One of the reason I love my podcast so much is that I can look back on the 800 interviews and see the people where that was just the beginning of our relationship, and Lisa Russell is one of those people! Her interview was published in September of 2020, but we stayed connected on Twitter post the episode. As time passed, she kept working and improving Aleria, her company. Speaking of which….

What Is Aleria?

For those who don’t know, Aleria measures inclusion in the workplace. Their Inclusion Assessment was designed to surface the day-to-day experiences of your employees and pinpoint specific opportunities to drive greater inclusion across your organization.

Most recently, they actually launched a course for startups to start thinking about DEI from day one. As long as your business has between 5 and 50 employees, you can participate. I think this is a very important initiative, as time and time again, the tech industry has proven that it doesn’t know how to build diverse teams. I think Aleria really solves this problem, now from day one with their new course.

Working With Aleria

Aleria and Seedscout fist truly crossed paths during this email exchange. I invited Lisa to join our Slack Channel and soon after, she expressed interest in joining the Seedscout platform. Naturally, there was a bug.

We eventually got her set up in Seedscout. For a while, there wasn’t interest in Aleria. This was mainly due to us having such a a small investor network on there at the time. With that said, about two months after spending time on the platform. Randy Holloway, a director at Google, expressed interest in learning more about Aleria. An intro was triggered on the platform and just like that, Lisa had her first intro on the Seedscout platform.

How did it go, you may ask? Under a month later, I saw this Tweet pop up on my timeline.

I was so thrilled to see this tweet. It didn’t just make me so happy for Lisa and Aleria for getting that bag, but was real validation that we were building something very special here at Seedscout. The reason being that this is one of the first introductions where I didn’t manually make hundreds of intro requests to get the one that wanted an intro. In fact, I didn’t spend any time making this intro happen. They were both on platform, expressed interest in meeting eachother, and were introduced with no effort on my part.

And to further nail in how important this is, Randy even doubled down most recently on Aleria, crystallizing his commitment to the company and showing the world the type of investors that Seedscout can attract.

I got a chance to meet Lisa in person for the first time at SaaStr Annual a few months ago where we got to chat. It was so nice hearing from a founder that not just found success on Seedscout, but has been one of our vocal advocates through the whole journey. And how all of that could happen without ever meeting in person or even knowing THAT much about eachother. This is the power of Seedscout.

I appreciate you Lisa and wish you tons more fundraising and company success. Looking forward to the next case study I can write about you in a few years about how you went from Seed to IPO, with Seedscout playing a tiny part in helping you get there 😎.