After 24 months, we just made our first hire
This past Sunday (11/16/14) was twenty four months to the day I met my co-founder Karl at a Startup Weekend in Tampa, FL. It was there I pitched EXMO, a mobile platform to connect people at events. To say we’ve experienced a lot since then would be an understatement. In 2014 alone, we:
- Moved to California with nothing more than a few suitcases
- Went through Y Combinator (Winter 2014)
- Pivoted to being a mobile-first ticketing platform and rebranded as Eventjoy
- Attempted to raise a seed round from major angels and VCs across Silicon Valley
- Were acquired by Ticketmaster
- And most importantly, built something that people want
We’ve done all of this as a co-founding duo who’s never hired (other than two interns during Y Combinator). While I’m incredibly proud of everything we’ve accomplished to date, it hasn’t been easy — nor should it be. Starting a company has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done and doing it somewhat alone is even harder. Even with joining Y Combinator, fundraising didn’t take off and we never had the funds to hire. To maximize our runway, we kept our burn incredibly low by sharing a work/live apartment in Mountain View, avoiding paid marketing, and utilizing as many startup discounts as we could find.
Being a startup founder means you have to be incredibly resourceful. For us, one of the things that meant was learning lots of new skills to compensate for all of the roles we couldn’t afford to hire. Karl, who came from a gaming background, became a unicorn of sorts and built our two iOS apps, organizer event management dashboard, backend infrastructure, internal API, marketing site, and about a 1000 different scripts for a variety of things. The product as it stands today could easily be supported by a handful of engineers. On the flip side, I came from an industrial engineering background, but got really into product design (UI/UX), internet marketing, and about every other responsibility that didn’t involve code. At the end of the day, we became generalists, but lacked the resources and time to dive deeper into any single area.
In September, we joined Ticketmaster so we could continue to grow Eventjoy and introduce it to a larger audience. The main difference compared to when we were independent is that we now have a lot more resources to scale the platform, grow the team, and invest in product development.
Today, I’m happy to announce that we made our first hire. He’ll be joining as engineer #1 and will be focusing on all things web, including our upcoming API. It’s taken 24 months to get to this point, but I feel we’re at an exciting part of the Eventjoy story. While building a business inside of a larger corporation has its pros and cons, we can finally build an amazing team, stop worrying about raising future rounds of funding just to extend our runway, and move into our own office in the heart of San Francisco. Recruiting is now a large portion of my day as we’re actively looking to fill a variety of roles. I’m excited for what the future will bring for Eventjoy and what the team will look like six to twelve months from now.
P.S — You already know we’re hiring, but if you’re interested, check out our careers page.
