If you want a LinkedIn post to really take off, simply say you need to hire a part time brand designer. 81 comments and 31 spam calls and emails later, I edited the post to read "THE POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED," but the pitches keep rolling in.
If you do ever find yourself pitching your services as a designer, please, for the love of god, include your portfolio link so I can easily see your work. I can’t tell you how many people just commented, “let’s chat!”
No. Thank you.
I recently took a new role building brand and marketing at a company called Ande. It’s a new approach to corporate entertainment: think private dining at restaurants, catering, boxes at sporting events, even branded merchandise. Ande has everything a corporation needs to entertain prospects or employees in one place, and streamlines the booking and planning process with AI.
As someone who often books corporate entertainment, the idea of making this manual, fragmented process easier was reason enough to be excited. But there’s an even deeper transformation that the companies like McGraw Hill, Cloudflare, and Salesforce who are adopting Ande are signing up for - finally centralizing entertainment spend.
Every business has a T&E line item they track in their budget. The T, travel, is a clearly managed category. Book it through a platform like Navan or Concur and the CFO can tell you exactly what’s being spent. The E, entertainment, has always been a black box. There’s been no way to centralize that spend until now. Drop the T from T&E and you get Ande (&E). Cute, right?
Ande is a two-sided marketplace like Uber (demand: rider, supply: driver) or Airbnb (demand: booker, supply: houses to book). For Ande, the demand side is corporations who want to book entertainment and on the vendor side, Ande has spent the last two years building out a roster of over 93,000 entertainment venues and 1,600 hospitality venues. This includes some of the largest and most decorated groups in the business: Altamarea Group, Che Fico, Gracious Hospitality, JKS, The Mina Group, MML, Nobu, Riviera Dining Group, Tao Group Hospitality, Unapologetic Foods, Bacchus Management Group, Wish You Were Here, and Wolfgang Puck.
It’s been exciting announcing Ande’s Series A and going heads down into build mode. Both my social life and this newsletter (no Party Talk this week) are taking a hit.
What trends have you been noticing while I’m heads down?
If you missed the last dispatch, we talked about the 80’s dominating current culture:
Ok bye! 🍊
Thanks for reading!
Congratulations on the new gig!!