Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Standing on a stage under hot lights and in front of a crowd of people, five CEOs — out of hundreds that applied for the completion — took turns pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
What was on the line, you might wonder?
Only a chance at a $100,000 check from Kinetic Ventures to take their respective startups to new levels.
The pitch competition was part of the second-annual rendition of Utah Tech Week, a "grassroots" festival made up of 180 events and attended by 15,000.
"It's really just everyone coming together to really build up the Utah startup ecosystem," said Trent Mano, co-founder and general partner of Convoi Ventures and the brain behind Utah Tech Week.
After a crowd of tech folks from around the state and beyond settled into their seats, the pitches started coming in. With only around five minutes to "sell" their big idea to the judges, the pressure was on the CEOs.
First, it was Ethan Webb pitching his Provo-based company Mindsmith, a platform for building custom e-learning content by using generative AI. Brad Romney pleaded his case for Verdi, another software company harnessing AI to help organizations speed up their workflow.
Following these pitches, Luis Benavides unveiled Neighborbrite — think Pinterest, but with a focus on using AI for design inspiration for home projects with a built-in marketplace that connects potential customers with landscaping companies. Jake Gallagher finished off the night with a pitch for his company, V2 Markets, a next-generation venture marketplace that facilitates primary deal flow, secondary trading and beyond while allowing investors to track and manage their venture portfolios.
Before the big prize was announced, the judges revealed that Benavides and Neighborbrite would also walk away successfully, taking home a $25,000 prize courtesy of the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity.
But when all was said and done, it was Jennie Moser and her company, Stagetime, that rose to the top and brought home the $100,000 prize.
Stagetime is a professional hiring hub for the live and performing arts ecosystem.
"Think opera, classical music, musical theater and we don't have a central place like LinkedIn to put ourselves out there in terms of gaining recruitment opportunities and being located by the hirers who hire us. Because we're a freelance gig economy, we are getting hired 12 times a year instead of retaining a long-term job, so there's a really significant need for these professionals to have a space that isn't literally just creating their own website and having to act like they're shopping themselves on Craigslist," Moser told KSL.com
I had stumbled on a massive supply-and-demand issue and I began to talk to the administrators and hiring managers who actually deal with this data and they echoed this problem back to me just as loud with frustration in terms of accessing great, quality talent in their area, hyper-skilled, that they could get to whenever they needed them.
– Jennie Moser, founder and CEO of Stagetime
Moser speaks about the performing arts ecosystem like she's part of it and that's because she is. A professional opera singer, Moser spun up a small service business building websites for her colleagues and very quickly scaled to six figures while she was still in college.
"(I) found that I had stumbled on a massive supply-and-demand issue and I began to talk to the administrators and hiring managers who actually deal with this data and they echoed this problem back to me just as loud with frustration in terms of accessing great, quality talent in their area, hyper-skilled, that they could get to whenever they needed them," Moser said.
Because the performing arts industry is in a near-constant state of hiring due to the short nature of the contracts, Moser said that companies are always looking for talent and the talent is always looking for their next gig. This is compounded by the fact that there is no central, digital location that aggregates performing arts talent.
That was the case until Stagetime came along.
Moser said that there are over 3 million performing arts professionals freelancing in the U.S. market alone, yielding an incredibly engaged user base for Stagetime.
"One of the big things from both sides has been finally having something standard to represent artists in a beautiful way and it means that hirers can find what they're looking for really quickly," Moser said. "We kind of over-indexed on making it, well, beautiful, because we wanted creatives to love it and so it was really important to us that it was a sleek product and it made them look even better than they already felt and that combination has served us really, really well."
As for how the $100,000 will help Moser take Stagetime to the next level?
"It's hugely crucial," she said. "We've been talking to some of the biggest performing arts names in the country but to deliver for teams at a high level of 10, 15 people (up to) places like the Metropolitan Opera ... is a really high bar to meet. I'm looking forward to finally using our 10,000-person community and growing that base for organizations to hire them now that we have that technology in place."
