Drafting A Roadmap to Startup Success

Ross Shanken, Chief Visionary Officer of Vojomo Holdings.

Ross Shanken, Chief Visionary Officer of Vojomo Holdings, is no stranger to startup success. In 2011, he founded Jornaya, a behavioral data and intelligence tech company based in Conshohocken that was acquired by Jersey City-based Verisk in 2020. He left in August 2021, almost ten years later. 

Starting around that time, Shanken started consulting with early-stage startups and making various angel investments that would often coincide with his advisory or consulting work. He began to notice patterns across all of these entrepreneurial companies, patterns of ways of leading earlier-stage companies into the future.

His past experience had taught him that there are methodologies and systematic ways of achieving high profitability growth and achieving high probability goals that could help these early stage companies more tightly focus on what they need to accomplish and how to go about accomplishing it in the most high profitability way, along with providing sales, and capital support. This was the starting point for his latest venture, Vojomo Holdings. 

What is the concept behind Vojomo?

We are growing a set of capital investment partners that will establish a pool of capital, and we're establishing technology to help with some of these systematic methods of helping companies grow. Finally, we're building a community in which every company that works with us is connected to each other through us.

What kinds of companies will you be working with?

Our background - me and most of the people I brought into the tent - we were a data and technology company, so we know that worked really well.

Companies in the world of data providers, not really large data providers like Equifax, Transunion, small early stage companies that have found proprietary ways of linking data together or proprietary data sets and applying them to marketing, to advertising, to compliance, to privacy issues with consumers.

If you look at that as our core, and then you take concentric circles outside of that core, those would be companies that are just software companies that kind of live in the marketing sales growth space or the compliance space, marketing compliance, ad compliance, privacy compliance… We know those worlds fairly well as well.

From a product and market perspective, we like to work with companies that we know fairly well so we don't have to become accelerated students in a new business area. But on the business side of their business, we know that world really well. Like how to build a thriving subscription based revenue business; how to help them grow; how to help them reach whatever their peak outcome is for their company - which most of the time is like being acquired, sometimes going public, but more often than not, being acquired some years down the line. And, we help with planning all that out into the future and then building a company around that future.

Photo courtesy of VISIT PHILADELPHIA.

Sounds like you're going to be really well poised to help these companies in many different areas.

Yeah, it's very comprehensive. And that's always often part of the problem with startups. And we're a startup now, just sort of keeping focus.

I learned a long time ago, we don't struggle to come up with good ideas. That's not the problem. The problem is we have an infinite number of ideas that we could be chasing with our time and money - our limited time and limited money. What we have to do is figure out where we need to focus our time and money that we think will be driving us towards a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, and some peak kind of outcome.

And, what you find in a lot of companies is they don't really think about that peak outcome, they don't talk about that peak outcome. So they have a team of people who aren't actually driving towards the same thing, and they're making decisions every day about where to spend their time and money. But the guide that they're using for those decisions is not the same thing. It's not the same future because we haven't even spent enough time on that future.

So, we go deep right away with trying to get a team of individuals sort of thinking like one about the future, committing to one future and starting at the end. We often say start at the end and work your way back, instead of starting with, what am I going to do this week? And if you do that, you can say, when is that big peak outcome? And you can work your way back to this week by working your way back to the next few years, the next year, the next quarter, and then each week you have certain things you're trying to get forward towards the quarterly, towards the annual, and so forth.

There's a whole systematic methodology that we didn't fully know or execute until starting in 2017. And it took us from a good, strong company to this phenomenal next four years and this incredible acquisition at the end of 2020.

What else would you like readers to know?

What drew me to this is there's this huge problem that I think almost all entrepreneurs face, at least first timers who haven't had a successful outcome. I would say there's an epidemic of lack of intention and clarity about what you're actually trying to do. And, as soon as you have two or more people without lack of clarity, the lack of clarity grows exponentially.

The problem can be solved in different ways, but the problem sort of cuts across systematic ways of thinking. It cuts across technology, it cuts across the community of entrepreneurs who can help each other, and it cuts across capital, like access to capital, which is widely misunderstood. And if you're a first-time founder or you don't have the street cred of having made a lot of people a lot of money already, it's challenging to find capital to help you.

So we're trying to cut across all of those and build a community of like minded people. We're building a couple different companies, but we're really trying to build a community.

We’d love to talk to anyone who cuts across any of those areas or is interested in these topics. We'd love to talk to them just to kind of continue building that community. Everything we're doing is learning from other people and reinforcing what things that we already know. We're just looking to make as many connections as possible in the whole world of startup growth and even later stage, but companies that are looking for high growth, that suffer from some of these challenges.