S3E6: In the Room with Analisa Goodin of Catch&Release | On building marketplaces, the intersection of art, creatives, and tech, and first-time fundraising

Welcome to The Room Podcast. My name is Madison McIlwain and I'm a partner for seed stage investments at DefyVC.

And I'm Claudia Laurie, a co-founder of Pryve. We're a founder and funder who are in the room where it happens. If you're a first-time founder or an emerging venture capitalist, we're glad you found us. We share inspiring, authentic, and insightful stories from founders, funders, and operators who have been in the room and provide tactical feedback on their early aha moments and learnings along the way. Before we dive into this week's episode, we have a short message from our partners.

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This week, we are excited to share our conversation with Annalisa Goodin, founder and CEO of Catch and Release. For those of you that haven't heard of Catch and Release, you have definitely seen Catch and Release in ads and media from some of your favorite brands. Catch and Release solves a specific problem that touches almost every creative, producer, and content creator in the production industry today, making it easy to discover the best content from the open web and make it available for licensing to agencies and brands worldwide. Annalisa certainly understands the pain points of creatives as she herself is one. She is a classically trained artist and art historian. For the decade prior to founding Catch and Release, Annalisa was CEO of VisualCatch, working with advertising agencies and brands and listening to customers agonize over how painful it is to find relevant, exciting content that's ready to license on increasingly quick turnaround commercial projects. This past April, Catch and Release raised a $15 million Series A led by Accel. In today's episode, we will touch on themes such as the intersection of art, creatives, and technology, tips for fundraising and pitching for founders who don't have traditional tech backgrounds, and how Analisa translated customer pain into a scalable marketplace. Let's open the door.

Thank you so much, Analisa, for joining us in the room today.

Oh, you're so welcome. I'm so excited to be here.

Your background is in visual arts, in design. Before we jump into the founding of Catch and Release, would love to rewind and hear a little bit more about your early interests and your early career path. How did your background in arts and design inform what ultimately became the building of Catch and Release? Have you always been interested in art and design?

Yes, from a really early age. And I would say it informed my starting of a company because I didn't come from a I didn't come from a typical tech or venture background. I wasn't— I didn't go to business school. I didn't study engineering or become interested in tech really until later. I would say my entry point into the market for what Catch and Release is doing really came from a deep empathy for creatives and the creative process. That was my domain expertise coming in, and that was something I always nurtured from a really early age. As early as I can remember, I was really interested in art, and I ended up studying art in college. I got a Bachelor in Fine Arts. Studied in Italy for 2 years, did art residencies in South Africa and Tuscany, had a studio practice in the Bay Area, and then did a master's in art theory and visual culture. And that really led me to my career at Catch and Release because I really understood the creative buyer and started to really empathize with their lack of tools to get what they need to get done in a short amount of time and with decreasing financial resources and I was inspired to, to fill a gap that I saw.

That's really incredible. And just as a quick aside, I also studied art history in college and have been doing a lot of painting. And for a brief second before I entered into tech, I thought I might have a career in the art space as well. So it's always incredible to meet another founder who's really excited about art.

That's so cool. We'll have to sidebar later. Into the weeds on art theory. Yeah, it was—

it's clear that you were definitely an artist from a very young age, but did you ever think you would become a founder when you were younger? Was there a first business that you started? I think for me it was a lemonade stand.

I didn't start a lemonade stand. I did partake in some lemonade selling. I always imagined I would start something. One of my early visions was I was going to start a salon in New York with an art gallery upstairs and a hair salon downstairs. But I, looking back on my, on my journey as a studio artist a very entrepreneurial journey, right? You are creating something from nothing. You've got to figure out how to market yourself. You have to— you're making product. And there's just a lot of facets to the studio journey that, that I think map well to entrepreneurialism. The thing missing for me and the reason I decided to, to pursue a new course was the team. I didn't have a team. I wasn't working with other people. I was working by myself. I had mentors, I had a community of artists that I studied with and was in constant dialogue with and who I was really inspired by. But that's a little different than reflecting back on my journey in startups of building a founding team, realizing a mission and a vision together, taking risks together, delegating, putting trust in someone else. That was the piece I think I was really missing was the, the collaboration.

And you've definitely had quite a bit of entrepreneurial experience with managing a team and building a business before Catch and Release. For 10 years, you worked as the founder and CEO of Visual Catch. Tell us a little bit more about this business and the team that you built and how that eventually informed the founding of Catch and Release.

Yeah, so after grad school, I got out of school with a master's in visual theory, and the paths available to me as far as a career were, were interesting. I could have— I worked as a curator for a while. I worked as an art writer. For a while. I produced a couple of exhibitions. I had my studio practice. I worked in restaurants, very high-end restaurant. I was— it was a great way to earn money, and I loved the— I think I got from restaurants what I didn't get from my studio practice and from curation, from curating, which was working on a team and being in a hustle environment and making something out of nothing and selling, and the hospitality component, which I really, really loved. But I committed to— if I'm going to work in restaurants, I want to be inspired and I want to learn something new. I want to be challenged. So that sent me to Michelin-star restaurants where I was like, I'm going to work for the best, learn from the best, and then see if there's anything I can apply to my art practice or to my other, other side hustles that I had going. So I had a series of these side hustles, and one of them was working in commercial production. I got a call from an executive producer, a friend of mine who was working at an advertising agency. Working on a campaign for, for a brand. And she said, hey, you're creative. We're having some challenges finding images for this campaign. Can you come in and work as a researcher for us? I thought, sure, I don't know what that is or what that means, but I'd love to. It sounds fun. And so I came in and met the creative director, and he downloaded his whole vision to me in his head of what this whole story was going to be over a 30-second period and what imagery was required to meet his expectation, his creative expectation. And then my job was to just pull up my computer and go into the internet and find stuff, which I absolutely loved. I loved research. After coming out of writing a thesis, I spent a lot of time digging through books and trying to tie concepts together. And being able to do that with visuals, with images and videos, was really fulfilling and really exciting and interesting. So I brought back a lot of results to my client and said, "What do you think? Here's what I found." He responded really well to a lot of them, gave me great feedback. And then the question came that I wasn't expecting, which was, we want to license these, we want to buy them. Uh, when can we have the high-res masters? Do we have model releases for all the people who appear in these images? And I went completely white in the face because I didn't know who these people were. I pulled them off of Flickr when it was in beta. I mean, it was just stuff I was pulling off of Google Images. It's the trap that creatives even today run into when they're just trying to paint a great picture. They're not thinking about attribution. They're not thinking about licensing. And so I quickly scrambled, so I didn't want to let him down. I quickly scrambled and just tried to figure out, okay, well, who owns this stuff? Can I reach them on the internet? Can I find information on them that would help me get in touch with them? And, and then getting in touch with them offered new challenges of, do they understand the licensing opportunity? Do I need to explain what licensing is? Do I have the paperwork I need? Is there a price my client has in mind to offer? So the whole marketplace transaction just didn't exist. And there was no tool to support that. There was just the internet, which was everybody's candy shop, but with no ability to buy anything. And so I thought that was a really interesting problem. And I, and it utilized some of my skills I had been developing in restaurants in terms of communicating effectively with perfect strangers and giving them a good experience, getting them over the line, as well as my visual and critical skills I had developed on the art side. And together, I just found myself incredibly curious about this really interesting space that wasn't being filled. And that space became obvious to me over the course of the next few years. And that's where I decided to start VisualCatch because I kept getting calls from clients, but that client would call again and say, we've got another project coming up. And then I get a project, a call from another producer saying, hey, the director from this last project told me that you were a good researcher. Can you come in and help us? And I heard that you can license stuff from random places. Can you come and help us do that? So it was becoming a niche. So I built VisualCatch as a company to do that, mostly staffed with freelancers. And I started with people who could help, who had expertise in licensing. So who really understood the legal ramifications of the space and curators, people who could do what I did on the visual side and could really identify, who knew how to understand or interpret a brief from a creative and translate that into results, content that, uh, that would meet the needs of the brief. So it was really catch and release. It was the early stages of catch and release, which was this two sides of a coin, a creative and a licensing side, but VisualCatch was the managed service version of what Catch and Release does today with tech.

Really interesting. And we're going to touch on a couple different parts of that marketplace dynamic later in our conversation. But before I get there, I have to ask, which Michelin-star restaurants did you work at?

So I had the great honor and excitement to open Commis in Oakland, which is on Piedmont Avenue. James Syabood is the chef there, and he had just opened this restaurant and needed an opening crew. So talk about early-stage startup experience, it was also a great time in restaurants to be able to define the early culture and early experience of guests at this place. It was the only Michelin-star restaurant in the East Bay because Chez Panisse had lost its star. So this was the only Michelin-star restaurant in the East Bay, and it led me to do stages and train at other Michelin-star restaurants in the Bay Area, which was really fun. And I've had non-Michelin-star restaurant experience too, but I always aimed for places that inspired me from a food and beverage perspective.

It's rare to meet someone like you in San Francisco who has this love of art and culture, and it's not dominated centrally by technology. That feels to be the ethos and lifeblood of our city. Claudia and I are both based in San Francisco as well. And so what was that moment for you when you went from having this incredible career in design and art, being an artist, as well as working in high-flying restaurants that also has an air of creative and building a really incredible managed marketplace research firm to going, I think I can scale this. This is something that I'm gonna build that's venture-backable. What was that aha moment for you?

I think that the— I love that question because you're right. And actually San Francisco used to be a city of artists. Its heritage actually is not in tech, it's in art and poetry and visuals. So I guess my entryway into tech was a little bit the same entryway into licensing. I was naive to to a side of it because of a deep passion for the other side of it. And when the two things merged, search and licensing merged, my concept and tech merged, and that was really a really exciting moment where I felt, wow, I really am in the right place at the right time. There's so much great creative work happening at agencies and brands in the Bay Area, but it's also a tech hub. So for my, my desire to turn this into a technology platform, I was, I was well positioned to do that in terms of where I was in the geography. So I think the way I would think about that is just deep frustration with the lack of tools. That, that was my entryway into tech. It wasn't, I see this massive— I, it wasn't just that I saw this massive venture-backable opportunity. It started with, why doesn't this exist? I know exactly how to do it and I'm doing it manually. And so there's so much redundancy and so many steps and training people. To do this was so arduous, but it was so rewarding when we got it right that I thought, how can I service more customers? How can I give them the ability to do this themselves? How do I build something that can take all of this redundancy and zip it up into something that can be almost an immediate experience of finding what you're looking for and getting it licensed? I observed the market for a few years waiting for some of the existing players to make a move. Because I thought, well, this is obvious. Somebody is going to do this. It's in the stock space or someone's going to do it. It's in the content space. And I saw some platforms poke at it from different edges, but no one had the, the domain expertise I did. No one had the firsthand pain and frustration that I did. And so that's what drove me initially to think, how big could this actually be and how much pain is being felt? And as I thought about that, is it just my pain? No, it's also my team's pain. It's also my customers' pain. And my customers work for their customers who also have pain. And as I thought about all that pain and frustration, I thought, that must mean that a tool has to be built to solve that. And then I de-risked that jump by doing market research and understanding. I had a lot of customers, so I was able to beta test the idea with a bank of people who were also experts in their own right. And I got enough validation that made me think I should turn this into a, into a product. I should hire an engineering team. I should actually start to translate what's in my head into an actual product roadmap that can get built and used.

Spoiler alert, you absolutely did that, and we'll come back to what exactly this new version of Catch and Release is. But recently you announced your $14 million Series A led by a top-tier Silicon Valley firm, Accel. So first off, congratulations. That is Such a feat, and especially in a pandemic to do so is incredibly impressive. How did you first meet the team at Excel?

I was introduced— so Catch and Release bootstrapped for the first couple of years of its business. So we transitioned Visual Catch, which was a purely managed service with no technology, to Catch and Release, where we inherited all of our customers, all of our workflows, all of our— everything that we had built and started hiring engineers and product folks. And actually translating what we had built in VisualCatch into a product. But we didn't raise funding right away, and that was its own learning curve. Being new to the venture and tech world was, how do you— who is this audience of investors, and how do I talk to them, and what kinds of questions do they ask, and how is the— what is the audience? I mean, I think as a founder and as an entrepreneur, one of our key attributes is storytelling, and storytelling comes from an understanding of the audience first and foremost. Who are they? What do they already know? How are they entering this story? What can I give them that help them take the ride or take the journey with me? And so I spent the first couple of years proving out the value proposition for Catch and Release and learning how to communicate that story and that vision to an investor audience. And we raised our first seed round in 2018 from Servin Ventures, which is a really great early-stage firm. Worked a lot with heavy operating VCs. I was very interested in people who were ex-operators. So we brought Gokul Rajaram on as an angel investor who had built AdSense at Google and then went on to become the head of product at Square and then Caviar and now DoorDash. Somebody I could bring my product roadmap to or bring a candidate I wanted to hire to and say, hey, tell me what you think of this person. Tell me what you think of this roadmap. What are we missing? What are we not asking? What are we What do you think? What do you have to add? So I really tried to surround myself in those post-bootstrapped days with people who had been down this path before and could help me see around some corners. And I treated them as advisory counsel in the early days. And that prepared me, I think, ultimately for raising the Series A, because I just got a lot of exposure from really smart people early on that could challenge me and eventually got the business to a point where where some of the top-tier funds wanted to take a look at it. Some of those introductions came from networks, people I already knew who said, I'd be— I'm happy to make introductions. And a lot of it came from my own just pitch and how I managed the pipeline of communications from that first phone call to term sheet. It's a delicate process. You don't want to give up too much in the beginning. You want to leave them wanting more. And designing that process a bit was part of it too.

If you were to, you know, speak to someone who is a founder themselves, and, and maybe you didn't come originally from the technology ecosystem, what advice would you have to them on their fundraising journey?

Well, I think I, so one of the best pieces of advice I ever got that didn't make any sense until after I'd raised money was, it's hard until it's not. And that's really true. The first, getting the first million dollars was scaling a mountain. And then all of a sudden getting to 2 million was pretty easy. So I think focusing on the first part of that journey is going to be the most important. And I think that the going in early when you're not quite ready is great, but not to ask for money, more to test the story and ask for advice from other people. So another great phrase is, when you want money, ask for advice. When you want advice, ask for money. And I think that's really true too. So go, go out specifically. I've given advice before when people want money from me, but it's true, right? So go out earlier. Test out the framework of your story. Don't ask for money, just ask, how does this resonate? What would you recommend I change? Are my metrics resonating? Do I need to think about this differently? Is the market big enough? Whatever it might be. Is my team— what do you think of my team? Here's what I put together. Where are the holes? Get all that stuff out of the way early, because by the time I met Accel, I had been pitching for 3 months already. I had already been— I was well-oiled. It was very, very well-oiled. And a lot of the larger firms can move pretty fast. So I would just say, don't do your, your rough drafts on the, on your, your ideal partners, do it on the people that you're not necessarily aiming to raise money from, but you respect and would want to get their advice on and do it a lot. I've pitched to hundreds of investors over the course of building this business, pitch to whoever will listen, even if it's not an investor. I mean, I've found myself pitching to waiters at restaurants or people, my friend, my family at Thanksgiving, whoever will listen. And I look for cues that tell me that part of the story resonated, that hooked them, that phrase worked. It became taxonomy of phrasing and language, especially when you're doing something that's never been done before. Nobody could relate to licensing the internet. They didn't know, they'd never licensed anything for commercial before. There was a lot of education on how the market works today and how we're going to fundamentally change it. So I had to find ways to communicate with people in a way that they could understand, they could relate to. And that took practice.

That advice is incredibly consistent with conversations Claudia and I have had actually on The Room prior, which is around not being too shy to share your idea and getting that iterative feedback early on, whether it be about the product itself or how you're telling your story and what the pitch looks. And so I'm so glad to hear you say that because I think Claudia and I both believe that is an excellent way to go about your first fundraise, your third fundraise, maybe even your final one. Claudia, anything you'd add there?

No, I mean, I think that resonates so much. When I reflect on my first fundraise, I think just looking back at where I started and where I ended after my 50th pitch, the, the narrative was very different. It was so much tighter. You were able to pick up on so much over that, those first few iterations. We've talked about this on the podcast, but being very open-eared to those first few conversations and constantly going back to the drawing board and rethinking how you can frame the story, rethinking how you can educate, really questioning whether people are understanding what you're saying is going to make the difference. And it seems that's exactly what you found in your experience.

Totally. Because there are patterns, there's patterns that you can pick up on. I mean, they, people always say that investors are great pattern matchers, but as entrepreneurs, we can be great pattern matchers too, if we meet enough investors to learn, "Oh, everyone's getting hung up on my business model, always, every time. What do I need to say to get them over that? Is there anything I need to lead with because I know that objection's coming?" There's a great— I'm a big sketch comedy fan and there's a great comedian, Mike Birbiglia. So he anticipates that somebody's going to be late every time. So he's built a joke in to 10 minutes into his set that's a joke about somebody being late because he knows someone's going to be walking into the theater at that moment. And he's ready. I think about that with pitching too, is where are investors going to get hung up? Because they're going to get hung up on something. And if you can— and they're all going to get hung up on the same stuff over and over again. So if you can anticipate those things, you can get them out of the way early. You can air them out. For mine, it was we weren't SaaS. We're not a SaaS business. A lot of investors really understand SaaS, and that's just what they understand. I went in saying, we're not SaaS, but our net revenue retention is 225%. Okay, I'm listening. I don't care anymore that it's not SaaS. That sounds great. Tell me more about that. So, but that took me years to get there in terms of learning what is the concern and how, what are they really after? It's not necessarily the model. It's really customer retention. It's predictability of revenue. So how can I shift the story, get them out of their own metrics and into mine? That was important.

Well, you've clearly made it work, not only because you successfully raised quite an impressive Series A, but also you have hundreds of customers using your product every day to help license great content. And so let's talk about your incredible product. From what we understand, Catch and Release is aiming to help find photos and videos easier to use for marketing and advertising and making this as, as simple as possible. Can you share a little bit more about how the name Catch and Release informs the user experience?

Yeah. I'd love to. And I'd love to also say that when I'm pitching to hundreds of investors and getting Accel to lead our A means that hundreds said no. So there wasn't— it wasn't easy. I don't want to make— I don't want people to feel, oh, it's so easy. It's really hard. And so resilience and just overcoming challenges is such an important quality too. So Catch and Release was a great naming story, actually, because it involves— I started the company in this room that I'm doing this podcast in. And my husband, who's a designer and a great strategist, actually helped me name it. He's a fly fisherman and he, I was describing to him in the early days when I was thinking about transitioning VisualCatch into a tech platform, I described to him my vision for Catch and Release, which was the internet is booming with content. Creators are creating every single day. Camera equipment is getting so much better. The quality of this content's incredible and brands are hamstrung by traditional production methods, and they need, they need to be liberated from that. They need to be able to go to Instagram or go to Vimeo and know that what they see and love, they can also license. And creators need the peace of mind that when a brand wants to use their content, that the exchange and the marketplace transaction can be safe and equitable, that they can get paid, that they can consent to the use of their content in advertising, and that it's an open and safe thing to do. And I said, it's not about building a library of content, stock house. It's really about leveraging all of the internet's content and being wherever the content is. And my husband turned to me and said, he said, yeah, it reminds me of fly fishing. It's a catch and release motion. You want to catch it and release it. You don't want to necessarily hold onto it and own it. You want to just be there in the moment and then let it go. And I was, well, you just named the company. It's going to be Catch and Release. And it's a great name for what we're doing. And it's two sides of this coin. It's really two sides of my own makeup, my own DNA, part creative, part analytical. It's part creative, part licensing and transactional. It's where art and business meet. And it's a really, it's a great name for what we're doing. And it's a great description of what the technology does too.

That's such a cool story. And I love the husband shout out for his creative energy and fingerprints on your company. And I have to say, I did watch a couple of the commercials. That you helped to create with Catch and Release content and the Red Lobster commercial and a few others. I would never have known that that was content that was not individually shot for that advertisement. It just so seamlessly pulled together what I would've imagined the content writers at Red Lobster would've said was what they needed. So anyone listening in, I would really encourage you to go check out some of the Catch and Release attributed content because you'll be like, wait, what? That wasn't custom? So very cool what you've been able to do and empower.

It needs to look high production value. It should look considered and thoughtful and intentional. And so then it's a matter of going through the internet with that lens and saying, okay, well, where does that stuff live and who's shooting it and where are they shooting it? And then Red Lobster had the additional exciting constraint of making sure that all of the content that they depicted or that they showed in their ad actually mapped back to real supply chain locations in the world. So it couldn't just be any sea, it couldn't just be any boat or any seafood coming out of the ocean. It actually had to map back to, to Red Lobster's menu. So that became another search.

And so you have some huge customers using your product, Red Lobster, but I'm sure when you were spending 2 years getting the business off the ground, bootstrapping, it didn't seem obvious that where you stand now is where you were going to be. I definitely face existential crises maybe on a daily basis around what next week and next year is going to look like. And so from your perspective, tell us about a time during the founding of Catch and Release where things didn't go as planned.

Every day, every single day. I think about the building of our team. I think about the transition from services to product. I think that took longer than we anticipated it would take. We had some really early investors that passed on the opportunity to invest in Catch and Release because of the services component and said, yeah, you might be able to get there, but come back to me when you've turned the corner. I'm not interested in taking that journey with you. And so I think we, I think I, I underappreciated how hard that transition would be. It's a mindset shift. It's a culture shift. Customers have to make that shift. So I think that, that you could point to that and say different personas of people were hired to join the company. Metric, different metrics were tracked. People were incentivized differently. The whole system was set up to support a different business. And so that transition was— I think I underestimated how hard that was going to be. And, and I think in terms of customers that there's— we learned so much from our customers in the early days because we were working with them side by side. We work a lot with advertising agencies and we love our partnerships with agency teams because they are, they are such creative hustlers. They're under the gun all the time. They're fighting fires and they're trying to come up with beautiful, creative, brilliant creative ideas despite all odds. And I love that about that culture. What's challenging to— as for a business is going to market as a product is that agencies aren't the only constituent in the economy of creative professionals. There's the brands, Red Lobster or P&G or Facebook or whomever play a large role in influencing what, what agencies do. And so that was a big learning in the early days was I think we need to broaden our horizon here from just working with advertising agencies who give us a lot of perspective on what happens on the ground, on the battleground in a project, hugely important information, but ultimately don't give us a lot of insight into the longer-term priorities for a brand. And so that, that was learning in the early days too, was I think we have to expand our horizon a little bit and start learning about other customer types. In our industry.

So you have agencies, you have brands, you have multiple people who are involved in the process of someone wanting an asset and Catch and Release basically servicing that need. You're not a SaaS business. I know that's a buzzword that investors use. Marketplace is another one as well.

Mm-hmm.

So could you tell us a little bit more about the key stakeholders in your marketplace and how have the dynamics between them evolved over time?

Yeah, definitely. So what's interesting about Catch and Release is that we are creating a marketplace with every transaction. So we have the demand side of our market, or really I think about them as all the buyers, and we want to be the rails upon which the whole industry licenses the internet, whether they're an agency, a brand, a production company, a freelancer, doesn't matter. If you're defining what a creative asset is going to be, if you're defining what a commercial is going to look, you are a buyer. And so we've built tools and capabilities and insights and also and services for the buy side. The supply side is all the creators on the internet. It's the creator economy. And we connect buyers to those creators on an on-demand basis. So customers come to our platform, they use our search tools, they identify content that they like from the web. And at the moment that they say, I want to license this, catch and release goes out and we contact the person who owns it and get them to transact and help them through that process. So we don't have an opt-in supply side to the marketplace, which makes us a little unique. It's not, we've got 1,000 suppliers and 1,000 customers, and then we just build both sides and then the thing builds. We actually have all these demand and we've got all of this prospective supply, and our technology helps us understand what's reliable and what isn't out there, both from a visual match perspective and also from a licensability perspective. We have a feature called the licensability rating that can assess instantaneously any URL on the web and give a buyer a prediction score as to how likely they are to license that. That's our supply. So our supply is very, very moving. It's constantly in flux because it's growing every single day. And it's our ability to predict who the creators are, how likely are they to transact, how quickly do we think they can transact, have they been in our network before, do we know any of the constituents in the, in the image or the video that help us determine that supply.

Have this incredible amount of capital from your recent fundraise to fuel the growth of Catch and Release. Tell us a little bit about what's next for you and your team's roadmap.

Well, it's a, it's really exciting. I mean, not just in terms of the, of the amount that we raised or, but really who we raised it from. I'm really excited about the partnership with the board member that's, that's joined and the, and the folks on the Accel side that are helping us. It's, it's a really exciting opportunity to accelerate toward our vision and take different kinds of bets that we couldn't take before. And it's been a, a good reframing for the whole team in terms of when you're operating under capital constraints, which companies who are bootstrapped often do, there can often be a cost to doing something, but there's also a cost to not doing something. And the cost of doing something is you may not succeed, you may fail. Indeed, you may fail at an idea or at a bet or at an investment that you make as a company. But the cost of not doing that is significant. And you have to have the runway and you have to have enough capital bandwidth to take those risks. So I'm really excited now that we have the opportunity to focus on our vision and our longer-term vision of licensing the internet. I'm really excited working with my team to say, where do we want to take these bets? Where do we want to— where do we want to try something that's never been done before anyway?

So I think in terms of where we are investing our Series A, it's It's really in product, it's in engineering, it's in marketing. I see marketing as a big opportunity for us because I think a lot of this is educating and changing the status quo and meeting customers where they are and bringing them along for this journey into the future as we see it. And marketing plays a really strategic role in that. So that's where we're mostly focusing on.

We're really excited for this next phase of growth for you and all that's to come for Catch and Release. If we can look back for a second, Claudia and I are so impressed and so intrigued by your previous life as an artist and creator yourself. Would you share with our listeners what was one of the most memorable moments for you as an artist yourself?

I had the opportunity when I was living in Italy after studying art there for 3 semesters to study with my mentors who were both 2 South African women that studied and grew up alongside contemporary artists and were themselves notable contemporary artists. And they had started this art school in Florence in the heart of the Renaissance to teach cutting, leading-edge art theory and contemporary art. It was a really cool experience to be exposed to. And I had the opportunity after studying with them for 3 semesters to be invited to participate in workshops with them privately in a group of— a curated group of students, or studenti, as we call them in Italian, and participate in art residencies in both South Africa and Italy. Where we had space to ourselves. We worked alongside a group, no walls in our studios. It was a lot of learning from each other, but I made some of the most interesting work of my life and, and was exposed to some of the most interesting artists I've ever come across. And just, I was in such an accelerated learning environment as far as art and art theory and questions around the art-making process was concerned. But that was probably one of the— that's been one of the highlights of my art career is Having access to amazing minds and being part of a community of people that are just so talented and challenging themselves every single day is really inspiring. And I think part of what gave me the audacity to start a company and deal with all the daily challenges was just getting up again and being, "Okay, back at it. We can do this.

Let's do it. This is so fun.

This is so cool. I love this journey." And just being in love with the process, loving the process as much as the product, I think is really important.

That is a good mantra to have for any founder out there who maybe is looking towards the IPO or the exit and down the line, but misses the small moments along the way of growth that you're never gonna get back. And so loving the process and not just the product, uh, is a very powerful note, uh, to get to the end of our conversation today. As we look, we looked back, we've talked about what happened in the lifecycle of Catch and Release to date, but companies are not just businesses, they're also people and their experiences. For you, Annalisa, what's next? What's coming up on the horizon for you personally, for you in this next phase of journey?

Well, I would say one thing that I'm— what I didn't mention that I think is definitely worth mentioning is when we talk about taking dollars from a Series A and investing them in product marketing and engineering, we're really talking about team. We're talking about investing in people who are going to join the journey and believe in this mission and vision and help us execute it. And I think that's been a really exciting thing for me that I've found myself really enjoying is the leadership piece and actually assembling this team, nurturing and growing the team, and putting ourselves in situations where we are— we challenge each other, we collaborate with each other. We have an improv coach that we work with who teaches us the value of creation on demand. It's really, really fun and ties back to my love for sketch comedy, but brings brings it into a business environment where the stakes are a little higher, but the need for trust and true collaboration and candor is equally as important for great creative output. So I really am becoming fascinated by what's in store for me from a leadership perspective, because I find that to be uniquely my position here at the company, but it's also something that I just find really inspiring. And I've made so many mistakes in the past this, that I'm in the early stages of learning how to be CEO and learning how to lead, that I'm just really excited to continually like refine and perfect and get better and better at doing it. So that's, that for me is a thing I'm really, I'm really focusing on. I've got two children. I have a 10-year-old and a 3.5-year-old.

The 10-year-old was here in my office when I started to catch and release in a Moses basket.

She was a month old when I was like, "Spark! Let's do this as a product." And so making sure that I— COVID has been friendly to us in the sense of having a lot of family time and not without stress, but with a lot of silver lining also. So making sure I'm available for my daughters and my husband and that we're going through all this together and making some time for ourselves, maybe taking a vacation at some point, maybe all that. That's going to be important too. But I'm really excited about the growth and the team and bringing people along for this and treating them with respect and holding us all accountable to this big, amazing thing we see.

Thank you so much for sharing that. And we're excited for you. Just hearing kind of your energy, it's incredibly infectious. We ask this final question to all of our podcast guests. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on your career?

There's been a lot at different stages too. There have been women who've inspired me on the art side. There have been women that have inspired me on the production side, on the restaurant side, on the technology side. I would say that my mother-in-law, Karen, who's an amazing strategist, was really inspiring to me, especially in the early days. She continues to be inspiring to me, but she really, to me, represented a bridge between the managed service part of my life and artist part of my life and the future as a tech CEO and showed me a path through her own actions on how to ask the right questions, how to develop the confidence to do it. She was just incredibly inspiring and just a bottomless well. Of knowledge and strategy and input that I drew from a lot in the early days and continue to draw from now.

That's incredible. Well, thank you so much, Annalisa, for sharing your story and your learnings and what you're looking forward to on today's episode. We are so excited that you were here and can't wait for what's next.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Claudia. Thank you, Madison. You guys are awesome.

Thank you for listening to for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please like, follow, subscribe, talk to us in Clubhouse, and share with friends. Get excited for next week's episode with another special guest answering your startup questions, airing June 8th, Tuesday at 8 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in The Room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5AC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank.

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