🎧 Interview: Jinesh Shah, Co-Founder of Endear

Leigh Sevin and Jinesh Shah in 2016 when they were working on Arthur, the predessesor to their current company, Endear. (Forbes)

This week, instead of writing a new blog piece, I recorded a conversation with Jinesh Shah.

A bit of background: Jinesh is the co-founder of Endear, a retail-focused CRM trusted by 800+ stores around the globe. He and Endear’s cofounder, Leigh Sevin, are truly endurance athletes, having worked through multiple pivots over the past 6-7 years before reaching this inflection point in their journey: a $2m seed fundraise led by Reformation.

In this episode we discuss:

• Venture for America: 2:30-7:15

• Cofounders: 4:00-8:00, 47:00-49:30

• Technical vs non-technical founding teams, pivots, and prototyping: 7:00-26:00

• Market sizing, scalability, product generalization, and the first customer: 12:30-14:00, 28:00-31:00

• Founder fatigue: 14:00-17:30

• Integration partnerships: 30:00-34:00

• Fundraising: 34:10-46:00

“Podcast” is too glorious a word for this audio file. The sound is choppy and hollow (I used a $72 Sony ICD-UX570 to record) and there is plenty of background noise (in the first minute you hear the mic cord slide off the table). Besides some light clean-up, it’s basically raw tape.

But I’m not trying to be a professional podcaster, so I hope you enjoy listening nonetheless — Jinesh is insightful and has an incredible story to share!