Alex Reynolds

The through-line

Reynolds's fixed idea is that events are the largest line of B2B marketing spend that nobody can measure, and that this is a data problem rather than a taste problem. He traces it to a specific, repeating scene: three years running, deciding whether to return to a major annual event, thousands of hours of executive meetings spent trying to answer one basic question, and no answer. "How did we do this past year and nobody really knew" [1]. Decisions got made at the eleventh hour, costs multiplied, thirty sales reps got sent, some of them "sipping Ros all day on the boat," and then "the CFO would say you know how did we do and nobody knew" [1]. Set against digital advertising, where "you have much better signal around you know the performance," the gap was obvious enough that he and his co-founder concluded "there has to be a better way to do this there's there so much wasted time and money that is being spent on this channel" [1].

The second half of the through-line is a conviction he held when it was unpopular: that in-person contact is not substitutable. He built Vendelux through a period when digital event platforms were valued in the billions and investors asked what made him think people would ever meet in person again [1][2][11]. He never wavered, and the argument has hardened rather than softened. Because so many people no longer work in offices, the old road show is dead, and events have become "really the one place when you can find the people you're looking for in in person" [1][2].

On why event ROI has never been answerable

The failure is structural, not a matter of lazy marketers. Everyone involved has an incentive to present favourable numbers, because everyone wants to be invited back to the tentpole events, and the smaller events get approved on a credit card with no follow-up at all [1]. Post-event debriefs collect who was in the meeting and what was discussed, and still leave the question of whether the needle moved unanswered [1]. His diagnosis of how events get chosen is blunt: marketers pick by the industry label on the event, or because they have always gone, or because the CEO says so, and "it's very much based on politics and gut not data and insights" [2].

The tooling gap is just as stark. Event marketers stitch together CRM, marketing automation and sales intelligence, but "the vast majority of what they're doing is Powerpoint Excel Blood Sweat and Tears," and he has spoken to marketers who say "I spend 30 hours every two weeks right we're just Googling to figure out what events I should be at" [2]. His explanation for why capital never flowed here is that "a lot of VCS are pattern matchers": the largest company in events is worth roughly six billion and took twenty years to get there, so investors concluded the category could not produce unicorns [2]. He thinks that reads the market wrong, because almost every existing event technology company is built for organizers, and organizers do not have big budgets [2].

On who you can meet with

Everything in the product follows from one principle: "our fundamental philosophy is that the success of event is all about who you can meet with right and so even if the right people are in the room at an event if you go there and you don't connect with them then they may as well have not been there" [1]. That reframes the whole question of event size. Large conferences he thinks of as an ecosystem, where much of the value sits in the VIP happy hours and small dinners around the main show, and the best organizers embrace those satellite events instead of trying to control them, because the buzz and value creation are higher when they proliferate [2]. Whether the FaceTime happens at a hundred-thousand-person conference or a hundred-person dinner matters far less than whether it happens at all [2].

The magic he is protecting is specific: "10,000 people or 100,000 people are all going to a specific place at a shared moment in time for a shared purpose," which makes people open to new experiences and new relationships in a way that cannot be imitated [2]. Virtual events, in his account, are genuinely useful for scale and reach, a round table reaching thousands or millions, "but that you know that that's kind of a webinar" [1]. Vendelux supported virtual formats when that was all there was, and demand from its customers and free users has been close to nothing [1].

On the bet against virtual, and fundraising through it

The first version of the platform was built on nights and weekends, with ten unaffiliated customers by February 2020 and plans to go full-time, and then the events industry was put on hold overnight, which he calls "probably one of the lowest moments in my life" [2]. He and his co-founder kept their day jobs and held the position that "the magic around events is getting people together in person" while a digital event platform peaked near an eight billion dollar valuation and later sold for a small fraction of that [2]. He is candid about the doubt: "those were some dark days right you look at yourself and say is this really gonna come back" [2].

Fundraising tracked that sentiment precisely. The first round went out in October 2021, just as Omicron hit and the market repeated the whole cycle again, and most investors said in-person events were never coming back [2][11]. He notes that VCs talk about being contrarian more often than they behave that way, and that the investor who did back him had been on trade show floors himself and saw it when few others did [2]. By the Series A the pendulum had swung and the raise was significantly easier, with people seeing the value rather than needing to be convinced of the premise [2][11]. His read on where the industry actually landed: 2023 events were back to roughly pre-pandemic size even with a weaker international audience, and 2024 events are on average bigger than they have ever been [2].

On event marketers as the unsung heroes

He is consistent and emphatic that this buyer is underserved. Event marketers move mountains, coordinating sales, partnerships, operations, PR and other marketing teams over months of preparation, and yet their outcomes depend entirely on stakeholders they do not control [1]. The asymmetry is what he keeps returning to: "if everything goes right at an event then you're nothing but if the coffee is cold or the booth isn't set up on time then they get all of the blame" [2]. He cites a customer who generated 175 leads she knew were already in reps' pipelines, and watched the reps fail to action them [1].

That is why the second aha moment in his sales conversations is accountability rather than discovery. Sales reps often treat a trip to Miami or Cannes as a free vacation when the point is to drive revenue, and marketers respond strongly to data that lets them "almost turn the tables" and hold sales to the job [2]. He describes the pitch as giving these marketers a seat at the table plus a mechanism of enforcement, and says the response is that their eyes light up [1][2]. On the old question of whether this audience will accept science over instinct, his answer is an unqualified yes [1].

On building an event strategy from scratch

He works backwards from objectives, and names the ones he considers real: lead generation, nurturing existing pipeline, and seeing existing customers, with KPIs of new pipeline generated, ARR touched by events, retention and net revenue retention [2]. Brand awareness matters, but he thinks it matters more for large companies than for startups [2]. From that north star, the next question is where the ICP actually is, which is the traditionally hard part, since the only conventional recourse is asking organizers or reading sponsor lists off a website [2].

Then come two decisions he treats as equally important. First, which events. Second, who to send, because the people you send need to be aligned with the audience that will be there, and if one rep has fifty leads at a show, that is the rep who goes [1][2]. With CRM data in the mix, prioritisation can follow deal value rather than headcount, weighting the stakeholders on a ten million dollar deal above those on a fifty thousand dollar one [2]. Finally, ROI gets tracked closely enough to confirm that the planned meetings actually happened and translated into wins [2].

He also insists the right-sized activation is often much smaller than the reflex suggests. If the goal is meeting ten people, the best ROI may be sending one excellent sales or partnerships person rather than spending hundreds of thousands or millions on a booth [1]. For a startup wanting to see five customers and twenty or thirty prospects, you can pay for travel, skip the ticket entirely, and run a VIP dinner in a private room that gets the ten people who matter into one conversation for a fraction of a sponsorship [1].

On events inside the wider marketing machine

He refuses the maximalist version of his own argument: "I would be lying if I was sitting here saying you know events are the only thing that matter" [1]. It is a multitouch attribution world, and event success depends on SDR and email campaigns going out beforehand so that everything is lined up on the day [1]. He singles out post-event follow-up as one of the highest ROI actions available, noting that the "hey I missed you at the event" email performs very well [1]. Across a customer lifetime there are digital touch points before, event touch points during, and further digital touch points as you look to upsell [1].

The horizontal sellers have the hardest version of the problem. If you sell microphones, there are a few specialised shows and you know your buyer; if you are PayPal, you can sell to almost any business above a certain size, which makes the world of events overwhelming and budget allocation across one, five or ten million dollars genuinely difficult [1]. Vendelux aims for coverage of every B2B event worldwide, with customers concentrated today in e-commerce and retail, data and security, and payments [1].

On the data underneath it

The data comes from everywhere he can get it: customers sharing information, publicly available sources, and increasingly direct work with event organizers, on the logic that organizers, sponsors and attendees all want the same thing, and better-prepared participants create more value [2][11]. The result is a database covering events, speakers, sponsors and attendee information, with three-plus years of historical signal on where people have been, cross-referenced against a customer's ideal customer profile, named target list or CRM pipeline [1][2]. The Fusion product layers AI and first-party data on top of that, aimed at making sense of the sheer volume of attendee history available [1].

On category creation

He is explicit that this is a category creation play, and that Vendelux is neither event tech nor sales intelligence [2]. The name is unsettled, with "connection generation marketing" floated as a candidate and described as work in process [2]. The model he reaches for is the transformation of account management into customer success, which took a function considered tactical and a cost centre and turned it into a strategic profit centre with net revenue retention as its gold standard metric [2]. Event marketing needs the same transition: everyone knows events are valuable, nobody can quantify it, and meanwhile sales, SDRs, customer success, recruiting, legal and finance all attend events independently with no one holding an end-to-end view [2]. His proposed role is a marketer who acts as quarterback for every in-person touch point with customers, prospects, partners and recruits [2]. The longer vision is broader than events themselves: "empower Humanity to build meaningful professional relationships," with events as today's best venue for that and other channels to follow [2].

The budget question has an unglamorous but practical answer. Since events already account for 24 to 40 percent of B2B marketing budgets, customers typically fund the platform out of their existing pie, taking a gold sponsorship instead of platinum or reallocating money left over from an event that came in under budget, and expand from there once sales sees the results and asks to be on the platform [2].

On selling the way he tells customers to sell

Vendelux treats itself as customer zero, using its own product to decide which events to attend [2]. SDRs live in trade show hubs like Vegas and London and work shows every week, on the reasoning that every show contains hundreds of event marketers at their maximum pain point, two or three months into preparation and feeling short of pre-booked meetings, and the pitch is to hear it from the twenty or thirty existing customers who are also on the floor and to come to the offsite VIP happy hour [2]. Content marketing runs on the same logic of meeting demand where it spikes: event guides, industry roundups that perform for SEO, and answers to the most commonly asked practical questions, down to the dress code, which people search two to four weeks before a show [2]. Case studies and that content feed both leads and free signups, and a free tier of roughly seven thousand event marketers converts into paid [1][2]. The ICP is anyone attending at least ten events a year, which typically means companies above 100 to 200 employees where a dedicated event or field marketer exists [2].

On managing partnerships at scale

His earlier experience of running platform partnerships shapes how he thinks about coverage. With 20,000 partner companies and a 75-person team, the answer was a tiered model: sixteen or seventeen thousand of those were developers building their own projects on APIs, managed as a community with community managers and events, and the remaining three thousand handled with customer success and dedicated partner managers [1]. The business unit grew from zero to roughly thirty million in ARR, and that growth came mostly from conferences and trade shows [2]. Events were where new customers and partners appeared, and where relationships that were on the rocks got repaired by sitting down and breaking bread [1]. That is the origin of the whole thesis: "when it worked well it was the best thing that we could do when it didn't work well it was a huge waste of time and money" [2].

Takeaways

• The decision to attend an event is usually made on politics, habit and gut, and the fix is knowing which of your target personas, prospects and customers will actually be in the room [2].
• Success at an event is determined by who you connect with, not who attends: "even if the right people are in the room at an event if you go there and you don't connect with them then they may as well have not been there" [1].
• The right-sized activation is often far smaller than a booth: if you need to meet ten people, send one excellent rep or host a private dinner for a fraction of a sponsorship cost [1].
• Choosing who to send matters as much as choosing the event; if a rep has fifty leads attending, that is the rep who goes, and CRM deal values should drive meeting priorities [1][2].
• Virtual events are effective for scale and reach but amount to a webinar, and demand for them among Vendelux's customers and free users is close to nothing [1].
• Because fewer people are in offices, the traditional road show has broken down and events are now the most reliable place to get face time with stakeholders [1][2].
• Event marketers are the unsung heroes of B2B: they carry the blame when the coffee is cold and get no credit when it goes right, and they respond to tooling that gives them leverage over sales follow-through [1][2].
• Events represent 24 to 40 percent of B2B marketing budgets, and new spend on event intelligence is typically funded by trading a platinum sponsorship for a gold one [2].
• The category model is what customer success did to account management: move event marketing from cost centre to strategic function with a quarterback owning every in-person touch point [2].
• Post-event follow-up, including the simple "hey I missed you at the event" email, is among the highest ROI actions a company can take around an event [1].