like, fully distributed teams, like, global teams payroll. Huge issue where, like, somebody is gonna make a lot of money in this over the next 10 years. Turns out now there's, like, 3 or 4 different companies that are, like, now raised, like, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in the past 3 years since the pandemic on this problem. But, like, at the time, John and I were like, we don't even begin to know how to solve this problem. It is not within, like, our skill set. Like, we wouldn't know how to approach it. So, like, that's a great problem. It's off the table for us.

Alex Hilleary [00:12:18]:
So, like, that's kinda how we went through this, process to get to the initial, like, problem solution that we were going around trying to solve.

John Wetzel [00:12:27]:
Yeah. The strong conviction that we did have throughout all of that was that remote work was gonna change the way fundamentally, like, work would would work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:36]:
And and this was before the pandemic. And before there was like this macro force that imposed it. Where where did your conviction come from before all of that happened?

John Wetzel [00:12:47]:
Some of it came from our own experiences. At BoxCast, we were allowed to do some flexible remote working, and I personally would go and visit one of my closest friends who's now a startup founder himself out in San Diego and would be there for, like, 2 weeks and would work great hours, would really enjoy it, and was like, this is a a phenomenal way to kind of mix up the way I'm working, and it would be a great, like, learning experience and those kind of things. And so it was like, why would every company not enable employees to do this? There is no change in productivity there. All the things we now know about remote work, we were experiencing. And, the more we dug into it, the more you saw that this was not, like, phenomena that was just, like, subject to us, but this was there's whole communities around, this sort of idea and people that were were being early adopters of this trend, really.

Alex Hilleary [00:13:40]:
Yeah. So many companies were, like, you saw them, like, sneakily, like, expanding their sales and, like, engineering teams remotely to help them, like, hire better people. And it's, like, that was subtly going on in the back. I think that's why it hit so hard during the pandemic. Like, why it stuck is because, like, this was already happening. And, like, at the time, we thought this was gonna play out over the next 5 to 10 years. We thought teams would be hybrid remote. Like, most teams would be hybrid remote 10 years from now, like, knowledge worker teams.

Alex Hilleary [00:14:07]:
And, obviously, that sped up faster. But, like, it was already in the works. And I think from just, like, a a mission standpoint too, I think we all kind of resonated. It's part of I think it's tied into the VFA thing as well. You know, we saw a lot of great things that would come out of going, remote. So I think for us, like, places like Cleveland that often you have people who grow up here who wanna have a great tech career, and you know what? They gotta go move to the coast. Right? Because they gotta go be in office, have those networks, those sorts of things. Remote work is, like, opening up, and we see it happening now.

Alex Hilleary [00:14:39]:
It's, like, all of these people who grew up in Cleveland, like, they're coming back to Cleveland because, like, they don't have to make that choice between where they wanna be, their families, their personal life, and their careers. Like, that's the thing we all, you know, got behind because we saw the impact it could have on, you know, places in middle America, you know, whether it's Cleveland, whether it's rural places, like, it was gonna have a positive impact. That and, like, the flexibility that remote work can provide and closing some of the, you know, when we think about gender inequity in the workplace, like, remote work and the flexibility that provides, like, will help those problems too. And so I think that's where we got really into this, like, idea of this future. We we talked to these people ops people that were, like, a decade ahead of where everybody else was at time, and they're like, this is what the future looks like, and we're like, we want that vision. Like, that is really exciting to us. Like, how can we help? And, like, I think that's really the energy and momentum that we got behind as we were we were starting things.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:36]:
So you you have these series of conversations, hundreds of people that you're aggregating this information from. You you pull out the patterns. You figure out, okay, these ones we don't we don't fully understand or don't wanna pursue or too hairy of a of a problem. Where do you ultimately land and what's the direction that that you choose to head in? What what was the original vision for for Gather?

John Wetzel [00:16:01]:
Yeah. So the original vision was around collecting inform and organizing information about, people, in particular, like, preferences about, like, the things that they liked or didn't like, and this was a man often a manual process that we were seeing an opportunity to to automate or or step in with the technology to at least assist. And the other piece of that was it was all over Slack. We heard resoundingly from people ops folks that they were sending hundreds of Slack DMs manually, and that's one of the the kind of cross country or cross company, Slack DMs were something that we wanted to address and solve.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:41]:
So what does the the MVP of of this idea look like? How do you actually how do you get started? And from, like, the the company perspective, we'll, you know, work our way towards, you know, Y Combinator here and how that comes into it. But but how do you think about the company at this point and and getting off the ground running?

John Wetzel [00:16:59]:
So very initially, it was just Alex and I who were working on this problem and doing some of this discovery. It became very evident quickly that we needed a a true technical cofounder as part of the group. And so we actually flew Brooks up for a little hackathon in Cleveland in the middle of February. Great idea if you wanna sell someone on Cleveland. Fly them from New Orleans to to Cleveland The

Alex Hilleary [00:17:23]:
best to

John Wetzel [00:17:24]:
be in Cleveland. And, and I'll pass it to Brooks to tell a little bit about, like, how that that went and, and what our initial MVP looked like.

Brooks Sime [00:17:33]:
Yeah. I mean, I will say this. I hadn't seen snow in a while, so it was a good call. Just thinking about that initial MVP, and that's running a little bit here. Like, that version of gather, I think, lasted about 6 or 7 months before we really decided it should be quite a bit bigger. But at that time, you know, getting an MVP in front of someone was something that we hadn't really done, I think was the biggest engineering it, a a tool that over Slack could collect information, was by far our smallest task. It was getting people to actually change the way that they did things to try out our tool that I think stood out as our biggest hurdle. I were to do that again, I think I would have, done it all over Google forms for the first, like, couple of months instead of spending any engineering time at all.

Brooks Sime [00:18:22]:
I was I mean, I think it's something that, as an engineer, I scoffed that for a long time, but I've since come all around on our tools like, you know, Bubble and and Webflow, all these low code, no code tools just because there is something to be said for not worrying so much about putting all things into into code and stone before actually getting it in front of people. But, yeah, our our initial our initial idea and MVP was very much a glorified form collector over Slack.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:53]:
And you got it out there though and and learned at some point that it had to be bigger than a glorified Google form over Slack. So, you know, what what what comes next?

John Wetzel [00:19:04]:
Yeah. That was one of the interesting pieces was trying to get it in the hands of those first couple people to try it. In particular, one of the challenges we had was the role of people operations, was a fairly new framing that I think is is continued to take, have more and more people kind of take it on and and have it. But at that time, you know, especially in Cleveland, it was mostly just seen as HR. And there were, Alex, how many people that showed up in the LinkedIn search for people operations in Cleveland

Brooks Sime [00:19:34]:
at the time?

Alex Hilleary [00:19:34]:
Oh, yeah. It was, like, 11, in the whole, like, Cleveland metro area that had, like, titles of, like, people or people operations or employee experience versus HR, which is like, basically, and just quickly, like, the difference is, like, kind of an approach. Like, if you've got an HR title, your company is probably thinking in a more traditional, like, HR sense and, like, HR also is not like a full transition. Like, HR exists. It exists in the future, but it's more of a compliance, payroll, administrative role versus, you know, people ops is thinking a lot more about employee experience, which is kind of where we put in and and, like, that was our target customer. And, like, not a lot of Cleveland companies at the time were thinking of employee experience at least in that way, but, like, on the coasts, that was, like, blowing up. So definitely a little bit of a challenge us being in Cleveland and not being right next to who we were targeting as our our kinda key customers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:31]:
How much convincing does it take that traditional HR oriented companies to understand what People Apps is?

Alex Hilleary [00:20:39]:
It's not worth it. I think that's what we learned was, like, it it there's, like, no it truly the pandemic helps. So, like, the way things have changed, we are living in such a like, this is 2018. Like, this is not like we this journey has not not been super long. But the way that minds have changed since then is just drastic because, like, you would go around and, like, most people, like, would not understand the value of it. Mainly because just, like, the employer employee relationship was very different. Like, now we're talking about all of these, like, crazy, like, talent dynamics that just, like, did not exist back then, and people are like, oh, shoot. Like, these employee experience things, like, do matter, and, like, I'm losing people like crazy.

Alex Hilleary [00:21:23]:
I can't attract new people. Like and now that's, like, become a lot more widespread, but at the time, it wasn't. And, like, there is no degree of convincing. You can go to, like, business leaders who don't think about it that way and be like, yes. Invest in this, like, extra thing because your employees should be happy. Like, that's not that's not a winning argument. Like so I think, you know, very early on, we realized, like, we need to be targeting the people that already believe this and saying we have a product to help these people.

Brooks Sime [00:21:51]:
I'll add that I think initially we really thought about, it from the perspective of employee retention. That was our that was our main wedge for quite a while. It was like you use a product like ours, and you'll be able to keep people from deserting your company or leaving, you know, after we put so much effort and time work into it. And that angle helped us have a lot of our initial conversations. But, again, as I was just saying, you can't really change someone's mind with that, especially if they think that the job a job is a gift that they give to their employees, and that they're lucky to have as opposed to one that is always as opposed to, like, an ongoing negotiation that is just it's that takes just as much work from you, the employer, as it does from the employee to maintain. So the pandemic and the ideas of the great resignation, I think, made it so we didn't even have to talk about it. It's just implicitly understood that these things mattered, which I gotta say, it felt great to be validated so quickly.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:54]:
Just like extraordinarily validated by the state of the world at at that

Brooks Sime [00:23:00]:
time. And,

John Wetzel [00:23:00]:
yeah. So with that initial product, we we rolled it out to about 10 companies and had, like, struggled to the point to get that and learned pretty quickly that it was just moderately useful at that. Like and and wasn't something that they were willing to pay for. When we got to the point of like, okay. Let's have you trial this. And then trying to get to the point of like, hey. Is this valuable enough to pay for? The answer was was pretty resoundingly no. And so this was kind of towards the end of of 2018, and we we had to figure out, you know, what was gonna be that next step.

John Wetzel [00:23:34]:
That was a little bit of a bigger, more convincing, more powerful, and also more useful, tool and and vision for them to get behind.

Alex Hilleary [00:23:44]:
Yeah. I think that was 20, 2019. So that was when we were in, yeah, we were at that point. So we had, like, built the initial product out, got into the Venture for America Accelerator, which was here in Cleveland at the time. So we were kind of in that accelerator. We'd gone full time, left our jobs to, like, work on gathering, and then it was within that context that we're, like, oh, our product's not really sellable. So that's that's about where we're sitting at at that moment.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:12]:
A good learning. Part of the journey.

Brooks Sime [00:24:15]:
That's us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:15]:
The, the business these companies succeed with is rarely the business they were founded on. Understanding and learning this, right? What is the bigger vision that y'all came away with and kind of rallied around going forward?

John Wetzel [00:24:31]:
Ultimately, we rallied around this concept of key moments in the employee journey, onboarding, birthdays, work anniversaries, offboarding, parental leave that are key places where the employee employer can actually interject a little bit of process, usually communication and coordination, task management, things like that. And there's a lot of it that goes on, especially, you know, during the the things like onboarding. And so we identify that as a key place that we were gonna center our product around, and we were gonna build tools to help them design those experiences and processes and then deliver them over Slack. And so we built our our pitch kind of around that towards the end of 2019 and pitched at several events. And, actually, we're we're pretty successful with this pitch that we had developed around employee moments and how it could help with retention and what it could do for employers. 1, 2 big checks, which I think is, like, every entrepreneur's, like, dream that one time you get this massive check that you get to hold, even if it's not like we're

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:35]:
not large. Physically large.

John Wetzel [00:25:37]:
Large check. Yeah. Not actually monetarily large. I mean, monetarily large enough. Yeah. No.

Alex Hilleary [00:25:41]:
It's pretty good. It was pretty good for a pitch competition. Yeah.

John Wetzel [00:25:44]:
Yeah. And and so one of those was was Brooks went out to the West Coast and pitched to in a people ops tech competition, which there the fact that something like that existed was awesome. And the fact that we, like, placed in it and and won was a really, like, validating experience for us. I think initially validating by someone external to kind of our own network locally. And that's kind of one of the first things that we're like, hey. This is on to something. It resonated with all the customers we had validated it with as well, and that gave us enough conviction to kind of build a product around, around that. So we scrapped all of our old code, completely started brand new new tech stack, totally different setup, and started out on on building what is, the current Gather product.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:32]:
And that sounds like, a more expensive endeavor ultimately. So I I know you had won some of these these pitch competitions, but from a funding standpoint, what what did that look like?

John Wetzel [00:26:44]:
Yeah. We had just been funded through grants, and then we actually got our first investment that was actually from Venture for America, which was very cool. And so that gave us enough funds to where we were able to, like, look at the 3 of us and kinda say, like, hey. Can, like, how how long can this, like, last us for? And and we we basically said, collectively, this is enough money for us to, like, to to, like, be scrappy. And I think that's where living in Cleveland actually was really useful was our cost and overhead was really low. And so we were able to build for we committed to building through the rest of 2020 and and seeing what kind of customer traction we could get and what, like, funding might then come from that period of time.

Alex Hilleary [00:27:26]:
And so, of course, the the kind of time period here, John's talking about this decision we made in, like, January, February 2020 of what the year 2020 was gonna look like. And then 2020, changed on us.

Brooks Sime [00:27:40]:
Yeah. So I think from there, after we had got some of that money, a little bit from BFA, a little bit from Cape York, they're the ones who'd run pitch competition. They were able to say, yeah, we can we can eat and live off this good. So let's start thinking about our next move. And I think that's something we learned from doing, the venture for America accelerator, which in many ways is a pre accelerator. They spent a lot of time just kind of orient orienting you around the what it looks like to be an entrepreneur. We decided that our next best bet would be to apply to a bigger one. I remember we were looking very closely at Techstars NYC.

Brooks Sime [00:28:16]:
We were very sure we had no chance at either. But it was super important to us that we had at least apply because we had been told by friends and mentors, you have to get your name out there so that you would be so that, you know, for later applications, they would know who you are. They'd be able to see your traction progress, what have you. And I think a lot of the things that we've talked just talked about about how work was changing were really resonating then. Our interview when was was our interview after things

Alex Hilleary [00:28:45]:
like that? This is a month after the pandemic started. So, like, we had gone, like, heads down building out the products through March of 2020. Right as we were trying to launch it with our pilot customers, the pandemic hit. We kinda just, like, went back heads down for 6 more weeks while our customers were, like, figuring out how to transition to remote work because, of course, it's the people ops people who were, like, leading that charge. And then also applied the accelerators during that time period where so these things, you know, became a lot more you know, they resonated with people, and then it turned out that, like, the world wasn't going under economically, and actually, startups were gonna start hiring again. And, you know, they were gonna have figure out how to do it remotely. So it turned out to be an interesting time where, like, for the moment, it seems bad. And then by, like, later that spring, it was actually looking like we were in a really good spot because we've just done a bunch of studying of, like, how to do remote onboarding.

Alex Hilleary [00:29:38]:
And then next thing you know, like, every company is trying to figure that out. So we were in a in a good spot there. And I think, you know, we were, like, lucky in that timing. Something I'll say about the YC app. So YC, we ended up getting into it, like, well before we expected to off of this product we built. We'd had, like, 10 companies sign up as pilots at that point. And, one thing I'll say about the YC process that, like, people ask about a lot, like, we got lucky in that we got read by the right partner who was a former founder who had had this exact pain point that we were solving for, and he's like, oh, I get this totally, and, like, that's how we got in. We would talk to other partners at YC later on in the process, and they're like, I don't get this at all.

Alex Hilleary [00:30:20]:
Like and we're like, if they read our application, like, totally wouldn't have gotten in. So I just like always you know, we got really lucky getting in the first go. There's a whole lot of luck in the process, who reads your apps, those sorts of things. And that's, like, what I always say about that process. But regardless, we got into YC, and so we were headed to, YC in in summer of 2020.

John Wetzel [00:30:42]:
Through that, we we actually, like, hold up in the basement of an Ohio City office and went to work at, like, that was y c for us. Normally, it's an in person accelerator, but, like, we made our own little y c in, in a a office in Ohio City, which was fun.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:01]:
So I know they they always, you know, push you to think big about what you're doing coming out of the Accelerator. How does the the YC experience change the trajectory of of Gather?

Alex Hilleary [00:31:17]:
Pretty dramatically, I'd say. You know, we came into this, and we weren't even sure, you know, at the time whether we wanted to go down. Like, we were pretty skeptical about the full VC path. We knew an accelerator would be helpful. You know, we did not like, we weren't gonna say no to YC, but we also were like, did not have the vision of, like, going out raising a ton of money from West Coast, BCs, which is, like, what YC is good for. And so I think that, you know, that whole time period, we're, like, thinking about, like, okay. What kind of company do we actually, you know, wanna build? And so I think we we wrestled with that a lot that summer as we were going through it. I think YC was great in a lot of ways.

Alex Hilleary [00:31:53]:
It, like, pushed us to monetize. I mean, it really got a lot of fire behind us that I don't think no. I think we would have been a little bit more hesitant on our own. You know, just first time founders, I think any time you've got people behind you who know what they're doing, putting fire behind you is, like, always very helpful. You know, we didn't have you know, we had these pilots signed up and, like, nobody was paying yet. And they're, like, come back here. Like, from for day 1, we want you to have paying customers. Now.

Alex Hilleary [00:32:19]:
And like, those sorts of things really helpful. But, you know, I think we did work through, like, funding and like, what are we trying to do with that? And, and up through YC demo day, like, we were still kind of figuring that out. We ultimately decided we wanted to raise a smaller realm than, like, most of our batchmates. We were initially gonna go for, like, 300 k, 500 k kind of target. We we, like, settled. We, like, negotiated with our partner. He's like, you gotta get it up higher than that. Like, everybody else is out here raising, like, 3 or $4,000,000.

Alex Hilleary [00:32:50]:
But, like, we hadn't chosen our trajectory yet. So I think, you know, a lot of those things, like, we were we were thinking through ultimately went to demo day and still, like, kind of pursuing more of a pre seed, like, angel round coming out of YC. But, you know, still targeting, like, had the YC energy behind us and seeing all these other great founders with us and, like, we were like, okay, we gotta grow faster. We gotta do you know, move faster, monetize faster, learn faster. I I think that's what YC was really good for for us.

John Wetzel [00:33:21]:
It also was a big unlocker from a perspective point of view. I think that we had a certain understanding of what it meant to grow a b to b SaaS startup. I mean, that's, like, the kind of the category that we're operating in. And that comes with it, like, an understanding of what metrics you should be shooting for, how you should be operating, those sort of things. And YC gave us an exposure to just so many more companies, both in the early stage and some other companies that are a few stages ahead to really give you a better perspective of, like, what is the actual startup landscape look like rather than just kinda this narrow slice that we had experienced through our own experiences and even through our, like, friends' experiences in in Venture for America.

Brooks Sime [00:34:06]:
Yeah. And I think also, I'll just say that coming out of y c and having that kind of win behind us really leveled us up just mentally. I recognizing that, oh, maybe we can maybe we can just do this and say we're gonna do all the things that we want at a time scale that we couldn't expect just because that's what everyone else was doing, at least in our budget. But, like and there's something I think to be said just for surrounding yourself with builders. That energy is incredibly infectious.

Alex Hilleary [00:34:36]:
Yeah. Because it felt like we didn't know what we're doing, but then we saw all of these people that were getting these, like, tech crunch. But, like, everybody that was, like, big name in the early stage startups, like, we saw behind the hood and or, like, under the hood, and we're like, oh, shoot. They don't know what they're doing either. We're just like them. We can also do this. Like

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:54]:
Yeah. There is there is a lot of that winging it as you go, but with with the confidence and that that win behind you. Because ultimately, you guys got that kind of attraction and and attention as well coming out of it. I remember if it was a TechCrunch article, but, right, something

John Wetzel [00:35:11]:
Yeah. We had a TechCrunch article published on us. I mean, the and just the confidence boost that you get from, like, being able to use that stamp where immediately when you're talking to someone, you're not like, hey. Yeah. We're this little startup. We're just beginning, you know, whatever. That that doesn't convince anyone that you're legitimate at all. They don't wanna open the door.

John Wetzel [00:35:30]:
They don't think that you're gonna be delivering anything of value. But you use that y c stamp, and it was it was often a really good way to open doors that otherwise might have been closed to us. So that's something that we definitely, got from it and we're we're lucky with.

Alex Hilleary [00:35:45]:
Yeah. The the reality is signaling matters so much. And, like, we're all first time founders. Right? And we're all young. And, like like I said, like, we didn't have a great, like, founder market fit. And we're from Cleveland, which, like, say what you want, but, like, if you're on the West Coast, like, they're not going to take you as, you know, like, anybody that's starting a company here. You'll you'll feel that. Like, they don't take you as seriously.

Alex Hilleary [00:36:09]:
Like, you're in Cleveland. What would you know about people ops? Do they even have people ops in Cleveland? The answer is no. But having the YC stamp on us, like, all of a sudden, we could get conversations with, like, a bunch of other people because it's, like, that credibility stamp that we needed. So, you know, whatever it is, like, that's that's something that was helpful for us. I would

Brooks Sime [00:36:27]:
say it even helped in Cleveland too, not just talking to people who are external to the city, but having that outsider stamp made us, I think, more of a landmark company here.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:38]:
I I'm sure it gets the the flywheel going. I know from a product sales scaling perspective, at that point, you're starting to bring on a lot more customers kind of in parallel. Alex, I know from the community building side, you know, I'd love to get your perspective on that as kind of ultimately something that I don't know how if you think of it as like a product, but like what what that ultimately came in parallel and relationship together and and just kind of the as we work our way towards ultimately, you know, an acquisition by by ChartHop. What what are the the things that are happening over the next year and a half, 2 years that that that have gotten you to the point where, you know, Gather is is, is acquired?

Alex Hilleary [00:37:18]:
Yeah. So kinda moving the story along a little bit. Right? We raised money following YC. We, hire on an engineer and a head of community, which we've decided, like, from a, like, growth route. We're gonna really lean into community marketing because that's, like, a lot of, you know, how we've seen people work in our space, in the in the people ops, HR space. There's a lot of, like, you get referrals from your friends. HR tech creates, like, you know, these spaces where people can talk and, like, put their brand behind it. And so, like, we saw that as kind of our our growth path.

Alex Hilleary [00:37:53]:
So, you you know, we come out of that. We've got a handful of customers at that point. So we're starting to build out our growth functions, which are, like, very content marketing driven, which is, like, my background. And then we brought on this head of community as our our 5th person to, you know, build out this, basically, like, community go to market arm, which is a kind of scary thing because it's a a longer term investment. Like, that doesn't play out right away. But I will say by, you know, 6 or 7 months after YC, that was going strong and, like, really helping us be a scrappy team, like, getting a bunch of demos, like, getting recognition within the space, and, and that kind of thing. So it was, I guess, kind of unique at that size to be building out that kind of function, but it was it turned out to be a really helpful thing when we didn't have you know, we weren't able to go hire, like, a couple salespeople and then have a marketing person doing something separate. So it was a a cool approach.

Alex Hilleary [00:38:50]:
And then I'll let y'all tackle it from the the product side, what we're doing during that time period.

John Wetzel [00:38:55]:
Yeah. So after y c, we kinda had a a product that was definitely sellable. Had a couple, like, small gaps, but really was providing the core value that we wanted to provide, and that was something that YC kinda pushed us to achieve. And so at that point, it was it was just building up the product and then the functionality and rounding out the the edges. One example in that is in order to to use Gather, we need to know who all the employees at the company are and when, say, they're starting or when their work anniversaries or birthdays are. Those are key information for us. And, originally, like, during y c, that was all just like a CSV upload one time. That was kind of the MVP way to do it.

John Wetzel [00:39:37]:
And then we had to incorporate, like, real integrations into their HR platforms. And that that kind of started happening in the the later half, and that was one of the big, like, unlocks for us to start selling even more because that would be something that every everyone would always ask is like, oh, do you integrate with, like, ADP or with Rippling or with Gusto? And those were were key, steps for us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:01]:
So one of the the things that I'm quite curious about is as part of the company building process, as you're you're growing the organization and selling something in the the space of people operations is how you were thinking about people operations internally as as you as a company and how how you tried to hold yourself to a standard as thought leaders in the space. You know, what was that process of, as first time founders, like learning how to build a company and selling a product that helps companies, you know, facilitate become better at at the people operations, experience? Well, how how are you navigating that?

John Wetzel [00:40:41]:
I like to think about it a lot through we, like, learned how to do people ops through osmosis. And it was just, like, by surrounding ourselves by with the people who were also doing people ops and and then trying to put it into practice ourselves was a very interesting experiment. We were certainly, I'm sure, much, much more thoughtful about it than your typical, like, startup. You know? And that started with our high our hiring process when we built out, you know, to hire our first few employees. Like, we had a full blown, like, laid out hiring process. It certainly wasn't perfect, but, like, we put a lot of a lot of thought and effort into making it good and equitable and those sort of things. And that translated then into the onboarding experience that we tried to build, as well as it was a great opportunity to, like, dog food our own product, which is super fun and interesting and, led to some good learnings and and output there.

Alex Hilleary [00:41:32]:
Yeah. We were like a 5 person and then an 8 person team, like, conducting onboarding like we were, like, an 80 person team, like, the companies we were selling to. It's, like, definitely overkill, but, like, worth it for the dog fording it. Like, we couldn't not do that and not go, like, build out this, like, really great program because, you know, it would feel very disingenuous to, to the product and and what we're advocating for.

Brooks Sime [00:41:56]:
Yeah. That echoes what I was gonna say. I think that more than anything, we probably were paralyzed by the realization that we can't have bad people ops for a people ops company. Anytime that we wanted to change or add to our process, it was thinking so much about the future of Gather and, like, how are we going to live and breathe the things that we were advising other companies to do. Because I think a large part of our product was not only helping people set up automation around key parts in the employee journey, but also just educating folks who were new to people ops or maybe had done it for a while, but wanted to feel like they were keeping up with how it was changing. Being able to cogently speak about that meant that we also had to live it. And I wanted to make sure that I felt like that from every every second that we worked there worked there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:46]:
And people ops is hard. Right? It's like I of of all the the founder journeys and and, experiences, people come back to hiring, retaining people as, like, the hardest part of the company building process. Like Absolutely. Irrespective of what it is that they are building, that people are the hardest part of it.

Brooks Sime [00:43:09]:
People are complicated, man. They're really really tough. I think I mean, I'm coming from an engineering background. It's like, I would always think about that as we were going through our hiring process. I was like, man, I'm spending more time thinking about, like, these candidates that we're looking at or, like, our employees today than I am about actually building. And it was still time well spent even though it felt like if I had asked myself that, you know, a year before I started to go, like, that's probably not where I would think I'd spend most of my time. And I think just kind of bringing it back to the ideas of, like, yeah, after people went remote, we didn't have to start convincing them that these things mattered. A lot of people were feeling that.

Brooks Sime [00:43:50]:
A lot of companies were feeling that just realization that this is gonna be the hardest thing that I do, and it really helped elevate people ops teams and people ops leaders at a time when I think they didn't have as much power.

John Wetzel [00:44:01]:
With our own people ops, we also had the opportunity to explore some kind of new concepts that maybe our people ops folks were trying out or we saw as kind of the newest things in the industry. I think about some of our, like, our engineering hiring process, for example, our last few candidates, we all did paid projects with where we brought them on to do a paid thing. And, you know, that that was a significant resource, like, that for us to give up at that time. Like, we were like, do we really pay these people? Like, we don't have that much cash in the bank. But we, as a as founders, felt that that was super important to pay people if they were going to do work for you, even if it was example work in a interview process. And that was a value that we wanted to, like, hold ourselves to and did throughout that process even if it was, like, you know, you cringed a little bit as a as someone that was already watching, you know, your your burn rate very closely. Yeah. We had a a holiday policy that was, fit for for people internationally.

John Wetzel [00:45:00]:
So you could actually choose your own international holidays that you personally would want to recognize as opposed to having a set number of company or set exact company holidays. So certain things like that that that were a little bit more on the edges and would be harder to advocate for at a larger company if we were just a employee that wanted to create that policy and and roll it out.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:23]:
If if we look at the the the flip side of that coin, you know, externally, how did you hold yourself accountable? What what were the measures of success? How are you kinda gauging the the efficacy of of Gather out there?

John Wetzel [00:45:38]:
Do you mean in in the view of our customers or if our Yeah.

Alex Hilleary [00:45:42]:
Yeah.

John Wetzel [00:45:42]:
Yeah. Oftentimes, it was in terms of, like, what did their how did their day to day change? Because we were automating a lot of the the tasks. We were looking at it through the lens oftentimes of the people ops person. And what did their life kinda before gather look like versus after gather. Oftentimes, it was like, yep. Every time I have a new hire, I send them an email, and then I set a reminder to myself on my calendar to send them this other email 3 days later. And those sort of things like, oh, yep. I don't have to do that anymore.

John Wetzel [00:46:13]:
And I can support, you know, bringing on, like, 12 new hires every 2 weeks without having to, like, pull my hair out of, like, all these manual tasks that I'm doing. And so, honestly, it's not, like, quantitative, but the qualitative feedback of those people ops coordinators especially to, you know, describing their life before and after Gather was the most gratifying thing as a as a product builder to to receive that feedback.

Alex Hilleary [00:46:41]:
And and the way we kinda also looked at, like, embeddedness in our customers is, like, ultimately, like, we're a workflow builder product for people operations. Right? So they build their onboarding workflow with us. What was really cool to see is, like, when they built, like, maybe an onboarding and, like, a work anniversary work flow. Well, did they go on and, like, did they find those successful? And did they go on to build other workflows? And, you know, to see a lot of our customers start to, you know, start with, like, 2 or 3 workflows and then expand and they truly were building out workflows across their whole entire employee experience using Gather. Like, that was really awesome to see because I think that was the the big vision coming together was, like, you know, we're not just an onboarding tool. You know, we're not a simple birthday and work anniversary reminder tool, but we are, like, this flexible communication and coordination tool for the people ops person across whatever they have to build for. And so I think that's really when we saw, you know, people using us for everything. That's where we knew, like, we were making a big impact in that work

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:41]:
workspace. So we're we're talking about gather in the in the past tense as it has ceased to exist as an organization in an exciting development and acquisition to to ChartHop. So I'd love to just hear the story of of Gather's destination and and new home.

John Wetzel [00:47:59]:
Yeah. So ChartHop is a people analytics platform, but they do much more than that. They're also you can, help companies with headcount planning and org design and compensation planning. We originally had heard about them because we were pitching an investor. They said, hey. I think, this one of our portfolio companies would be a really good integration for y'all. They have a kinda core source of truth because ChartHop brings in this information and aggregates it as a as a people analytics company. And so they provide a really good base layer of, like, what is that employee data? And that was one of the issues that I mentioned earlier that was pretty fundamental to what we were doing at Gather.

John Wetzel [00:48:44]:
And so, that led to, ultimately, a conversation with the Ian White, who's the CEO of, of ChartHop. Yeah.

Alex Hilleary [00:48:53]:
And I think at this time so now we're talking. We've fast forwarded some more. Companies continue to grow. We're actually in a in a great spot. Like, the same month that we initially had the first conversations at the end, which was November, 2021, was actually our best growth month of all time. Like, we were hitting a lot of our metrics and, like, in a really good place from a a company standpoint. But I think assessing I think coming back to that same question of, like, how big of a company is this that we're building? Can we be that fully, like, you know, VCs wanna see a path to being a $10,000,000,000 company right now? And, like, you gotta connect those dots. And it's like, you know, realistically, are we going to be that platform, and what will that take to become that platform? Those were some questions we were thinking about while our business was doing really well, while we were growing a lot, and while we were having these conversations starting these conversations off with with ChartHop.

Alex Hilleary [00:49:47]:
So, like, there was a lot of stuff that we were thinking through it at this point. And, yeah, I think, you know, started those conversations and just kept getting better. And, you know, I think from a product standpoint, it was just like a really good fit. And then you get further into the conversations, and then you're realizing from a people standpoint, it's a really good fit. From a mission and value standpoint, it's a really good fit. And, like, sort of weigh these things beside, you know, alternative options.

Brooks Sime [00:50:11]:
I think one thing that ChartHop really stands out in my mind is doing very well is recognizing the complexity that is people operations and all the things that they're in charge of. Gather from its very first iteration was always thought of as something that would have to be very flexible because we wanted to match employee cultures. We wanted to be able to say that this isn't a out of the box tool that's gonna help you do onboarding in one specific way. It's gonna help you do your onboarding or celebrate birthdays in the way that you care about or even thinking about offboarding in a way that's suitable for your particular company situation. ChartHop, from its very first iterations, has always focused on making sure that any company that uses them can configure it and build an analytics platform that actually helps them make the decision they need to. And when we think about things like headcount planning and compensation planning, those are really sensitive subjects. How many people are you how many people at your company? How much do you how much are they going to get paid? That looks like that can be very different, and it's not something that I think a lot of companies really talk or share a lot about, at least between each other. So being able to handle all of these different types of kinda company playbooks was very similar to our own ethos.

Brooks Sime [00:51:25]:
And I think it made it clear to me from a builder standpoint, like, okay. If we join this larger team, we'll still be able to build out the vision that we had regather, which was a tool, which is a workflow builder that at every single point in the employee journey could have an impact, no matter the kind of company that you are, large or small.

John Wetzel [00:51:45]:
I think that's something we're really grateful for in this acquisition is just the opportunity to keep working on the same problems that we were working on before. I think, you know, unless you get really, really far in building a company, there's there's definitely at least for for me, there was this notion of, like, unfinished business where we had had had some impact on some people and gotten some of that positive validation I talked about earlier, but we hadn't seen the large scale impact or a change to all people ops and all HR departments that we really wanted to to bring about because they are still dealing with tools that are our legacy. They're years behind what their colleagues in sales and marketing have. And that's one of the problems we originally identified, and it hasn't changed in the last, like, 4 or 5 years. And at ChartHop, we're going to have the opportunity to solve that problem at scale, which is really, really, really exciting.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:38]:
One of the more macro topics I've been curious to get your perspective on is having had the foresight on remote work and, you know, maybe not predicting COVID in its in its entirety, but but that it was coming, and in a a timely fashion. What are the the other areas of people operations where it's happening? And and maybe it'll take a, you know, a a catastrophic catalyst to to move the needle. But but where where what is the future of people ops? And and what are the companies that are innovating the best in the space doing right now that that will put them ahead, in terms of the that employee experience?

Alex Hilleary [00:53:20]:
I'm just thinking of, a picture of John's face on the Internet right now that says this man predicted remote work. Here's what he says is coming next.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:30]:
Yeah. Tell us, Sean,

John Wetzel [00:53:31]:
what's coming next. What is coming next?

Brooks Sime [00:53:33]:
What's about your LinkedIn post that you queued up around this topic?

John Wetzel [00:53:39]:
Yeah. I mean, I I think what's in some ways coming next is people ops and the people who are working in it. I think the role is just shifting so much that one of the changes that I hope comes is is actually more people coming from other roles and organizations into people operations and viewing it as a strategic center and understanding what that can drive in terms of business value. So one of my favorite, like, new sayings is that, like, people operations is the new product management. Like, product management didn't exist 10 years ago. It took, like, the the year of, like, 2010 to or to 2020, like, is when the role of of product management, like, came into existence, and it's, like, popularity in in kind of the tech world. I see the same thing happening with people ops and employee experience. And so, you know, it's not necessarily a a tech play, but more a how companies are viewing this role, how they're deploying it across their organizations is changing it in a a massive way.

John Wetzel [00:54:42]:
So if you're considering it, switch into people operations if you're not in it already because I think there's a a new wave of of folks joining in.

Alex Hilleary [00:54:51]:
The the most fascinating thing in my mind right now that's happening is just the change in employer employee relationship and how the power dynamics has, like, completely swapped, like, for the first time ever. And, like, employee like, a knowledge worker company well, any companies right now, like, employees have the power and how that just changes everything about, like, business decisions. And, like, we're just beginning to get into that world and, like, I don't think that's going away anytime soon. So I think that just has, like, tons of ramifications on, like, the future of work and what that looks like, and we're just beginning to explore that. I think nobody has actually figured out remote work still. Like, you've got so many of these tech offices that haven't made real decisions yet, and we haven't gotten into this post COVID world fully yet. Like, we've been saying this for forever, but, like, people still haven't figured this stuff out. Nobody actually I don't think anybody knows at at their companies 2 to 3 years from now whether they're gonna be hybrid remote, like, or, like, what way they're gonna be hybrid or remote.

Alex Hilleary [00:55:52]:
Like, none of these things have been figured out. So, like, those those, like, problems are all in front of us, and, like, there's so many opportunities for solutions to, like, figure out what that future of work actually could look like. So I it's just that such a fun space to be in right now, like, because everything's changing so quickly.

Brooks Sime [00:56:09]:
Yeah. I'll say that, I think that from the perspective of what best practices are, like, we one of the things that we did really early on was we, built a thing called the people operations playbook. It was supposed to be focused around tactical advice for people ops teams so that they could, like, get cracking quickly and also just be a good introduction or a gatherers before having to try our product. I think something that we saw time and time again was, like, people op as John is implying, like, people ops is an emerging like, category of work that doesn't have a playbook, not in the way that for me, like, software engineering has things like agile where it's, like, their ways and, like, thoughts about how good people ops should be structured where, like, in comparison to good engineering. And I I see that as being what one of the next steps is thought leaders really organizing around broad sweeping ideas that can be applicable at, different types of companies that are such are the actual basis of what, you know, good employee experiences. It's more of a more defined and a lot less amorphous.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:11]:
So I wanna maybe bookend the the conversation here with some some learnings and and reflections on on the whole process having, you know, gone gone from 0 to to exit here. You know, what are what are the things that that you've taken with you and, you know, maybe a a framing to this question could be, you know, what what matters to you as part of this process that we haven't necessarily talked about yet?

John Wetzel [00:57:36]:
The first word that comes to mind for me is naivety naivety. Like, we were so naive when we were starting this business. But at the same time, I don't know that I would have been less naive had I not tried to start the business. You know, I'm sure there would have been other ways to to go about some of this learning, but I do think a lot of it is was just the time and space spent trying to to do this, trying to fundraise, but, trying to get a a product in a customer's hands for the first time. All so many things I would change about doing it now, but I don't know that I would ever have learned them without just doing and and trying them for the first time.

Alex Hilleary [00:58:19]:
Yeah. Ton of ton of learning along the way. Kinda to John's point, like, we we didn't know we were getting into going into the process. Like, we it took us so much longer to learn every aspect than like and I think this is just the thing about being first time founders. Like, you just don't get it. And then the next time around, you're like, oh, shoot. I know how to avoid, like, all of these things, you know, that will potentially come up because I've been through it before. I think I'm I'm really excited about, like, the journey we went through.

Alex Hilleary [00:58:48]:
And it was, you know, a 3 year experience for us, but, like, it's nice to see it from beginning to end because I can now assess that, you know, whenever the next time comes, like, I've learned things across, like, every aspect of this. Like, I mean, even through the acquisition, you learn, you know, in the very early days, you're figuring out, like, okay, what things do I really need to do very well right now in, like, setting up our operations and stuff, and what stuff can I get away with? Like, because you can't do everything well. So you're, like, what things matter and what things don't. Well, you go to the acquisition side, and you see, like, you know, what lawyers are looking at and, like, what actually matters and, like, how a company assesses your value. And then you're like, oh, shoot. Like, I, like, now understand, like, how I should have been prioritizing things earlier on, how I should have been setting us up structurally, all those things. So I think I'm, like, very grateful to have gone through this process in a short period of time and to have seen it beginning to end because I think, you know, I'm excited for for the next time around and, like, all of those learnings because you do learn so much so quickly.

Brooks Sime [00:59:55]:
I'll say that I think one thing I've noticed coming through this whole process is that some of our not necessarily our best decisions and that they were most most well thought, but the ones that paid off the most were the ones that I think came from a place of going full force. Earlier, we talked a little bit about going into y c and not necessarily knowing we were fully in on the VC path and kind of waffling there. And I think that from that angle, if we had decided to either not do it at all or go all the way in, I I would have felt better about that decision. And on the flip side of that, our decisions around some of, like, the product that we built early on. I remember there was this one moment in my super, like, we need to build this specific thing for one specific customer. And we've gotten all this advice that you never do that. You everything has to be scalable and built out for everyone. And we're just like, okay, but we haven't sold really sold them any money yet.

Brooks Sime [01:00:53]:
So we're gonna do this anyways. And I think that was when that was one of our 0 to 1 moments. So we landed a big client because we did what they asked us to do, and in some ways. And for a short time, that was all that mattered. And we just went all in and think about it that hard. So so I have the caveat. It's not always, like, the most thoughtful decision. But as a founder, making sure that you actually go all in and really decide if you're going to do something, trust your gut fully, is my biggest learning.

Brooks Sime [01:01:23]:
2nd time around, I'm gonna be much more intense.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:28]:
Yeah. That's awesome. Well, our our closing question for for everyone on the show is for not necessarily your favorite thing in in Cleveland, but for something that other folks may not necessarily know about. Hidden gem, if you will. So with that, we'll go around the horn here and and unearth your hidden gems.

John Wetzel [01:01:52]:
Yeah. So my hidden gem is in Cleveland, I think, is a experience, which is the experience of riding a 100 miles on your bike in a circle all around Cleveland, around the full Emerald necklace. I've I've been able to do it twice, and we started kind of in the downtown area every time we've done it early in the morning. And you're you're riding out east as the kind of sun is rising up over the lake, and it's majestic. And then right as the sun is kind of coming up, you're riding through, like, Gates Mills area down in the valleys, and there's the the dew on the, grass is starting to steam. And, I enjoy the heck out of the fact that you can can make a complete loop on almost exclusively parks in Cleveland. And it's just a wonderful, way to to see all parts of the the city. So would recommend, that if you are if you're able to to accomplish it.

Alex Hilleary [01:02:50]:
For me, I definitely I consider myself a Metro Parks connoisseur, and, I have like a ranking of all, like all 18, all my favorite ones. Brexville is my favorite, And I like this area around Ottawa Point in Brexville Reservation. That's probably my favorite, like, area of Metropark. And my my, like, hidden gem hack is there's a lot of great all purpose, like, trails all around the Metroparks, and, like, those are great for all the reasons John just said about, like, biking obviously, they're mainly built for horses, but I have spent dozens of hours, like, running and walking on these trails. I've, like, never seen a horse. But you can get into some spots, especially in Brexville, where, like, you really I mean, you're in the Cleveland suburbs, but, like, you feel like you're in the woods, and you don't feel like anybody's around you. And I that's a nice thing to feel, like, 20 minutes away from your, like, Cleveland house.

Brooks Sime [01:03:49]:
Mine's not nature related. I'm gonna shout out 3 places. 1, Britney's record shop. They have the best collection of vinyls I've seen in a long time. 2, I really like roller skating. There, I've been to a lot of this place is technically a chain, but to me, they're Cleveland special. The United Skates of America. Wonderful name, wonderful place to roller skate.

Brooks Sime [01:04:14]:
Would recommend to all.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:16]:
Oh, there it is. We just gotta get some roller skates and do the emerald necklace.

Brooks Sime [01:04:24]:
Okay. All the jazz.

John Wetzel [01:04:25]:
We'll see

Alex Hilleary [01:04:25]:
you there.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:27]:
Well, Alex, John, Brooks, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing the the story, and and journey over the the last few years.

John Wetzel [01:04:37]:
Thank you, Jeff.

Alex Hilleary [01:04:38]:
Thanks for having us.

Brooks Sime [01:04:39]:
Thanks, Jeff.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:40]:
If folks have anything they would want to follow-up with you about, What is the the best way for them to do so?

Alex Hilleary [01:04:47]:
LinkedIn. John's a LinkedIn influencer. So find them there. LinkedIn straight.

John Wetzel [01:04:52]:
You can also reach all 3 of us at [e-mail].

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:59]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey at lay of the land dot f m or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land