Ron Elwell and the art of the well-timed invitation

Ron Elwell gave the chef four words: “Do whatever you want.” In October 2014, a Swoop client dinner at Restaurant Marc Forgione in New York came with grass underfoot and an invitation to remove your shoes. Sixty guests had been offered a rather literal departure from the corporate dinner circuit. Someone had finally found a business use for turf that did not involve golf.

Elwell organized the occasion with Lonny Sweet of the Connect Group. Its purpose was to thank business partners. The freedom belonged to Forgione; Elwell supplied the permission. It is a small episode in a long executive career, but an appealing place to begin. A guest can decline. Getting the invitation right becomes a business problem.

Today, Elwell is Swoop’s co-founder and chief executive. His earlier posts include running Octave Communications, serving as an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and leading Goal.com. Read those job titles together and the career can look restless. Look at the products and another pattern appears: conference calls, football coverage, advertising. Each depends on persuading people that their attention will be well spent.

Before the browser, a better conference call

In November 2001, Elwell wrote about a predicament familiar to telephone companies. Carrying calls was becoming a commodity. Providers needed services that would give customers a reason to stay. Conferencing offered one answer: bring colleagues together without sending them to an airport. His explanation was practical, concerned with how a service worked and what its buyer would pay.

He described the transition between conventional telephone networks and internet-based calling. Businesses would not move everything at once. A conferencing system had to accommodate both, making the underlying network invisible to the people using it. Equipment could share workloads across locations. Bandwidth could cost less. The person joining a call should still get a dependable conversation.

“Conferencing is an integral tool of business communications,” he wrote. It is the sort of sentence that will never make a motivational poster. It does, however, locate the commercial argument in an ordinary working day. The technical achievement matters because people have something to discuss, preferably before the meeting scheduled to discuss the meeting.

That same year, Octave introduced MeetAbout, a subscription service for wireless carriers and service providers. A mobile user could start a group conversation from a buddy list through an available virtual conference room. The applications could check whether people were available. Long before today’s familiar group-chat habits, Elwell was selling the usefulness of assembling several people through a phone.

His responsibilities also extended beyond the product pitch. Before Octave, he held several executive roles at Dictaphone, including leadership of Canadian operations and marketing and product development. At Octave, he led international expansion and developed its wireless strategy. The business was acquired by Voyant Technologies in early 2003. By March 2004, Elwell was an operating partner at Bessemer and had been named chairman of wireless-networking company ReefEdge.

Nineteen million reasons to understand an audience

The next conspicuous audience was considerably louder than a conference call. Elwell became chief executive of Goal.com, the football publisher. When Perform acquired the business in February 2011, Goal.com was publishing in fifteen languages. It had drawn 19.4 million unique visitors the previous January. Football provided a shared subject; language and local coverage gave that audience more than one way through the door.

The acquisition brought the publisher together with Perform’s sports data, video news, highlights and live-streaming operations. The commercial fit was easy to follow: an established destination for fans could carry a wider range of material. Elwell’s comment on the deal credited founder Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni’s vision. He had run the company; he did not claim to have invented its audience.

There is a useful distinction here between having traffic and understanding why it arrives. A football reader has chosen a subject, often with considerable emotional investment. Advertising placed around that choice still has to earn its place. Elwell’s next business would concentrate on the gap between the content someone wanted and the commercial message a publisher wanted them to see.

The question that became Swoop

Simeon Simeonov’s recollection of Swoop’s beginning places Elwell near the completion of the Goal.com sale. Simeonov was an entrepreneur in residence at General Catalyst. The two knew each other through venture capital, although they had never done a deal together. Their shared question concerned how badly web advertising often worked. They pursued it into a company.

That account gives the founding a specific texture. Two people with experience of investing and operating had found something irritating enough to work on. Their existing connection made the conversation possible. It did not supply the answer. The question still needed a product, customers and a reason for a publisher to put someone else’s technology inside its pages.

Swoop was founded in 2011. Its February 2012 launch offered a concrete example: someone reading a recipe could receive information about relevant local grocery offers within that content. A separate search could be avoided. The service, previously called Shopximity, began with food. It joined an everyday editorial activity to a possible purchase without asking the reader to start the whole journey again.

The launch also showed how many interests Elwell had to reconcile. Hearst saw a potential revenue stream that could keep visitors on its sites. Agencies wanted offers to appear at relevant moments. The reader wanted useful information. A workable arrangement had to leave room for all three. A clever ad placement could still fail if one participant found the experience tiresome.

A sales pitch with fifty miles attached

In May 2013, advertising professor Edward Boches described a 50-mile road ride with Elwell. The conversation turned to Swoop and the business of making online content pay. It is an unusually good setting for explaining an advertising product: a bicycle offers limited space for presentation slides, and a hill can interrupt a monologue more effectively than a polite client.

Boches described Swoop’s use of “hints.” A reader could indicate interest before seeing an offer, with the message tailored to the context. His example again involved a recipe. The proposed exchange depended on a small act of permission. Someone had already chosen to read; an advertiser could offer a next step. The response would determine whether that next step happened.

The cycling encounter gives the profile a welcome change of pace, but its business point is fairly exact. Elwell was working on what happened after a search had delivered someone to a page. Much of the web’s commercial machinery concentrates on attracting a visit. His proposition asked what useful thing could happen during one.

By September 2017, Swoop had added IBM global chief data officer Inderpal Bhandari to its board. Its marketplace included automotive advertisers, and its announcement described the use of search-advertising techniques and dynamic ad placements across relevant publishers. The underlying challenge had acquired a more technical vocabulary: translate online engagement into something a client could act on. Elwell was bringing data expertise into the room where that work would be directed.

The founder returns to an independent company

Swoop’s corporate structure changed again in September 2024. New Mountain Capital established it as a standalone business after its period within Real Chemistry. The two companies would maintain a preferred partnership. Elwell remained the named founder and CEO in the announcement. Independence arrived with an existing business, established relationships and an investor already familiar with the operation.

That distinction matters when reading a founder’s career. Starting a company produces one set of decisions. Continuing to run it through changes in ownership and organization produces others. Swoop’s 2024 announcement emphasized additional investment flexibility and room to expand. The immediate work involved deciding what an independent operation would need around it, including the people responsible for its finances.

Cameron Hyzer joined as chief financial officer that December. He had previously held the same role at ZoomInfo and had experience with acquisitions and a public offering. Elwell’s welcome linked those capabilities to Swoop’s ambitions. Recruiting a finance leader is a quieter development than launching a product, but it says something concrete about the next stage: growth needs planning, accounting and people who can ask awkward questions about the numbers.

A more recent marker arrived in March 2026, when Swoop received a second consecutive Best Places to Work designation from the Business Intelligence Group. The recognition drew on a voluntary, anonymous employee survey covering leadership, professional development and the working environment. Elwell gave the credit to the team. It supplies a different view of the company from a customer announcement: the people being asked to build it had an opportunity to answer back.

“Do whatever you want.”

Ron Elwell’s brief to chef Marc Forgione

Making room for someone else

Across these episodes, Elwell’s work has repeatedly involved arranging the conditions for other people to participate. That is a reading of the career, rather than a personality test. The evidence is in the choices: networks that could accommodate different callers, a publisher serving different languages, advertising designed around a reader’s current interest, and appointments that brought additional experience into the business.

Even the dinner fits, provided the metaphor is allowed to stay modest. A good meal cannot explain a company. It can show an executive handing creative control to someone hired for that purpose. Forgione put the invitation into practice.

The lasting interest in Elwell’s story is how often the setting changes while the invitation remains consequential. A phone call needs people to join. A publisher needs readers to return. A company needs colleagues and partners willing to keep building. He has spent a career working on those arrangements. Occasionally, there is grass under the table.