Startup Revolution: Danny Frenkel of PunchUP Live On How Their Emerging Startup is Changing the Game

An Interview With Dina Aletras

Subject matter you and the team are passionate about. I haven’t taken more than 4 hours off of work in the last year and yet still wake up excited every morning. The reason I’ve been able to do it is because I love watching comedy, I love what comedy represents and I love the people who choose to spend their life in the space.

Startups are at the forefront of innovation, driving change across various industries with fresh ideas and cutting-edge technologies. These emerging companies are not only disrupting traditional markets but also creating new opportunities and transforming the way we live and work. What makes these startups successful, and what can we learn from their journeys? As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Danny Frenkel.

Danny Frenkel is the co-founder and CEO of PunchUp Live, the innovative company revolutionizing the comedy industry by transforming how comedy is consumed, tours are scheduled, tickets are sold, specials are released, and consumer data is returned to entertainers. Before founding PunchUp, Danny spent 13 years as an executive at Meta, where he founded the consumer insights practice, led internal product development, and served as the Director of Advertiser Ecosystem, developing industry standards for data privacy and ads measurement. A true comedy lover, Danny has performed stand-up comedy and consulted with various comedians on maximizing their online presence over the past decade.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I started at Facebook in the New York office in 2010 when nobody fully understood how to use social media from a business perspective. I’ve been a fan of standup comedy my whole life, so while my day job involved helping large brands advertise on the platform, I spent a lot of my spare time helping out comedians who were my friends. Thirteen years later, it became clear that the incentives had heavily diverged between my comedian friends who were providing content for free for the hope of reaching their audience and social media companies who ultimately service advertisers. After much research and deliberation, I decided to start this company with another ex-Facebook employee aimed at redesigning the relationship between live entertainers and their audiences.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

The most interesting story is probably the onboarding of comedian Joe List. I have been a fan of Joe’s for a long time and spent a lot of last summer trying to convince him to be an early adopter of PunchUp. He (along with most other comedians at that time) were understandably skeptical about joining a new platform. He decided to post his latest special to YouTube, which was initially a big disappointment for us. However, shortly after he posted it, and followed all of You Tube’s instructions on how to ensure a smooth debut, his special got demonetized due to the mention of a word in a joke that YouTube deemed inappropriate. His team quickly came back interested in also posting his special on our site- which was a big break for us and the start of a mass adoption by the comedy community.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The funniest mistake was probably when I was in the middle of a kickoff call with a comedian and my wife had unknowingly connected her headphones to my computer, so she began talking to the comedian thinking it was her mother who had picked up her phone call, and it was a minute before we realized what had happened. The main lesson I learned is to not allow my wife to pair her headphones to any of my devices :)

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

Right now I’m really excited about an entertainer-specific app we’re developing that is going to allow them to run all aspects of their business. We can send them push notifications telling them when and what they should post online to maximize sales, allow them to email their fans directly ahead of shows and have convenience features, like centralizing their travel itinerary.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Being short- I think being short is a wildly unappreciated trait for success. It keeps you humble, and I think if you don’t go full Napoleon complex, being short instills a good work ethic and determination.

Diverse background- I started my career in more of a sales role and transitioned into product positions. Having the ability to wear multiple hats in a leadership function is helpful because you’re able to provide high level guidance to the experts who actually know how to do the work in a given function.

Pragmatism- being able to know where we want to get to in 3 years, but also understanding where we’re at in the moment. Making decisions that make sense for our current state in the current moment has been critical for our success.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. What was the initial inspiration behind your startup, and how did you turn that idea into a reality?

The initial inspiration for my business came from a combination of my love for Stand-Up Comedy and my background in data privacy and ads measurement. As I mentioned earlier, I realized over the last couple years that incentives are not properly aligned between comedians and the large social media companies they rely on to reach their audiences. This point was hammered home from a particular lunch a couple years ago. I was eating with a famous comedian I’d become friends with who told me a story: They would do an “Ask Me Anything” when they were on a plane. One time a fan asked them the question “My friend just hit me with his bicycle, what should I do to get them back?” and he jokingly responded, “Run them over with your car”. He got banned from a social media site for a long time because according to their policies he was Inciting Violence. I understood both sides of the story: the comedian was clearly making a joke and social media sites with billions of users don’t have the ability to screen for sarcasm in content. That was probably my earliest realization that over the long run, these two sets of needs (comedians to be funny and social media to be a moderated environment at scale) were incompatible and that there was likely a better model.

Can you describe a significant challenge your startup faced and how your team overcame it?

Entertainment is an extremely insular industry. It was very difficult at first to break in and get people to listen to what I had to say. We overcame it by very carefully threading the needle between perseverance and annoying folks, as well as a combination of reaching out to agents and managers as well as to talent directly. Over time, we developed enough case studies and momentum where now people will largely hear us out.

What strategies have you found most effective in scaling your startup and reaching a wider audience?

Our primary strategy here has been to provide as much value to the entertainers as possible. They end up being amazing ambassadors for us, so we try our best to help them grow their businesses, which in turn helps us grow ours.

How do you foster innovation within your company to stay ahead of the competition?

We have a very open culture at the company where everyone comes up with ideas and debates key decisions. Everyone has a deep sense of ownership and autonomy, which allows us to move quickly and keep everyone excited about the work.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful And Innovative Startup” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Choose a co-founder you can trust and rely on who has a different skill set than you. I met Alex Dejani while we were both at Meta. He has proven to be extremely valuable not just as an engineering leader, but also as someone who approaches problems differently than I do. I tend to be a bit more focused on the near-term demand while he is amazing at pushing on long-term implications and costs. This yin and yang has allowed us to get to the right call on critical decisions.
2. Killer team with a focus on making the right type of hires at the right time for the business. We’re still relatively small, so every hire matters. In our early stages we made sure to over index on technical hires as we needed to build a lot of features. However, we grew so quickly, we had to quickly adjust our hiring plans by bringing on some operations centered folks to ensure we could also provide quality services to our customers and the comedians. Remaining agile and responsive to changing demands has allowed us to scale effectively.
3. Subject matter you and the team are passionate about. I haven’t taken more than 4 hours off of work in the last year and yet still wake up excited every morning. The reason I’ve been able to do it is because I love watching comedy, I love what comedy represents and I love the people who choose to spend their life in the space.
4. Investors you can get good advice from. We’re lucky enough to have some amazing investors in our pre-seed round who have provided amazing advice as we’ve scaled. Eric Seufert, Howard Lindzon, Haley Bryant, Jeremy Friedman, Dave Schatz, Matthew and Jason Goldman have all been folks I’ve called regularly to talk through key decisions. We wouldn’t be where we are without them.
5. Prior leadership experience. I started managing people in my mid-20s, which allowed me to build up a range of leadership experiences, including starting new teams, hiring/firing people, setting long term goals, short term roadmaps. There are inevitably so many new experiences when starting a company, it’s been very helpful to come into this confident in my ability to lead an organization.

More than four out of five startups fail. What have you done to break out from that pattern, and be successful when so many others have not?

I don’t know if we’ve broken patterns as much as we work in an industry and on problems that the whole team is really interested in. Everyone is a big comedy fan, so it allows us to really enjoy what we do, which in turn allows us all to work harder and more effectively. It also helps that we built measurement into our product from day 1, so we are able to show how much we’ve helped increase ticket sales.

Because of the role you play, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

My movement would be one of staying tethered to reality. Most of my career was spent in tech when companies were trying to “change the world”. I have much less grandiose goals- I want to be a good person and work on something that I enjoy and makes people happy. I would love a movement based around that.

This was really meaningful! Thank you so much for your time.

About the Interviewer: Dina Aletras boasts over 20 years of expertise in the corporate media industry. She possesses an in-depth understanding of growth, strategy, and leadership, having held significant roles at some of the UK’s largest media organizations. At Reach PLC, the UK’s largest tabloid publisher, she served in various director capacities. Additionally, she held leadership roles at The Independent Magazine Group and DMGT. Her extensive knowledge spans editorial, digital, revenue, sales, and advertising. Upon relocating to Switzerland, Dina took on the responsibility of managing and promoting the international section of Corriere del Ticino — CdT.ch pioneering the English page “onthespot.” She also was the Co-Editor of Southern Switzerland’s first official Italian and English bilingual magazine.