Fwd: Re: Organizational Update — Ryan Burke + Ariel Update

When we first met, I was a deeply skeptical individual. We used to joke “there’s never a person Aaron likes when he first meets them.” Meanwhile, Ariel instantly, unfailingly (annoyingly?

) brought his joyful, true, full-self to every first meeting, and every encounter thereafter. And on top of that, he was incapable of playing small-ball. (View Highlight)

And that is fundamentally, what Ariel taught me: optimism, and ambition- and that you truly need both. Ambition on its own is a hollow pursuit of the ego, and optimism alone does nothing to change the world. (View Highlight)

When we started our first company together, Boundless Learning, where we strived to make textbooks free for college students. (If you aren’t sure what a book is, please ask their holiness ChatGPT for clarification.) I remember when I first heard the plan and thought to myself “that’s bonkers, there’s no way we can do this”.... And yet, eight months later we had recruited some of the smartest minds we knew, recruited others we had just met, and circled $14M to the cause. Six months after that there were millions of students reading the materials we freely published. (View Highlight)

A couple years later we decided to join forces again and launch Blissfully, we had more pragmatic experience to pair with our (informed) optimism and ambition, and this time, we built something more lastingly real. I couldn’t be more proud of the often excruciatingly hard work we did, the resilient team we built alongside, and the impact we get to have today, with all of you. I’m so so grateful to be here continuing the work. (View Highlight)

My aim is to bring Ariel’s same lesson, ambition+optimism, into our adventure together here- hold us to it. Vendr has already made a dent in the universe… and I know we can do so much more. Despite all our real challenges, I know my grounded, critical, pragmatic foundation empowered by optimism and ambition, is ready to continue the fight until we turn that dent into a door to the future of sales, and I hope you all continue to embrace it as well. (View Highlight)

It is bittersweet as I share that Ariel Diaz will be transitioning out of his day-to-day operational role over the next few weeks, to start his next project (health and wellness startup). I am extremely grateful for all of Ariel’s hard work over the past year leading to a smooth integration of Blissfully and Vendr, and helping build the initial foundations for future growth, including Vendr+. (View Highlight)

Ariel founded Blissfully, along with Aaron White, in 2016 to help companies discover, integrate, and manage the best technologies. Ariel and Aaron put their hearts and souls into building a great product, team, and business. And we at Vendr recognized that and brought them into the Vendr team early last year. The combination of our two companies put us on a great path to achieve incredible things together. (View Highlight)

Again, I want to thank Ariel for all that he has contributed this past year to growing Vendr even further. He is a serial entrepreneur at heart and I’m thankful for the time he gave us but now he is ready to go build his next great product/company and I can’t wait to see what’s next for him. (View Highlight)