Meeting Minds Podcast with Lisa Carrel
Youtube Video
Tell us how you developed what you’re doing today.
This company, Proxfinity, was started to capitalize and enhance human to human interactions at live meetings and events. We have a wearable technology we pair with back end software it was designed to help meeting participants find others in a room that have common interests. Make madness out of mayhem, you walk into a room and it’s like who do I talk to and about what? We help facilitate and drive that. Because we pair with back end software and data, we are able to measure that and quantify face to face at meeting and events. Our mission is to help people have the best most meaningful human interactions.
I can’t imagine this was what you wanted to do growing up, tell us what Lisa prior to this was doing.
I’ve always been passionate about marketing, sales, business. I have 2 young daughters who were much smaller when we started this company. Out of the gate, I didn’t see myself coming out of college thinking events, wearable technology. We are all so glued to our cell phones, and that need for a ping and gratification. It was something I didn’t want for my kids. I said let’s use technology that can bring back face to face rather than take away.
How did you build a solution that adds value and solves a problem rather than something that just makes money?
A lot of founders have an idea for a solution, and go and build it without creating a solution to a problem that exists. Interviewing everyone and talking to meeting planners, all stake holders at meetings and events, understanding their problems and what solutions were out there, we started building this. We’re up agains apps and software, the beginning people said we were crazy. But these apps were becoming a crowded space. There was a bit of app fatigue, you had to download an app for every event and learn something new. If they could just show up and not have to do anything to have the conversations to have the ROI they anticipated on all levels, it was something that became a must have rather than a nice to have.
Explain the wearable technology and what it is.
People now are not meeting face to face so now in the current state it is not a must have but as people come back, we are not going to have a vaccine, but we are not putting events on hold. How can we help people maintain social distance and exchange contact information and have meaningful conversations that get back to networking? We’ve retooled our tech to help give a social cue as to when you’re within 6 feet of another individual and you can help maintain social distance barriers and deliver data, if there is an outbreak, contact trace. We have the ability to notify. Now because we have the wearable that’s tracking peer to peer interactions at 6 foot distances, we have new analytics on if we are able to maintain social distance, if there’s an outbreak whats the chance it will spread to everyone or how can we contain it. As you start having larger and larger meetings you can start seeing where do things start to break down?
Let’s talk about inclusion.
We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You can easily say we have 50 women in this group or 10% of this race etc. You can see that in the numbers it’s easy to do. But if you have 50% men and women, when you bring them together are the men talking to the women? Our technology not only helps and can weight the connections so we can help cross departmental and gender interactions but we can track and rate them!