Why I created an Advisory Board for my startup

Why I created an Advisory Board for my startup

The most important job I have as the CEO and co-founder of Localeur is to set our long-term vision and put the right people, especially my co-founder and product chief Chase White, in the position to make it reality. But as an early-stage startup, most of this work entails doing things to position us to reach short-term milestones, including anticipating and jumping over temporary hurdles, in an effort to scale from a friends-funded concept like we were when we launched in Austin at SXSW 2013 to an angel-backed startup like we’ve been the past year in growing our monthly user base 1,500% to a Series A-ready startup in the next 12-to-18 months that morphs into a rapidly-growing, revenue-generating business.

With this in mind, one of the first moves I made in 2015 to position Localeur for growth was to officially establish Localeur’s board of directors with the appointment of Heather Brunner, my mentor and former boss at Bazaarvoice who is CEO of WP Engine and was recently named Austin’s best CEO, as a director and Blake Chandlee, our lead investor and Facebook’s VP of Global Partnerships who played a key role in expanding their community into Europe, Asia and Latin America, as an observer, joining my co-founder Chase and myself.

Upon closing our first institutional round in 2016, we will likely add a third director to join our board, and, thinking further out, I’ve already initiated conversations with a number of successful entrepreneurs whom I believe will make for a great independent board member to bring relevant consumer/mobile/travel industry knowledge and expertise to this group as early as 2016.

Many of our investors, even those not on our board, serve as highly engaged and insightful advisers to me personally, and it’s worth noting that diversity has been one of the key facets I’ve focused on in securing these investors as travel and local services like TripAdvisor and Yelp have traditionally been the products of white male founders whereas the user bases of these services and products tended to be far more ethnically diverse along with having an outsized community of female contributors and super fans.

So we’ve gotten a tremendously diverse range of perspective whether it’s from Steve Pamon in New York who just became COO of Beyonce’s entertainment group, Parkwood Entertainment, or Kevin Moore in Dallas, who is invested in dozens of early-stage startups like Shyp and Favor, or the multiple married couples we count as investors along with the plethora of technology expertise we can access right here in Austin from Bazaarvoice founder and former CEO Brett Hurt, Spredfast co-founder and People Pattern founder Ken Cho, CS Identity President Joe Ross and Chris Shonk, an active investor here in Austin who recently connected me with a fellow entrepreneur / startup whom we’re likely to partner with in 2016.

Today, I’m proud to share that I’ve also just established an official Advisory Board for Localeur, as well.

The goal of the Advisory Board is to help Localeur better understand how we can more directly fulfill our mission of helping people experience local wherever they go, not from a revenue-centric or technical standpoint, but from a community perspective without it being treated as a product-specific focus group. In short, these folks will help me better set the vision for Localeur from a community and market positioning standpoint to make sure we’re speaking the language of the users we have and the users we are going after who share our desire to finally rid ourselves of Yelp. We just had our first conference call, which we’ll do monthly, and we’re going to plan to meet at least one time in 2016 as a group here in Austin.

In addition to our highly invested and engaged investors and advisers, I created this Advisory Board after realizing a need for an additional roster of advisers who more closely reflect our core user demo (85% of our users are 35-and-under compared to much older average user bases for Yelp and TripAdvisor) and have the ability to offer direct product feedback and share insight from an independent, non-investment driven standpoint.

The members of our Advisory Board range from tech industry pros to folks in the fashion and music industries, not to mention clearly reflecting the ethnic, gender and geographic spectrum of our users. There are so many amazing people in Localeur’s community from Jane Ko, one of Austin’s top food and travel bloggers, and Wendy Miller in Seattle, who truly does know all the amazing bars and restaurants in the city before anyone else, to Ericka Mitton in New York and Nicole List in Miami, who each carry the same high level of local savvyness in their home cities, respectively, so I imagine the makeup of this group will continue to evolve alongside our expansion and business. I plan to add additional members to this group in 2016 as we expand into new markets, including likely additions from Europe and Latin America, but our debut Advisory Board consists of the following folks:

- Alicia Mooty, a project manager in the software group for Pixar based in San Francisco by way of the Midwest,

- Brandon Perlman, the founder of The Gramlist and a co-founder of StyleCaster (acquired by SheKnows in 2014) based in NYC,

- Cristina Fisher, who does special projects for SXSW and is based in Austin after growing up in Southern California,

- Kiel Berry, the EVP of Linkin Park’s creative agency and VC firm, Machine Shop who is based in LA but spent years in New York in brand building,

- Larry Luk, a senior designer at Atlanta-based agency Son & Sons and co-owner of the streetwear brand, We Are The Process brand,

- Rachael King, the former head of communications for DogVacay and former head of social for SideCar who now lives in LA after a stint in SF,

- Sam Kidd, who facilitates creative projects and art direction for leading women’s brand Tory Burch out of New York though originally from Texas; and

- Sandeep Jain, the co-founder and CTO of RigUp, a Founders Fund-backed energy software startup based in Austin who is originally from New York and was previously an engineering manager at Google.

In addition to this group, I’ve also been fortunate to get solid fundraising and technical advice from two friends from our shared time at Bazaarvoice in Joe McCann, the co-Founder and CEO of NodeSource, and Scott Bonneau, the CTO of Wikibuy (one of Austin’s most buzzworthy and ambitious startups), former CTO of Polyvore and a former Google engineering manager. These guys are deep in the startup grind today with focus on fundraising, team building and user growth just like we are and I will be work to bring their latest-and-greatest technical and team-building insight closer to the stellar product roadmap being developed and built by my co-founder Chase and our founding engineer Chase Moody in 2016.

My job as CEO and co-founder gets a whole lot easier when I’m able to find intelligent, passionate people who share a desire to experience local wherever they go, then tap into their brand and business building, community management, design, expansion, fundraising, marketing, partner development, product and technical expertise to help Localeur fulfill its mission. This new Advisory Board will amplify the constantly-elevating execution of our founding team, the insight of our investors and board of directors, and help you experience local wherever you go that much easier.