From $3K a Month to a 9-Figure Valuation: A First-Time Founder Story
It was 2019. Jason Alco was a year out of college with a degree in computer science, working his first job as a software engineer and giving himself 10 months to find an idea worth quitting for.
At a party in the Hollywood Hills, Jason met someone who, after chatting, said, “Let’s connect,” and pulled out what looked like a credit card.
Instead, he tapped the card to Jason’s phone and a push notification appeared…
Jason’s eyes lit up.
“How did that work without downloading an app?”
“It’s a brand-new technology.”
Jason left the party unable to stop thinking about what he had just seen, and he started researching it right away.
The Prototype
Jason ordered various parts online and built an early prototype. Once he confirmed it worked, he brought it to his friend and roommate, Nick Eischens.
He walked into the living room and said, “Nick, check this out…”
He tapped Nick’s phone with the prototype, and it instantly shared Jason’s Instagram.
Nick was blown away.
“That’s magic,” he said.
With shared enthusiasm, the two skipped any sort of market research and began building right away. The first product was simple: a small NFC tag (about the size of a quarter) placed on the back of a phone. Tap it against another phone, and a digital profile opened instantly on the recipient’s device without needing to download an app.
Popl was officially launched.
First Money In
Popl’s first investor came from a chance encounter.
One of Popl’s associates was in Las Vegas during one of the world’s largest technology conferences when he overheard someone approach the concierge.
“Excuse me, miss, do you happen to know where the [name withheld] cocktail party is?”
Of the roughly 150,000 people attending the conference, [name withheld] was hosting an intimate gathering of about 70 influential people. Among the guests was Neal Batra, a well-connected entertainment attorney and prolific angel investor.
The associate turned to him.
“Dude, you’re going to the [name withheld] party?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
“No. Can you get us in?”
“…No.”
A few awkward seconds passed. Then the conversation continued.
Popl got pitched.
Weeks later, Neal met with the Popl team in Los Angeles to vet the team and the technology. He pointed out the existential risk that a major smartphone manufacturer could integrate the same functionality. This was years before the world’s biggest phone manufacturer introduced “NameDrop.” He determined it was a worthwhile risk. Remote negotiations followed.
Neal had arranged for three of his portfolio companies to serve as sponsors for some of Paris Fashion Week’s most exclusive after-parties. While there, he signed and wired, becoming Popl’s first investor.
Shortly after securing its first check, Popl raised a friends-and-family round backed by a couple of early angels, including Jason’s father and Popl advisor, Mike Alvarez Cohen.
Breakout
Just weeks after Popl launched, the world shut down. The pandemic froze the in-person interactions the product had been built around.
At the same time, a new social media platform was emerging as a force in how everyone consumed content, giving the team an unexpected path forward.
Jason determined that a video simply showing Popl in action was all that was needed to replicate the feeling he had when he first encountered it. Using that formula, the team began posting videos that showed the product in seconds: one phone tapping another, followed by the instant appearance of a digital profile. The format was visual, surprising and easy to understand without explanation.
Jason called his friend Arev Davtian, an emerging content creator known as @endicci, and they met at their college campus gym.
There, Jason, Nick and Arev filmed a simple video: Arev walked up to the camera and said, “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
“Oh Arev, I never got your phone number.”
“I got you.”
She turned around, tapped Jason’s phone with her Popl and walked away as if it were already a normal way to share contact information.
That was it.
The video went viral, reaching 80 million views across more than 160 countries. Orders surged. Popl was now struggling to keep up with demand. It was a chaotic sprint by a small group of recent college grads to build out the tech, fulfillment and customer service.
Y Combinator
For their next move, the Popl team applied to Y Combinator… and was rejected.
The team kept growing and decided to apply again for the next batch.
This time around, instead of getting an acceptance right away, the founding team received an email from Michael Seibel, Y Combinator’s CEO at the time.
It read along the lines of “If you can share your bank statements showing the volume of revenue you say these Popl devices are doing, then you’re in.”
The Popl team sent all their statements for full transparency, and waited. Two days later, Popl was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.
Y Combinator was a pivotal moment for the company.
The Seed Round
After completing Y Combinator, Popl presented the company to thousands of investors on a video conference call as part of Y Combinator’s Demo Day.
The two weeks that followed were a whirlwind of investor meetings and high-stakes decisions.
The team received competing offers to lead the round, ultimately choosing between Justin Kan’s Goat Capital and a well-known venture firm with more than $40 billion under management. On the day a decision was needed to choose one, Jason and Nick walked through sunny Beverly Hills for hours, debating which partner would best shape Popl’s future.
After a strong back-and-forth, they chose Goat Capital. Justin Kan’s close relationship with Michael Seibel and Y Combinator made him the stronger fit, and their better terms allowed the founding team to keep more of the company they were building.
Popl raised its seed round at a $22 million valuation.
Popl HQ: Beverly Hills
Fresh off the raise, the team felt they were finally onto something big.
That year, Popl grew more than 1,300%.
The team used that momentum to build something just as important: community. Popl rented a Beverly Hills mansion, where eight members of the founding team moved in, including Popl’s VP of product and Jason’s brother, Ryan Alco.
The house became the center of company life. Friday dinners at some of Los Angeles’ best restaurants became a tradition, alongside team retreats, events, collaborations and shared milestones. They worked hard, celebrated the wins and experienced countless firsts together, with one goal underneath it all: growing Popl.
The Beverly Hills headquarters served as a hub for the growing Popl community, hosting customers, partners, investors, friends and family for a series of standout events. During LA Tech Week, Popl was selected to host the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 event for L.A., bringing the broader ecosystem together to celebrate the company’s momentum.
Growing Up
As growth continued, Popl faced a new challenge: turning a viral hardware product into a sustainable tech company.
Popl went from selling NFC tags to teens, to building a digital business card software platform. The hardware opened the door, but the software created lasting value, giving users a way to manage their identities, share information and build relationships at scale.
As adoption among professionals took off, the opportunity expanded from individual users to entire organizations. The product spread into national real estate brokerages, major basketball franchises and eventually 90% of the Fortune 500.
One of many new customers was the Brooklyn Nets. Popl closed a blockbuster five-year deal with the organization. Once signed, Jason flew out to the Brooklyn Nets facility to onboard the team.
The partnership depended on successfully connecting Popl’s digital business cards to the Nets’ highly customized CRM setup. If the integration failed, the deal could have fallen apart before it ever began. During the first technical meeting, Jason was able to solve each obstacle live, solidifying the partnership and earning an immediate vote of confidence from the Nets staff.
Once onboarding was complete, the team celebrated by sitting courtside at that evening’s Nets game.
Despite significant growth, Popl started to see limits to scaling.
Growing Pains
Focused on digital business cards, the company went out to raise a Series A in 2022. It entered serious conversations with several leading venture capital firms.
Jason got far along in talks with a partner at Silicon Valley’s most recognizable venture capital firm, with early investments in some of the most successful companies of our generation. In the final meeting, they dove into every nuance of Popl from the business model to customer support systems to the 10-year vision.
Days later, the decision arrived via email.
It was a pass.
While digital business cards had become a meaningful business, investors did not believe the category was large enough to generate venture-scale returns.
It became clear that something needed to change.
A New Path
The failed fundraise forced Popl to look more closely at how its customers were using the product.
A pattern emerged.
Popl’s most engaged users were not individuals sharing digital business cards. They were sales teams on trade show floors using digital cards in reverse. Instead of sharing their own information, they were using Popl to capture everyone else’s.
Around those teams was a largely untracked market: in-person events.
Event badge scanners had barely evolved in decades. Business cards disappeared into pockets. Notes were scattered across phones and spreadsheets. Follow-ups never happened because the information captured during conversations rarely made its way into the systems responsible for generating revenue.
One night at Popl’s Beverly Hills HQ, Bryce Alsten, Popl’s VP of marketing, asked the group, “What if users could scan any event badge with our app? We could take the name and company printed on it, then enrich that into an email, phone number, and full contact profile.”
The team called the idea “event lead capture.”
Betting the House
A couple of months later, Popl moved from Los Angeles to New York.
This brought the team closer to enterprise customers, major events and the market it was beginning to pursue.
On the trip from L.A. to N.Y.C., Jason had an epiphany. He turned to Ryan and Bryce, and said:
“Guys, I think we go all in.”
He did not mean building event lead capture as just another feature. He meant a full pivot, which meant betting the entire company on it. The decision put the existing brand, product roadmap and strong revenue stream at risk.
That moment marked the beginning of Popl’s move into event lead capture.
The Data Engine
The vision depended on a difficult technical assumption: a phone camera could replace rented badge scanners and work across any event.
An event badge typically includes a name and company, but no email address, phone number, social profiles or CRM context. For Popl to become the source of truth for event lead capture, the system needed to identify the person from a badge, enrich their data, verify the information and deliver it quickly enough to feel immediate.
Jason asked several colleagues in the data enrichment space if this sort of product was feasible, and they all had the same sentiment: “Absolutely not.”
The market’s skepticism was justified. The available data was inconsistent. AI models were less capable in 2024. Data providers returned conflicting results. Similar names, outdated emails and incomplete professional profiles created edge cases everywhere.
So Popl decided to build its own AI-native data engine. The system combined AI-powered OCR with a waterfall across more than 20 hand-selected data partners, then used AI agents to find the info those providers missed and verify the results with humanlike accuracy.
It took two years to make the data engine reliable enough for teams to trust Popl as their source of truth for event lead capture.
If it hadn’t worked, Popl would have given up a functional business, damaged the brand and left itself without a clear path forward.
But it worked.
The Rebuild
With the new direction clear, Popl needed to revamp the team.
After leading Popl’s product development from its earliest days, Ryan Alco was promoted to chief product officer, and Bryce Alsten became vice president of marketing.
Dieter Heren joined as head of revenue operations and rose to chief revenue officer, bringing the B2B sales leadership experience the young team needed to scale. Natalie Miller joined as vice president of operations, bringing the level-headed leadership and meticulous attention to detail that became the cherry on top of the new team.
That same year, some of Popl leadership attended the largest music festival in Las Vegas, where they had a table on the festival’s famous Skydeck. They struck up a conversation with the group at the neighboring table, which just so happened to include a talented engineer who had recently left ClickUp, the billion-dollar project management platform.
Jason was introduced to Jorgen Phillips, and the two quickly bonded as “two tech guys who like EDM.” Popl was looking for its next CTO, and as the conversation progressed, it became clear Jorgen could be the perfect fit.
The timing was ideal.
Jorgen joined to scale Popl’s enterprise-grade data infrastructure and, alongside Jason, architected its AI-native data engine, combining speed, industry knowledge and strategic thinking to create one of the company’s most valuable and difficult-to-replicate competitive advantages.
Coming Into Focus
One night in 2025 at a well-known members’ club in New York City, Jason reconnected with Neal Batra, Popl’s first investor. It was the first time they had sat down to discuss the company’s new event lead capture business.
Neal had taken early positions in several leading AI companies over the years and started pointing out the risks of relying solely on the tech Popl had built. After Jason explained who the key players were and how the rapidly growing industry worked, they strategized about how best to turn potential long-term risks into company moats.
Over the months that followed, Popl put that strategy into motion, securing back-to-back agreements that exponentially strengthened its position in the market.
First, Popl launched Popl for Claude, a native AI connector (MCP) that lets teams interact with their in-person event data directly inside Claude and other leading AI platforms. The push to make Popl AI-native was driven by several key team members, including one of Popl’s lead engineers, Christian Ciabattoni, Jason’s longtime friend from college.
Then, Popl announced a long-term data relationship with Apollo.io, one of the world’s leading B2B data platforms. This strengthened the data foundation behind every lead captured through Popl.
Finally, Popl secured a category-exclusive option agreement with RocketReach — another leader in data, whose database spans 700 million professional profiles. Jason worked closely with RocketReach CEO Scott Kim to structure the deal.
From the outside, the announcements looked like momentum arriving all at once. The announcements spanned a few weeks. The work behind them took several months.
With its vision sharpened, product proven, team in place, positive cash flow and strategic relationships now established, Popl enters its next stage with momentum and a clear position at the forefront of an emerging market.
And Popl’s next moves are already underway.
At a party in the Hollywood Hills, Jason met someone who, after chatting, said, “Let’s connect,” and pulled out what looked like a credit card.
Instead, he tapped the card to Jason’s phone and a push notification appeared…
Jason’s eyes lit up.
“How did that work without downloading an app?”
“It’s a brand-new technology.”
Jason left the party unable to stop thinking about what he had just seen, and he started researching it right away.
The Prototype
Jason ordered various parts online and built an early prototype. Once he confirmed it worked, he brought it to his friend and roommate, Nick Eischens.
He walked into the living room and said, “Nick, check this out…”
He tapped Nick’s phone with the prototype, and it instantly shared Jason’s Instagram.
Nick was blown away.
“That’s magic,” he said.
With shared enthusiasm, the two skipped any sort of market research and began building right away. The first product was simple: a small NFC tag (about the size of a quarter) placed on the back of a phone. Tap it against another phone, and a digital profile opened instantly on the recipient’s device without needing to download an app.
Popl was officially launched.
First Money In
Popl’s first investor came from a chance encounter.
One of Popl’s associates was in Las Vegas during one of the world’s largest technology conferences when he overheard someone approach the concierge.
“Excuse me, miss, do you happen to know where the [name withheld] cocktail party is?”
Of the roughly 150,000 people attending the conference, [name withheld] was hosting an intimate gathering of about 70 influential people. Among the guests was Neal Batra, a well-connected entertainment attorney and prolific angel investor.
The associate turned to him.
“Dude, you’re going to the [name withheld] party?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
“No. Can you get us in?”
“…No.”
A few awkward seconds passed. Then the conversation continued.
Popl got pitched.
Weeks later, Neal met with the Popl team in Los Angeles to vet the team and the technology. He pointed out the existential risk that a major smartphone manufacturer could integrate the same functionality. This was years before the world’s biggest phone manufacturer introduced “NameDrop.” He determined it was a worthwhile risk. Remote negotiations followed.
Neal had arranged for three of his portfolio companies to serve as sponsors for some of Paris Fashion Week’s most exclusive after-parties. While there, he signed and wired, becoming Popl’s first investor.
Shortly after securing its first check, Popl raised a friends-and-family round backed by a couple of early angels, including Jason’s father and Popl advisor, Mike Alvarez Cohen.
Breakout
Just weeks after Popl launched, the world shut down. The pandemic froze the in-person interactions the product had been built around.
At the same time, a new social media platform was emerging as a force in how everyone consumed content, giving the team an unexpected path forward.
Jason determined that a video simply showing Popl in action was all that was needed to replicate the feeling he had when he first encountered it. Using that formula, the team began posting videos that showed the product in seconds: one phone tapping another, followed by the instant appearance of a digital profile. The format was visual, surprising and easy to understand without explanation.
Jason called his friend Arev Davtian, an emerging content creator known as @endicci, and they met at their college campus gym.
There, Jason, Nick and Arev filmed a simple video: Arev walked up to the camera and said, “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
“Oh Arev, I never got your phone number.”
“I got you.”
She turned around, tapped Jason’s phone with her Popl and walked away as if it were already a normal way to share contact information.
That was it.
The video went viral, reaching 80 million views across more than 160 countries. Orders surged. Popl was now struggling to keep up with demand. It was a chaotic sprint by a small group of recent college grads to build out the tech, fulfillment and customer service.
Y Combinator
For their next move, the Popl team applied to Y Combinator… and was rejected.
The team kept growing and decided to apply again for the next batch.
This time around, instead of getting an acceptance right away, the founding team received an email from Michael Seibel, Y Combinator’s CEO at the time.
It read along the lines of “If you can share your bank statements showing the volume of revenue you say these Popl devices are doing, then you’re in.”
The Popl team sent all their statements for full transparency, and waited. Two days later, Popl was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.
Y Combinator was a pivotal moment for the company.
The Seed Round
After completing Y Combinator, Popl presented the company to thousands of investors on a video conference call as part of Y Combinator’s Demo Day.
The two weeks that followed were a whirlwind of investor meetings and high-stakes decisions.
The team received competing offers to lead the round, ultimately choosing between Justin Kan’s Goat Capital and a well-known venture firm with more than $40 billion under management. On the day a decision was needed to choose one, Jason and Nick walked through sunny Beverly Hills for hours, debating which partner would best shape Popl’s future.
After a strong back-and-forth, they chose Goat Capital. Justin Kan’s close relationship with Michael Seibel and Y Combinator made him the stronger fit, and their better terms allowed the founding team to keep more of the company they were building.
Popl raised its seed round at a $22 million valuation.
Popl HQ: Beverly Hills
Fresh off the raise, the team felt they were finally onto something big.
That year, Popl grew more than 1,300%.
The team used that momentum to build something just as important: community. Popl rented a Beverly Hills mansion, where eight members of the founding team moved in, including Popl’s VP of product and Jason’s brother, Ryan Alco.
The house became the center of company life. Friday dinners at some of Los Angeles’ best restaurants became a tradition, alongside team retreats, events, collaborations and shared milestones. They worked hard, celebrated the wins and experienced countless firsts together, with one goal underneath it all: growing Popl.
The Beverly Hills headquarters served as a hub for the growing Popl community, hosting customers, partners, investors, friends and family for a series of standout events. During LA Tech Week, Popl was selected to host the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 event for L.A., bringing the broader ecosystem together to celebrate the company’s momentum.
Growing Up
As growth continued, Popl faced a new challenge: turning a viral hardware product into a sustainable tech company.
Popl went from selling NFC tags to teens, to building a digital business card software platform. The hardware opened the door, but the software created lasting value, giving users a way to manage their identities, share information and build relationships at scale.
As adoption among professionals took off, the opportunity expanded from individual users to entire organizations. The product spread into national real estate brokerages, major basketball franchises and eventually 90% of the Fortune 500.
One of many new customers was the Brooklyn Nets. Popl closed a blockbuster five-year deal with the organization. Once signed, Jason flew out to the Brooklyn Nets facility to onboard the team.
The partnership depended on successfully connecting Popl’s digital business cards to the Nets’ highly customized CRM setup. If the integration failed, the deal could have fallen apart before it ever began. During the first technical meeting, Jason was able to solve each obstacle live, solidifying the partnership and earning an immediate vote of confidence from the Nets staff.
Once onboarding was complete, the team celebrated by sitting courtside at that evening’s Nets game.
Despite significant growth, Popl started to see limits to scaling.
Growing Pains
Focused on digital business cards, the company went out to raise a Series A in 2022. It entered serious conversations with several leading venture capital firms.
Jason got far along in talks with a partner at Silicon Valley’s most recognizable venture capital firm, with early investments in some of the most successful companies of our generation. In the final meeting, they dove into every nuance of Popl from the business model to customer support systems to the 10-year vision.
Days later, the decision arrived via email.
It was a pass.
While digital business cards had become a meaningful business, investors did not believe the category was large enough to generate venture-scale returns.
It became clear that something needed to change.
A New Path
The failed fundraise forced Popl to look more closely at how its customers were using the product.
A pattern emerged.
Popl’s most engaged users were not individuals sharing digital business cards. They were sales teams on trade show floors using digital cards in reverse. Instead of sharing their own information, they were using Popl to capture everyone else’s.
Around those teams was a largely untracked market: in-person events.
Event badge scanners had barely evolved in decades. Business cards disappeared into pockets. Notes were scattered across phones and spreadsheets. Follow-ups never happened because the information captured during conversations rarely made its way into the systems responsible for generating revenue.
One night at Popl’s Beverly Hills HQ, Bryce Alsten, Popl’s VP of marketing, asked the group, “What if users could scan any event badge with our app? We could take the name and company printed on it, then enrich that into an email, phone number, and full contact profile.”
The team called the idea “event lead capture.”
Betting the House
A couple of months later, Popl moved from Los Angeles to New York.
This brought the team closer to enterprise customers, major events and the market it was beginning to pursue.
On the trip from L.A. to N.Y.C., Jason had an epiphany. He turned to Ryan and Bryce, and said:
“Guys, I think we go all in.”
He did not mean building event lead capture as just another feature. He meant a full pivot, which meant betting the entire company on it. The decision put the existing brand, product roadmap and strong revenue stream at risk.
That moment marked the beginning of Popl’s move into event lead capture.
The Data Engine
The vision depended on a difficult technical assumption: a phone camera could replace rented badge scanners and work across any event.
An event badge typically includes a name and company, but no email address, phone number, social profiles or CRM context. For Popl to become the source of truth for event lead capture, the system needed to identify the person from a badge, enrich their data, verify the information and deliver it quickly enough to feel immediate.
Jason asked several colleagues in the data enrichment space if this sort of product was feasible, and they all had the same sentiment: “Absolutely not.”
The market’s skepticism was justified. The available data was inconsistent. AI models were less capable in 2024. Data providers returned conflicting results. Similar names, outdated emails and incomplete professional profiles created edge cases everywhere.
So Popl decided to build its own AI-native data engine. The system combined AI-powered OCR with a waterfall across more than 20 hand-selected data partners, then used AI agents to find the info those providers missed and verify the results with humanlike accuracy.
It took two years to make the data engine reliable enough for teams to trust Popl as their source of truth for event lead capture.
If it hadn’t worked, Popl would have given up a functional business, damaged the brand and left itself without a clear path forward.
But it worked.
The Rebuild
With the new direction clear, Popl needed to revamp the team.
After leading Popl’s product development from its earliest days, Ryan Alco was promoted to chief product officer, and Bryce Alsten became vice president of marketing.
Dieter Heren joined as head of revenue operations and rose to chief revenue officer, bringing the B2B sales leadership experience the young team needed to scale. Natalie Miller joined as vice president of operations, bringing the level-headed leadership and meticulous attention to detail that became the cherry on top of the new team.
That same year, some of Popl leadership attended the largest music festival in Las Vegas, where they had a table on the festival’s famous Skydeck. They struck up a conversation with the group at the neighboring table, which just so happened to include a talented engineer who had recently left ClickUp, the billion-dollar project management platform.
Jason was introduced to Jorgen Phillips, and the two quickly bonded as “two tech guys who like EDM.” Popl was looking for its next CTO, and as the conversation progressed, it became clear Jorgen could be the perfect fit.
The timing was ideal.
Jorgen joined to scale Popl’s enterprise-grade data infrastructure and, alongside Jason, architected its AI-native data engine, combining speed, industry knowledge and strategic thinking to create one of the company’s most valuable and difficult-to-replicate competitive advantages.
Coming Into Focus
One night in 2025 at a well-known members’ club in New York City, Jason reconnected with Neal Batra, Popl’s first investor. It was the first time they had sat down to discuss the company’s new event lead capture business.
Neal had taken early positions in several leading AI companies over the years and started pointing out the risks of relying solely on the tech Popl had built. After Jason explained who the key players were and how the rapidly growing industry worked, they strategized about how best to turn potential long-term risks into company moats.
Over the months that followed, Popl put that strategy into motion, securing back-to-back agreements that exponentially strengthened its position in the market.
First, Popl launched Popl for Claude, a native AI connector (MCP) that lets teams interact with their in-person event data directly inside Claude and other leading AI platforms. The push to make Popl AI-native was driven by several key team members, including one of Popl’s lead engineers, Christian Ciabattoni, Jason’s longtime friend from college.
Then, Popl announced a long-term data relationship with Apollo.io, one of the world’s leading B2B data platforms. This strengthened the data foundation behind every lead captured through Popl.
Finally, Popl secured a category-exclusive option agreement with RocketReach — another leader in data, whose database spans 700 million professional profiles. Jason worked closely with RocketReach CEO Scott Kim to structure the deal.
From the outside, the announcements looked like momentum arriving all at once. The announcements spanned a few weeks. The work behind them took several months.
With its vision sharpened, product proven, team in place, positive cash flow and strategic relationships now established, Popl enters its next stage with momentum and a clear position at the forefront of an emerging market.
And Popl’s next moves are already underway.