MGMT Boston - W2, Q2 23 - EKOS // Jasmine Pogue, Skilltype

EKOS // Jasmine Pogue, Skilltype

TLDR:

• EKOS - all in one engagement platform for hybrid communities

• Jasmine Pogue, Head of Revenue @ Skilltype - she’s been through a storm or two on a path to establishing herself as the Head of Revenue at Skilltype

Other Resources:

• Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find

• Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted

• Q2 Startups Highlighted: Wonderment

• Q2 Operators Highlighted: Dana Wensberg, Paperless Parts

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EKOS

Founder: Melis Dural
Founding: 2020
Mission: EKOS helps professionals meet and build faster relationships inside and outside of their organizations
Employees: 12
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed
Investors: Angels
Key Customers: To Be Announced
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

EKOS.ai is an “all in one engagement platform for hybrid communities” founded by Melis Dural in 2020. To understand EKOS is to understand Melis. She’s originally from Turkey, traveled to Switzerland for high school, and came to the U.S. when she was 18 to attend Northeastern. She went on to complete her MBA at Babson. To communicate with friends, family, and colleagues she’s pretty much been remote the entirety of her adult life. 

She has a knack for building relationships from prior roles doing NGO fundraising and later IT executive recruiting. It got her thinking about what later became EKOS as she networked her way through Boston and around the world. She founded an AI-powered all-in-one engagement platform to revolutionize the way hybrid communities engage, grow and connect with each other.

If you can date from your couch, shouldn’t you be able to network with people from anywhere too?

The way we work and network has changed a lot these past few years and both hybrid work and communities have become the new norm. The challenge with networking today is you might go to an event and only interact with 2% of the people there. If there’s 100 people at a 2 hour event, how many people can you realistically interact with? 10? That’s probably stretching it. Not everyone knows the pac man trick either! And once the event is over, poof. The opportunity has passed. There should be a better way..

EKOS communities are digital spaces where you can turn to people for help or ask questions. They’ve built a user friendly platform with a B2B sales motion on behalf of corporate customers with a plan to open up the onboarding to more users in the months ahead. Strategically, corporate customers are always trying to drive community building efforts through announcements, events, and their partnership networks which keeps bringing users back into the app. EKOS sees 85% attendance rate of RSVP’d users from community events hosted on the platform.

Most communities today use e-mail, Slack, or dare I say…Teams. EKOS is plugging in machine learning features to learn user preferences and make connections more meaningful within their communities. All introductions are double opt-in through the app. From a pricing perspective, individuals may join the public space for free. Organizations that want to manage their own spaces are charged on an admin basis, and each space can have unlimited subspaces. They’re thoughtfully managing Dunbar Effect thinking by limiting subspaces (think channels) to 250 people to keep conversations more meaningful and they’re building the whole digital experience to align with the goal of driving deeper community engagement.

To date, all of EKOS’ growth has been inbound through their existing partners like First Republic, Techstars, and other venture & accelerator programs. They’ll likely shift to an outbound motion after another round of fundraising. In EKOS’ earliest days, the team is focused on creating the network effects around their communities and their momentum is building quickly as they’ve already seen 1000% user growth off of their initial base.

EKOS is a remote startup, with team members in Boston and Turkey, aspiring to build the platform into a cornerstone of the Boston business ecosystem and professional communities far beyond the Commonwealth.

If you’re on mobile or web, click this link to create your profile. Once you complete your profile you can download the iOS app. Any public EKOS user can create an event to host or join a local event in their community in the weeks ahead.

If you’re an accelerator, incubator, innovation lab, or investment group and looking for a place to host your community, book a demo directly with the Founder Melis (she attends them all) here.

Finally, be on the lookout for some exciting news from EKOS in the months ahead!

Operators to Know (Locally):

• Buke Cuhader, Head of Community and Partnerships

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the EKOS team I’m sure I missed some up & coming operators internally

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the key milestones EKOS is looking to reach in the months ahead?

• What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team?

• What is the long term vision for the company? 

• What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about EKOS you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more communities into a more collaborative, welcoming age. All networkers and luminaries applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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Jasmine Pogue, Head of Revenue @ Skilltype

Jasmine Pogue has been through a storm or two on a path to establishing herself as a revenue leader and future executive leader determined to make it to the top no matter the obstacle. She’s been around the world on a career journey from retail to telecom to SaaS and is just getting started. Today, she manages the revenue team for Skilltype, a talent management software company serving libraries. There are a few of those around here I’ve heard?

Jasmine comes from a military family and was born in San Diego, CA. She spent some time in Japan, then Detroit, but lived most of her life in and around New Orleans before most recently relocating to Boston. She’s part of a big family filled with siblings and step siblings. Jasmine, her older brother, and two younger sisters were raised while both of her parents served in the military as Marines. Her mom worked full time and home schooled the Pogue kids while juggling her military career. Her dad worked on bases across the country and around the world spending his entire career in the service.

When Jasmine was 15 her mother tragically passed away from breast cancer. She attributes her work ethic and ambition to the childhood example her mom set early and often. Each time they moved into a new community, it was her mom who would help plant their roots. She would create homeschooling communities, set their curriculums, and help the family feel at home wherever they went.

Jasmine was ahead of the class, still recovering from her loss, when she went off to college at the age of 16 to attend the University of New Orleans. She enrolled as a Political Science major, then in the summer of 2005 everything changed. Just a week or two after the semester began, Hurricane Katrina battered the region and changed the lives of Jasmine, her family, and local residents forever. 

This was before social media so it’s probably still hard for many of us to grasp the full impact of what that hurricane did to New Orleans and the surrounding area. Luckily, Jasmine’s family had plenty of time to evacuate. But coming back to the city a month after the storm was an entirely different experience. Jasmine returned to find their family home full of black mold and needing to be completely rebuilt. Between losing her mom, the hurricane, and the rebuilding years that followed it was a dizzying series of events for an adolescent kid trying to make her way in the world. 

Time sort of stopped for a couple years. While the university reopened later that fall, Jasmine waited two years before returning to college. The rest of her family remained in Texas living on a military base but Jasmine stayed in New Orleans. She worked in retail at Kay Jewelers by day, making sure to return home by the 5pm curfew without the aid of streetlights before the city fell dark, in more ways than one, each night. With so much capital flowing into the city from FEMA, the Red Cross, and beyond it was a pretty unique time to work at a jewelry store.

Eventually, Jasmine returned to UNO to get her degree but this time enrolled as a Business major. With a little more age, wisdom, and the experience of witnessing local crime & corruption that followed the storm, Political Science didn’t seem so interesting anymore.

After graduation, she found a job at AT&T in the telecom industry as a retail sales consultant. Wasting no time, Jasmine set a goal for herself that she would become a manager within a year. Her New Orleans area management team said that wasn’t necessarily realistic to become an Assistant Manager after just a year, but she continued to follow her mother’s ambitious example.

Jasmine doesn’t let much slow her down. She applied to an open management position in Baton Rouge and they jumped at the chance to hire a leader like Jasmine. So she moved an hour or so west to accomplish her goal.

AT&T was a great place to launch a career. They were supportive and invested in her as a professional. After only a couple years she was elevated to join the Business Sales team, a corporate position managing large strategic accounts and negotiating multi-million-dollar contracts. There was a manager who had heard of Jasmine’s work ethic and specifically asked to interview her. To this day she recalls AT&T as one of the best companies she’s worked for. 

She then took another role as the Director of Career Development for the Women of Louisiana. She organized outreach, created resources for female employees, and assisted the local women of AT&T in growing their careers. She helped negotiate raises for her team and even helped negotiate a settlement on some courthouse steps once.

But she didn’t see a clear path to becoming the President of AT&T. That’s how high she’s setting her sights. Later, she joined OurConnections, providing AT&T's full portfolio of services to clients across industries like finance, education, healthcare, and manufacturing. After that, she moved on to T-Mobile, overseeing large strategic accounts in multiple industries including telehealth, financial, and global delivery services . That final move teed up her transition into SaaS at Skilltype.

Soon after moving over to Skilltype, Jasmine made the move up to Boston. Her husband works in academia and found a role at the Harvard Dental School so they moved up to the Boston area during the pandemic to try something new. They’re loving it!

Jasmine and their family take the train into the city with their family and have picnics on the Boston Common or Public Garde. Her husband is on a mission to try every single pizza place he can find locally. Some local residents might know a guy who’s been doing that too. East Dedham Pizzeria is near the top of their list with great eggplant pizza. If you have any other top pizza destinations, send them Jasmine’s way!

Jasmine also home schools her kids part time while juggling her full time job so she spends a lot of time with her two kids at public libraries. Moms! How do they do it all?? As a practicing Buddhist for over 15 years, she also enjoys spending time at the New England Buddhist Center in Brookline. 

Boston happens to be a great hub for Skilltype to continue to build out their team and business. They’re a remote first company but their COO is located here too. Since they’re a talent management software platform for libraries, helping them make decisions around retaining and reskilling talent, there’s no shortage of potential clients locally!

Jasmine came in as the first Customer Success Manager and quickly rose to become Skilltype’s Head of Revenue. She oversaw Customer Success & Sales but Customer Success has since been moved to an Operations team. They all, of course, still work pretty closely together and have grown from a double digit customer base to a triple digit customer base over the course of 2022. In 2023, they are aiming to grow another 3x. Skilltype is looking at how to incorporate machine learning tools into their product, continuing to build on a PLG (product led growth) sales motion, and refining the Customer Success vs. Sales team service and expansion model.

Jasmine is responsible for closing deals and growing the existing customer base. She’s working to expand revenue through multi year contracts, protect the existing client base, and overall spearheads their recurring revenue strategy.

Here are three things Jasmine shared with me about what she’s learned on her path from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Boston scaling Skilltype’s revenue team as she aims for the c-suite:

Trust Your Instincts: “you do not have to stay at a place longer just because you think you have to be loyal. Trust your instincts, the best people do. Your career and your pocketbook will thank you for it.” Sometimes it’s just time to move on!

Still Be Grateful: Jasmine relayed that being grateful supports the prior learning. It’s important to “be grateful for your experiences. Even if you stay at a job too long or have a difficult experience, sometimes you need to go through something in order to get to your next thing”.

Don’t Be Afraid to Learn New Things: “all of the things I’m working on that are not a part of my job description have broadened my skill set. I can put them on my resume as projects I’ve worked on.” While at first glance it may seem like she doesn’t know how to do something, she’s had to perform duties outside of her core job descriptions because she’s been trusted to take on additional responsibilities. This helps expand her horizons and opportunities 

Eventually, Jasmine wants to be a President or CEO of a company but incorporate that work alongside “Dialogue on Race Louisiana”, a non-profit with the goal to end racism through transformational education. This organization has a mostly New Orleans area presence but she’d love to get in person facilitators in the Boston area in the years ahead. She’d love to do some board work later in her career too alongside her non-profit aspirations. You’ll see Jasmine doing leadership work regardless of the tax status!

To learn more about Jasmine check her out on LinkedIn, visiting the Boston Common for a picnic, or perhaps helping her husband taste test local pizzerias. Thanks for sharing. We can’t wait to see the impact you make on behalf of business and non-profit institutions in the years ahead!

Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!

See you next week!
-Matt