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From NYU to $500m GMV: Founder Spotlight with Avante Price, Posh
Six years ago, Avante Price was in his dorm room at NYU, DJing and hosting events around New York, frustrated with the broken software he was forced to use. He saw the same problem every other founder sees: Eventbrite was enormous, worth billions, and almost universally hated. So he built Posh.
Today, Posh has processed half a billion dollars through its platform, powers 10 million accounts, and just closed a Series B to chase toward that $100 million ARR milestone. More impressively, it's done so not by out-engineering Eventbrite, but by out-relating to customers and fundamentally rethinking the acquisition playbook. At 70 people, Avante still reads text messages from customers at 2am - and his customer success team does the same. He's hiring 15 community events a month. He's turning down shiny objects. He's firing fast and ruthlessly. And he's cracked how to scale founder-led value at magnitude.
Here's what we think matters most from his conversation with Jeremy Kagan, MD, Textbook Ventures at our first Founder Spotlight Breakfast in New York.
Founder-led sales beats infrastructure
When you have no money, no product that's better than the incumbent, and no defensible moat, what you have is your ability to care more than anyone else. Avante didn't spend the first few years competing on features. He spent them building a lead list in second-tier markets (think: one hour outside St. Louis, not Manhattan or San Francisco) and literally flying out to have dinner with event organisers.
"I don't have all the functionality you have on Eventbrite, but I'm here and I will respond to your texts at 2am on Sunday. I will build exactly what you need."
He wasn't trying to beat Eventbrite on product. He was trying to beat them on relationship.
This wasn't scalable, so he hired his first sales person and did the same thing together - two of them working a market, doubling the output without diluting the thesis. The insight many founders miss is that founder-led sales isn't a phase you pass through on the way to ‘real’ sales. It's a proof of concept that your relationship-to-product ratio is right. Only then can you systematise it.
Your first job isn't to build a better product. It's to prove that people will work with you because you care. Once you've proven that, hire people who can replicate that care. Scaling founder-led value means teaching others to care the same way.
Cold outreach to VCs is dead weight
"I've never gotten a cheque from a cold email. Not even today. Do not waste your time. I cold emailed hundreds, maybe thousands of people. It doesn't work."
Instead, Avante relied on hard intros from people that investors respect. VCs make decisions based on social proof and warm introductions and a cold email tells them you don't have either. If you're at the stage where you need money, you should already have relationships in the room who believe in you enough to vouch.
His advice to our network is to find someone on LinkedIn with a mutual connection to the VC you want to reach. Ask that mutual for a real introduction. Yes, it's slower. Yes, it's more work. But every dollar he's ever raised came through this method.
Your network is your pre-seed round. If you don't have warm relationships with potential investors, stop pitching and start building them. Cold outreach is a time suck that signals you haven't done the relationship work so do the latter first.
You have to own the narrative then check every box
The mistake Avante said he made early on was being honest… a little too honest. He'd tell VCs: "We're building a better Eventbrite” and they would respond: "Eventbrite is public, its multiples are terrible, there's no TAM, and you're building a business on promoters. Why should I care?"
So he changed the narrative. Instead of ‘better Eventbrite’, the story became about loneliness, community, and connection - universal human problems that any VC's daughter or son can relate to. In doing this, he reframed why the business matters. And suddenly VCs stopped asking whether the market was real and started asking when he was ready to scale.
A tip he shared that separates good pitchers from great ones is mapping out every objection a VC will raise before you get on the call, then preemptively answer them. Avante would show the product (show, don’t tell). He tabulates to his charts and lets the growth speak. Then, and only then, does he zoom out to the philosophical why. He's checking boxes methodically, proving the business works today, before he gets abstract about the future.
Another hack he’s uncovered is using a standing desk during every pitch call to keep your blood flowing, your energy up, and your delivery animated. If you don't believe in the company enough to stand for it, VCs won't believe in it either.
Your job is to tell a true story that investors can feel. Map out what every investor will ask and answer it before they ask. Show, don't tell. Make them feel your energy. And yes, stand up.
Brand is the only moat you can't vibe code away
This is the insight that separates Posh's strategy from almost everyone else's. In a world where any sophisticated operator can copy your product within months, and AI will commoditise your tooling within years, the only defensible advantage is brand and the relationships it represents.
"I'm shifting away from B2B SaaS because SaaS is getting really commoditised. In a couple of years, any operator can vibe code the B2B tools they need. You can't vibe code demand. You can't vibe code brand. That's the moat."
So Posh is building toward being a destination - the place where event organisers and attendees go to discover experiences because it’s the only place where you feel known, invited to community events, and part of a network.
How do you build that at scale? By protecting founder-led relationships even when you're at 70 people. Avante's customer success team gets paid a perpetual commission on every dollar their customers generate, because they need to own the relationship. His CSMs have a work phone they have to answer 24/7. It sounds brutal but this is how he believes you scale founder-led care.
If you're competing on product alone, you've already lost. Identify what can't be commoditised - usually it's relationship, community, or trust. Build your moat around that instead. Then hire people who are willing to defend it as fiercely as you do.
Build three acquisition channels and ignore everything else
Avante spent the early days throwing 15 different acquisition strategies at the wall. None of them worked particularly well. Then he got ruthless about focus. Today, Posh has exactly three acquisition channels: direct sales, affiliates, and community events.
The community team reaches out to event organisers already using Posh in a market and says, "We're hosting an industry happy hour for event organisers in your city. We think you're awesome. Come for free, meet your peers." At that event, some organisers become paid affiliates who refer people in their network. Meanwhile, the sales team shows up to the same event and follows up on qualified leads. The whole system multiplies itself.
The reason this works is that event organisers in second-tier markets have never seen a community built for them. Being invited to a room full of people doing what you do is enough. Posh hosts 15 of these events a month now, both in new markets and existing ones (existing markets get a quarterly refresh to retain organisers and remind them they're part of something).
What makes this genius is that it's a low-code solution to a product problem. Avante originally wanted to build a marketplace connecting organisers to vendors, DJs, and photographers. Instead of building that marketplace in code, he realized the MVP was just inviting all those people to a room. The outcome is identical but the capital required is a fraction.
Many founders can over-engineer their acquisition strategy. Pick three channels that work together (not in parallel). Make them so tight that one feeds the other. Then be ruthless about saying no to everything else. You'll scale faster by running three channels at 90% than by running 15 at 15%.
Hire for slope, not talent
At early-stage, you can't afford the brilliant 10x engineer from Google. But you can afford the college kid who is curious, learns at inhuman speed, and will work 12-14 hours a day because they're excited about the ownership.
The question Avante asks every candidate: "What do you believe to be true that most people disagree with?" It's a screening mechanism for curiosity and independent thinking. Most people reference something from pop culture (Avante heard someone say Finding Nemo is a bad movie). But the great hires? They answer with something they've actually thought deeply about. One of his best engineers said: "I believe AI monarchies are the best form of government." Avante disagrees with the take, but it proved the guy was deeply inquisitive, thinking about the world, and ballsy enough to articulate an unpopular thesis in a job interview.
That translates to work. High-slope people are always reading, always learning, always listening to podcasts and picking up skills they weren't asked to develop. They raise their own talent bar over time. He believes a brilliant candidate who peaked years ago will always lose to the sponge who's on a learning curve.
At early stage, optimise for trajectory, not pedigree. Hire people who are learning faster than they're aging. Test for curiosity. Pay them less than you would a proven hire, but give them real ownership and the freedom to learn. Five years later, your $100K equity grant to the slope player will have been the best hire you made.
Fire fast. Hire slow.
This can feel like the inverse of what most founders do. They agonise over hiring decisions (six-month search for the perfect Head of Sales) but tolerate bad hires for years out of guilt or inertia. Avante does the opposite.
Hire slowly. Be meticulous. Get the person wrong early, and everything downstream gets harder - culture suffers, other people have to compensate, and you lose momentum. Once you've hired, move fast. Avante says he's never regretted firing anyone, only regretted not doing it sooner.
"If there's any doubt, there's no doubt. Fire someone as soon as you feel a weird feeling in your gut."
At 70 people, Avante's job has become less about doing the work and more about being a politician, figurehead, and people person, even though he has a head of people. The way to not spend all your time on ‘people problems’ is to hire great people first and fire mediocre ones immediately. Everything else cascades from that.
Hire so slowly that hiring feels painful. Fire so fast that your team is slightly uncomfortable. The discomfort means you're not tolerating mediocrity and sends a message to the rest of your ambitious, driven team.
Retention is the North Star metric for brand
Early-stage founders obsess over growth metrics, Avante obsesses over retention. Why? Because retention proves you have a moat. Growth with churn is a leaky bucket - expensive and unsustainable. Growth with retention is a brand.
For consumer or B2B products, the question is always: What percentage of your customers are still active, still paying, still engaged six months later? If you can't prove that number is climbing, you're proving that your product, brand, or relationship isn't actually sticky. You're proving your moat is hollow.
Before you obsess over your next marketing channel, obsess over whether your existing customers stay. Retention is the truest signal of product-market fit, and the hardest metric to fake.
The loneliness epidemic is real (even if you're building event software)
This is the through-line Avante keeps coming back to. His business is built to solve loneliness and disconnection. Everyone wants to be social. Everyone wants to find cool things to do. The fact that everyone can relate to that problem is why his Series A and Series B were phenomenal.
Avante built a platform that solves the human thing first (connection, community, belonging) and then happened to use software as one mechanism. The software is good. The relationships are better. That's why Posh is scaled the way it has.]
If your product doesn't solve a problem that any investor can relate to, you're in trouble. Zoom out. What's the human insight underneath the software? Build around that, not the other way around.
What it all boils down to
What runs through everything Avante shared is a refusal to play by incumbent rules. He didn't try to out-engineer Eventbrite. He didn't raise venture capital because VCs told him to. He didn't scale his company the way SaaS playbooks said he should. He built relationships first, then systematised them. He said no to shiny objects. He hired for learning curves instead of resumes. He fired people he didn't believe in immediately. He chose retention over growth.
By doing things differently, he built a company that's now worth hundreds of millions.
A huge thank you to Avante for such a candid and generous session, and to Jeremy Kagan for moderating with curiosity and rigor. Founder-led value at scale is hard, but not impossible. Avante's proved you can do it.
The full recording of our breakfast is available to watch on our YouTube channel now.
