The founder who turned conference chaos into a data problem
He lined up ten customers for February 2020, then the events industry went dark overnight. Alex Reynolds kept building anyway - and turned the messy art of picking conferences into a data problem worth solving.
In February 2020, Alex Reynolds had ten customers lined up and a company to run. The plan was clean: launch a platform that told marketers which conferences and trade shows were actually worth the flights, the booth, the badge scanners, the open bar. Then the world's calendar emptied out. Every event on earth was cancelled at once. The single industry his company existed to serve simply stopped happening.
Most people would have read that as the market telling them no. Reynolds read it as a delay. He kept building. Four years later, Vendelux tracks more than 160,000 global B2B events and 65 million data points, has raised roughly $18 million, and counts Okta, PayPal and Publicis among the companies that now check the data before they decide where to show up.
The through-line of his story is not a lucky break. It is stubbornness applied to a boring, expensive problem almost nobody wanted to touch.
01 / The originThe Cannes Lions problem
Before Vendelux, Reynolds ran Platform Solutions at Shutterstock, where he built a business unit to roughly $30 million in annual recurring revenue with a global team of about 75 people. It was there, watching how large companies actually made decisions, that he noticed the same quiet dysfunction repeat itself every year.
The clearest example was Cannes Lions, the advertising industry's giant gathering on the French Riviera. Every year, stakeholders wanted to go. Every year, the cost climbed. And every year, nobody could say whether it had worked. Decisions landed at the last minute, budgets inflated, and the return on all of it stayed a mystery.
If you show up to the event and you're amongst 10,000 or 100,000 people, it's incredibly difficult to get attention from the people that you care about.
He kept looking for the tool that would fix this - the software that would tell a marketing team which events their customers and competitors were attending, and what came back from showing up. There wasn't one. So the gap in the market and the itch to build his own thing arrived at the same time.
02 / The bloodlineThree generations of building
The urge to start something was not new to the family. Reynolds describes himself as a third-generation entrepreneur. His grandfather came through Ellis Island and opened a meat market in Boston. His father founded a market research company. The products changed across the decades - meat, then market research, then machine learning - but the instinct to run your own thing carried straight down the line.
That lineage shows up in how he talks about risk. He is not chasing a moonshot so much as continuing a habit. When he left the security of a senior role at Shutterstock, it read less like a leap and more like a family tradition catching up with him.
03 / The co-founderFive years before the leap
Reynolds met his co-founder, Stefan Deeran, at Shutterstock. They worked side by side for five years before they ever started a company together. That runway is central to how he thinks about the single most important early decision a founder makes.
Picking a co-founder is very much like a marriage.
You don't marry a stranger, the logic goes, and you shouldn't build a company with one either. The years of watching each other handle pressure, disagreement and boredom were the due diligence. By the time Vendelux existed, the hardest partnership question was already answered.
That same deliberateness showed up in the company's culture. Before hiring a single full-time employee, Reynolds and his team wrote down their values as explicit trade-offs. One of them - "ownership mentality versus mercenary mentality" - was designed to filter out people chasing the next title bump, and to keep the people who wanted to stay and build.
04 / The playbookJust start, then charge a dollar
Ask Reynolds for advice and you get something close to the opposite of a business-school plan. His first rule is to skip most of the planning. He has watched too many people polish a strategy for a year instead of putting a rough version in front of a real customer. A wireframe counts. Anything that tests the assumption counts.
He knows this firsthand, because his own first assumption was wrong. Vendelux thought it would sell to sales reps. It turned out marketers were the buyers. He only found that out by shipping.
People are going to vote with their wallets.
His second rule follows from the first: don't trust the feedback of friends. Politeness and genuine interest look identical right up until money changes hands. So charge - even a dollar - and watch who actually pays. And his third rule is the one he says matters most for anyone small taking on anyone large.
Speed is your only advantage as a new entrepreneur or new company.
05 / The productWhat the data actually buys
Underneath the founder philosophy is a fairly concrete machine. Vendelux aggregates attendance data from many sources, including direct partnerships with event organizers, and layers on predictive modeling and CRM integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce. The output is a plain answer to an expensive question: is this event worth it, and who from your list will be in the room?
The results customers report are not subtle. Reynolds points to teams cutting cost-per-lead in half and lifting event-sourced revenue by well over a hundred percent - numbers that then justify doubling or tripling the next year's event budget. His argument to marketers is that the old approach of sending everyone everywhere no longer holds.
If you get to the event and you haven't done the pre-work, you've already lost.
His preferred rhythm is to reach out two to three weeks before an event, when people are close enough to be thinking about the trip but not yet buried in it, and to send the right handful of people rather than a crowd. The traditional multi-city roadshow, he argues flatly, is dead.
06 / The bigger betRelationships, not just rooms
Events are the entry point, not the destination. Reynolds frames the long-term mission in broader terms - empowering people to build meaningful professional relationships, and eventually extending that into customer success, mentorship and recruiting. He is careful to separate that idea from the social networks. Clicking "connect," he points out, is not the same thing as actually knowing someone.
The path there has not been tidy. He talks openly about navigating banking scares, customer disputes and security threats - the constant supply of unexpected problems that comes with running a young company. His response to all of it is almost unfashionably simple.
The only way it won't work out is if you stop. But if you keep putting one foot in front of the other and making a little progress every day, then over time, little by little, it becomes a lot.
That is, in the end, the whole story compressed into a sentence. He had every reason to stop in February 2020. The events industry gave him permission to walk away. He treated it as a Tuesday, put one foot in front of the other, and kept walking until the calendar filled back up - this time with a company that could tell you exactly which dates were worth the trip.