#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Andrew Prystai, CEO & Co-Founder, Event Vesta
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Reimagining the Online Event Management Experience
Event Vesta is an event discovery and promotion platform founded in Omaha, Neb. working to improve the connectivity between event organizers and attendees. Andrew Prystai, CEO and co-founder, shared with us the origins of the platform, his experience as a tech entrepreneur in the Midwest, and the ways in which existing tech policy frameworks have enabled their team to build a successful platform.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create Event Vesta?
I studied at Creighton University, and during my time there I got into startups when one of my professors was accepted into a tech accelerator called the Global Insurance Accelerator. I started working with him part-time as I was finishing my MBA and then joined him full-time as the first employee and co-founder right after graduation. This led to our 2015 venture—Drive Spotter—which provided computer vision for trucking fleets when computer vision services and AI were in their early stages. This experience made me realize that I enjoyed high growth tech startups and we were relatively successful finishing an additional accelerator, TechStars Mobility in Detroit, and in total raised around $1.5m in venture capital. This was quite rare for the Midwest, especially given that we raised most of it pre-product and pre-customer.
After leaving Drive Spotter I knew I wanted to try startups again and start something else. To figure this out, I put together a list of four or five different ideas and the one common theme that just kept coming back was events. I was on the Chamber of Commerce's Young Professionals Council in Omaha and at that point in time, I saw how hard it was for us to get the word out for our events and how many young professionals wanted a new way to find out what was going on. It was a struggle to find and showcase the “cool things to do” in Omaha on Facebook, Eventbrite, or wherever else, inspiring me to start Event Vesta.
What is the work you all are doing at Event Vesta?
Our goal is to connect the community through events. For event organizers, we aim to make it simpler and more efficient to both organize and promote events. We’ve done this with an easy-to-use attendance management portal and local event promotion service in 60 cities across the country, primarily in the Midwest and Southeast. The way this works is the event organizers put their events into our platform and we take care of circulating the event details to that network of local newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, visitor bureau magazines, and more—covering all the places people go to look for what’s going on in the city. This promotional work is something most small businesses and organizations do not have the time to complete or they lack the knowledge to do it themselves, something we solve with the click of one button for a price comparable with a single Facebook ad to do it.
For users looking to go to events and local experiences in all our markets today, we provide a web platform where you can find those events and register for them. Additionally, our mobile app (currently available in Omaha only) enables users to discover events in a fun, engaging way—similar to a Tinder-like experience for events. The system is built to be social too, where you can make plans with your friends in the app rather than having to send text messages and calendar invites back and forth. Events are inherently social and something you want to do with friends, but no other platform has really made the whole process easy, something we’re tackling.
As a founder building a business outside of a traditional tech hub, can you speak on some of the challenges you have faced accessing the capital or talent you needed to build your business? How do you think policymakers should be thinking about those issues?
You hit the nail on the head on naming some of our biggest challenges. I think it’s a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. I’d argue that the areas outside the traditional tech hubs probably lack the tech talent which leads to lack of investment capital. But there’s definitely a lot of interplay between those two problems. We do not have a large tech workforce here in Nebraska versus other states, and quite often the student’s most interested in “starting up” are the ones most likely to leave for opportunities in other states. We’re seeing a real brain drain and the people that do stay, they tend to be much more risk averse. On the capital side, this becomes an issue, as I mentioned, because you don’t have the talent to build that most valuable version of your product. This is especially harmful since you need that capital to launch the first version of your product, and at times it can feel easier to raise a later stage round for millions of dollars than it is to get the $50,000 you need on day 1 to get your company started.
I know the platform has the ability for users to create their own posts about events or share items with friends. Have you given thought to what user-generated content means from a legal and policy perspective, and what might it mean for your company if the law changed?
We would definitely prefer to see Section 230 not change. Thankfully, we’d be in a better spot than a platform that is strictly built around social media because the vast majority of our user-generated content is created by the organizers that are trying to sell tickets to their event and venues who are concerned about their own reputations. Therefore, we’ve been able to largely avoid running into content that violates our terms or would pose potential legal challenges. However, if the law were to change, it would cause a lot of angst and unnecessary cost, which we don’t have the resources to handle. When it comes to these kinds of legal and policy issues, uniform frameworks that work across the country like Section 230 are very useful.
One of the areas that has posed a significant challenge for us has been data privacy. It would be helpful to have a nationwide standard when it comes to data privacy policy, especially since we’re looking to expand into new states. Part of the reason that we have not expanded into certain states like California is because of the resources required to handle California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance, which is something that we have to think about every time we look at entering a state that has its own, unique privacy compliance requirements.
Can you touch on how Event Vesta goes about rank ordering events or preferences on the platform and how regulatory changes to your ability to tailor content to your users might impact your work?
For us, it would be a setback if our ability to tailor content to our users was hindered. Part of the reason why we built an interface where users could swipe through events and quickly share their interests was so that we could better understand the types of events that appeal to different users as well as the collective network. This system is currently built on a rudimentary algorithm largely based on popularity scores and some other inputs, and while our algorithm as it currently exists is not very scalable, not having the ability to build a more sophisticated algorithm would be a massive hindrance to our long term ability to grow. This would impact our ability to compete with foreign companies, and frankly would create some regulatory capture and give an unfair advantage to established companies by allowing them to grandfather in prior work while putting a large cost burden on new entrants in this space.
Do you encounter Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests? And do you have thoughts about proposals to change that law, for example, to require all companies to proactively catch infringing content?
Our terms of service stipulate that whatever content you upload you are self certifying that you have the copyright rights to do so. We’re able to do that because of existing law. Luckily, most users create their own unique graphics for each event. However, we have been in a situation where one of our customers reached out to us saying that we needed to change all their images on their event because they received a cease-and-desist letter for using an artist’s likeness. Responding to requests in this way is doable, but having to build a filtering system on the front end that would filter user content would be extremely cost prohibitive. Frankly, if that was a system we had to build on day one to get this off the ground, then we probably would never have even started.
Are there any other startup policy issues that you think should receive more attention from lawmakers?
In our last investment round, we received an investment as a certified opportunity zone business. I do think that the federal government should continue to play a role in encouraging these types of investments, especially speaking from the perspective of a founder in a non-traditional tech area. It would be helpful if there were more federal programs aimed towards regions or states that are under-capitalized, such as a regional tax credit broken up by federal bank jurisdiction to encourage cross-border capital investment as there are already a lot of state-specific programs. Creation of these programs would encourage the spread of capital across the country instead of this winner-take-all mentality where you have to move to Silicon Valley instead of investing in companies in Iowa or Nebraska. Additionally, a corporate investment credit program—basically an angel tax credit program—would be great. Continuing to get funders involved in investing in startups in their early stages is important for the ecosystem.
As it relates to talent, there are many great international students who come to Omaha or Lincoln but as a startup we cannot afford to pay for the visa application and go through the different regulatory hoops. It would be incredibly helpful if there was a program for tech startups to apply to that would help in this process to keep some of that talent. Or if there were incentive programs like loan forgiveness at a reduced rate that pushes students towards working for startups that will build the next cutting-edge technologies.
What are your goals for Event Vesta moving forward?
Our goal is to be in the largest 100 metropolitan areas by the end of next year. We are currently raising a seed round right now to help enable that. Additionally, we’re planning on launching our mobile app into at least 10 or 15 markets across the country, and are working on the marketing strategy to get it rolling into those cities. It’s kind of a fast follow strategy where we go super broad across a lot of different cities to create some really fun network effects with franchises in particular. But then we can go back and get really deep into selected markets by following behind with our mobile app and really capturing the full potential of each city.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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