zaarly Archives - Serious Startups

How Zaarly’s Eric Koester CoFounded One of the Most Innovative Companies

Eric Koester spent much of his earlier career assisting startups. Now he is the co-founder & CMO of one of the most innovative companies in the world according to Fast Company. Zaarly is literally changing the economy. They are disrupting how people purchase services and opening the door for people to create profitable businesses they never thought possible!

Zaarly raised $14 million in 2012, and in October 2012 former CEO of Ebay & current Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, joined the company’s board. If that is not enough star power, mega celebrity & actor Ashton Kutcher was Zaarly’s very first investor!

“Eric most recently served as VP Operations & General Counsel at Appature Inc., a cloud-based relationship marketing software company. Prior to joining Appature in 2010, Eric was a corporate and securities attorney for Cooley LLP where he represented public and private technology, energy and life sciences companies, venture capital firms and investment banks in a wide range of transactions, including public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, securities issuances, technology licensing transactions, corporate partnerships, commercial agreements and venture capital financings.

Before joining Cooley, Eric was the Financial Reporting Manager at Ventana Medical Systems, a leading diagnostics company acquired by Roche in 2008. Eric began his career in Morgan Stanley’s financial advisory services group. He holds a JD from The George Washington University School of Law, BA in Business Administration from Marquette University and is a certified public accountant in the State of Washington.”

Watch Eric talk about his life journey and how Zaarly almost didn’t happen!

Preview

*Quick Eric Koester Background Bio

*Eric’s history of the entrepreneur spirit

*Being a startup lawyer

*Entrepreneur itch

*One of the “Most Innovative Companies in the World” that almost was not!

*Karma & Fate

*The disruptive path of Zaarly

*This post originally appeared on Tech Hustlers.

Swiss Startup Nearbors, Let Your Neighbors Pick Up Your Shopping List

In reading the pitch from Swiss startup Nearbors I immediately started thinking about Zaarly. The pitch talks about being too busy to go out shopping for groceries or food and having someone else do it for you. Zaarly has done well in some big city markets and is deploying across other medium markets in the United States, so why not have a similar startup in Switzerland?

Well after watching the video below, I quickly realized that Nearbors has taken part of the Zaarly concept a lot further and they’ve combined mobile payments.

Here’s how it works:

Say you’re on deadline either working from home or the office. It’s lunch time and you need some groceries or a decent salad and sandwich. With Zaarly you put the request out there and hope that someone responds.

With Nearbors, there is a community of folks out there waiting for your Nearbor requests. Nearbors, neighbor couriers sign up for the service, have GPS enabled on their phone and receive “jobs” while they are enroute.

So now say Sally is passing by Panera and they are networked into the Nearbors program. I can order a half sandwich and macaroni and cheese and have Sally bring it to me on her way back to her office.

The best part is that through Nearbors they already have my payment information. When Sally gets to checkout she shares a QR code unique to my payment information order and voila it’s paid for. I can see where Sally is enroute to my home or office in the app and then when she arrives I can click the app one more time to pay her a “commission”.

This idea is very well thought out and according to co-founder Ryan Vannin they hope for global expansion. We got a chance to talk with Vannin who’s native tongue is Italian, so please look past his English and onto this great idea.

London Startup: StreetPin Takes The Community Bulletin Board Mobile

By a show of hands who’s old enough to remember the community bulletin board at the grocery store? Sure there are probably some grocery stores that still have them, but they don’t fill up like they used to. Everyone has resorted to some kind of app or some kind of social network.

Well London startup StreetPin is looking to bring the community bulletin board back in a social, mobile sort of way. It’s actually a novel concept. They are of course building it in London and hopefully they will scale up large enough to adopt here in the U.S.

Now we know that Craigslist has a community section but StreetPin is more about short little pin up notes that are looking for reaction, remedy and answers as quick as possible. It’s kind of like a simplified version of both Craigslist and Zaarly all rolled up into one with a sense of urgency and immediacy about it.

We got a chance to talk with StreetPin co-founder and CEO Tim Buick about StreetPin. He gives some great examples of how to use the new service in the interview below the break.