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Showing posts with label JEREMY SMITH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JEREMY SMITH. Show all posts
Friday, June 20, 2014
Thursday, June 12, 2014
SPOT HERO - How this company landed $4.5M to help you find a parking spot
By Sandra Guy | Get In Touch: @sandraguy | sguy@suntimes.com By Sandra Guy Business, Grid - June 11, 2014 7:00 amHow this company landed $4.5M to help you find a parking spot
Team SpotHero: Alex Kruger (from left), Elan Mosbacher, Mark Lawrence, Jeremy Smith and Larry Kiss.
“It’s so convenient,” he said. “I just pop into a location and choose where I want to park. I have my spots picked out at two or three locations near the office.”
SpotHero, an on-demand parking-spot-finder website and mobile app, said Wednesday it has raised $4.5 million — its biggest funding round to date — and plans to hire more employees, improve its product and expand its presence locally and in the Western and Southwestern United States.
The company will also get a new board member: Mike Gamson, a senior vice president of sales at LinkedIn.
It’s an example of Chicago-area natives made good: Co-founders Jeremy Smith, 27, and Mark Lawrence, 28, grew up in Skokie and Winnetka, respectively, and got their first taste of success by winning the Apps for Metro Chicago competition three years ago.
The company, which moved into new headquarters June 1 at 720 N. Franklin St., takes a cut of each parking spot it sells. Smith, the chief operating officer, said the company works with more than 700 parking lots, garages and valets nationwide, and has “hundreds of thousands of paying customers” in seven markets, including Chicago. In Chicago, SpotHero works with 260 parking lots, garages and valet-parked sites.
The other markets are Baltimore, Boston, Newark, New York, Milwaukee and Washington.
Owners of parking spaces post their listings of available spaces for free with SpotHero, and set the prices. Motorists use the website and mobile app for free, and pay the going rate for an available parking space, which Smith said can result in as much as 35 percent savings from a full-price parking spot. The average daily full-price parking spot in Chicago is $32, Smith said.
Smith said SpotHero generates more than $500,000 yearly in incremental revenue for its parking-spot-owner partners, including four of the largest in the country — ABM Parking Services, Impark, LAZ Parking and Chicago-based Standard Parking.
SpotHero, which employs 19 in Chicago and 22 total, aims to expand to new markets such as Dallas, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Smith said.
The company intends to hire an undetermined number of new employees for jobs such as operations, marketing and account managers, and software engineers and mobile app developers.
SpotHero’s new funding brings the 2-year-old company’s total venture capital to $7 million. The latest backers include new investors Chicago Ventures, an early-stage fund headed by Kevin Willer and Stuart Larkins; Bullpen Capital; Draper Associates and 1871 CEO Howard Tullman’s G2T3V venture capital fund.
Returning investors include Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Battery Ventures, Lightbank and OCA Ventures.
Chicago Ventures’ Larkins said Tuesday he and Willer were won over to invest in SpotHero because the company has improved its process so that motorists can scan a QR code from their smartphones at parking sites or give an attendant their confirmation number, all without having to use a paper receipt or paper reservation.
Larkins uses SpotHero about twice a week when he drives from his home in Winnetka to the office downtown.
Friday, February 22, 2013
TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY CEO HOWARD TULLMAN INTERVIEWED BY SPOTHERO CEO JEREMY SMITH FOR GRID CHICAGO
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE: http://www.chicagogrid.com/people/flashpoint-howard-tullman-shares-his-wisdom-with-spothero-cofounder-jeremy-smith/
JS: Wanted to talk to you about hiring. At what point do you determine it’s right to start bringing somebody in?
HAT: I always say that the CEO is the last person who should do any hiring at all. Because CEOs are a) really busy, b) always focused on selling, not great listeners. And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, CEOs by and large believe that if it’s a great person, they can find a job for them. And that is a not a good strategy for a startup.
The issue with [hiring] more experienced people is they have a different approach to everything. Everything isn’t a fire drill [to them], which isn’t necessarily startup culture. You’re bringing them in because they’re middle management and they’re a little more mature. But that culture clash with the young people who have been doing everything and running around is something that’s really complicated to manage.
JS: So let’s say it is a senior position. You can tell in interviews that this is somebody who’s very intelligent, but keeping them challenged is going to be difficult. How do you go about that?
HAT: If you’re worried about how to keep somebody busy, they’re probably the wrong person. You’ve got to find somebody, whether they’re senior or not, who’s excited about the opportunities. It’s almost impossible to think that anybody would be bored or wouldn’t be challenged if they were the right person. Smarts is really important. Attitude, way more important. Energy, probably even more important than that.
JS: My company is dealing with major parking companies. We’re the small fish in the sea right now. We’re not in a position of leverage over them. What gives you tipoffs that, OK, now we have some real bargaining power?
HAT: When we were building one of our businesses that serves insurance companies, which are monsters, there [was] what I called FOMO — fear of missing out. If you convinced them that the other big players were doing it, and they were going to be left behind, then lo and behold, they got on the program.
JS: What sets great entrepreneurs apart from your average business owners?
HAT: It’s like we say about movies: If you’re in the movie business to make movies, you’re going to be really happy. If you’re in it to make money, you’re in the wrong business. I think that’s absolutely true of great entrepreneurs. The money is nice. But they’re in it because they want to change things. They want to do important work.
JS: If you sit back and see somebody that’s in my shoes, what would be the best piece of advice about growing and continuing to be an entrepreneur?
HAT: First of all, I almost never sit back. No. 2, I would say, learn to sleep really fast. Then, I would say, understand that we’re not umbilically connected to any business — it’s not your family, it’s not your life, it doesn’t define you. The minute you take venture capital money, you have to understand that one of the [potential] outcomes is that the company could go on without you, [it] could be sold whether you like it or not. So you have to have this attitude that if this is the way I want to spend my life, it also may be in a different business. The question is always the same, and that is, is this something I want to be doing? Is it important work? Is it something I can get excited about?
Thursday, February 14, 2013
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