Zach Shapiro

Post-pitch story

Andrew Hoagland and Zach Shapiro launched Vetd in Philadelphia in April 2018 to make buying business software less painful. The platform helped companies discover, compare and vet software vendors, with input from a community of other buyers. Philadelphia tech site Technical.ly named it #8 on its 2019 RealLIST of startups to watch. Then, in January 2020, Vetd shut down, and Hoagland did something many founders don't. He wrote a detailed public post-mortem, published by Technical.ly on January 21, 2020, explaining why. After pitching dozens of investors, the team couldn't raise the money it needed to keep growing. He was honest that the company hadn't found a business model investors would back at that stage. Hoagland landed quickly. In April 2020 he became Head of Revenue at nextmv, another Philadelphia startup, and he later went on to sales leadership roles, including Strategic Account Director at Gisual. Vetd's run was short, but its ending is worth reading. The post-mortem is one of the more useful things a founder can leave behind: a clear account of what didn't work, written so the next founder doesn't repeat it.