Alexander Reynolds

The through-line

Reynolds keeps returning to one gap: events consume between 24 and 40 percent of a B2B marketing budget and remain the least instrumented channel in the stack [2]. He traces the idea back to a recurring conversation at Shutterstock, where the business unit he and his co-founder Stephan built from zero to roughly $30 million in ARR grew mostly through conferences and trade shows [2]. Every year the same question came up about Cannes Lions, "should we go back to this event," and the answer depended on knowing how the previous year had gone, "and nobody really knew" [1]. The decision would be made at the eleventh hour, a month out, when everything cost ten times what it would have with planning, thirty sales reps would be sent, a yacht booked, some reps working the floor and some "sipping Ros all day on the boat," and then "the CFO would say you know how did we do and nobody knew" [1]. That is the mismatch the company exists to close: "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 position has widened over time. What began as measuring event ROI has become an argument that a whole marketing function needs to be redefined, with the ambition stated as a vision to "empower Humanity to build meaningful professional relationships," of which events are the current best expression rather than the endpoint [2].

On who you meet being the whole game

The philosophy underneath the product is narrow and consistent: "our fundamental philosophy is that the success of event is all about who you can meet with," and "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]. So the work is making meetings happen before, during and after the show [1]. Vendelux has built a database of events, speakers, sponsors and attendee information, over 100,000 events by one account and 200,000 on the system by another, cross-referenced against a customer's ideal customer profile, a named list of companies, or specific people, with a CRM integration so that a $10 million open deal weighs more than a $50,000 one [1][2]. Data comes "everywhere that we possibly can," from customers, from public sources, and increasingly from organizers directly, on the logic that everyone benefits when attendees and sponsors arrive prepared [2].

The second output matters as much as the first: not only which events, but who to send. Reynolds argues it often makes no sense to spend hundreds of thousands or millions on an activation if the goal is to meet ten specific people, and the better return can be one excellent sales or partnerships person who will actually connect with them [1]. For a startup, the ticket may be optional altogether: fly in, host a great dinner in a private room, and for a fraction of a sponsorship get the ten people who matter most into one conversation [1]. He is also blunt that this is not how most teams decide today. Marketers pick events by industry label, by habit, or because the CEO says so, so "it's very much based on politics and gut not data and insights" [2].

On building an event strategy from scratch

Asked how he would run the function himself, he works backwards from objectives before touching a calendar. The best ones are 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 counts, though he thinks it matters more for large companies than for smaller startups [2]. Only then does the question of where the ICP will be arise, which he calls the traditionally difficult part, since the alternatives are asking organizers or reading sponsor lists off a website [2]. After that comes who to send, aligning reps to the audience so that the person with fifty leads at the show is the person on the plane, and then close tracking of whether the meetings happened and whether they converted to wins in the CRM [2].

None of this is a claim that events stand alone. "It's a multitouch attribution world," and event success depends on SDR and email campaigns going out in advance so everything is lined up [1]. The single highest-ROI action he names is on the other side of the show: the "hey I missed you at the event" email, which performs unusually well [1]. Digital and in-person touch points run through the whole customer lifetime, before, during and at upsell [1].

On the bet against virtual events

The company was building on nights and weekends with ten unaffiliated customers in February 2020, ready to go full time, when the industry went on hold, which he calls "probably one of the lowest moments in my life" [2]. They kept their day jobs and stayed skeptical of the consensus while Hopin and Hubilo were the rage, on the belief that "the magic around events is getting people together in person" [2]. He notes Hopin peaked around an $8 billion valuation and later sold to RingCentral for a fraction of it [2]. Vendelux supported virtual events during COVID because that was all that existed, but interest from its roughly sixty customers and thousands of free users has been "almost nothing" [1]. He allows digital its proper use case, scale and reach for a roundtable or a broadcast to thousands, "but that you know that that's kind of a webinar" [1]. What in-person offers cannot be imitated: "the magic of events are that 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 relationships [2].

That contrarian read also shaped fundraising. Going out in October 2021, just as Omicron hit, most investors asked what made him think people would ever meet in person again [1][2]. He credits Ben Narasin at Tenacity, who had worked trade show floors himself, with seeing it when few others did, and says the Series A was significantly easier once the pendulum had swung back [2]. The trend has since compounded in his favour: remote work removed the old road show, where one New York-to-California trip put you in front of Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Snap at their campuses, so "events have become even more important" as the one place to find people face to face [1]. He reports events were back to roughly pre-pandemic size in 2023, with a smaller international audience, and by 2024 were bigger on average than they have ever been [2].

On event marketers as the unsung heroes

Reynolds is consistent and warm about the buyer. "We call these marketers the unsung heroes because 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]. They spend months coordinating sales, partnerships, operations, PR and other marketing teams, and yet their outcomes depend entirely on stakeholders they do not control [1]. He tells of a customer who delivered 175 leads that she knew sat in reps' pipelines, and the reps never actioned them [1]. Their tooling is CRM, marketing automation and sales intelligence, and beyond that "the vast majority of what they're doing is Powerpoint Excel Blood Sweat and Tears," with marketers reporting thirty hours every two weeks spent Googling which events to attend [2].

That produces two aha moments. The first is being shown every persona they care about across every event on their radar [2]. The second is accountability running the other way: sales reps want to go to Miami or Cannes and "they almost treat it like a free vacation," when they are there to drive revenue, so handing marketers data to hold sales to their job is something "they love" [2]. In his framing, the platform gives the event marketer a seat at the table and an enforcement mechanism at the same time [1].

On creating a category rather than joining one

He is explicit that Vendelux is neither event tech nor sales intelligence, and that a name for the new category is still work in progress, "whether it's connection generation marketing or something like that" [2]. The reasoning about why nobody funded this space is candid: "a lot of VCS are pattern matchers," and they look at Cvent, worth roughly six billion after twenty years, conclude the ceiling is low, and move on [2]. His counter is that almost every event tech company is built for organizers, who do not have big budgets, while the money sits with the attending and sponsoring companies [2].

The model he holds up is Gainsight, which took account management, a tactical cost centre, and turned it into customer success, a strategic profit centre with net revenue retention as the gold-standard metric [2]. Event marketing needs the same transition, because today sales, SDRs, customer success, recruiting, legal and finance all attend events independently and the event marketing function has almost no end-to-end visibility [2]. His answer is "a new marketer who's almost the quarterback for all of those inperson touch points," directing every occasion where the company meets customers, prospects, partners or recruits in person [2].

On the ICP, the budget line and how expansion happens

The target is event and field marketers, generally at companies above 100 to 200 employees where the role is dedicated, and specifically those attending at least ten events a year so the platform can support them across a whole calendar [2]. Coverage ambition is every B2B event worldwide, with today's customers concentrated in e-commerce and retail, data and security, tech and payments [1]. The pain scales with breadth of ICP: a company selling microphones knows its handful of specialised shows and its buyer, while an Okta or a PayPal can sell to almost any business of a certain size, which makes allocating one, five or ten million dollars across an overwhelming world of events genuinely hard [1].

On budget, he does not ask for a new line item at first. Event marketers already control a large pie, so they fund the first purchase from within it, taking a gold sponsorship instead of platinum or reallocating an underspend, and once results show, the sales team asks to be on the platform and the account grows from there [2]. Approach shifts with company size, from ten-person startups to large organisations, though the in-person core stays the same: the right people, at the right time, in the right place [1].

On how Vendelux markets itself

"We consider ourselves to be customer zero": the company uses its own product to choose which events to attend, and keeps SDRs living in trade show hubs like Vegas and London who work shows every week [2]. The insight is timing. Hundreds of event marketers at any given show are at their maximum pain point, having just spent two or three months preparing and feeling short of pre-booked meetings, and the pitch is to hear it from the ten to thirty existing customers also at that event and to come to the offsite VIP happy hour [2]. Content is built around the same behaviour: event guides and industry roundups such as best AI events and best tech events perform for SEO, and answer the very basic questions people search two to four weeks before a show, down to the dress code [2]. Case studies plus that content drive both leads and signups to a free tier of roughly 7,000 event marketers, who then convert [2].

He also thinks the biggest shows should be understood as ecosystems, where much of the value sits in the VIP happy hours and small dinners around the main event [2]. The best organisers embrace those satellite events; the ones who try to control the ecosystem because they believe the value should be theirs end up suppressing the buzz [2]. Whether the FaceTime happens at a 100,000-person conference or a 100-person dinner matters less than the fact that it happens at all [2].

On the Shutterstock origins of the thesis

The credibility for all of this comes from having run the problem at scale. At Shutterstock, the platform solutions team made the company's image, footage and music content available inside the places where people actually create websites, emails and ads, providing building blocks that added value for partners and end users as well [1]. Managing more than 20,000 partnerships with 75 people worked through tiering: some 16,000 to 17,000 developers building their own projects on the API were run as a community with community managers and events, while the remaining 3,000 or so got customer success and dedicated partner managers [1]. Within that machine, events "when they worked well they were the single best thing that that we could do as a business," producing new customers and partners, and giving a chance to sit down with a partner when a relationship was "on the rocks" and repair it in person [1]. The counterpart was equally clear: at a bad event "you knew immediately," after months of preparation [1].

Takeaways

• Judge an event by who you can meet, not by its industry label or the size of the activation: "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].
• For a target list of ten people, sending one excellent rep or hosting a private dinner can beat a six or seven figure sponsorship [1].
• Build the strategy backwards from objectives and KPIs, new pipeline, ARR touched by events, and net revenue retention, then find where the ICP will be, then decide who to send, then track meetings through to wins in the CRM [2].
• The highest-ROI single action around an event is the follow-up "hey I missed you at the event" email, inside a multi-touch programme of pre-event SDR and email campaigns [1].
• Virtual events serve scale and reach and amount to a webinar; interest from Vendelux customers and free users has been "almost nothing," while 2024 events ran bigger on average than ever before [1][2].
• Event marketers carry all the blame and none of the credit, work largely in "Powerpoint Excel Blood Sweat and Tears," and buy fastest when given both proof of value and a way to hold sales accountable [2].
• Events are a category-creation play modelled on Gainsight's move from account management to customer success, aiming at a marketer who acts as "the quarterback for all of those inperson touch points" [2].
• Sell where the pain peaks: SDRs based in trade show hubs, existing customers on the floor as references, and an offsite VIP happy hour, backed by SEO event guides feeding a free tier of about 7,000 marketers [2].