In their own words.
Tell us about Odeko and your journey.
I've managed to build half a dozen companies that have been in the space. Four years ago I left a hedge fund that acquired my last company and started Odeko with the aspiration that we could potentially bring a similar benefit to the physical brick-and-mortar coffee shop in particular. Over the past three years — we launched the product effectively three years ago right after COVID — we've grown into over 10,000 coffee shops across the world. We have buildings in 14 cities, and we've helped a bunch of those shops achieve higher survival rates than the industry would normally see. It's been a lot of fun.
Who else is on the cap table?
We have four of the top-20 investors from the Midas list on our board. First Round at the beginning. GGV — Hans, who's done quite a bit. Tiger Global, Primary — which is now a legendary fund and a long-time fund of ours. Addition, one of the first adventures there. So we're really lucky.
What value has MVP added?
The team at MVP has directly campaigned for us. I think Wes and a couple of the other people actually got us customers — which no VC does, because who knows coffee shops? It's a weird graph. They also brought to bear a number of industry experts even at the beginning of the relationship, which was helpful — we didn't have a lot of graph into the spaces MVP has access to. We had a number of conversations about how food, supply lines work, and folks who had interest in the coffee category.
What did you appreciate about how MVP positioned themselves?
Wes is great. Some of the team members there really are individually great partners to have — which isn't always the case. Sometimes people bet on the firm, not the partner, but the people you actually deal with make a difference, and the people we've dealt with there have all been helpful individually as well as as a group. We generally don't believe anyone when they sell us their superpowers — every fund has the most impactful recruiting team and PR facilities, and it rarely turns out to be true. MVP was pretty honest about where they thought they would be able to help, and were able to follow through on it.
Would you suggest other founders take MVP on their cap table?
The proof's in the pudding — we've made a lot of introductions to them, folks we know who are raising capital. The way we share it is: it's a worthwhile addition to your cap table. People don't understand the necessity in this kind of world of having diversified knowledge bases and access to different kinds of thinking. We'd suggest them as a good partner.