How this Founder Reinvented Her Startup

Some business plans get written on a napkin. Talia Mashiach’s outline for Eved required a tablecloth.

Two years ago, she and Jai Shekhawat, then-CEO of software maker Fieldglass, were brainstorming over lunch about how she could turn her small business—a web-based marketplace for corporate meeting planners and vendors—into a full-service software product for big companies. Before leaving the West Loop diner, Mashiach folded up the paper tablecloth on which she had scribbled her notes. Then she went back to work.

Soon she relaunched Eved as a provider of software that allows corporations to monitor and manage their spending on meetings and events, from bid through payment. Six months later, computer maker Dell signed on as her first big customer. Other Fortune 500 giants have followed, including Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly. Eved also boasts more than 5,000 vendors.

“It’s a hot space,” says Teran Andes, a managing director in KPMG’s procurement-advisory practice in Chicago, who has recommended Eved to clients. “Now is her moment.”

Mashiach declines to disclose the company’s financial numbers but says sales could nearly triple in the coming year. To get there, the 38-year-old CEO hired Morningstar veteran Trista Hannan to head up sales, one of a half-dozen additions to Eved’s staff in the past three months. The company is up to nearly 60 employees. (Sixteen of them are in Chicago; most of Eved’s engineering team is in Romania, where Mashiach’s longtime tech partner, Christi Zech, is based.) She expects to add 20 to 30 people next year.

SELF-TAUGHT

One of the few women in Chicago to create a tech startup, Mashiach studied marketing at Loyola University Chicago but taught herself software architecture. She’s gotten this far thanks to that DIY ethos and by turning to successful entrepreneurs and investors for guidance. In addition to Shekhawat, her mentors include Matt McCall, Michael Ferro and Bob Montgomery.

McCall, a partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, is impressed by her pluck. “No matter what happens, she goes, ‘I’m going to fix this and it’s going to be a huge success,’ “ he says. “I have never seen her doubt the vision once in 10 years.” Pritzker Group led a $9.5 million investment in Eved three years ago.

When Mashiach started the original Eved in 2004, her aim was to modernize the corporate events business, which was largely run via faxes, Post-its, phone calls and spreadsheets. Her alternative was moving much of the rigmarole to a website. “We grew it to nearly $10 million, but it was low-margin and there was no recurring revenue,” she says.

Mashiach wanted more. In 2011, she sold the service business but kept the underlying technology and the Eved name. She then set out to build a site for event planners and management companies, and all of the vendors they use. The procurement platform allowed companies to find a vendor and handle invoicing online. What companies like Dell really wanted, though, was the ability to track and automate transactions throughout the process so they could control spending in real time.

“Dell was great in helping us figure out what the product needs to do,” she says.

Tools like Eved’s have become common for other activities, from factory production to logistics and travel. But even though some companies are spending up to $1 billion a year on get-togethers, their events planners largely were left to their own devices. “It’s a huge area of spend that’s not well-controlled,” Andes says.

After employing Eved, Dell says it cut administrative costs for meetings by 20 percent.

Such results have the potential to make Eved’s product sticky—and lucrative. The company licenses its software based on a percentage of total spending that goes through the platform. In other words, the bigger the bill, the more Eved pockets.

Of course, other companies, including American Express, Cvent and Lanyon, own big chunks of the estimated $770 billion meetings and events business, such as payments, planning and putting on events. But Mashiach says Eved is the only one that stitches together everything in a single view.

“It’s unique,” agrees Bruce Morgan, a senior vice president at BCD Meetings & Events, a Chicago-based meetings management company that uses Eved and recommends it to customers. He’d like the company to add a hotel database component, to make the platform a true one-stop shop. Still, he says, “I think they’re opening the eyes of the industry to full automation.”

If Mashiach needs to pivot to Eved 3.0, she still has that tablecloth for guidance.