How a hospitality startup founder hooked Google’s VC firm to lead its $5.8 seed round with a 4-minute pitch

• Jason Shames founded Skipper in 2020 and raised $5.8 million in seed funding this August.

• He met his lead investor, Google’s Gradient Ventures, through Pear’s demo day.

• Shames’ strong team and extensive hospitality knowledge were big selling points.

Jason Shames is a professor of hotel distribution at NYU and the cofounder of Skipper, a boutique hotel-booking platform he launched in 2020. Before raising an official seed round for the company, Shames received investments from family, friends, and Pear, an early-stage venture fund based in California. Last year, as part of Pear’s annual demo day, Shames got to pitch his startup in just three-and-a-half minutes to hundreds of investors.

After the presentation, Shames told Insider, 70 lead firms reached out — including an investor at Gradient Ventures, Google’s venture fund focused on early-stage companies primarily in the AI space. “We were very fortunate that we got a lot of interest in our business, and I think it was because travel became interesting to venture capitalists for the first time in a while,” Shames told Insider.

In August, Skipper announced a $5.8 million seed round led by GV. Shames, who most recently served as the vice president of web and digital distribution at boutique-hotel brand Ace Hotels, and Wen-Wen Lam, a partner at GV, shared what about the company’s pitch helped it gain the major VC firm’s attention, and how their partnership came to fruition.

A match of experiences and a strong team

After the demo day, Shames said, he was connected with Lam through an associate at GV. Shames knew Lam from his days running the travel company Jetaport. She also came with similar experience to his, having built and exited a booking company called NexTravel before joining GV.

Old-school payment processes were one of the biggest problems she’d faced when running her company — so seeing Skipper as a viable solution, she told Insider, got her instantly intrigued. “I know the travel industry quite well. And that’s one of the reasons why I made the investment in Skipper, because I saw the big opportunity in what they’re doing,” Lam said.

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Shames’ team, which consists of Dane Bratz and Cole Maritz, two Stanford alumni with substantial experience in software and hospitality, and the company’s partnerships with Robert Redford’s Sundance Mountain Resort, Marram Montauk, and The Ameswell Hotel in Silicon Valley, were other selling points for the investor. “Jason and his team have very deep knowledge and connections in the hotel and travel industries. So they’re the best team to get customers, and they wouldn’t have a lot of issues going to market. They would be able to not only build new tech but work with existing systems as well.” Lam said.

Shames said he decided to work with GV because of Lam’s deep knowledge of the industry and the firm’s connection to Google, which he believes is the most powerful force in travel right now. The two have monthly check-ins and frequently communicate via email and text about developments around sales, product, and recruiting.

“There’s a lot of value to the relationship,” Shames said. “Their industry experience is so valuable for us, and they’ve been a great sounding board and brilliant operating partner. It makes me understand the value of a top-tier fund.”

Read the original article on Business Insider