Suggestions
Shahed Khan
Entrepreneur, Digital Marketer, Alliances Leader
Shahed Khan is an investor and entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently an investor at Various, a role he has held since January 2020. In this capacity, he acts as an angel investor in several private companies, including notable startups like Remote, Replit, and Eight Sleep.13
Prior to his role at Various, Shahed co-founded Loom, a video communication platform that gained significant traction and was sold for $1 billion. During his tenure at Loom, he served as President until January 2021, overseeing its growth to over 23 million users across more than 350,000 companies.13
Shahed's professional background includes experience as an analyst at Upfront Ventures and a product designer at Weebly. His investment strategy focuses on early-stage companies, leveraging his extensive experience in technology and entrepreneurship to identify promising startups.12
Highlights
We paid $150k for 'loom.com' in 2018.
How we acquired that domain is still one of the company’s wildest stories...
In 2017, we rebranded from our original name Opentest — to Loom.
A name we thought was original, resembled what we were doing ('weaving' conversations), and hoped to turn into a verb (send me a 'loom').
We paid $10 for http://useloom.com and registered @useloom everywhere we could.
As Loom grew, so did our brand.
One of our early investors suggested we trademark our name to weed out any confusion with similar brands.
He was right (more on this shortly).
This was happening while we were in midst of closing our Series A.
With a new round of cash coming in — and our promise to new investors of positioning ourselves as the 'Loom' in the market.
We knew we had to take our brand far more serious than we had up until this point.
I went off on a side quest to figure out who owned the Loom domain, social handles, and SEO.
The WHOIS listed a public SaaS company as the contact.
They acquired a company with the same name four years earlier and shut the brand down.
This was an inactive domain within a public company, serving no use to them.
I was able to get in touch with the CEO, who then forwarded us to the person in charge of IP.
We went back and forth on email for weeks.
I offered them $50k for the domain, knowing well, it would be appraised by a third party for more than $400k.
I mentioned we were a small seed-stage startup with a small budget — and they agreed to selling it to us for $75k.
Thinking I just negotiated the deal of a lifetime, I was ready to sign docs & send the wire until their legal team went silent on us.
Weeks had gone by. I sent email after email.
Almost a full month after we had settled on a price, I hear back from their legal team.
Just a few days earlier — they hear from a separate party also very interested in the domain...
The legal team put us in touch with the competing party and told us to negotiate on price and come back to them with the highest offer.
This startup, was pre-product, raised less than we had.
and already had approval from their VC to spend upwards of $500k on this domain (!!)
There was no way we would compete at a price that high, but the other company was not willing to back down.
Lucky for us, they hadn't shared their budget with the legal team / and the legal team never mentioned our bid to them.
We needed to convince them to find a new name.
The CEO's biggest worry was wasting time on finding a new name & coming up with a new brand design.
Our only chance at settling this immediately was to offer to pay for this company to rebrand away from 'Loom'.
So we offered him $75k cash. Contingent to him walking away from the domain.
To our complete surprise, he accepted.
We paid him $75k.
He walked away from the negotiation. The legal team sold us the domain for $75K.
We paid $150k altogether for a domain that was worth well over $500k.
We won with luck.
How 9 months of building without success, 2 difficult pivots, and dozens of rejections resulted in Loom:
In reflecting back on the last 8 years, and investing in 40+ companies, I've become convinced that the most common pitfall for founders is investing too much time on finding the ‘perfect’ solution to their idea.
Loom didn’t begin as Loom.
It started around a whiteboard with Vinay, Joe, and myself. We wrote down 6 ideas, and went with the solution we thought was "the one".
A user testing marketplace.
7 months in, we only made $600, but learned an important lesson:
Companies cared less about advice from experts (what we were selling). Instead, they wanted to hear from their own customers.
We pivoted. The new idea?
Build a SaaS offering that’d let companies get direct feedback from their own users.
As Vinay started to rebuild the product, Joe and I spent weeks cold emailing 300 different companies offering a free trial
Soon after—we heard back from a research team at Harvard.
They used our product (called Opentest at the time) to gather insights from 7 students for a campaign.
As a result—they received 7 different videos..
Instead of sharing these videos back with the entire research team...
Someone at Harvard used the same Chrome extension (built originally for the user testers themselves)
to record a 1-minute summary of the 7 videos.
This 1-minute video was shared back with their team.
This wasn’t how our product was supposed to be used.
We realized that people were more interested in using Loom as a communication tool.
When we were able to realize that...
We took the extension, launched it on Product Hunt in June 2016, and had 3,000 people sign up on the same day.
Which was 2,990 more users than we’d had in the 9 months prior.
A couple things one can take away from our experience:
First, de-stress yourself from “finding the perfect idea”.
It’s impossible to predict how things will go once you start—and it’s better to start and adapt than never launch because you’re worried something won’t work.
Second, the four traits that got us to Loom were:
- Timing of the market
- Camaraderie
- Intense focus
- Pure luck
We were in a period where remote work was early, but not a foreign concept.
We enabled a ‘trust by default’ mentality amongst the team. We celebrated outputs that drove real results. This contained our own bias and ego.
We limited distractions, even the shiny ones (investor meetings, meetups, high-value dinners in SF, etc) and chipped away at finding product-market fit.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending more time with founders on getting their V1 out, helping discover growth opportunities, fundraising, and advising as founders go from 0-1 as well as those scaling from 1-2.
I'm opening a few slots to work with me 1:1 for the next 3-4 months.
- You're a Founder or CEO
- You're building in B2B SaaS or Consumer
Comment "Interested" below & the team at Intro will send you a link to my booking page.
Experience
Education
Location
People also viewed
Related People
Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.