Passo update I sent out recently:
I started a series today sharing an “Open Kimono” view on investor updates at Passo, emails I am using and the underlying stats. (link to the series: https://medium.com/series/startups-ahoy-651211a71682)
This is an effort to be open about what we’re doing at Passo, and to share to learn from feedback. I believe that through this kind of sharing we can help each other learn and know what our asks are so that we can reach into our network to help each other.
When I think about an investor update to external folks, here are the things that count:
- A quick recap — as you build, you get better at explaining what you do
- Team — who’s manning the ship and who’s new?
- Product update — show what’s been done and don’t bullshit about it. Share a product roadmap whilst you’re at it!
- Funding — what’s the ask, valuation, how much is hard & soft committed, terms, when does the round close, what stage are you at?
- Anything else that’s incredibly relevant
- Revenues, deals, partnerships
My view is: Give a real snapshot of everything that’s meaningful, but in a structured and ordered way.
I also keep to this structure on all comms, which means that when folks get anything from me, their brain is wired for the same format each time. Even in the email format: Stucture is established before the content. Content is king, Context is god.
Here we go!
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This is one I sent recently (this past week):
Subject: [Passo] New CEO, update, thoughts on ICO, and Impulse Ventures terms sheet
Hi,
Happy Sunday! Hope that you’re enjoying the return of Summer.
It’s been a while since I last updated you, and reaching out to update you on what’s happening at Passo.
Most importantly, I’m humbled and proud to announce that I’ve taken up the mantle as CEO at Passo.
I’m lucky enough to be working with some of my closest and talented friends on solving a meaningful problem. Below is a bit of an update on where we are at and opportunities for you, friends and portfolio companies to collaborate.
Below are updates on:
- Recap
- Team
- Product update aka: hotness under the hood
- ICO discussion
- Funding round led by Impulse Ventures
1. Recap on what Passo is all about:
Passo gives shoppers the ability to manage and share their web-wide purchase history and verified shopping preferences with any retailer, resulting in more relevant product recommendations, which has proven to significantly increase transaction conversion up to 22%.
By being the only solutions that has a full view of the shopper based on their purchases at all retailers across the web, we can provide the most personal shopping experience on each retail site and eliminate the pain of search. You don’t find the products… the products find you.
It’s a single shopper profile that allows retailers to get the full view of the consumer across all retailers, whilst giving shoppers control of their data and Amazon-like benefits across the web such as accurate recommendations, centralized shipping tracking and order management.
A video of what our MVP looks like on a retailer site: https://youtu.be/qqo7IMs-oHA
Consumers finally get:
- to see who has access to their data and control it (think blockchain integration, more on the ICO below)
- the best recommendations on every site they visit based on a total view of their purchases across the web. When they remove a recommendation on any site, their profile gets smarter
- Amazon-like benefits: one place for their wishlisted items; 1-click checkout on all Passo-enabled sites; all their orders, invoices, ability to track shipments and do returns from their Passo profile; One profile to sign into retailers with so you never fill out another custom form again from signup to shipping.
- Share your profile with friends and family so that they can see sites with your eyes and get you gifts you want to keep that fit your style and size.
Business model:
Enterprise customers like JCrew pay us between $15k-$50k per month on 18 month contracts based on API calls to our system. At a later stage we will include percentage of lift and other data-based revenue models.
Link to Investor Deck: https://knightgames.docsend.com/view/7ffe3tw
How it works: https://knightgames.docsend.com/view/9rkmmgd
Investor FAQ: (more on this tool soon!) https://docs.google.com/a/passoprivacy.com/document/d/1ict3GMmsSewzS3sxSIlpKEOV8BlFxhR1JkrlECVPMcY/edit?usp=sharing
2. Team:
Our team is stronger than ever:
- Our technology team has worked together for 15 years at Priceline.com (architect, the VP Engineering, their lead back-end engineer). They remained there heading up Priceline’s technology efforts, leading to the $98Bn market cap company it is today.
- Divakar Rayapaty, Passo’s CTO and original & principal engineer that architected and managed Priceline.com, has recruited his dream team, including his right hand man from Priceline.com, Mike Rizzo. With these hires, Passo has an extremely strong dev team that can compete with any large company. These hires were instrumental in building Priceline.com and have several years experience working with Divakar.
- Divakar Rayapaty, CTO — Formerly Priceline.com (14 years), investor and founder at FlowHealth and Makers Brand
- Mike Rizzo, VP of Engineering — Formerly VP of Engineering at Priceline.com (15 years)
- Abhishek Yeramalla, Senior Software Engineer — Formerly Priceline.com (9 years), Advalent
- Vlad Ustinov, Dev Ops Engineer — Formerly FlowHealth, Makers Brand
- Alexey Kulyukin, Backend Engineer — Formerly FlowHealth, Makers Brand
- Mike DelGuidice, UX/UI Design — Formerly Match Marketing Group
- Michael Herman, Sales — Global President of Sales at Ellie Tahari (Joining after seed round, has +50 clients identified where he knows the key decision maker)
3. Product update:
- Passo’s ingestion engine can process over 25MM SKUs in realtime on production-grade hardware. Ingestion means: break into our proprietary key identifiers which work across every retailer, and make applicable to a shopper profile based on their historical purchases at all retailers connected to Passo
- Results are filterable and searchable in realtime
- Our system is elastic and serverless
- Our AI product recommendation engine is built out and waiting to be trained with live customer data
- Magento integration is built
- We’ve been approved for a Demandware/ CommerceCloud Premiere Partnership (next thing we will build is that integration)
- We’re supplementing the historical purchase data with a user onboarding “game” similar to Stitchfix. Design phase ends on Sunday, to be delivered for coding. The “shopper IQ” game will now happen within the retailer site
- New static site being launched this week
- I’ve attached a 6 month product roadmap
4. ICO:
It’s become obvious that Passo profiles are a great application of the blockchain. Almost every investor is asking us about it.
We are busy investigating to create our whitepaper and ICO. An interesting case study is Civic, run by my longtime friend Vinny Lingham (also Passo advisor), which recently raised $33MM in their ICO and has some parallels to Passo. Please feel free to contact me and discuss. We would love your feedback, advice or collaboration.
We are speaking with the founders of some of the best known crypto currencies about this ICO and our product, which they are excited about as it has immediate real-world application and can open crypto and blockchain to the major retailers without the pain of wrapping their heads around how to apply it.
No decisions made yet — we’re at the data gathering stage and speaking to as many folks as we know to get a read on the path forward.
5. Impulse Ventures:
We’re raising a round (before an ICO):
Lead investor: Impulse Ventures (Terms sheet attached)
Raising: $2.2MM at $8MM pre-money valuation
Hard Committed: $350k
Soft Committed: $750k
Stage: Pre-launch, committed clients, MVP validated
Closing Date: 15 August 2017
Shopper profiles created: 700,000 users
Thank you for taking the time to read this update and staying interested in a really tough problem our team is working on solving.
I’m excited to lead our team to our next step in bringing consumers closer to their data and for both them and retailers to realize unprecedented value from the experience.
Looking forward to reconnecting.
Eran
