Vator Box is our fast-paced show where entrepreneurs present their promising ideas or early-stage businesses in front of prominent angels or investors in Silicon Valley. In this episode, Ron Bloom, founder of Mevio, a video entertainment network, funded by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Crosslink Capital, is our guest host, joining Ezra Roizen and me. We take a look at Confidantly, which helps professionals find and search for people they want to meet by aggregating information from events they attend. Winston Choe kicks it off with a 90-second pitch.
Then we jump into our five-minute Q&A, the panelists' two-minute feedback, and Nicholas' one-minute final word.
Here are a few highlights:
- Winston explains that Confidantly is integrated with Eventbrite and Meetup and can scan and search close to 500,000 events. The startup acquires customers through co-marketing with event organizers. It has a 10% conversion rate and 30% of visitors come back weekly.The startup is building interest graphs, based on events people attend and public profiles. The information is used to do social matching.
- Both Ron and Ezra like the idea that enough information on a person can allow someone to find them at an unlikely event. For instance, a VP of mobile who is a dog lover might be more approachable at a Chihuahua Meetup, rather than a tech conference. The question they ask is whether Confidantly is gathering enough intelligence. Winston explains that since there are 30 million events, he will be able to extrat enough data.
- Ezra calls Confidantly "commerce and eHarmony combined."
- Winston says he will provide lead-gen reports to marketers seeking to find their target audience.
- Ron calls Confidantly a "social intelligence" tool and encourages him to be the "Switzerland of social intelligence."
- Both Ron and Ezra encourage Confindantly to focus on the technology and get the girth of penetration.
Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.
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Confidantly is a business-networking company that finds the best networking opportunities and people to meet, to greatly increase the effectiveness of your networking.
Users can search for the best networking opportunities at more than 50k upcoming events every month with people they want to meet. They can subscribe for weekly email alerts of the best opportunities that week, and also receive a Twitter feed of the latest opportunities that have been discovered for the next day. When they get to the event, they already know the top ten people to meet and can use the Mobile Web App to find the best way to start the engagement and also discover the best opportunities nearby. The solution gives the user a clear advantage in knowing where to go, who to meet, and what to say in advance, in order to greatly increase the effectiveness of their networking.
Most people miss the best networking opportunities with people they want to meet because of the proliferation of events and lack of information on the other people there. They mingle around the event looking for the chance encounter and manage to only talk to a small number of people, most of whom turn out to be the wrong match, and resulting in no follow-up and missed opportunities.
We solve this problem by finding people who are attending events and meetups worldwide, discover their public social-profiles, and match them up with our users so that they can network more effectively in person. This is done through interest-graphs that are dynamically created from the event, profile, search data and a proprietary matching algorithm to find the most relevant networking opportunities and people to meet, based on the user’s social-profile. The service is delivered on the Web and on all major Smartphone platforms.
Since starting the Private Beta trial in Nov’2010, the service has grown to hundreds of thousands of networking events in twelve thousand cities with millions of attendees.
Our Subscribers come from a broad set of industries and we have seen a user conversion-rate to subscription and weekly engagement-rate that is 2-3x the industry-average.
We have acquired users through Email, Social and Affiliate Marketing, which can be scaled quickly at low-cost.
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Advisor-to and commenter-on emerging ventures
