Out of 150+ applications and fierce competition from the six early-stage tech startup finalists from across the Southeast, here’s the pitch that won City Shoppe the title of OutPitch 2021 Champion:
As the virtual applause faded, we caught up with CEO and co-founder Ash Cintas and the OutPitch 2021 judges to dig deeper into how City Shoppe out pitched the competition and what this win means for Ash and her team.
Why were you inspired to build City Shoppe?
As a former small business owner, I was frustrated with the lack of support and platforms for small business owners (SMBs) to manage and compete against the pay-to-play of eCommerce. My business was too grown to be on Etsy but too small to make a dent on Amazon. Why wasn’t there an option for small-to-medium-sized businesses to fit in?
As a conscious consumer, the rabbit hole of search engines and social media made it impossible for me to find the brands or retailers I aligned with, and I didn’t want to or have the time to spend hours searching. I thought to myself: Why does local shopping have to be limited to my physical proximity in a digital world? Why can’t I shop local value-driven brands from around the country, all from one site?
”City Shoppe has demonstrated impressive traction in solving acute pain points for small business owners. Their timing and trends have remained aligned in spite of challenges like the pandemic, focusing on loyalty to local businesses in every iteration of developing their robust solution. Plus, Ash is a strong founder with domain expertise! “ – Ariana Desiree Thacker, Guest Judge from Conscience VC
What keeps you and your team at City Shoppe going on hard days?
What keeps us going is the community and support we are building for small businesses that have notoriously been left out to bring their products worldwide. It brings excitement and reassurance that the City Shoppe team is creating a life-changing experience and company when a seller on City Shoppe gets their first sale from a customer halfway across the country, who usually would have never known about them and their products.
“Personally, I am always looking for more ways to shop locally and by impact, but I have struggled to find great makers and products. City Shoppe clearly helps solve the needs of so many small business owners by connecting consumers to the products they want more than ever.
As a founder, Ash has the right set of experiences and vision for building a company like City Shoppe. Plus, the founding team’s demonstrated ability to execute quickly and their solution’s early traction is something we always look for when investing in early-stage startups. We are super excited to welcome Ash to the Outlander family!” – Leura Craig, Judge from Outlander VC
Why do you want to work with Outlander VC?
What drew me to Outlander and their OutPitch competition was their team’s vision. They could see our idea for a different world of e-commerce created by the collective of small businesses, which not only employ most of the US workforce but they’re also the hearts and souls of our communities. From the beginning, Outlander’s in-depth analysis of our market showed authentic engagement and belief.
Being a Southern woman at heart, growing up in Virginia and North Carolina, and now building our HQ in Austin, I knew the Outlander’s intentionality and passion for funding underrepresented founders in the Southeast made them the perfect fit to work with. Winning OutPitch, I look forward to the Outlander team’s guidance, mentorship, and support to help push City Shoppe to the next level.
“Many small businesses don’t have the resources or experience to effectively manage their digital commerce. City Shoppe is helping fill that gap via services and technology. The team has a deep understanding of the problem and relevant experience that qualifies them to solve this problem. They’ve executed quickly during uncertain times and early metrics indicate they’re creating value for the small businesses and consumers they serve.” – Jermaine Brown, Judge from Outlander VC
What is the long-term vision for City Shoppe?
City Shop’s long-term vision is to redefine what it means to buy and sell online (instead of our current siloed and fragmented platforms) by building a digital community of shared resources, engagement, and connection for businesses and consumers globally.
Nine months ago, our team of seven came together to change the way the world shops local and to give small businesses a fighting chance to succeed in eCommerce. I want to spotlight and thank the City Shoppe team for their tireless work, passion, and belief in what we are building. The fun has just begun!
Thank you again to all six of our OutPitch 2021 finalists, who made our judges’ decision incredibly difficult by representing the most innovative early-stage tech startups across the Southeast. Watch all six finalists’ live pitch and Q&A here:
Thank you to our brilliant panel of VC judges, including Ariana Desiree Thacker from Conscience VC and Jermaine Brown and Leura Craig from Outlander VC, for your thoughtful questions for each finalist, as well as Paige Craig for a lively and insightful Q&A with our OutPitch 2021 audience. #TeamCockroach
And thank you to our audience of 200+ investors and founders for tuning in from around the globe to cheer on our innovative OutPitch 2021 finalists.
Until next time, keep hunting and stay outlandish!
As we lap the one-year anniversary of the global shutdown and shift to working from home, companies are evaluating the long-term pros and cons of employing a distributed workforce, and according to Chris Herd, “Remote work isn’t going anywhere.” As the founder of Firstbase, a startup helping companies manage remote employees, Herd reports that even during lockdowns and while juggling homeschooling kids, 80-90% of people have reported that they never want to work in an office full-time again, and 46% of people want to work from home at least part-time. And he predicts those numbers are likely to grow further once the benefits of remote work post-COVID are fully realized. Since remote work is here to stay, we must figure out how to make it work for all of us.
Though many prefer WFH to an office commute, the transition has had unforeseen impacts on how we work individually and as teams. The research Microsoft began at the beginning of the pandemic shows that most of their new remote workers reported a lack of physical cues, body language, and ability to gauge emotional responses in remote communication methods as significant hurdles to productive disagreement and decision-making. Likewise, a recent analysis by TINYpulse also found that employees onboarded remotely mid-pandemic were not absorbing their new workplaces’ culture and values, attributing it to those onboarded after COVID-19 being less connected with their teammates. According to a report released by employee experience company Limeade, the culmination of these factors leads to increased burnout levels: 72% reported experiencing burnout—up from 42% in a similar survey before the pandemic.
“We are all right now participants in a giant, natural, uncontrolled remote work experiment from which [we] must learn.”
— Microsoft
With 1 in 4 Americans set to continue WFH in 2021, there will be an even stronger call for the development of innovative tech in order to battle growing burnout and isolation rates. Here are Remoter’s top five cultural aspects that “challenge” an enjoyable remote day to day that they recommend company leaders work to address:
Teams communicating exclusively through digital mediums must adapt to incorporate meaningful interactions between team members and recreate the ease and clarity of in-person idea-sharing in our new virtual workplaces. Here are a few tools to get the ball rolling with your remote team.
How do we adapt our remote work processes to recreate the ease and clarity of in-person idea sharing in our virtual workspaces? We’ve included some of our favorite tools for collaborating virtually that help to minimize the top challenges for enjoyable remote work.
With Loom, you can record your camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously. Your video is then immediately available to share through Loom’s patented technology like the video to the right.
Loom’s technology is excellent for all your asynchronous communication needs, like nailing a virtual pitch (looking at you, founders!), sharing project updates with your team, and troubleshooting technical issues. Not every update needs to be a video conference, and, frankly, operating that way can be a colossal waste of time and energy. One of our remote workforce’s top requests is for fewer video meetings, so embrace the asynchronicity and send a Loom instead!
Through collaborative pre-meeting agendas and calendar syncing, Notiv ensures all attendees are prepped and ready for a meeting before it begins. When Notiv joins your video or phone meeting, the application automatically records the meeting’s content and highlights important decisions, action items, and insights. After hanging up, Notiv creates a searchable transcript from the audio recording, which can be shared and reviewed quickly to get the full context behind all your team’s decisions.
Notiv’s technology not only makes pre-meeting planning and collaboration simple, it also frees your team up to be fully present mid-meeting by alleviating the need to take detailed notes. Plus, with Notiv’s searchable transcript and assignable action-items, your team will always be on the same page.
Complete with brainstorming rooms, focus areas, meeting rooms, and, of course, a kitchen for coffee breaks and office banter, each virtual office is fully customizable to accommodate your company’s, team’s, and individual needs.
Teemyco’s virtual office replicates co-worker interactions and the team presence of working in the same building, like popping into your favorite coworker’s office to chat without the back-and-forth scheduling and meeting links. Your team appears as icons that can move from room to room based on their workstyle mood. Shift your icon to a quiet zone when you need to concentrate without people trying to ping you, then move over to the kitchen when you’re in need of some fresh office banter.
This free Slack app allows you to schedule messages into the future both out of courtesy for working hours and as a way to schedule reminders for your team meeting in advance. The developers created this app for “bosses who like to constantly ask for stuff, but want to minimize complaints about work/life balance,” but we also love it for scheduling reminders from yourself to yourself to take a break or submit that credit card statement on time!
After adding the app to your Slack workspace, simply type /schedule followed by the message and the date and time you want the message to be sent. For example, type /schedule Hello @channel! Reminder that our monthly virtual happy hour starts in 15 minutes! 4:45 pm and press enter. You can also use natural language like /schedule Do you wanna make a call? in 5 minutes or simply send /schedule and a window will open where you can compose your message, choose the date, time, and destination within Slack.
How do we cultivate company culture over tools like Slack and Zoom? Long-term remote worker productivity is directly related to camaraderie and positive company culture, so we’ve included some tools that help foster company culture via automated daily interactions, plus our suggestion for a fun, engaging virtual happy hour.
Whether you opt for virtual coffee roulette between coworkers or a virtual watercooler channel to spark team-wide discussions, Donut will automate the team-building activities for you.
With goals like “Banish Social Isolation” and “Take the Watercooler Virtual,” Donut helps combat burnout by encouraging socializing across time zones and departments with prompts that inspire thoughtful conversations—and even the occasional friendly debate. Although remote teams might not be together in an office, serendipitous social interactions are still meaningful and help build happier, more productive teams. Add @donut to your Slack workspace and watch the connections blossom over virtual coffees and lunches!
DailBot keeps remote teams aligned and facilitates deep work by reducing the need for meetings via automated daily standups, team check-ins, and periodic surveys (read: fewer video calls!). To help build camaraderie in your virtual team, DailyBot allows teammates to send and receive kudos, earn rewards for their outstanding work, and track overall team motivation.
After adding DailyBot to your Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Hangouts, team members will be automatically prompted to submit updates covering their recent achievements, plans for the workday, and where they may be getting stuck. It will also ask how they are feeling and if they need any assistance. Through kudos leaderboards with optional rewards or fun games, DailyBot automates the celebration of wins and creates a culture of recognition and continuous improvement for a more productive and connected remote team.
By adding BirthdayBot to your Slack Workspace, you can automate the celebration of every team member’s birthday or work anniversary without lifting a finger. Since we can’t all gather around the break room and sing to you over cupcakes, this little bot is a thoughtful and easy way to make your team feel appreciated and connected to one another.
With video meetings dominating work hours, the last thing your team needs or wants is another video meeting in the name of team-building. By adding Lounge to your Slack workspace, you’ve handled the next virtual happy hour’s RSVPs and event reminders, as well as leveling up the event with in-Slack games like Codenames, Werewolf, Pictionary, WTF—What The Facts?!, and Alien Invasion.
One of remote workers’ top requests is to stop making everything a video call—this includes fun events! Lounge lets you connect from your phone or desktop in a virtual space with built-in audio, quirky avatars, and more. Plus, you don’t even have to play to join in on the fun! Hop around game rooms to chat with your team, spectate, or join the ongoing game.
As we lap the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 quarantine and the massive, global shift to remote work, Outlander VC’s team dynamic has become the new normal: an entirely virtual team working from homes around the world.
We encourage company leaders to invest in making this new normal as seamless and positive an experience as possible for their teams by prioritizing services that foster meaningful connection and simplify collaboration. The productivity of both in-person and remote work is influenced by the same key factor: positive company culture. Workplaces that prioritize strong company culture can have high employee productivity no matter where their desks may be.
For February’s Outlandish Speaker Series, we spoke with Lo Toney of Plexo Capital.
Lo Toney is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, which he incubated and spun out from GV (Google Ventures), based on a strategy to increase access to early-stage deal flow. Plexo Capital invests in emerging seed-stage VCs and invests directly into companies sourced from the portfolios of VCs where Plexo Capital has an investment.
Prior to founding Plexo Capital, Lo was a Partner on the investing team at GV where he focused on marketplaces, mobile, and consumer products. Before GV, Lo was a Partner with Comcast Ventures, leading the Catalyst Fund and working with the main fund focusing on mobile messaging marketplaces. He also worked with Zynga as the GM of Zynga Poker with full P+L responsibility for Zynga’s largest franchise at that time. During his leadership, web bookings increased by over 150% with margin expansion. Lo has also held executive roles with Nike + eBay as well as startups funded by top-tier investors.
Lo received his M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business (University of California at Berkeley), where he completed the Management of Technology program: a joint curriculum program with the College of Engineering. Lo received his B.S. from Hampton University in Virginia.
Lo spoke with Outlander’s Paige Craig about investing in emerging managers, diversity in venture capital, and the future of work. Listen to the full conversation or hit the highlights of our Q&A:
This national conversation about race wouldn’t have really gotten to the point it’s at today without the unfortunate events of last summer. Without question, I think everyone can agree that this wave of protests felt different. But I also think there is a feeling—and I’ve heard it and I feel it as well—that it may be kind of waning now, that it is just a moment. We don’t want that to happen. We want to see it turn into a movement.
So we’re staying focused on these issues, especially in highlighting the great things that happen when we can get capital into the hands of these Black GPs who data shows often have more diverse portfolios than their peers. More capital into the hands of diverse GPs is more capital into their more diverse portfolios, and once their portfolio companies get access to that capital to execute their strategies, those diverse founders also go down a wealth creation path which ripples out into their communities.
Data also shows that these diverse-led companies also end up hiring a more diverse early employee base. And when those diverse employees have access to capital, the opportunities change for them because they’ve got a financial backstop they didn’t have before. They can go and start a company or invest in one of their peers. And then capital goes back to the GPs, and if the GPs have enough liquidity events, they go down the wealth creation path and capital goes back to the LPs. This model leverages a great strategy to drive alpha and produce returns with the by-product—which I’m really passionate about—of diversifying the ecosystem is working, and we should all triple down on this.
And this is very similar to what happens in a geographic ecosystem, right? Just look at what’s happening in Atlanta: money paid to employees of bigger businesses is used to start companies investing in early-stage startups, thus creating a whole ecosystem for startup funding. Atlanta is really interesting because we can actually see that vertical ecosystem built around people of color, Black people in particular. So, I look at places like Atlanta as a kind of proof of what can happen when there’s inclusion at the earliest stages of the development of an ecosystem.
“Atlanta is really interesting because we can actually see that vertical ecosystem built around people of color, Black people in particular. So, I look at places like Atlanta as a kind of proof of what can happen when there’s inclusion at the earliest stages of the development of an ecosystem.”
— Lo Toney, Founding Managing Partner, Plexo Capital
Based on all the individual anecdotes that I’ve seen, it is clear that more capital has gone into Black-led companies within the past 12 months, but not as much as we would like. I’m anxiously awaiting the actual data to come out because I think what we’ve seen is probably an increase, especially in later-stage companies like Calendly in Atlanta or Squire in New York. The most visible examples have been at the later-stage companies, where we had never really seen any dollars go into Black-led companies at the later stages before.
Part of the problem is also the lack of Black venture capitalists. Then within the Black VCs, there are even fewer Black limited partners, and within the Black LPs, there are only really two types: the majority being professionals that work for the endowments and foundations of the world and the minority of Black LPs are people like me who are controlling their own pool of capital. And we don’t tend to see as much activity by the pension funds in early-stage venture capital due to their obligations and liabilities to their constituents.
First and foremost, this is an issue that actually keeps a lot of potentially great GPs out of the market. One of our GPs actually told me about pitching a prospective LP—a retired venture capitalist—who listened to the GPs challenges and said, “Well, maybe you’re not rich enough to be a VC.” And I was shocked. First of all, there’s no data that I’ve seen that says the richer you are the better of a venture capitalist you’re going to be, right? But, to your question, there is a financial reality to being a successful venture capitalist as well.
We’ve estimated that it takes about $1-2M to get things rolling. And how do we get to that number? Well, it’s a combination of things. For one, foregoing their salary for what we estimate will take about 24 months from the time that a data room is open with an LPA until the final close happens. They’ve got to finance their lifestyle so they can focus fully on raising a fund, which is really difficult especially for an early manager. If you’re an emerging fund manager, you might have 50 LPs to 100 LPs, and that alone takes a lot of hustle over a long period of time even pre-pandemic. There are travel, pre-marketing, and hiring expenses, not to mention one of the bigger expenses, if it’s not able to be deferred, of legal aid for fund formation. All of which a GP is paying out of pocket. Then, once that first close happens, there is the ability to recoup fund formation.
Usually, for a smaller fund, I’d say you probably no more than $250K or so. You’re likely not going to recoup any of that lost salary or travel expenses, but the legal expenses are non-negotiable. And to your question, Paige, your salary is not going to be what it was—if you’re lucky, it’ll be half or maybe a third until you can stack a couple of funds to have stacked management fees. And, then, you’ve still got to turn around and pledge 1-2% as the GP commit, which is a significant financial hurdle for a lot of people to enter the space.
I’ve seen people handle this a little more creatively than how I answered above. I know I was lucky in that I was able to basically be an entrepreneur in residence while I was working on my fund at GV. And if you can find an opportunity to work inside of a fund, I highly recommend doing it to get a little bit of salary and a little bit of infrastructure as you build. And to touch on diversity again, that’s a great way that firms can help diverse emerging managers, right? My other recommendation is to see if you can defer your legal fees. If you can go to one of these larger shops, they might be willing to defer the legal fees, which is a big help to not have to pay those until after there’s a close.
“One of our GPs actually told me about pitching a prospective LP—a retired venture capitalist—who listened to the GPs challenges and said, “Well, maybe you’re not rich enough to be a VC.” And I was shocked. First of all, there’s no data that I’ve seen that says the richer you are the better of a venture capitalist you’re going to be, right? But, to your question, there is a financial reality to being a successful venture capitalist as well.”
— Lo Toney, Founding Managing Partner, Plexo Capital
At the end of the day, our objective is to make sure our Plexo Capital GPs can make that transition from being a great investor to a great fund manager. And there is a difference. It’s one thing to be able to pick and support portfolio companies, but a whole other ball-game having investors in your own fund and managing that process with other people’s money. For instance, it requires having lawyers craft the LPA, negotiating that LPA to meet objectives with the investors, creating a cadence of communication that makes sense for your investors, reporting that gives your investors the information that they need, the insight into what it is and isn’t working with our strategy, putting together a go-to-market strategy for a fundraising process, and more. All of those things don’t really have anything to do with being a great investor. Those are skills of a great fund manager, which is what we’re really trying to help our GPs transition into.
It really just depends. My first thought is that this goes back to something called strategy drift, which is when a company doesn’t change with technology or with competition and continues to do business the same as it always has been doing it. And the one thing that LPs don’t want to see is strategy drift. For instance, when you look at the data about what actually produces the majority of manager churn inside of a portfolio, it’s not usually tied to any fund performance metrics but more often a combination of strategy drift, general partnership issues, and poor communication—all elements that really are more about whether or not you’re a good fund manager, not a great investor.
So, my feedback for this emerging fund manager is to go in with a thesis and a strategy, then execute against it. In that strategy, there must be lessons learned in Fund I that are going to support the elements of the strategy of moving forward into a successor fund as well as any required modifications. The key is the ability to be able to provide that insight to the prospective investor as to why these decisions are being made, so really focus on being consistent in your strategy while also recognizing and adapting the lessons learned in Fund I.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of times when a fund manager is interacting with an LP, the LP is going to want to build a relationship over time because we’re preparing for multi-decade relationships. And it may be the case that the LP looking at the current fund is not going to invest until the next fund because they want to see a full cycle, right? Your ability to demonstrate the lessons learned in Fund I that made you stick to your strategy and even make necessary tweaks to that strategy is critical to building trust with your LPs.
When I think about the things that were gaining traction pre-pandemic, there was a lot of focus on delivery services that enabled consumers to reclaim their time. Then from an operational perspective, we were thinking about the fundamental shifts and logistical measures that needed to happen to get those things to consumers quickly and with minimal effort on their part.
For example, we’ve invested in this virtual kitchen company, which looks at all the data around people’s preferences for types of food, where those people live, and then creates a hub-and-spoke model with ghost kitchen restaurants that look like they’re brick and mortar in terms of their online presence. But they’re not! They’re solely geared towards UberEats-style delivery. Pre-pandemic, we saw these ghost kitchens climbing higher and higher on the algorithm because of all the data that they’re using to understand preference and location. Then the pandemic hits, and all of a sudden there’s a steep rise and increase in demand for that type of service.
For consumers, there’s been an acceleration in these delivery services, as well as anything to do with the screen. Driven by the insatiable demand for content from Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ and the uptick in playing video games together and remotely, the demand for an infrastructure required to be able to deliver those services has also increased.
On the enterprise side, think about all of the naysayers that were laggards when it came to accepting remote work and a distributed workforce. There was a psychological barrier as well as a financial barrier because even if people agreed that it was going to be productive, they didn’t necessarily have the infrastructure in place to be able to support remote work or a distributed workforce. But then the pandemic hits, and now the naysayers have been forced to deploy billions of dollars into building that infrastructure. It would have taken years to get the investment that we’ve seen into all the infrastructure required to have a secure system for remote access work, but we’ve seen this massive acceleration when the pandemic first started.
We’ve seen massive amounts of money going into these different services for both consumers’ and for enterprises’ new normals, which I think are likely going to persist long-term. That’s where a lot of new opportunities are going to happen. The downside, of course, is that these great new innovations are juxtaposed against the pain and suffering of so many people across the globe. So, for investors, it’s really important to think about the things that we can invest in that can help narrow socioeconomic gaps as a by-product of what they do as opposed to widening those gaps.
For us, Talli has always been love at first Demo Day. 💙
In the fall of 2020, Outlander VC’ Founding Partner Leura Craig happened upon Lauren Longo pitching at Launchpad2X. Immediately, Leura was intrigued by the badass female founder determined to help new parents with innovative, intuitive tech. With Lauren’s background in user experience and software product management—coupled with her husband John’s software and hardware development background—they created the first Talli device as a way to stay afloat during the overwhelming first months with a newborn.
As Lauren and John spoke with friends about how they were keeping up with new-parent life via a simple button device they’d built, they realized they’d built something other parents needed too. Putting their technical skills to work, they developed their concept into a beta version of the Talli device—all built inside plastic storage containers! They sent the beta device out to 30 families across the US, along with a web application they’d built to record and analyze the device’s event data. After receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from their beta testing, they decided to go all-in getting Talli ready for market, bringing on long-time colleague Patrick Caldwell as Talli’s CTO to work with Lauren as CEO.
From the beginning, the Talli team has received frequent requests from other segments of the caregiving market who wanted Talli to help them, too: parents of older children with special needs, people struggling with diagnosis and management of chronic diseases such as epilepsy, and adult children managing the care of aging loved ones. Talli has laid the groundwork for their platform to easily expand into these additional segments, building the entire Talli platform for easy reconfiguration.
Next week, Lauren and Patrick will present at Outlander VC’s inaugural Demo Day, bringing the meet-cute story of Outlander and Talli full-circle. To mark the occasion, we’ve asked both Lauren Longo and Leura Craig to reflect on Talli’s journey since that pitch in the fall of 2020 and how they foresee Talli changing even more lives in the next 20 years.
Lauren Longo, CEO, Talli: Millennial parents have grown up as master multi-taskers with technology streamlining their professional and personal lives. With a growing number of couples working toward a seemingly-elusive work-life balance while also raising children, more and more parents are turning to tech for new ways to solve age-old parenting dilemmas: sharing the load of feedings, diapers, sleep, and day-to-day care, while also monitoring overall health and development; finding success with breastfeeding (a common hurdle new moms face); establishing sleep schedules that are healthy for baby and supportive of parents’ mental and physical health; and more.
Traditional pen and paper tracking can more-or-less get the job done but are a little clunky and obviously have zero automation for getting the data into a useful summary to show trends and patterns. Baby tracking apps have emerged in recent years as the next step; however, logging events in an app is a multi-step process and requires you to have your phone with you in the first place—neither of which is ideal in the 24/7 whirlwind of infant care. Plus, this method requires all of your child’s caregivers to be relatively tech-savvy, which can be difficult for nannies, grandparents, and other caregivers to access and update, preventing consistent tracking of care when Mom and Dad are away.
Talli’s simple, one-touch device distills the multi-step logging of these apps into the press of a button. It’s quick and easy for parents, freeing up time and mental space in their daily routine, and it’s intuitive enough for grandparents and nannies, enabling consistent tracking of care across caregivers. And we’ve even added an Alexa skill for hands-free logging as well! From the Talli device or Alexa skill, baby’s events are logged in our app, where all data appear in real-time from anywhere.
Lauren: In the short-term, we are planning to unlock full customization features this summer, which will allow parents to extend the use of their Talli beyond the infant phase. Once Talli is fully-customizable, the sky’s the limit for what our customers can track and for other markets we can serve.
With that being said, we envision Talli providing simple tracking across the care tech market: infant care, senior care, chronic conditions, and animal care in B2C and B2B channels. We also envision our customers publishing their own Talli configurations that helped them and that others can download and use, such as configurations for smoking cessation, plant care, daily chores, workout routines, etc.
We know that caregivers across industries are facing increasing demands for data entry and tracking, in addition to increased patient loads. It’s approaching an untenable situation, reflected in high turnover rates and staffing shortages. We believe that simplifying the logging of repeated care activities to the push of a button will expedite the data-entry process for overworked staff and allow them to improve the consistency of data being tracked. In this way, Talli can help staff focus on the quality of care and improve the health outcomes of the people they serve.
Lauren: First and foremost, we’re parents, so we know from personal experience how difficult and overwhelming that first year is with a new baby. We know how important and daunting it is to try and keep up with everything from shaping a symbiotic sleep schedule to getting the hang of feeding (especially breastfeeding) for both baby’s development and a parent’s peace of mind that you’ve got this under control.
We’ve spent our careers honing technical skills for finding the simplest ways technology can solve a real-world problem and then implementing those solutions. But, until Talli, we were applying these skills to things like budgeting systems and time card management. These are real business problems, for sure, but Talli is our opportunity to improve the day-to-day life and well-being of families throughout all of the wonderful and challenging stages of caregiving.
“We all truly believe Talli is something the world needs, and we believe there’s nobody who would do it better than us. ”
— Lauren Longo, CEO, Talli
Lauren: My dad has been an entrepreneur for the last 30 years in various cleaning-related businesses. Until my sister and I forced him to stop, he was famous for taking a sip of his organic and environmentally friendly multi-purpose cleaner on sales calls! He’s had his share of both success and failure as an entrepreneur, so he has been a wonderful source of advice and support to me in this journey.
My mom spent her entire career teaching students with hearing impairments and special needs, and she always went above and beyond to support her students’ families outside of school. I was lucky enough to be directly involved in her work for much of my childhood, which really instilled in me a drive to help others wherever I can.
Lauren: In short: 2020. From a business perspective, the pandemic disrupted our production and we were forced to delay our Talli Baby launch. Plus, our team has now worked remotely from homes full of kids running amok for much of this year as well. I can attest that being a full-time working mom with both of my kids at home has certainly leveled-up my ability to multitask and increased my capacity for stress!
At the same time, my kids have always kept me focused on the “why” of Talli, and they’ve been very involved in this journey in their own ways. We hope to instill in them lessons around perseverance, work ethic, and never giving in to fear by modeling those behaviors through this venture.
Leura Craig: When I first saw Lauren pitch at Launchpad2X, I was immediately intrigued by the potential of such a huge and relatable problem—one which Lauren had faced herself—that Talli was seeking to solve with intuitively simple software and hardware. As an investor, I really value founders with category-expertise who develop their solutions out of their own experiences. When you’re solving a problem you’ve faced, the motivation and drive behind your venture is extremely personal, and that’s why you want to solve it.
When I reached out to learn more about Talli, she told me about a night when she broke down sobbing because her doctor wanted her to track all of these data points and metrics so they could understand how her first child was growing and evolving. And this is a common thing that pediatricians ask for because a newborn’s eating and sleeping routine is critical to their development and growth, right? But like all new parents, she was feeling overwhelmed and couldn’t figure out a way to keep track of all that information, so she decided to build a better way.
I mean, she literally built a better way. After learning more about what Lauren and her co-founders were developing with Talli, I was not only impressed with Lauren as a brilliant, organized, and driven founder, but also that they had already managed to create and test their hardware prototype. Hardware is a notoriously difficult category for tech startups. Many ventures run into issues figuring out 1) how to build a prototype, 2) how to test it, 3) when do you get users to test it, and 4) and when do you evolve it to the next generation. But Lauren and her co-founders, through thoughtful iterations and early user testing, developed a very sticky product that people absolutely love.
Leura: Well, to start, one of Lauren’s superpowers is her eye for branding and UI/UX, which is so important in a solution aimed at ease-of-use. To have hardware that’s intuitive and elegantly designed paired with incredibly intelligent software is a game-changer in the category of baby care. But what was also compelling to me as an investor is that they’re not stopping with baby care. We’ve already seen how quickly and organically Talli’s baby care platform has grown, so we are anticipating a similarly enthusiastic response when they branch out into other categories as well.
Talli’s event logging solution can easily be applied to senior care, pet care, fitness routines, medication and symptom management, and more. But in the bigger picture, it can also be applied to B2B manufacturing or any other category of business that could benefit from smart recommendations based on tracking events. In my mind, there are endless use-cases because they’ve intentionally designed it to be content-agnostic. Talli can help people be more mindful and productive, while also enabling them to reflect on the trends of their lives based on their logged-events. That’s why Talli is such a powerful solution: it can be applied to anything.
First and foremost, I believe that other investors should invest in Talli because they’ve proven to be an exceptional early-stage company a la Outlander’s Founder Framework: the founding team has already proven they have the vision, intelligence, character, and execution to build a multi-billion dollar company. Lauren and her team are not only extremely dedicated, but they have also demonstrated they have the outside-of-the-box creativity, problem-solving, and grit necessary to navigate the challenges scaling will inevitably bring.
In the last few years, consumer hardware has been neglected by venture capital. Because of this industry trend, I worry that investors will be hesitant to embrace the potential power hardware can have in solving consumer problems, especially when combined with great software. So, to all my fellow investors who love consumer products: get excited to meet Lauren and her team! This is one of those types of companies where if they get it right, Talli will change the way we think about event tracking tech solutions for good.
“This is one of those types of companies where if they get it right, Talli will change the way we think about event tracking tech and solutions for good.”
— Leura Craig, Founding Partner, Outlander VC
Our mission at Talli® is to reduce the mental burden of caregiving through easier logging of care and health data. Our flexible IoT platform provides hardware and software options for one-touch, mobile, and hands-free logging across infant care, senior care, and home health markets. Talli is flexible enough to track any type of event and then translate that data into actionable information and the insights you need most.
Based in Atlanta, GA, co-founders Lauren Longo and Patrick Caldwell are disrupting the tracking and sharing of health and care data through an IoT logging and health data platform with configurable hardware and software solutions.
The Partners at Outlander VC share one very important commonality: experience as founders. Each of us turned to venture capital to solve a problem we faced while sitting on the other side of the pitch deck, and we are now uniquely positioned to mentor founders based on this shared understanding. From the barriers facing minority entrepreneurs to the pitfalls of trial and error, here’s how our team of founders-turned-venture-capitalists is using their founder experience to guide their investing, plus their advice for founders just starting out.
As a female founder raising venture capital, I was pitching to a fairly homogenous subset of men to which I was a stark minority. At networking events, I was disheartened by the lack of gender or racial diversity (especially where those identities intersect) among my fellow founders. In recent years, it’s become more widely-acknowledged that the tech startup ecosystem is not diverse enough. However, just talking about this lack of diversity is also not enough.
We know that 65% of venture capital firms have no female partners and 81% have no Black investors, which directly impacts how they source potential investments, evaluate founders, and fund ventures. At Outlander, we believe that who sits at the decision-making table matters. We believe that one of the best ways to diversify the tech ecosystem is to diversify who is writing the checks, so that is exactly what we did.
On a more day-to-day level, one of the things I work on with Outlander’s portfolio companies that I learned as a founder is ruthlessly prioritizing where you invest your energy. There will always be too much to do and never enough time, so it’s crucial that founders intentionally prioritize progress in areas that will get their venture to its next important milestone.
“At Outlander, we believe that who sits at the decision-making table matters. We believe that one of the best ways to diversify the tech ecosystem is to diversify who is writing the checks, so that is exactly what we did.”
I didn’t start my military business to make money; I started it to solve big problems with a crazy idea that I knew would make a massive impact. And when I transitioned to tech investing, I realized that every founder I met was just like me just years earlier: motivated despite a world of naysayers that can’t wrap their heads around such an ambitious vision for the future and also very much in need of support beyond just capital.
As we point out in Outlander’s Founder Framework, founders are psychologically unique in their bigger-than-life visions and the need for emotional resilience, which is why former operators often make the best mentors and investors: we get what it’s like to willingly embark into uncharted waters when everyone ashore thinks you’ve lost your damn mind.
As a founder turned investor, my advice for any founder is to experiment at the intersection of their passions and capabilities—this will ensure your venture offers a truly innovative and unique insight into the problem you’re trying to solve. It’s not enough to just find a problem and set out to solve it; without an underlying motivation, there is less reason to push through when things inevitably get tough.
“It’s not enough to just find a problem and set out to solve it; without an underlying motivation, there is less reason to push through when things inevitably get tough.”
Though not a tech startup founder, I’ve been fortunate to walk the founder path in other industries. Throughout these experiences, I kept arriving at this conclusion: the companies I wanted to build were ones that 1) I truly believe will make a significant, positive impact in the world, and 2) the founders are uniquely positioned to build their vision of the future.
When I quickly learned that becoming an expert in all my areas of interest was unrealistic, I realized that venture capital offered the perfect modality to scale this desire. As an investor, I am in my happy place: working with brilliant minds who are passionate about solving big-impact problems across a myriad of industries. Investment fit or not, my mission is to help founders succeed, and I revel in acting as both a sounding board for their business challenges, as well as making introductions to potential resources, talking through life, and much more.
Reflecting on my time as a founder, I definitely could have been more honest with myself about my strengths and weaknesses and worked to build a more robust support network. I often encourage our founders to lead with their vision of the future and the unwavering belief that they are uniquely positioned to build that vision. However, this unwavering belief is not to be confused with the unrealistic expectation that founders be experts in every aspect of their startup and execute every operation perfectly (far from it!), but knowing when to assess their gaps and rely on the support system they’ve built is crucial to their success.
“As an investor, I am in my happy place: working with brilliant minds who are passionate about solving big-impact problems across a myriad of industries. Investment fit for not, my mission is to help founders succeed.”
My founder experience is one I hear often as an investor: I didn’t know what I didn’t know until it was too late. As a non-technical founder, I did know I had certain knowledge gaps related to technology. I didn’t realize I also had other big gaps in relationships, capital, and start-up expertise that I’d have to fill to scale my company to over $10M in annual revenue.
I like to joke that during those years of trial and error I personally stepped on most of the hidden landmines that lie in wait for new founders. Now, as an investor, I’m eager to share my experiences with founders to help them stay on safe ground and scale their ventures bigger and faster—and with less angst—than I did mine.
I learned a lot of timeless lessons during my entrepreneurial journey, many of which apply to all leadership roles, not just founding a tech company. An important overarching one is that you must be self-aware and brutally honest with yourself. You won’t be great at everything. That’s okay! Accept it, and don’t try to do it all yourself. Purposefully surround yourself with advisors, cofounders, and peers who complement your weaknesses and your skillset. No one will expect you, the founder, to be an expert in every aspect of your company. You’re expected to lead, a big part of which is equipping your company with the experts it needs to thrive.
“No one will expect you, the founder, to be an expert in every aspect of your company. You’re expected to lead, a big part of which is equipping your company with the experts it needs to thrive.”
With 20+ years in tech as an operator, serial founder, and startup advisor, I’ve observed the process of raising startup capital from countless case-studies, and what I keep running into is a dissonance between the exceptional women of color founders I meet and the inaction of investors.
Note that I am not citing a lack of opportunities, but that fewer investors have been willing to take a chance on a marginalized founder’s vision: it runs the gamut from microaggressions in interviews to dismissing ventures aiming to revolutionize multi-billion dollar industries that simply do not apply to the majority of (white, male) investors. I’ve seen and experienced first-hand the gap between marginalized founders and the support they need to grow their ventures, and I wanted to be a part of the solution.
To bridge this gap, I work to educate the tech community about the untapped potential of not only these underrepresented founders but also the untapped potential of the Southeast. In that same vein, my biggest piece of advice is really for investors, and it’s simple: don’t count us out. If you want to invest in truly exceptional founders, start making a conscious effort to cultivate relationships with investors and founders who don’t look or talk like you. If you want to invest in startups already changing the world with their vision, forget what you thought you knew about the South. We’re here, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.
“If you want to invest in startups already changing the world with their vision, forget what you thought you knew about the South. We’re here, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on. ”
These founder-turned-venture-capitalists are not only uniquely positioned to mentor Outlander VC’s portfolio companies from a place of experience and innate understanding, but we also bring a founder’s mentality (vision, intelligence, character, and execution) to how and why we invest. At Outlander, we invest in the brightest founders with game-changing visions for the future because we know what it’s like to be on the edge of something big.