New York Tech Week Special: Live Recording with Partiful Co-Founder and CEO, Shreya Murthy

The entire purpose of Partiful is to create a space for real socialization. Even the word social has gotten totally corrupted when we think of like social media. Like, what does that even mean? Like, socializing is going to a party. So it's not this made up term that tech has turned into something that means something totally different than actually hanging out with your friends.

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Welcome back to The Room Podcast, where we bring you into the room where it happens, live from New York Tech Week. This special episode was powered by Mercury, Perkins Coie, Level 10, and JLL. For those who couldn't join us in person, we sat down with Shreya Murthy, a co-founder and CEO of Partful. The social events platform that took over our calendars. Famously dubbed Eventbrite for hot people, with millions of users, Partiful has quietly become the go-to RSVP link for a generation that craves connection, aesthetic, and IRL energy. Since launching just a few years ago, Partiful has exploded, earning reputations across Apple, Google, Fast Company, and so many more publications. I first met Shreya in the early days before she even raised her seed round from Google Ventures and was fortunate enough to get to angel invest. Even then, it was clear she was building something that shifted the consumer social paradigm. Smart, scrappy, and deeply intentional, Shreya is not only a consumer visionary, she's one of the most thoughtful founders we know. What made this event so special was the myriad of ecosystem overlaps from Partiful being a client at Mercury to a16z doing their Series A to this being New York Tech Week hosted by a16z. We love to see The Room Podcast collaborative community shine in the room, offline and online. All right, now it's time to open the door.

Welcome everyone. My name's Fiona Brophy. I'm a partner at Perkins Coie. I'm in the startup practice there. We're co-hosting this. We've done other events with The Room, which we're thrilled to be a sponsor of. Perkins is a law firm. We have 1,100 lawyers. Offices all over the country, including in London and then Asia. And we pride ourselves on working with disruptive companies. We've been around for over 100 years and worked with disruptive companies throughout, including a little-known company that you may have heard of before called The Boeing Company, which we helped to incorporate and take public almost 100 years ago. So, we feel like rapidly emerging growth companies are in our DNA and have been for a long time. I want to talk a little bit about The Room podcast. It's hosted by Claudia Laurie and Madison McIlwain. It's a top technology podcast founded in 2020 with the mission of opening the door to the room where it happens. They were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in media and are ranked in the top 10% of technology podcasts. Claudia and Madison met in San Francisco in 2018 when they were both product managers and have established their careers together as a respective founder and funder. Claudia is the former co-founder of Pryve, a subscription billing platform for CPG brands, which was just acquired by Recurly last month. Madison is an angel investor and former partner over DeFi VC Seed Practice and very recent graduate of Harvard Business School. Congratulations. If you're not already subscribed to The Room podcast, be sure to do so wherever you get your podcasts. And without further ado, I'll bring on Madison and Claudia.

Thank you so much. Hi everyone. Thank you all for being here on a kind of hot first Monday of June and just taking time for a really exciting week, New York Tech Week. It's actually our inaugural New York Tech Week event, and we've been doing them in San Francisco for about 3 years since the inception of this, and we're thrilled to be in the big city. We want to just really quickly thank all of our sponsors, of course, Perkins Coie as well as Mercury. We also have JLL helping us with the stage. Space, and of course Level 10, who really opened up this amazing venue for us. So let's give them a shout out round of applause. Okay. Well, the person you're all really here to see, cause you guys can listen to us all the time online, is actually Shreya. So Shreya, why don't you come up with us?

Woo!

Shreya is the visionary behind Partiful. Has anyone used Partiful in the room before? Thank you. Oh my gosh, crazy. I'm gonna give Shreya's background and then you're gonna know more than you ever knew you needed to know about her and her founding journey of Partiful. A fun fact is actually Shreya has never done a podcast before officially. So we're really grateful that we bamboozled her to sharing her story here with us today. So Shreya Murthy is the co-founder and CEO of Partiful, the modern social events platform that makes it incredibly easy to make plans and build real-world relationships. Since launching in 2021, Partiful has scaled to millions of users and earned accolades such as Google's Best App of 2024, Apple's Editor's Choice App, App of the Day, and a Cultural Impact finalist for 2024, as well as Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for 2025. I think it's safe to say we know it's kind of a verb moment, right? Like you have a Partiful, you Partiful. And I think growing up, the idea of something becoming a verb was an iconic moment for any founder. And it's so cool to see you passing that chasm, so to speak. Before founding Partiful in early 2020, Shreya had led a number of leadership roles in building enterprise software at high-growth startups. So enterprise and consumer don't always go at odds. And she holds a BA from Princeton University and currently lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two cats. All right, let's open the door. If anyone knows, we love to start at the beginning with all of our guests. So first of all, Shreya, thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, both of you. I'm excited.

Thrilled. Okay, so we got some background, but tell us a bit more. Where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in Texas and then moved to Tampa, Florida when I was 12. So my whole upbringing was very centered around small town Texas community. My parents are immigrants from India, and I remember a childhood of just going to Indian parties all the time. Like my parents had tons of friends and I grew up in like a litter of dozens of other kids who were raised in part of that same community. And then when I moved to Florida, I was entering my teenage years and Florida is a beautiful place, but where I grew up was definitely suburbs, boring suburbs, big box stores, and I definitely felt creatively limited there. So when I came to New York for the first time, when I came to the Northeast, I was just like, oh, this is who I am. These are my people. So it was challenging from that perspective to feel the soul-crushingness of the burbs, but really happy with where I ended up.

Yeah.

Your outfit's like a little bit Texas meets burbs meets New York. This is trying out. In this vein of early identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

I never thought I was going to become a founder. Right. And I think there was an alternate universe where I could have been completely happy just working a random corporate job and being that person for the rest of my life. I had people I knew who always wanted to be founders, and I always thought like, I could never do that.

Absolutely.

I think it catches some people early on and we get this answer like half, half. I was always gonna become a founder, or just like you, maybe it wasn't on the vision board. So we mentioned you studied politics at Princeton. Tell us a bit more about how going from that undergrad experience either sparked your curiosity about entrepreneurship or didn't, and that transition from Princeton to the real world.

Yeah. In high school, my favorite subject was physics, and I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer or an aerospace engineer. And so when I applied to college, I applied as an engineer. And when I chose Princeton and I got there, I realized two things pretty quickly. So, the first was that Princeton's engineering program was very theoretical, so I wasn't going to get to do machine shop my freshman year. I was going to be doing a bunch of problem sets, and that was way less exciting than actually feeling like I was building something. And then I had been such a good kid, straight-A student in high school, and then I got to college and I discovered partying. And then I realized that the grueling demands of a hardcore engineering degree, taking these super intense quantitative classes was really gonna be at odds with my partying priorities. And so I, I chose partying. I, I knew—

Well, I think that was you playing the long game, honestly.

I dropped the mechanical engineering major and it was risky because With engineering, it felt like a very safe degree. Like I knew I could get a job, but I took a leap of faith and was like, I wanna just try learning for its own sake. So what was I interested in? I was really interested in people and the way people worked. I took anthropology classes and sociology classes, and I found those really interesting. And then I took, I think this happens to a lot of people in college, you just take one transformational class with the right professor and you're like, this is what I'm gonna do. So I took a class on political theory, which is really less about politics as it exists today and more about how we organize ourselves in society. And I found that so fascinating. And I ended up my junior and senior year getting really into privacy. I wrote my senior thesis on the right to privacy, which is a very misunderstood topic. So I thought a lot of these norms around how we live our lives and how that intersects with things like legal frameworks were really interesting, but none of that translated to what I was going to do after.

So you make this transition from the world of applied theory, partying, going from Princeton into the city. You've been in the broader New York metro area now for a decade plus, and I think the city itself has seen a lot of transformation in that time, particularly in its appetite towards technology.

Yeah.

You started your career in technology. You're absolutely still in it with this founder hat. Tell us a bit more, especially because it's New York Tech Week, you know, how have you seen this tech ecosystem evolve in that decade plus?

That's a great question. When I graduated and was living in New York, I've, I've lived in New York my entire professional life. I'm aging myself with this, but tech was not a huge thing. Like everyone from my school went into finance and consulting, and I stumbled into discovering software. And what I really loved about it was it felt like this space where I could turn back on that engineering brain of mine and be creative again. I think people don't give software development enough credit for how creative of a space it can be. But when I first tried pitching Cartiful to investors, for example, most of the New York tech ecosystem at that time was focused on ad tech and marketing tech on the software side. And if you were in consumer, the entire focus was D2C. And so if you said that you were building a consumer product, you got put into this bucket of D2C. People are like, are you like Harry's? Are you like Casper? And what I was doing didn't fit into either of those boxes. So I ended up needing to go out to the West Coast to raise because at the time no one in New York really understood what Partiful was. And what's cool to see, especially with the kickoff of this Tech Week, is just how much that's changed and how vibrant and diverse the New York tech ecosystem is now.

Before we dive a little bit deeper into your fundraising journey, let's talk about the early days of Partiful. You have this incredibly interesting background, incredibly interesting early career, and everyone here knows what Partiful is. Everyone's used it. It needs no introduction. But if you had to tell the audience, what was the initial idea behind Partiful? What was the aha moment? Walk us through that early journey.

I wish I could say there was a single aha. Moment. It was more like the end result of banging my head against the door a lot. What happened was I was working at this AI startup that was selling to Fortune 500 enterprises, and we were building customer service software. And I had spent most of my career in tech building for these large private enterprises, and I had started to find it really boring, but I didn't know what else I could do with my own career. And I made a list of all of the things that I wanted out of a job. So I wanted to work in an industry I found really meaningful. I wanted to work on a product I believed in. I wanted to work with a group of people I really respected. I wanted a role that would recognize and help me leverage this very diverse skill set that I had built across product and BD. And I wanted that role to be based in New York. And I could find companies that checked most of those boxes except the last one. And when I realized how important those things were to me, when I realized how important it was to me to be building something I truly believed in and on a mission that I actually cared about, which wasn't how do we make these corporations more efficient, The only option was going to be creating it myself. So I stumbled into entrepreneurship almost as a process of elimination. And the mission that I was really passionate about was solving the problem of social isolation. This was in the time after big critical world events, things like the 2016 election, which I think showed how social media could be not just this happy-go-lucky force for good that connected all of us, but I think it was one of the first times that we really saw ways that social media could be really toxic and drive really toxic narratives and lead us to not get closer to one another, but distrust one another. And I thought that the most important thing I could do to address that problem would be to make it easier to cultivate community in the real world, because what I had found for myself was that the conversations that I had offline, the conversations that I had in private, the conversations that I had when I could look someone in the eye and get a read of their tone and their body language and just have so much of a richer textured conversation that left room for one of us to stumble, to be wrong, to clarify what we meant, to correct ourselves, that led to much more fruitful discussion and finding common ground and building really authentic bonds in a way that I felt wasn't possible for myself and for so many other people. And I became obsessed with this idea that if I could figure out the unlock to connecting people meaningfully in the real world and allow them to build those relationships and do that at scale, that I could help create some antidote to this growing seemingly irreversible trend of social isolation. So that was the extent of the plan, was work at a job that was my dream job, and I guess I had to create it, and work on a mission that I really wanted to solve. And it was with those two ideas alone that I quit my job with no other plan.

I love that anecdote, and I love the passion that you have for the space that you're building in. I think there's a lot of founders that start a company because they wanna become a founder and then they figure out what to build. But you knew that this was a systemic problem that could become a really big business and you just went for it. On the topic of social isolation, building a company takes a village and often takes a co-founder. So tell us a little bit about your co-founder Joy. How did you meet and how did you cultivate trust and know that she was the right person to build Partiful with?

I got really lucky with Joy and I get lucky with joy every single day, and it started at the beginning. So we met in the way that I think most people make so many meaningful relationships, which is we met through mutual friends. So we had a mutual friend who introduced us, and that really helped because she could vouch for both of us, and we both trusted her a lot when she said, "Okay, this person's cool." And as I got to know Joy, there were a couple of things that stood out to me. One was that she was an exceptional exceptional engineer, clearly one of the best in the world at what she did. The other was that she cared a lot about building a certain kind of company, a company that shared the same values that I held. We were really committed to building a diverse company, building a company that cared for the well-being of our employees, building a company that didn't have the kind of toxic startup culture that we saw with so many of the companies around us. And so, I knew she was talented, I knew she really cared, and I knew that like me, she wanted to be on this journey for the next decade plus. So, we did the whole co-founder dating thing, like you can find these 50-question surveys online where you can like fill out and see if your answers match up. And so, we did some of that. The one area where I think there was an open question was we both you fill out this little matrix, which is what are you good at and what do you like doing? And you want all those things to be complementary. You don't want people stepping on each other's toes too much. We both said we thought we were good at product and we wanted to spend a lot of time doing it, which could lead to a lot of butting heads. But in our case, it ended up being so complementary. So what's been so cool is because we've both been so committed to the relationship and to the values of the company, We have honestly probably both surprised each other in how much we have, in how much the other person has impressed us. Every step of the journey, I've learned so much about her and I'm just like, wow, I didn't know you were also good at that and also good at that. So it's been amazing.

Well, it's cool to hear that, like, not necessarily all the best co-founder pairs fit into this tick-the-box framework, right? Sometimes there's this chemistry that can't really be defined that works out over time. There's a lot of early-stage founders here, maybe folks that are thinking about starting a company. Looking for a co-founder, what advice would you have for folks in the room?

What's cool about the time that we live in now is with vibe coding, you saw the hats outside, you might not actually need a co-founder to get started, which is I think probably the first time in the history of the tech ecosystem that you could say that with a straight face. I think what that means is it's not just checking a box of, oh, I need someone who's good at sales, this person's good at sales, or I need someone who's great at coding, this person's good at coding, but it's more important than ever, I think, to find someone who shares your values and who wants to build the kind of company that you want to build and who shares the goals, who shares the same time horizon as you, because those are the things that are really hard to change versus obviously you want that person to be talented, but there's so many people you can hire onto your team to fill every type of role that you need to fill, the one thing that won't really change, or ideally shouldn't really change, is those values. And so I think that's the thing you wanna get right from the beginning.

That's awesome. You mentioned a little bit about social isolation and just the change in today's society and environment. You started Partiful right before a global pandemic. Talk about a time to get started. And somehow you were able to build one of the most iconic platforms around gathering people together. Tell us a little bit about what COVID was like for the Partiful team and how your product really evolved. Evolve through that time?

It was really tough, but I always feel weird saying that because COVID was tough for everyone and it was tough for millions more people for millions more important reasons than our tiny little party startup trying to survive. But what happened was Joy and I had started talking in the fall of 2019. We made it official at the beginning of 2020 and we set out to raise our first round of venture funding. In February of 2020, just cuz that's what I thought you did. You found your co-founder and then you went and raised money and like that, that's what you did. And we ended up closing the round in the middle of March 2020. It was literally the last week I could pitch large group, real world social gatherings with a straight face. And then the world shut down. What happened next was, if you remember, like there was a few weeks where we were like, oh, it's gonna be done in a few weeks. This sucks, but it'll be fine. And then I think as the time window stretched on in that year, those 18 months between when we started the company and when we actually launched were the toughest years that we've had with the company so far, because anyone here who's built a product or has tried to build a product knows you can't really build in isolation. You need to be able to test it. And we were not going to be promoting parties during a pandemic. We were not cosigning underground parties. We were not about super spreader. Events, but what that meant for us personally was we were really limited in knowing if we were building the right thing and to go 18 months with just no data on if you're building the right thing was very scary.

It's like loading a cannon and firing it, hoping you're aiming it correctly.

Exactly.

Let's talk a little bit about the product. I think Partiful really differentiated itself with its SMS-based approach. Everyone here, I think, uses SMS and it's probably the fastest way to reach everyone, but you didn't launch with an app. Tell us a little bit about the strategy and what the first version of the Parful product was.

I think a lot of people, when they approach products, they don't necessarily question every single decision that they're making. A lot of times you can reduce apps to like, okay, it's, it's a mobile app and it's got this onboarding flow and you ask the user to do all these things and then they're in the app and you kind of take some of those core starting experiences for granted as just things you have to do. One thing that was really different about the way Joy and I approached building Partiful was that we really questioned every assumption about what you needed to do to build a consumer app. And I think that's because both of us had spent so much time not in consumer that we just didn't have that same tunnel vision, perhaps. And so we didn't make the assumption that Partiful needed to be an app. In fact, when we thought about our own lives, we're like, we hate downloading apps. Like, I don't need another app on my phone, and you certainly You don't need an app for something that might be a fairly infrequent use case, which is how often are you planning a party? And then from a pragmatic perspective, if any of you are on the technical side, you'll know that app builds take time. Like you actually have to build the app, you have to submit it to the App Store, you have to get Apple to approve it. And that cycle can in some cases take days. Sometimes you can be stuck in review for like weeks in the worst case scenario. What's nice about web development is you can deploy straight to production and it can be live to your users instantly. And so if you want to get out 3 new features in a single day and have users testing them that same day, web is the best place to do that. So for us, we were like, we want to obsess over removing every single piece of friction between the user and experiencing the value of our product. One, because that's the right thing to do for the user. Two, because that's how we're going to learn. The fastest. And so downloading an app is frictional. Signing in before you get to play around with the product is frictional. And so everything that we could do to strip away that friction while allowing ourselves to go faster, we invested in.

I have a few founder friends that are building in the consumer space, and I think the most common thing they're coming up against is when is the right time to launch? Because it's not like B2B where you launch something, you get some feedback and you close another customer and it's this highly iterative process. There's something scary about launching a consumer product to the public, what metrics did you orient yourself around to know that this is ready? We're ready to not only launch a beta, but we're also ready to build an app.

The app decision came much later. The app decision came once users were literally begging us for an app and which was a great signal because it was a huge pain in the ass to build the app. We had to like rebuild everything and then like rebuild it again. It's a big journey to go on, especially the more you've built on web and then need to get to feature parity with the app, but In the early days, the luxury of being at the very start of your journey is that no one cares. And no one cares can sound demotivating, but no one cares should be super, super motivating because if you launch and it's bad, it's fine. No one cares. And it's probably bad. Like the first version of Partiful was bad. We made lots of very bad decisions in the beginning, but it's great if you can learn that it's bad from 1 user or 10 users as opposed to it being bad for millions of users. And so I think the biggest unlock in the early days was just being unafraid for it to be bad, being unafraid to show it to anyone. We were so grateful for anyone who would just use Partiful at all. We were like, oh my gosh, thank you. And so it started with just a handful of people using it. And by the time it was good enough, we had a few more people using it. And then we were fortunate to see it just take off from there.

Yeah, I think we resonate with the put out like your first pancake and don't care too much. I think our first season of The Room podcast probably constitutes—

we should delink that. Yeah, we should delink that.

A lot of people had trust in us early on, and you've built now what is an incredible product and experience, of course, all of which we use today. And to do so, you've raised millions of dollars. So congratulations on multiple rounds of funding that have been led like the likes of Andreessen. So shout out a16z for the tech week, GV and Initialize. But tell us, who was the first person who said yes to investing in you?

It's one of my mentors. His name is John Redgrave, and he said yes to me before I even really fully knew what I was doing or that I was starting a company. I think I like called him crying in the fall of 2018, and I told him like all of the things that I have hated about my work experience to date. And it was just more of a rant. And I was like, yeah, I think I wanna start a company and just do all these things differently. And very gently, he was like, I don't think that's a good reason to start a company. He was someone who had built a successful company of his own and went on to— he sold his first company to Apple. He sold his next company to Discord. And he was a real— is still an expert in trust and safety online. His mission is to make the internet safer for people. And so what was great about him was he took took my rantings and ramblings and saw within that the kernel of a drive. And it was very— it was a very blind drive to go do this thing, even though it was completely irrational, and nurtured that until it turned into what became a company.

Well, Madison, you were also an early yes. You were an angel investor in Partiful, so you two go way back. I'd love to just flip the script to you, Madison. As an angel investor, what made Partiful and Shreya so compelling? At The Seed?

I got very lucky to have been sent my first partyful in October of 2021 for a tech event that I was going to out in San Francisco.

That's a flex.

Yeah, thank you very much. I was like a very small women investor event of which we all had been vaccinated and tested and all the things. And I was like, this is the most seamless experience I've ever had. To your point about product design, and I'd been a product manager and felt like, wow, this is how I want to invite people to parties. Who is this founder? I was an early-stage investor at the time, so that was my day job. And so I like looked you up, had some mutual friends, and we got connected through this mutual friend, Christine Hong. So shout out to you. But I happened to be in New York the next week, and I was just blown away by your fashion sense. Also, the level of thoughtfulness, which is of course coming through today, and your vision for how social friendships can transcend both offline and online, which as the Gen Z cusper was something I had been thinking a lot about just from a personal thesis perspective. And then of course also investing. And part of does this so seamlessly. I'd also launched SMS at Gap and thought SMS had a moment. And I really believe still today that one of the most powerful features of Partiful is the virality and the way that it can be in all of our pockets all the time. And so honestly, I owe you a thanks because A, she let me angel invest, which was huge. And also I think meeting you was one of the first times I had conviction in a product and a person that I knew was uniquely for our generation. And that doesn't come along every day. No.

When I met you, Madison, I was like, I will fight tooth and nail to create allocation for this powerhouse woman who just clearly, when you see a vision, you really chase it. And I think that was so special. And I saw you doing that with us. And for anyone who's raising or thinking about raising, the people you want are the true believers. And Madison is one.

Thank you, Shreya. That's very kind of you. I'm lucky to have invested in you and Claudia. I think Shreya embodied what I think is my favorite headline about Partiful early on, which was event right for hot people. I think also I was like, yeah, that's exactly what this product is like. And they nailed it.

Okay.

Well, you know, it's clear that you're on a rocket ship. For those who don't know, today Partiful has over 2 million users just in 2025 alone, and it's only June. Claudia and I have personally attended 167 Partifuls and hosted—

I'll do a flex.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We also enjoy partying and we've had over 19 events that we've hosted combined. So we love your product. Tell us a little bit more about this go-to-market strategy and then of course subsequent business model now that you've hit such scale.

When we started Partiful, we thought a lot about what we would want monetization to look like. One thing we realized pretty early on was that if we throw up a paywall too soon, we are going to lose out on a lot of of learning about what users actually want, because a paywall is friction. And if you remember what I said before, we were obsessed with removing all the friction within the product. And because we were fortunate to have venture funding, we didn't have to monetize right away. We started to get asked questions about it, and then and we weren't ready to answer them because we're like, we have a plan, we just want to talk about it now. So we just threw up a tweet, which is still our most viral tweet ever, which is just, we're not going to make money, we're just here to help you party, enjoy it, babes. Most people knew it was a joke, but there's still some people who think it's very serious. This is the whole problem on social media. You can't tell that I'm being sarcastic, and it looks so lame if I follow this up by being like, this is sarcastic, stop reporting this seriously in the media, like asterisks. But we were always just like, like, how do we do this in a way that doesn't create friction, which encumbers the core product experience? Because that also doesn't really serve our mission. We wanna make it frictionless together, and we don't think that you should have to pay just to like hang out with your friends. So what we did think about was, what are all the problems with planning events that do require spending money, and how can we solve those problems? And if we do solve those problems and you're already in the mindset of spending money, then maybe we can facilitate those transactions and take a cut of that. So we actually just launched the first plank of that, which is a partnership with Instacart on a new app of theirs. It's an app that helps you order drinks and snacks delivered to an event. It's called Sizzz, and we've integrated it within Partiful. So now when you create a Partiful, you'll see an option to start a group order. What you can do is create a shared group cart for you and all of the guests of your event. What's nice about it is you can order drinks and snacks and supplies for a party, but everyone only pays for what they add. So you don't have to deal with any of the annoying cost-splitting, post-event Venmoing. If someone really wants, you know, one brand of tequila, they can order that. If someone else really wants like turtle chips, they can order that. If someone only wants to pay for their $5 turtle chips, that's fine. Guests don't pay any delivery fee. The host only pays a flat rate. That $5 delivery fee, no matter how big the order is. So we were like, this is awesome. This is something we would actually use for our party. Cause I'm always that person who last minute is like, shoot, I forgot the tequila. We only have gin, or I forgot ice. And like now someone has to run and go find ice. And so it solved a problem that I personally had with planning events, which is just dealing with the last minute, getting all the supplies you need. And so now that's integrated into Partiful. And that's a way that we make money. And it's the start of this broader journey that we're on to just facilitate so much of the party planning process and save you time and money in doing that and allow us to monetize that way.

I think of you a bit as the venture capitalist whisperer. When we first met, I was blown away and you start to see enough startup pitches that it gets harder to blow you away. And I truly was, and you've managed to do this so well. But one of the biggest things VCs like is revenue. So how have you managed to have these conversations so thoughtfully and owning the vision of what Partiful is going to become with your VCs? Like tips for a founder who's navigating the, when do we start turning on monetization question?

It really depends on the company. In our case, one of the things that we got really lucky with, I mean, there are many apps that took a long time to monetize, like social media companies, and for us, because we had been on this venture path, the most important thing is not necessarily monetization, it was growth. If you build something, and the mission that we were on was to build something that could touch the lives of, in theory, everyone in the world. We believe everyone should have a thriving social life. We believe everyone should have a really easy way to get together with their friends and meet new people and make more friends. And if the TAM of your business is everyone, then people can see how Partiful affects their lives personally. If you extrapolate that out, that is just such a huge market that it's much easier to underwrite a venture-scale return when that is your market.

Well, we've talked on a lot of different growth metrics, especially on the user front, but what's always impressed me is how you've done this with such a small team. The small team meme is very much in the press today, but not so much when you were getting started. So tell us a little bit more about how you you thought about scaling your team inside of Partiful?

We were obsessively lean because we had this— not fear-based mentality, but we never knew which day was going to be our last. I was terrified of having to lay off people or prematurely scaling. I had heard and seen all these horror stories about building up too big of a team only to then have to draw that down. And those are people's lives that you're impacting. And if you think back to one of our core values was, how do we build a company where we really take care of our teammates and create a safe place where all employees of Partiful can really thrive. It's hard to do that if you're hyperscaling to a bloated organization and have to lay people off. That's not thriving. We thought about how big can we actually scale this while being super rigorous about the decisions we make, which also had the side benefit of limiting the product's bloat because the more people you have, the more you will feel like you have to build. If you have a very lean team, like when we raised our Series we had 7 people on the team, like we physically could not build that much, but that kept the product remarkably simple. And I think it was only much later that we realized there's so many things we actually have to build. And once we got to the breaking point of we have to build these things, that was what gave us the green light to start scaling because we got to the point where it was really hurting us not to.

One of the core features of Partiful is how creative it is. It's simple yet creative. You can do what you want with your own Partiful. You can add bubbles to your background. You can have a fun little image in the front. So what's your favorite Partiful that you've ever seen on the account? Or like top 3?

Oh, that is a great question.

It wasn't in the prepared one.

Sorry.

I just had the thought. Oh yeah.

I have to give a shout out to my friend Chloe, who this past weekend did this. It's like a CrossFit, but it's also a marathon. It's called like High Rocks or something, or people are nodding. Okay. I have no idea. It sounds, it sounded very scary and I like tune out once I started hearing, it's like a relay race where you do CrossFit and you have a partner that you do it with. And she's like a very dainty New England lady and she dropped this particle that was the fire cannons on either side. And it just looked like the most aggressively masculine bro-y particle I had ever seen. And it was like, "Ahmad and Chloe take high rocks." And I was just like, I love that. That this friend of mine who I would never think would have this form of self-expression is dropping this Partiful, which is just, I guess, her crazy CrossFit bro-y side where she's just gonna outlift 20 dudes, which I'm pretty sure she did on Saturday.

Nice, nice. Chloe sounds like a boss, so we should have her on the podcast. I think it's interesting, many of us using Partiful probably started using it during the unbundling of Facebook and Meta. We realized this super app experience that Facebook was offering wasn't good enough for us. And we started taking things out of the product. And Beautiful absolutely has done that with events, but it's also done it with my social graph. There is no way that Facebook has caught up with all the people I've met in the past 5 years. Definitely not in business school. I don't think I added a single friend on Facebook in business school. I hopefully I made some friends too. So I guess taking a step back, how have you guys thought about building into that social graph network, which is a very hard data and product problem?

What's interesting is if you look at what Facebook did with their social graph, they used it to serve up entertainment. The purpose of the social graph was so that when you looked at your newsfeed, you could see content from your friends and you would be interested in that content because it was from your friends. And there was a whole period of time where that was really novel before you didn't know what all your friends were doing. At once. And so that was the most entertaining content in your life. What we realized collectively with the rise of TikTok, and prior to that Meta realized with Instagram, was like, actually, your friends are boring from the perspective of like, they're not professional content creators. And so with Instagram, what we saw is actually your core friend graph is not the best vehicle for serving you the most entertaining content. It's influencers and influencers are all beautiful and their lives are perfect and they travel to exotic locations and they wear beautiful clothes and like, that's way better than what your friend's doing on Saturday night. And so they started prioritizing in the Instagram showing you quote unquote better content, which was coming from people who are better at making content than your friends. And what we all saw with TikTok was that turns out they don't even necessarily need to be influencers. They can just be random people who are funny or silly or smart, who can create a short video that captures your attention. And actually just democratizing content creation and not even using a social graph, but serving you content from anyone anywhere in the world is actually an even better form of serving you entertainment. So when most of these companies think about the social graph, it's an input into something else. For us, when we think about Partiful, the social graph is very much the purpose of what makes you belong there. It is a space for you to hang out with your friends. It is a space for you to find new things to do with your friends. It is a space for you to meet new people and make new friends. And we've intentionally designed so much of Partiful to facilitate those friendships. And so for us, we're We're not using that graph to do something else, to create some other form of entertainment so that we can serve you ads. We're creating it so that your social graph just has a home and so that you can foster more of those friendships in real life. Like, the reason that we have this data is so that we can help you find friends of friends, find more people to invite to parties or to go to their parties so that you can build more of these relationships because we think that that the way that you build friendships most successfully is not by meeting total strangers, is not by finding people with common interests. It's through friends of friends. And so the entire purpose of Partiful is to create a space for real socialization. Even the word social has gotten totally corrupted when we think of like social media. Like, what does that even mean? Like, socializing is going to a party. So it's not this made-up term that tech has turned into something that means something totally different than actually hanging out with your friends.

The number of times where I've met I met someone at an event or party and wanted to follow up with them or just know who they were, I always go to Partiful to search through the list and be like, oh, that's that person.

That's awesome.

Exactly. I love that. Well, we spoke a little bit about the past. Let's talk a little bit about the future, not just for Partiful, but for the sector overall. Tell us, what is your take on consumer as a sector for growth and opportunity, especially in context of AI and all that 2025 has to bring?

What's interesting about consumer is there's only really 4 consumer businesses. People are very simple. We don't have that many needs. We want to make money. We want to get laid. We want to be entertained. We want to eat when we're hungry. And most apps will check one of those boxes. And so the biggest consumer companies are all entertainment companies, whether that's Meta, whether that's ByteDance, whether that's something like Netflix or YouTube. They're all competing for the same eyeballs. They're all competing to entertain you. What's interesting to see totally from the sidelines, because Partiful is not doing any of this, but I'm seeing a lot of interesting attempts to use AI to create new forms of entertainment. Like, what if you could have a world that was totally customized to your favorite fantasy novels or your favorite video games? It's the same reason open-world video games can be so compelling. What if you could just pretend that you exist in this other world and live that fantasy? So I'm curious to see if AI can create really novel forms of entertainment in that way. And then the other space is more on the consumer utility side. How can we make things better, faster, and cheaper so that people can more easily do those things that they want to do, whether it's get somewhere faster or get their food faster or get laid.

I love that.

A few minutes ago you mentioned direct-to-consumer was what investors thought was consumer a few years ago. I think that's very much not the case anymore. I think we've seen this rise in fall of D2C. And so for folks that are building in the consumer space, fundraising, there's a lot of new discipline around how investors are thinking about consumer. What have you seen actually resonate in the room? And for folks that are fundraising, what do you think they need to show to capture the attention of these consumer investors?

What I've found is it's easier than ever now to create new product experiences. And so the first thing I would say is if you're raising your first round of funding, challenge yourself to see if you actually need it, because the economics for you personally can in many cases work way better if you don't need it. A very concrete example is if it's you and a small team of friends and you put an app or product out there and you crack the TikTok algorithm and make really great content to help your product go viral, and you can get to a a $10 million exit, that is a life-changing amount of money for you and that small group of people. On the VC scale, that is an utter failure. So raising venture funding puts you on this path that commits you to a billion-dollar-plus outcome, and that could be what you're actually going for, and that's totally fine. But given that it's easier than ever, it's cheaper than ever, it's faster than ever to build a product, if you're raising, I would almost first say like, do you actually want do you want to raise, or do you want to do this for a few years and potentially make a life-changing amount of money and then do something else?

From my friends who are founders, more than ever before, everyone's saying, actually, do I want to raise venture? And that was not the conversation 2 years ago.

Yeah, when I did it, I didn't know anything about building companies. I literally just raised venture funding because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. What I'm seeing resonate, if you are in the room, is having a very strong basis, not just on how your product retains, but also what is the self-sustaining growth loop that is built into your product. So the metrics you hear from VCs are, if you're building a consumer product, you ideally want it to be a daily use case, but hey, Partiful is not a daily use case. So all the conventional wisdom is just a guideline, not a hard and fast rule. But there are some metrics that they want to see around retention. They want to see that when people come to your app, they're sticking around, call it 50%, you know, day 7 retention, day 30 retention. They want to see that all your retention retention curves flatten out. But now we've actually seen a lot more products hit that retention threshold. So I think what's starting to change now is how can you tell not just that retention story, but also a growth story as well. And ideally there's some aspect of your product that creates a self-sustaining growth loop within it. So for Partiful, that's sharing invites with people. In fact, the only way to use Partiful is to share it with friends, which is a growth loop we didn't think that much about in the early days, but now we're very grateful for. So I would make sure that not only do I have really strong retention, which can take a lot of time, but also that you can demonstrate how your product will grow by virtue of people using it versus solely relying on an external channel like ads or TikTok content or whatever it is, because then you're kind of at the mercy of whatever that channel or algorithm changes. And, you know, if the algorithm changes one day and all of a sudden your growth is wiped out, that's not great. And so the more you can own own your growth loop, the more durable of a product and business you've built.

We have two more questions for you and then we will go party, as is the theme for today. What's next for you personally, Shreya?

I'm a lot older than when I started Partiful. When I started Partiful, I was like a degenerate partier in my 20s. And now that I've entered my 30s, I'm seeing a lot of my friends friends get married. I'm starting to see some of my friends have kids, and I'm thinking a lot about how do I make Partyful relevant for people in that stage of their life? Because when I was single and in my 20s, I had a lot more free time and I was able to go out a ton. And I also just had way more energy to be out late every single night. And I really wanted to go to events all the time because I was trying to not only make new friends, but I was also trying to date. And I met my partner at a party.

Let's go.

So now what's interesting is I'm not sure if other people see this in their own lives, but when people start to like couple up and then some people go into their holes where they only hang out with their SO and they form these really tiny nuclear bubbles where you're like, why don't I see you anymore? And it's like, oh, it's because you're partnered up or you got married. So I'm thinking about how do we create community at that stage of our lives. I have friends who are talking about no one can afford to buy a house anymore, but it's like, what if we all go in on a house together? How do we create a friend group village? How do we raise our kids in a community where we all can be around each other all the time? So instead of me trying to figure out date night and babysitting by myself, it's just, oh, whose house are the 6 kids hanging out at tonight? Let's just throw them there and 2 people can go on a date night. So I'm really interested in how do you build community be at that new stage of your life and make sure that as you enter a stage where you have more responsibilities, things like marriage and kids, you can continue to prioritize your friendships during that stage of your life. Because most people by default, as they have less time— like, it's no one's fault— they can just easily start to become less and less of a priority or become something that you have less time for. And so how can I personally, and you know how I think about this in the context of Partiful, use these tools that we have to it so much easier to find time to see those people and build that engine of friendship into every stage of our lives.

Well, we're so excited to see what's coming up on the roadmap to touch on that theme. And we'd love to now ask you our final and hero question of The Room podcast. Who is a woman that has inspired you and has really impacted your career?

I was thinking a lot about this question. It made me reflect on something deep, which is that when I think of so much of my professional life before Partiful, all of my bosses were men. All of my mentors were men. I simply didn't know that many women who I could look up to. And I mean, there would be women from a distance who I considered role models, but no one who I worked with personally. And when I started building Partiful, that was one of the things I set out to change, having an all-women founding team, hiring so many incredible women into our company. Company early on. And so when I reflect on that question, actually what comes to mind is— this is not cheating, but I do think about the incredible female investors that I have on my cap table. So I think of Madison McIlwain, I think of another one of my investors, Aika Ho, Jen Wolfe, who led our seed round at Initialize, Laura Chow, who I just spoke to earlier today, and so many of these brilliant women who are incredible investors in their own rights and also see so much of the heart and emotion and creativity and value that we are trying to build into Partiful and appreciate and support that, not just on a personal level, but also because it's great business.

Well, thank you so much for sharing that, and thank you for joining us in the room in person today.

Actually in a room.

Actually in the room. It's been such a pleasure to hear your story, and we're so excited Madison McIlwain to now kick off the rest of the evening, which will be a bit of a kind of happy hour mixer just outside of the door. And a huge thank you to our sponsors, partners, Perkins, Mercury, JLL, Level 10, all of the above, and Partiful, of course. This has been a great way to kick off New York Tech Week.

Thank you both, and thank you all for being here.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast.

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See you in the room.

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