How My Startup Grind Led To A Bevy Of New Possibilities
In 2010, some friends started hosting a small community of builders and doers in my little office in Silicon Valley. We called it Startup Grind. Ever since then we have been building and scaling our community. Six years ago, my co-founders and I started working on a new project to help scale Startup Grind’s community. In the classic “solve your own problem” we went to work building something only and specifically for us. Originally we called it the “Startup Grind Dashboard” (not our best name ever) but in looking for a name, we stumbled onto the name Bevy which means a large group of similar things, or basically what a community is.
Soon after launching to our surprise, we found others who had our same problems. The first person I showed it to became the first customer. Early on after a 5-minute demo, a future customer said, “It’s like you’ve been reading my journal, this is exactly what I need.” This feedback pushed us beyond all the rejection and setbacks any new product faces.
In June of 2017 with a handful of enterprise customers, we raised $1M in angel funding and split the team in half keeping some on SG and the other half went to Bevy. Startup Grind became a shareholder of the new entity having incubated Bevy’s technology and team.
Today, Bevy is announcing its Series C funding round of $40M, valuing the company at $325M. In 2020 the world finally started to understand the business value that community can bring through in-person and virtual events. With a 100-person team growing to 250 people shortly, Bevy has thus far defied the odds in a competitive $400B virtual event category.
Startup Grind’s influence is weaved throughout the funding round. From new investors like Arlan who attended our events only to become the headline speaker, or Angela Benton who I met 8-years ago and spoke at three SG events, or past and present SG team members like TD Lowe and Phin Mpofu. One new investor Taj Ahmad Eldridge عائلة أحمد told me upon meeting him in our first call, “You had me at Startup Grind. I’ve always liked your community.”
Bevy works with enterprises like Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, Adobe, Atlassian, Zendesk, and HubSpot to help build and scale their community piggybacking off the technology, IP, and methodology we pioneered at Startup Grind.
When I step back and look at what we built and continue to build at Startup Grind, it is remarkable to me. With no standalone product, funding, or installed customer base, we have used a grassroots and word-of-mouth community strategy that has scaled globally to 120 countries. The HQ team of about 20-people and about 2,000 volunteers are able to educate more startups than any organization that I am aware of.
While I’m grateful for the success of Bevy, none of this would have been possible without Startup Grind. When people ask me, “What success has come from Startup Grind?” I always point to myself and my co-founders.
Before we started attending Startup Grind events, we were just another company fumbling around trying to figure out what to do without any real idea how to build something anyone wanted. But after each event I attended, I would get a new insight into my business that I took home and implemented over the next few days and weeks. Then the next month I would attend again, learn something new, and apply it the next month. This went on for years.
After attending hundreds of Startup Grind events, I eventually realized that I had quietly built an entrepreneurial Ph.D. for myself. Listening and learning at Startup Grind at night, and then applying the learnings in the field by day.
This past year during the COVID-19 pandemic I have spent my days and some nights back where it all began — in the “Startup Grind garage” attached to my house in Palo Alto. New since the last startup? Two new girls plus the two boys we had when SG started.
This is the space where I spent 1,000 days working with the early team to build a community person by person and brick by brick. In a strange way that’s now happened twice, starting all over in this garage, building another company from the ground up.
So while Startup Grind and Bevy have so far to go to reach their full potential, this is a good opportunity for me to stop and thank this amazing community for all it has taught me.
How grateful I am for Startup Grind’s patience in teaching me how to be a leader and product builder. How grateful I am for the 15,000 entrepreneurs, investors, and speakers that have come to Startup Grind over the years. How grateful I am for the thousands of Chapter Directors that embody our values and are the face of SG in their city and community.
I am excited to discover what Startup Grind will teach me over the next 10 years. I am excited for Bevy to be able to give back to Startup Grind as it becomes a market leader and builds value in equity gives for the early investment made to build the product.
This week I pulled out and hung the original Startup Grind banner back on the garage door where it’s always belonged. I printed it in a panic before one big event and we used it for years after that.
The sign looks almost brand new like it wants back in the action again. This sign has been with us through a lot. Difficult days that all small companies face. Too many startup disappointments and high fives to remember. A million whiteboard sessions. More late nights than I’d like to admit. Witnessing thousands of calls from every corner of the earth. So many events.
But we are here now. With all the momentum and confidence and experience to make the next ten years better than the last ten. I owe that all to the Startup Grind community.
Now back to work. Gotta keep grinding because we’re just getting started.
