It’s now easy to say that Talent/Hack is becoming the new MindBody for fitness professionals to fully manage their bookings, business, and payment processing. As early Zoom investor Emergence Capital invests $17 million, we’re assembling the firepower around the table to ensure that Talent/Hack is a monster company.
But startups are never always up and to the right, despite what TechCrunch will make you believe. Instead they are the product of thousands of sleepless nights, grit, hard conversations, and comfort in ambiguity led by people generally with more conviction than sanity. It’s cliche to say, but true startup leadership takes suspending disbelief, and having dogged determination when literally everyone doubts you. There’s a point when your friends question you, your family questions you, and you somehow never quite question yourself, despite the logic that you should. Where that grit comes from I don’t know, but when you meet people like Alexandra Bonetti you see it in their eyes and feel it in their passion. We wrote the first check into Talent/Hack when the website had barely been designed in Venezuela, Bonetti’s home country. Having known her since 2004, and seen her fight and succeed in many other things in life, writing a check into her company was a “no brainer.” At the pre-seed we back people and ideas, not companies. We don’t look at metrics, we look at market size. We are far more psychologist than financial engineer. And when you sit across the table from Alexandra you feel that no matter what, she’s going to make it happen.
Looking back on a few years with Talent/Hack we’ve all seen highs and lows, personalities flare and egos battle, but we’ve never seen Alexandra waver. This is the type of character we look for in every founder. Grit, determination, humility to listen, and charisma. Charisma is the ability to walk into any room and hire anyone, to convince people of the impossible. When Jack Dorsey pitched Square a decade ago I heard someone mumble next to me, “that wasn’t a pitch, that was a seduction.” Great leaders persuade, and they never stop believing in what they’re building. You can’t always be right, but you have to believe you are until your users tell you otherwise, and then you have to be as decisive as possible to change course based on feedback.
We couldn’t be more proud to have been partners with Alexandra since 2004, and day-zero of Talent/Hack many years after, and to see her rise to become the very first Latina-led portfolio company of Emergence Capital.