TriNet Pitch Competition

Kate Kozak: Hi, everybody. Good afternoon and thank you so much for being here. My name is Kate Kozak. I work with our venture capital partnerships on the West Coast, and boy, do we have an event for you guys. We have curated six amazing companies that are here today presenting. You're gonna see diversity, creativity, passion, behind what they do and we are so excited to have them.

But before we get to that, I would love to introduce you to our amazing panelists over here on the corner. So, step up. We have Will with LairHippo. Come on over. We have Elizabeth from Anthemus. We have Oliver with ff Capital. And we have Katie Shea with Divergent. So each of these panelists are going to be listening in on the presentation for things that really kind of pique their interest, the passion, the creativeness behind the presentation.

Our contestants are going to have seven minutes to present and after that, we're going to have three minutes of questioning from our VC panelists. And at the very end, we're going to be walking away and making a very difficult decision as to who is going to come out the winner. And now that winner is going to walk away with a special award, but also $10,000 in TriNet administrative services credit. So a lot on the line today and we are very excited to get this started. So with that, I would love to bring on our first contestant. Let's make sure we get their information up here. First on the board is Jean.

Jean Smart: Hi everyone, thank you very much for being here. This is my first pitch off, so I'm super excited. Yes, here we go. My name is Jean Smart and I'm the founder and CEO of Penelope. We are a modern 401k platform built specifically for micro businesses. Micro, you hear SMB a lot, and it's massive. I'm focusing on the small micro. That's under 50 employees. Our sweet spot is under 20. I've been in financial services for a long time, doing workplace benefits for the largest companies, and I'm thrilled to be doing this for the very small businesses.

So this is James and Grace, my mom and dad. They came from Korea several years ago, and they started a lot of small businesses, bodegas, grocery stores, dry cleaning stores. And while they were successful, they never opened a retirement account. We just did not talk about stocks and bonds growing up. So they made sure I was educated, and I've spent the bulk of my time in financial services. They're the inspiration, and they are not alone. 25% of Americans have zero saved for retirement.

Let that sink in. One in four have not one dollar. Majority of Americans work at these small businesses. Under 10 employees. And during COVID, 700,000 new businesses started. A lot of solopreneurs. More than half don't offer a plan. That leaves 57 million Americans vulnerable. So, I call this sort of the carrot and stick at the federal and state level.

Government is doing something to address this. You may have heard of Secure, Secure 2 during COVID. There's bipartisan legislation that has passed, that congress has passed, to incentivize these small businesses to start in their retirement plan. This is unprecedented. At the state level, 18 states have passed legislation mandating a qualified retirement plan. In June of last year in California, if you had fewer than five employees or up to five employees, you had to have a plan, or you will start getting fined $250 per employee. So if you have 10 employees, and then six months later another 500, that's 7,500, it will cost $2,300 to set up Penelope. Twenty-two other states have legislation going, impacting the group, and with Social Security running out in ten years, this has become a crisis.

So, not only is the market massive, it is nearly entirely untapped. And we're talking the micro, the one employee, the five employee. So over to the left, I've worked for a couple of these guys. 25,000 large companies are supported by the 25 largest record keepers. Over to the right is everybody else. There are a few digital record keepers that started about 10 years ago. Some of them are moving up market, but we're looking at 6 million companies. So, when I focused on this, having been in financial services, and looking under the hood, and understanding all the pricing and all the intermediaries, I wanted to start from the ground up.

My North Star is to make sure that the lowest paid person at the smallest company, if they work for 40 years, has a shot at saving a million dollars. So in order to do that, there are a couple things that we differentiate. Flat pricing, I'm going to get into that. Fair, no proprietary funds. We're agnostic, objective and doing it fast. In today's modern world, I'm a small business owner now, working at large companies. I don't have time to talk to somebody. You don't have an HR person. You don't have a finance person. You are the chief janitor officer, which is what I am. When you see something, you've got to pick it up. So, this is what I mean by flat pricing.

We charge per use, not based on the size of your assets at the plan. So, what that translates to, it's called Asset Center Management. It's like a few cents here, a few dollars every week over 40 years compounded is a lot. Our plan saves an average employee putting in $5,000 a year in 40 years almost a quarter of a million dollars. That translates to four and a half years of additional senior living. It translates to paying for your grandkids' college and it translates to a trip in Europe every year. House funds? No. Agnostic. We use Vanguard index funds based on your birth date, so we're using target date funds. There are a few socially responsible funds we're adding next year because we have a young population fast.

Most of our digital competitors are taking two hours to onboard. We're self-serving in less than 15 minutes. What previous competitors have done and pioneered, Penelope has perfected. Call it the second mover advantage. These are our clients. Tiffany has a peer-to-peer group company with less than 10 employees. She picked Penelope because of her education in digital high touch. Jefferson owns four small restaurants in Massachusetts. He chose us because of the Vanguard funds. He's a former Wall Street trader and knows exactly how things are priced. Roberta, she's the head of a nonprofit group. Roberta chose us because of our mission.

And we know mission-based companies that choose providers based on that are two or three times sticky. So what does that translate into delivering for our clients? Our automation, our automated, automatic enrollment, contribution, participation, and investments have created planned participation of over 90%. They're on average, over the last year, saving over $ 6,000, which is double the national average. And from a gross perspective, we've been live for 18 months. We have doubled in clients, revenue and savings for all of our participants. And we are just getting started. With that, thank you very much and I'll answer any questions.

Elizabeth: Jean, I can jump in. Elizabeth from Anthemus. Great presentation. Would love to hear a little bit more about your target customers and how they find out about Penelope.

Jean: We have two channels. We go DTC using social digital, that's the biggest part, and LinkedIn has been a friend more than anything. It's been amazing to see us rank up and up. They set up a demo, 15 minutes. We send them a quick questionnaire. They fill that out and we onboard them. So there's direct partnerships. This is what I meant by some of the earlier digital partnerships. We are working with some PEOs. We hope to be working with TriNet here.

We would love that. We're working with PEOs. We're connected with the Universal Payroll API Integrator, so we connect with over 200 payroll providers automatically. And I have to say, I'm really proud to say, almost half of our clients are foreign born and women-owned businesses. So, they're saving for the first time, and there are partnerships with women's networking, small business organizations that we're activating. That's a core part of that member benefit. So, there are a couple of strategic things, but that's confidential for now. Yeah.

Kate: Alright, I think we have time for one more question.

Katie Shea: Hi, Katie Schea, Diversion Capital. I was also raised by small business owners, so this resonates a lot. I've heard portability becoming more and more important in kind of 401k accounts and some people say small business is forever, but other people jump around. Is that something that is part of the product or is that something that you're hearing from the market that's important from a product perspective or customer perspective?

Jean: A lot of the providers that are doing portability, they're not 401ks, they're auto IRAs and IRAs are brokerage accounts. So we have no problem with distribution if a participant leaves and transferring. There are a couple of other fintech providers who make that pretty seamless. The one thing I will say is the difference between that account and this, this account allows you to save $22,000 to $30,000 which is significant. The $6,500 is just not enough. And the final thing I'll say is one of my investors is here. They focus on longevity. We're living a lot longer. You know, the idea of retiring at 65 and having 60, 40% stocks and bonds is obsolete. We're living longer, there's time to save, and $6,500 a year is not going to get you there.

Kate: Alright, let's give it up for Jean! Thanks for sharing a little bit about Penelope with us. We were excited to have you on board. Before we get to our next contestant, I want to go back to the judges and learn a little bit about you guys. Will, let's start with you. Could you share a little bit about your role and what you currently look to invest in?

Will McKelvey: Sure thing. So I'm an investor at Lair Hippo. Lair Hippo is a New York-based early-stage fund. We've been around for 13 years. The entire team is based in New York. And we really invest on people who are building in the city. We invest at the pre-seed, seed and series A stages, and we're generalists. So we'll look at everything from consumer to enterprise to hardware to software.

Kate: Thank you. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: So I work at Anthemus, which is a full life cycle investment fund focused on fintech. So Penelope is very much right in our wheelhouse. We were launched about 10 years ago, have about $1.5 billion from an AUM perspective, and I get to sit on a fund called the Female Innovators Lab Fund. So I invest out of a $50 million fund in female founders in co-founded teams across the U.S., Europe, UK and Canada. So very excited to be here.

Kate: Awesome. Glad to have you. Oliver.

Oliver Mitchell: Hi, how are you? So I'm Oliver Mitchell, partner at ff Venture Capital. We've been around for 15 years. We have six U.S. funds and two European funds. We focus on seed stage investments in fintech, enterprise software, automation technologies and sustainability.

Kate: Fantastic. And Katie.

Katie Shea: Hi everybody. Katie Shea, founding general partner of Divergent Capital. We're a $30 million pre-seed fund generalist, but, operator led. So I spent most of my career as a head of marketing from the $0 to $30 million revenue stage. And my partner has spent most of her career on the tech and product side of early-stage companies. Thanks for having us.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the share. As you guys can see, we have some expertise in the house today. So with that, let's get to our second contestant. Melis, I think you're up.

Melis Dural: Hi, everyone. My name is Melis Dural. I'm the founder and CEO of Ekos.AI. So I came to the U.S. about 19 years ago. The American accent did not come with it, but got it within the 19 years. And I realized how important community was. When I first got here, I thought I had an amazing community. I had friends who I graduated with. Then, when I went into the workforce, I realized I didn't have anyone to refer me. It was 2009 and it was tough to get a job, let alone a job with an H-1B. So I started really thinking about community and how we find communities that are relevant to us. For the past 15, 16 years, I've been in recruiting sales and ops. And one thing that I realized is community is extremely important to the success of any business. Your customers are a community, a nonprofit has a community, an alumni group has a community. But what did all of them have in common? Existing community management tools are failing on the engagement side.

An average community manager, and you might not go with that title, uses 12 platforms and they want to use one or at least two, max three. And they want to be able to reduce their subscriptions and increase engagement among their members. That's why we built Ekos, the community platform that automates engagement using AI, bridging the gap between in real life experiences and virtual experiences.

How does Ekos elevate and automate engagement? One of the things that we've done is create a seamless automated onboarding process. We've created AI powered matchmaking among your community members so that they can meet each other, build relevant relationships, interactive in person virtual event and meeting experiences, which drive real time networking and relevant relationship building.

Why Ekos? Most of the platforms out there have not focused on relationship building. They focused on being able to drive projects, being able to host on demand content for you to be able to consume. But not really the one-to-one or you being able to meet the rest of your group or members and build relationships. And Ekos is an all-in-one solution that automates engagement. We've seen 1,000% month-over-month growth, completely organic. We've actually spent zero money on sales and marketing. This has all been through word of mouth and the network effect, which, frankly, we're very proud of. And we have over 2,500 daily active users, which is something pretty big for an early-stage company such as ours.

We've built with our customers, we've listened to our customers, and frankly, before we even put a line of code in there, we've tested Figma UX, UI screens to be able to understand what your needs were, not only as community managers, but also as members. We validated an urgent market need. We've been able to onboard over 15 customers within the past few months. We have, again, like I said, spent zero marketing on zero dollars on marketing and sales. We've seen a PMF within the accelerator, incubator, community, as well as alumni groups. But recently, we've started selling to SaaS customers who are using it for their own customers and community. The community management engagement space is huge. Quite frankly, you're talking about the events market, you're talking about the social networking market. And when we're looking at this, we're actually looking at businesses with a hundred, sorry, up to a thousand members, or between a thousand and ten thousand members.

Our business model right now is a B2B SaaS model. We're selling spaces to community managers. Next, we're going to be rolling out paid community membership and event ticketing, where we're going to be charging a transaction fee. And we already have white label agreements with a few of our enterprise clients. As I said, we've been targeting a specific ecosystem, which has been the tech ecosystem. Frankly, they are amazing early adapters and they give feedback pretty quickly, which has been very helpful. We've been able to grow quite fast using public facing events. People have been attending events without noticing or realizing what Ekos is, meeting a few people and then starting their own communities and coming to this and onboarding their companies.

Today, our focus is to become the number one community management platform by driving engagement among your members. Tomorrow, we want to be the community marketplace, the number one community marketplace. Our team has specifically focused on this problem and has experienced it firsthand. We've all worked in a hybrid remote work environment.

I frankly have been working remotely since I was 22 years old and have built most of my relationships digitally unlike a lot of you guys who've built it through COVID digitally. And we're raising a seed round to be able to reach $1 million in ARR, which, frankly, we only need to be able to onboard 170 customers, and we're pretty close to hitting our first milestone before that. Thank you so much.

Kate: Melis, thank you so much. You did an amazing job. Team, any questions?

Will: Yeah. Thank you so much. Quick question. Thinking about how you plan to expand the business model. Obviously, the Percy pricing is a great way to start. But do you have a product road map where you sort of expand the depth that you penetrate into each individual community that you work with?

Melis: That's a great question. So what we've done is create pricing tiers based on the number of members you're onboarding. But we also have tiers based on usage, which we're going to be rolling out. There's also a freemium model so that you can test out the product, so you can onboard up to 50 community members where you can use limited amount of event and meeting experiences, and then after that, it starts pay-walling you.

Oliver: Can you elaborate more on how you're utilizing artificial intelligence? You said the matching aspect, but where does it go from there?

Melis: Absolutely. I'm so happy I left my appendix in here.

Oliver: Just tell me.

Melis: Sure. We've been using proximity matching. The first scenarios are based on the data that we gather when you're going through onboarding or whoever, or whatever your community manager is uploading. We do have automated onboarding experiences available to you. And then it's based on behavior. So how much time are you spending with me? Are you passing on a profile such as mine? Have you become a mentor to someone else within your community and are spending more time? And then based on that, it'll start suggesting more people to you that are in that unique persona.

Oliver: So a recommendation engine.

Melis: Yes.

Kate: All right. Let's give it up for Melis. How's everybody feeling? Are you excited about these companies? All right. I love it. I love the passion in the room. All right. With that, I am excited to introduce Nico up here front. He's going to be talking about Waku today.

Nico Estrella: Hello, everyone. My name is Nico Estrella. I'm a former professional soccer player and the co-founder of Waku. Waku is a prebiotic herbal tea that has an amazing taste. No added sugar and five grams of prebiotic fiber. This is a picture of me and my co-founder Juan back in September 2020. We had just packed all of our Boston apartment into this storage unit. And we were ready to drive for 15 hours because we were moving to Michigan to live in my uncle's basement. We were feeling overwhelmed. We couldn't shake off this sense of defeat.

For the last couple years, we've been pouring our souls into this business. And the future didn't look too bright for Waku at that point. Two years before this, we moved from Ecuador to Boston to start Waku from the ground up. And even though we have previously started another successful company back in Ecuador, we knew nothing about the beverage industry in the U.S. When Juan was doing his MBA in Babson College, we started to learn a lot about very successful companies, like Vitamin Water, Bai, Vita Coco. These are companies that disrupted their categories and later got acquired a billion-dollar valuations because they introduced to the market a great tasting product that aligned themselves with what the market was looking for at the moment.

We got particularly interested in the bottle tea category. This is a category that's $7 billion in size and hasn't seen a lot of innovation for about 25 years ago. And we believe this is an industry ripe for disruption because the leading brands in the category are packed with sugar and artificial ingredients. This made us remember of a very popular herbal tea we grew up drinking back home. It's a herbal tea that it's a centuries old recipe that we grew up drinking back home, and it's very popular in Ecuador because of the great taste and the gut health benefits that it has.

But would American consumers care a lot at all about gut health? It turns out gut health is top of mind for the American consumers. Over half of Americans are suffering from some type of digestive issue and nine out of ten Americans have fiber deficient diets. No wonder why products like kombucha became so popular, even though the taste of kombucha is not that great, in my opinion. So me and Juan, after the previous company that we had, we wanted to start a company that could allow us to generate impact in Ecuador. So after learning about the opportunity, we set ourselves a very ambitious goal. We want to disrupt the tea industry with this gut healthy tea, while sourcing our ingredients directly from Ecuadorian farmers at fair trade prices. So we are helping to support our communities.

So for the next two years, we laser focused on making this a reality. At the beginning, it was just me and Juan biking around Boston with a cooler full of Waku on the back, selling Waku to every convenience store, restaurant, cafe that we could find. At the beginning, we thought we were doing great. We were selling Waku in hundreds of stores. Me and Juan were doing demos in hundreds of stores, like standing in front of customers, in farmers markets sharing Waku with anyone that would listen. And we were very excited about the impact that we were already generating in Ecuador, even at this small scale.

But then the pandemic hit, and we learned a very important lesson the hard way. You see, the most important thing in the beverage industry is not so much in how many stores you are in. At that point we were in hundreds of stores in New England. But it's more about the velocity. Velocity is how many bottles you are selling in every store you are in. And we started to realize, well, like getting on the shelves is the easy part, but getting your product to be sold out of the shelf is hard. If your product is not selling well, retailers are going to kick you out of the shelves and you're probably not getting another chance. So we started to realize consumers were not coming back to Waku after they tried it for the first time. And when the lockdowns started to happen, we couldn't do demos anymore. Retailers were not looking for new beverages for their shelves. So, our sales plummeted, we lost most of our customers, we were running out of money very fast. So we had a lot of products on hand at that point. And we had to make a tough decision.

This was the first time ever that we were really thinking on throwing in the towel. We couldn't afford to live in Boston anymore. We were not being able to pay our salaries. So, we got to this point. But part of me thought we could still make it through, because, I mean, the opportunity was still there. We were seeing new brands like Olipop and Poppy that introduced to the market prebiotic sodas with low sugar and all natural ingredients, and they are disrupting the soda category. Basically the same concept as Waku but in a different part of the shelf. So I knew we just needed a little bit more time to figure out what was not working about Waku.

So I told Juan, "Hey, let's work on the product. Until we launch this iteration of the product, let's not give up." Juan just said, "Okay, I got your back." So we buckled up, moved to Michigan. And for the next several months, we worked very hard into perfecting the product. We were able to build an amazing online community. And with their feedback, we perfected the flavor, the messaging, the ingredients, and we got to a point that the product was tasting so good and we were having such great feedback online. So fast forward to June of last year, the moment of truth for Waku. We were gonna launch officially the 2.0 version of Waku in the Fancy Food Show, one of the biggest trade shows in the country for food and beverages.

And I'm happy to share that at that show, we crushed it. Waku was selected as one of the hottest brands. Thank you. We got selected as one of the hottest brands in the show. And we won the People's Choice Awards there. This got us in contact with Whole Foods, the dream retailer for every beverage brand in the country. They wanted to get us in. So they gave us a small shot. We started with 22 stores in Whole Foods New York. We launched in January this year, and after just three months, we became the best-selling bottled tea in New York City.

And thanks to this success, hopefully they started to expand us into more regions, and now we're becoming the best-selling tea in Connecticut and New Jersey, too. This year has been amazing for us. Every month we're seeing double digit growth, and this year we're gonna close with $650,000 in sales. 90% of this revenue is coming just from the 55 Whole Foods we are in. So the sales per door that we're having are crazy right now.

Kate: Nicely done. Right on time, Nico. Well done. Panelists, any questions for Nico?

Oliver: First off before becoming a founder and operator in NVC I worked on launching Snapple, so this sits close to home in advertising. And the key to Snapple was they were the first ones to sell, you know, a new age drink flavored iced tea in non-grocery stores. I don't know if that's a way to phrase it, but it was small bodegas, you know, as you were saying, small, you know, epicurean stores, gourmet garage, which is no longer around and other places like that.

And I think, you know, Whole Foods is great and it's really great to have that relationship with the consumer. I know, personally I've been in retail. Retail is really tough and I've had a lot of inventory on hand, I know what that's like, especially with an expiration date. I would just say this, a couple things, you know, from a pitching standpoint, just a little bit of advice, start with the good news. You know, because starting with the bad news, you know, and it's a long story. So I would start with the good news, and then if somebody asks, you know, why is it taking so long, then you can get into the longer story.

I'd also say, and this is, I don't know why you went to the can. I remember, like, early when I started my career in advertising, going to focus groups, outside of Manhattan because we're outside of Manhattan, we're in Brooklyn, but outside of New York City, which is an island off the coast of the United States. And people were very passionate about our glass bottles. And, you know, Quaker, when they bought Snapple wanted to switch it to a can and sell it next to Gatorade. And people were very passionately against that. So why did you like go to a can? It's sort of cheapens it. The glass is so beautiful and everything.

Nico: So it's basically a lot of feedback from the market. Whenever we were having glasses, glasses were just too heavy to ship. So because of environmental reasons, consumers prefer cans. It's easier to recycle, easier to ship, and we're able to maintain lower costs. So we don't have to jump up the price.

Oliver: Consumers or like Whole Foods, the merchants?

Nico: Both. The retailers preferred cans. They also like glass bottles, but they know that glass bottles are becoming more expensive. And consumers also just like cans. Yeah.

Katie: This is sparkling? Like it's like a sparkling tea?

Nico: No, just the still. Still tea. Still tea. Yeah.

Oliver: You can have some.

Katie: How do you decide on the $2.99 price point?

Nico: $2.99, we are in the middle of the price range for teas. We're not the most expensive, we're not the cheapest. At that point, we can have healthy margins. We're at 40% margins right now. And we can move volume because we're not the most expensive tea in the shop.

Kate: All right, let's give it up for Nico. Pop one of those for everybody in the audience, right? All right, we've heard from three amazing companies, but guys, we still have three more to go. So with that, I would love to bring up Christie to talk to us about Wagmo. Christie, welcome.

Christie Horvath: Okay. Hi everybody. My name is Christie Horvath. I am the co-founder and CEO of Wagmo. And at Wagmo, we help pet parents budget, access and navigate all that it means to keep your pets well. Why am I talking to you about pets? How many of you in this audience have pets at home? Raise your hand. Alright. Statistically, we are actually now in a crazy time in life, where there are more households in the U.S. with pets than there are with children, which is insane. Cheaper. Maybe. And these are people that are genuinely thinking of pets like children, right? Having pets instead of kids. In many instances they are spending more on their pets than they do themselves. I am very much one of these people. I am a card-carrying dog mom. And I actually started Wagmo after a personal incident that I had with my dog, Denver. So professionally, to back up a little bit, I am a big-time insurance nerd. I spent the first like seven years of my life working only with insurance companies.

I love insurance. And I'm also a crazy dog person, like 10 out of 10 times would rather hang out with a dog than a human. And one night I was in business school, and my dog, at the time, Denver was his name started having seizures, completely out of the blue. He was totally healthy and then one night I'm in the emergency vet. Then I'm doing a dog neurologist. Then we're doing doggy CT scans, which I didn't even know was a thing. Thousands of dollars later, I'm in business school, I have negative income, came away very appreciative of the trauma and expense that goes into keeping a pet alive and well.

And I was very grateful I had pet insurance. And I actually called my little brother and was like, "Tyler, you got to get pet insurance for your dog. It really saved us." And his knee jerk reaction was, "Why would I do that? Pet insurance is a ripoff. It doesn't cover anything that I need." And I'm like, "Wait a minute. This is madness, right? This product fundamentally makes sense." But there's a huge disconnect between what customers think they're getting and what's out there. And as I pulled on that thread, really came to realize that it all comes down to wellness care. That when you're a human and you go to the doctor for your flu shot and your annual exam, it's covered by your insurance, but when you take your dog to the vet or your cat to the vet for their shots and their exams, it's not covered. And so what I decided to do in the spirit of getting people access to better health care for their pets and taking out that financial tension, we built a first of its kind wellness plan to specifically help navigate the everyday components of pet care. So for those of you cat or dog owners in the room every time you go to the vet, you like brace for that $300 bill.

This is precisely designed to remove that pain. So this is going to cover things like exam fees, vaccines, grooming, flea, tick and heartworm medication. We also offer 24/7 telemedicine support, behavioral consults, nutritional consults and dog training for you puppy parents out there. This is different than pet insurance. So this has no exclusions around pre-existing conditions. Don't care if you're a dog or a cat, or how old your pet is, or where you live. And there is no network required. So the way that this works is you would basically go to whichever vet you'd like, take a picture of your bill, upload it to us and within hours, we will Venmo, PayPal or direct deposit your cash back to you.

We literally text your money back. It's a millennial's dream. Behind the scenes, what we've done is we've actually built our own proprietary claim system from the ground up to support this, like, truly groundbreaking claims experience. Under the Wagmo umbrella, we have our wellness plan, which is really our bread and butter.

This is our flagship product. And we have an insurance product, which is going to cover more of your emergencies. So think about cancer treatment, surgeries, that type of things. And the idea really is, between the two, you're covered end-to-end, nose-to-tail, if you will. And one nuance that I'll point out here is that Wagmo's actually the only provider on the market who has decoupled pet insurance from pet wellness.

So it's a small nuance, but what that has allowed us to do is basically structure our wellness program so that it is not considered insurance. Who cares, right? Turns out lots of people care. The regulators, first and foremost. So what we've done is we've taken our pet wellness program on a standalone basis, and we've packaged it as a group employer benefit, so we started direct to consumer, built and scaled a D to C business that was efficient and growing, started to leg into the employer channel coming out of COVID when everybody and their mother got a COVID puppy and it really took off.

So we sell directly to employers as a group benefit. We partner with PEOs like TriNet, hopefully. We partner with ben admins, and we also work with insurance carriers to basically white label our program on their behalf. What we are doing quite differently, you may have seen a pet insurance benefit in your life. Perhaps some of you employers in here have one. You might have seen a MetLife, you might have seen a Nationwide that's like a sad little discount link that opens a browser window and the employee has to go log in and sign up directly. We're actually embedding directly within the enrollment flow. So we integrate directly with the ben admin or the PEO on the back end and allow employees to enroll on a payroll deduction basis right in their benefit experience.

So you pick your dental care, your vision care, now you pick your pet health care as well. So, we are now in over 200,000 eligible lives on our Wagmo Wellness Benefit Program. We are seeing seven times higher enrollment rates than our competitors like Nationwide and MetLife. And we are doing just over $9 million in ARR and I didn't put it on here but our NPS is 90 and my team was very mad that I didn't include that in there so yeah. That's a little bit about Wagmo. I'm happy to answer questions or we can just look at pictures of dogs.

Will: Yeah, well so Larry has spent a lot of time thinking about the pet space. Can you tell us about what the economics look like of the wellness plan as far as usage?

Christie: Yeah, so the wellness plan functions pretty similarly to dental insurance, if anybody here is a dental insurance nerd. Basically, what we have is scheduled coverage allotments per category. So you would be covered, for instance, up to three vaccines over the course of the year, or up to two exam fees. And the core components of the product are, it's basically a breakage model.

So we price it assuming some folks will utilize in totality and some will under and then we also have kind of margin accretive or margin neutral components like our telemedicine support service and we have a perks program that offers kind of exclusive discounts for people. So on average for the wellness product, we drive a margin of about 60% for our direct to consumer customers and for our employer program, we're anywhere between 60 and 75%.

Elizabeth: Great presentation. I'm a big dog fan, so I loved it. I love all these photos of dogs, too, especially as you've grown and scaled curious of how your competitors have changed and how you think about your value proposition currently.

Christie: Yeah, it's funny, because when I first started this, everyone was like, "Oh, it's just a dog." I'm like no, it's not. So interestingly, we have really paved the road as far as wellness as a category. I think when we first started wellness, nobody wanted to touch it because they were all in on pet insurance. And still today, people are all in on pet insurance, but they're starting to really tune into the fact that wellness is actually what customers want and need.

It's pretty darn hard to build in the way that we've built it, and I can tell you all about that offline, don't want to bore everybody. But what we're starting to see now is that because pet insurance is becoming more crowded, and there's some price sensitivity, it becomes a function, not necessarily of the pet insurance product, but what other value can you offer your customers.

And these insurance carriers that are going insurance first are really hamstrung by regulation in terms of what other services they can bundle in, how they can distribute it, how they can discount it. So we've basically been able to offer additional value add services as our, like, trojan horse, and then we cross sell into the insurance. We more or less took the opposite approach of going to market and so far we're still the only ones out there.

Kate: All right. I am a dog mom myself with two large breed hundred pound dogs with severe allergies. So I understand the cost that goes hand in hand with that. But great job. With that, I would love to bring up our next contestant. So, Larissa, can you please take the stage and share a little bit about Joyn with us?

Larissa Licha: Hello, I'm Larissa, I'm the CNO. I can't even say my title. CEO, co-founder of Joyn. It's also my first pitch so this will be great. Just to go a little bit back in time, I used to be a product manager in a prior life. And as a product manager, the objective is to build products customers love and want to buy and ultimately generate a shit ton of revenue for your company. So when I was a PM, I thought I'd spent my time like this. I talk a lot to customers and understand what their pain points are, what the opportunities are. I plan an amazing road map and execute it and really deliver these products that customers love. Spend a little bit of time on admin, right? Because that just comes with work.

But my day looked a lot more like this. I found myself in like, endless status meetings, and alignment meetings, and Slack back and forth. And I was like, what the hell am I doing? Like this should really not be my job. And the reality too is, this is not just product managers, it's sales, it's engineering, it's especially HR.

There's just so much overhead that now comes with just doing your job. And the reality is that operational complexity has become insane. We now have siloed departments with siloed tools that all don't talk to each other. And the only way to connect them is bring in more resources. We now bring in COOs earlier than ever and chief of staff earlier than ever. And I actually was this person. I became the chief of staff that manually stitched together all the context, the tools, the people to create this executive bird’s eye view of what's going on at the company and help us actually make decisions. The reality is, I don't believe people should do this work, I think software should.

So we create real time operational footprints of what's actually happening in the organization, across tools and people, related to outcomes that you care about. And we lay our AI on top, I know everyone's tired of hearing AI. But we lay our AI on top so you can instantly query Joyn and understand what's actually going on, get a TLDR and understand what action is required.

So instead of like spending all this time talking to a thousand people on where they're at, you can just ask us, we'll tell you and you can immediately take action instead of spending, I don't know, 20 hours on information gathering. Secondly, we stopped the annoying copy pasting of data and information between tools. I spent so much time stitching data between JIRA and Notion and Asana and Airtable, and I was like, this is dumb. But because we are spending so much time on these different tools, and everyone needs oversight, somebody has to do it, and it was me. We automatically detect when this happens, and automatically stitch the data for you.

And now it's annoying things like reminding stakeholders to please fill out a slide. We also do this for you, because this was also the bane of my existence. So, looking at one of our design partners, Hippo, is one of our earliest adopters. They're a 600-person company today, they make $120 million revenue. The problem is with the lack of operational visibility. It's also really just like sunken costs that we have no insight into. We lose about 30 hours every single week per employee to the work about work. We hire unnecessary headcount to be the patchwork, and we have so many unnecessary tools, but we don't know which ones they are because we have no oversight in how they're being used.

So for us, we give insight into all of that, cut the costs and add that money right to your baseline. And this is one of our people. He's a VP of the project management organization. He went really high up the ladder, and he was saying, "The higher up I go, the more I realize how painful it is to ask my team, has this been done?" We have somebody here that's actually in a venture firm, head of operations that finds herself retyping Airtable notes between Notion and cross surfacing email chains. And she keeps thinking longingly about John several times a day, which is very exciting. Or this chief of staff, which basically defines what my life used to be like.

Feeling like an annoying bee buzzing around people's heads, telling them to do something. And honestly, like she said, it shouldn't be happening. It's not strategic and we agree with that.

So in just three weeks of opening up our product, we signed three design partners. And now we have seven more interested pilots. Actually that number since yesterday is 12 because my co-founder is crushing it and she just started outreach and everyone wants the thing so that's exciting. And for me and my co-founder we actually worked together for over nine years. We worked at a machine learning and AI company for nine years together where we were all focused on buying decisions, influencing buying decisions and then became the chief of staff and realized all of the stuff we're doing manually, we can help through ML and machine learning.

And that's ultimately led us to found a company together. We're also backed by really incredible people. We're going through Techstars Boulder right now. Our demo day is coming up in a month, so this is a good way to get some exposure. And we're also backed by PeopleTech Partners, which probably some of you are familiar with, because they're all focused on HR and people teams.

We have also incredible advisory board that have built amazing people teams. They've led operations at incredible companies. They're coaching CEOs to do better, and we have amazing advisor on the AI machine learning site as well. And we're actually just raising our first round now. Obviously, you want to get product market fit like every pre-seed company wants, but that's really what our focus is. And I think that's my slides.

Oliver: So walk me through how you become a billion-dollar-company. What is, you know, that million gonna do and where do you see, you know, your opportunities for growth and integration going down the line?

Larissa: Yeah. I mean, the biggest opportunity for us dollar now is to take out companies like Monday and Asana, honestly, because what Monday and Asana do is they really give you oversight, but they don't solve for the overhead. And Asana is a public company, Monday is a public company. Right now we're just really focused on like growth stage companies that are kind of in this transition point from series A, really trying to get from product market fit to revenue and really start losing oversight. So that's who we're focusing on right now. But we do see ourselves move up in a price like that's why Western Union, Dow Jones also on that list, but not our immediate focus.

Katie: What are design partners signing up for now? Is there an actual like MVP of a product or?

Larissa: Yes. So they're actively using it. Yes. Yeah.

Will: And do you know the other slide you had about the sort of cost reductions? Because what I understand from talking friends and Saas sales right now is that the only way you can move product is by emphasizing savings. Increase revenues great, but it's like can you draw direct connections to the savings and how do you guys create that causal relationship?

Larissa: Yeah, so for example, one of the customers that we're working with for them, I was like, I have so many Salesforce seats. It costs me like over a million every quarter. I know I don't need them, but I don't know which ones they are. If you save me like a million dollars, like for my annual bill, I'll give you $500,000 tomorrow. And because we see how people are using tools, whether they're actually actively using that, we can help them cut this.

And we can also honestly help them just have less operators. My company prior, we had five chiefs of staff at an 800-person company and 15 more people just program management because our operations was bonkers. So that's really where we come in, in terms of like cost savings. And then their revenue increases more about really helping employees spend time on the things they were actually hired for rather than just like nonsensical overhead, honestly.

Katie: Is the chief of staff usually your evangelist internally?

Larissa: Yes, and the head of biz ops. Those have been our two biggest ones which are very underserved. They have no product right now.

Kate: Larissa, great job. Did I hear you say that was your first pitch?

Larissa: Yes.

Kate: Didn't she do amazing, guys? Let's give her some encouragement. You did so awesome. Yeah. Fantastic job. Oh, good. Alright, guys. With that, we are down to one more contestant. So bringing it home for us is Omer with AskFora. Welcome, Omer.

Omer Trajman: It sucks going last. These are amazing companies. My name is Omer. I'm the founder of Askfora. We help you do better work with people you know. Askfora automatically maps the skills of the talent among your employees and among candidates. And I'm gonna tell you a bit today about how organizations save money on recruiting and help optimize workforce planning and training using AskFora.

Before I jump in, it's good to kind of level set about what is a skillset? Why is it actually important? And what you've noticed, obviously over COVID that where we work has changed. People are working remotely. They're hybrid. They're coming to the office. They're coming to different offices. And now how we work is actually changing. Our valued workforce, our baby boomers are leaving full time work, but they're not retiring and they have a lot of skills. They have a lot of experience that they're taking with them. Meanwhile, as Gen Z enters the workforce, they have a lot of new innovative ideas, a lot of skills.

They're slightly less engaged potentially in the work that they're doing. And we also know that focusing on skills reduces bias, it increases opportunities for diverse talent in the workforce. So why map the skills of your employees specifically? Well, skills maps are helpful in reducing hiring costs and increasing retention. You can uncover internal talent within the company that obviously reduces your hiring costs. It increases your attention. Employee referrals are also a great way if you know the skills of the people that employees are referring in and reducing your recruiting costs. They result in better culture fit in the organization.

And we also know that proactively identifying opportunities for employees increases engagement within the company. People are not necessarily applying for internal jobs. If they're applying for a job, they're applying for a job elsewhere. The problem is that keeping track of all these skills is near impossible. The workforce is constantly upskilling, ideally, right, and learning more about how to do better work. And the skills that you need to be competitive are constantly changing. So connecting these is a huge challenge. This is where AskFora provides value.

So AskFora is an AI platform for the skills economy. We use the power of AI to map the skills of existing talent, and this lets you source internal talent into new roles before they're applying for jobs at other companies. It aligns the training, learning, and workforce development with strategic goals of the company and the roles that you have open, and it helps a distributed workforce find other knowledgeable colleagues. We use public data to do this. This requires zero effort on the part of employees. It requires zero effort on the part of employers. We look at LinkedIn, of course. We look at public Facebook profiles. We look at Twitter, X, whatever it's gonna be called next. We look at GitHub, Substack, Notion, Medium.

We also look at the deeper aspects of the web that are all public: blogs, if there's degrees, there's certifications, industry associations, and optionally, employees and employers can bring in internal resources. A lot of people learn well by example. I know I do. This is an anonymized use case. We're gonna talk about a medical device company. It's a few hundred people. They have a new AI product because everyone does that they're releasing. And they actually need someone to help educate customers build some training, get some customer feedback. And so the skill set requires some experience working with customers, maybe building some training, ideally knowledge of AI, and domain expertise.

So we've got our cast of characters. Danny is our product lead. Danny needs to fill his new role working with Henry over in HR. You will discover as we do, that they find Erica, who currently works for Craig and is actually a perfect fit for this role. So the first thing, zero effort, AskFora builds the skills map, and AskFora automatically creates this for all employees. This can also include alumni, it can include anyone in the ATS system, it can include referrals, industry experts, colleagues of employees from past companies, basically, a massive data set of people to search. Danny and Henry then put together the skills they're looking for. If there's a job rec, AskFora will scrape that, use again, NLP and AI to figure out additional skills to search for that might be a good fit. And they're looking for, as we said, customer success, product docs, training, AI. This is the dream list of skills for this role. And that's it. AskFora searches for employees and finds people who are a match.

AskFora can also optionally search for people who are not employees if you want to look outside the company to bring in talent or if you're just looking to find people internally to fill this role because you don't have the budget to hire someone new. The actual search process takes minutes. Of course, Danny and Henry now need to go over to Greg, Erica's manager, and to Erica, and to figure out how do we do this transition. Do we need to backfill? Is Erica going to be involved in helping to onboard a replacement? And then there's another ask for a use case right there: we need to hire someone to backfill Erica's job.

So this is exciting, right? You can service internally, you can save money on onboarding, you can save money on hiring. But what if you could fill multiple roles at the same time? Large organizations do this. They do workforce planning. You have entire teams with staffing expertise. They focus on workforce planning. They understand the talent pool. They spend months on this exercise. And it's often not accessible to smaller organizations. So how do you do it with AskFora? Well, because AskFora is an AI engine under the covers, we can parallelize the search. So executive teams and managers don't need to write every job record.

They can specify the roles. We pull from our database the types of skills that are required for those roles, automatically figure out the skills of existing employees, and then build that map between existing role, existing employees in the companies and future roles. Teams and managers can also drill down into the analytics, try and understand how skills are currently distributed. Managers can compare the skills in their team based on the tenure, their overall experience, location, or really any other attribute that they plug into the system. And then HR can help identify the ideal skills given a target role for these employees for focusing their learning and development efforts. If you are interested, see me, free skills map and an optional trial of AskFora.

Kate: Let's go to our judges. Any questions?

Elizabeth: Omer, great presentation. We'd love to hear a little bit more about who you're selling into at these companies. Is it the HR leaders? And I know it's probably still early, but what does that sales process look like in terms of a timeline perspective?

Omer: It is early. It's way too early to tell timeline. We're actually launching publicly later this month, so it's all been design partners and early beta testers. We found that our hit rate with HR is near 100%%, especially in our target market, but they struggle to justify why they need yet another tool for sourcing recruiting. And so we found the best go to market is to just find a company, build a skills map, email the CEO and the CFO and say, "If you need to fill roles internally, we have that data." And then they're either interested or they're not.

Will: What's the minimum size company that this is really viable for?

Omer: As soon as you can't name everyone. So it's usually a couple hundred people is where it becomes interesting. The other thing that's interesting is that we did some early design work with tech companies, and they were horrible customers because tech is largely engineers and salespeople. And then everyone else supporting them. Highly specialized manufacturing, specialized consulting, D to C, where there's a lot of different roles and mobility is very difficult within the company, those actually end up being the best customers.

Kate: Awesome job. Thank you. All right, guys, that was all six contestants. We have a little bit of extra time, so I actually want to take it back to our panelists over here, because I think we might have been a little bit short with some questions. I think, Oliver, you might have had an additional one for Larissa, correct?

Oliver: I just wanted to know what was the most popular feature. Is it the cut and pasting across different platforms? May you elaborate on that?

Larissa: It's usually the querying and getting an instant status. It's also been executive because you can attach when work is actually being done for certain employees. For example, what is Sally doing. So that's been right now, the most popular.

Kate: Perfect. And any other questions for our contestants that we didn't get to?

Oliver: What kind of dog do you have?

Christie: Great question. I have a rescue, her name is Aspen and I have a foster dog at home. Aspen is like a Husky, German Shepard mix, and who knows what the foster is.

Elizabeth: You from Colorado? Denver, Aspen.

Christie: I am from Colorado.

Kate: Love it. Well, Jean, Melis, Larissa, Christie, Omer, Nico, amazing job. We really appreciate you sharing your companies about us. So now it is time for our judges to deliberate. So, judges, can I take you outside? Everybody stay here. We're going to be back in just a couple of minutes and reveal the winner.

Kate: All right, guys, welcome back. The decision has been made. It was a difficult one because we heard from some amazing companies, but there is a consensus. So are we ready to hear the winner?

Let's hear it for the winner of the inaugural 2023 PeopleForce TriNet Pitch event—Jean, with Penelope.

You are so welcome. We would like to hand you this award and you will also be the recipient of $10,000 in TriNet administrative credit. Yes! Can you come over this way really quick? We'd love to take a group photo with you. And then the judges actually wanted to give you some feedback as well after. Alright, team. Congratulations.

Jean: Thanks, guys. Really appreciate.

Oliver: Let's go over there and sit around the table.

Kate: Alright, back there, we got it. Yeah, she's right back there. There you go. Alright, awesome job. Congrats, Jean. Thank you so much. You're so welcome, so stick aside, they're going to give you a little bit of positive feedback.

Jean: Sure. In public or separately? Alright, in public.

Will: Right now. Go for it. I think that obviously, like, VCs love large markets, and it's clear that where you're going after is really big and it'll be hard to tap, but if you can unlock it, there's a ton of good that can be done and you can make a lot of money.

Jean: Thank you. You know the 57 million? I'm gonna take one or two, three of them. You know, there's plenty of opportunity. It's just massive. We know that SMBs is, a friend of mine said, it's like targeting Asia. Right? You do it one at a time and you just go and you figure it out and that's what we've been doing for the past 18 months.

Elizabeth: I was going to say, I loved the why of the story, especially starting with your parents. I thought it was such a powerful narrative and you think a lot about why founders are starting businesses. And so you initially had that hook to understand, okay, what is driving her? Where is this coming from? So I just loved how you kicked it off.

Jean: Thank you. And the company's named after my daughter, Penelope, who by the way, changed her name to Penny. Cause we talk about this so much. My goal in life is that she has less therapy than me, but, she is the direct beneficiary. And so, you know, some of us inherit wealth, some of us build it over time, but the reality is most of us just work for 40 or 50 years.

Oliver: So thank you for that. Before addressing Penelope or Penny, I just want to say we were super impressed by everyone that presented. I mean, I think everyone should give them a round of applause. I think, you know, echoing the personal story and then your professional story and combining those together was very strong in your presentation. And, you know, I used to have retail stores across the Northeast and know that every dollar and also competing for great talent is really important at retail because that's who's selling your goods, you know. And so your mission there is really great.

I think the area that could be very additive is teaming up with people like TriNet and teaming up with channels that can go there. You know, they could really amp it and figure out a way how maybe for that small business owner that $5,000 could be somehow credited back. So, you know, they're not looking at it. I remember going back to my advertising days. I really haven't talked about it too often now, twice. But I remember working with fast food. And you have franchisees and they would be like, "No, I'm not going to honor that. You know, what corporate is telling me to honor as far as like, you know, buy one, get one. That costs me money." And so, whatever you can do to save that contribution would move you further down the line.

Jean: Thank you.

Katie: Great presentation. I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about this space and I think the legislation piece is actually pretty significant here for the next five to ten years. You touched on it, but it's like, so rare that there's bipartisan agreement that this is like absolutely a crisis. Like there is a retirement savings crisis. So I think, there even could have been like a little bit more of expansion on that. But I think it's a huge part of why a company like this needs to exist now. Like both sides are agreeing that they have to figure out how to get people saving.

Jean: And the reality is there's so many people just earning barely enough to survive, right? And so, do you know what the minimum wage is? $7.25.

So in California, New York, and Florida at $17 and $18, but still. So there are many for whom this won't even apply, but you can see the mandates going down, whether you're a one-person shop or a thousand-person shop, you will have to start providing. It is like health care. It's one, it's health and wealth, it's together.

Kate: Well, awesome job. Congratulations. We're so thrilled. Thank you again to all of our contestants. Will, Elizabeth, Oliver, Katie. Thank you so much for your expertise and your feedback today. We appreciate it. And everybody, thank you for joining. Enjoy the rest of your evening.