Founder · Builder · Avochato
Alex De Simone
He thinks the customer holds the steering wheel. So he built a way for businesses to text back - and got a thousand of them to listen.
He thinks the customer holds the steering wheel. So he built a way for businesses to text back - and got a thousand of them to listen.
Walk into most software companies and the founder will tell you they are building the future. Alex De Simone built something smaller and stranger: a way for a plumber, a car dealer, or a university to answer a text message. Avochato, the company he co-founded and runs, does one unglamorous thing extremely well - it lets a business have a real conversation over SMS, the way a friend would.
That bet looks obvious now. It did not in 2015, when email autoresponders and phone trees were how companies "talked" to people. De Simone started Avochato the summer after his first year at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, building the core product inside the Stanford Venture Studio between classes, knocking on doors to ask businesses what they actually needed, and closing the first paying customers himself.
Within a year, a five-person team had pushed Avochato past seven-figure revenue. By the end of 2018 he had raised a $5 million Series A led by Amity Ventures. Today the platform counts more than a thousand customers running millions of two-way conversations - sales teams chasing leads, support teams fielding questions, operations teams coordinating in real time. The pitch never changed: meet people where their thumbs already are.
Customers are in the driver's seat. When they reach out, the experience needs to be personalized, instant, and always on.
The straight path would have kept him at Accenture, in a suit, advising other people on how to run their companies. De Simone left to do the harder thing. He taught himself to write software and talked his way into Moovweb, a mobile commerce shop, as a developer - shipping mobile sites that reached millions of shoppers, including one for Men's Wearhouse.
That is where the founder bug bit. With his roommate and a Moovweb colleague, he co-founded Jobr, a job-search app that borrowed the most addictive mechanic of its era: swipe right to apply, swipe left to skip. Tinder, but for getting hired. It drew press and investors quickly, and it forced a choice. De Simone chose Stanford GSB - and somehow kept Jobr alive on the side.
The double life paid off on a single afternoon. On graduation day in 2016, Jobr was acquired by Monster.com and folded into its platform, while his new venture, Avochato, closed its first round of funding. Two bets, two outcomes, same cap and gown.
His training is mechanical engineering - a BS from Johns Hopkins, a master's from Stanford - which is a tidy explanation for how he thinks. Engineers do not romanticize the problem. They find the simplest mechanism that works and they ship it. Business messaging was exactly that kind of problem hiding in plain sight.
Avochato has kept evolving with the tools around it. In 2023 the company plugged into OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, adding AI-assisted replies so teams could draft and route conversations faster - the same instinct that started the company, applied to a new layer of the stack.
He promised his MBA class a slice of equity from his startups - an oddly exact 2.016%, a wink to the Class of 2016. When Jobr sold and Avochato funded on the same day, his became the first such pledge to actually pay out.
Avochato acquired hundreds of early customers by texting them through Avochato. The clearest demo of a messaging tool is a message that lands - so the company became its own best case study.
His title carries a Spanish word for a reason. He grew up partly in Madrid, earning an IB Bilingual Diploma from the American School of Madrid before Johns Hopkins and Stanford.
Stanford GSB gave life to my new venture. Pledging a piece of my equity back to the community was the least I could do.