Lay of The Land

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.