SXSW Startups: VOLO
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 18, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Social and Culture, which will pitch at 11 am Saturday, March 9, VOLO is transforming career development through volunteering, to help people build happier, more fulfilling careers. Its Career Volunteering platform offers a differentiated approach to professional development that addresses skill-building by offering hands-on skilled volunteering opportunities to learn and grow, all while making a positive impact in the local community.
Co-founder/COO Lotis Bautista offered some thoughts about the company.
What is your competitive advantage?
VOLO is the first platform to make volunteering an integrated part of career development. At the moment, our competitors focus on career development, volunteering or recruitment, but VOLO brings all three of these together into one platform. As a result, VOLO provides value to both organizations and individuals along the career development journey. We’ve built our technology by working closely with our early clients who are tasked with supporting career development across thousands of students and employees. These same clients have already seen a 30 percent increase in engagement in their programs as a result of using VOLO to promote skilled volunteering roles.
The universe has also helped us to create a super team of people with very deep expertise in all of the areas that VOLO covers: Education, Technology and Recruitment. Our deep understanding of the challenges faced by companies, charities, universities and individuals in regards to career development, provides us with a unique and difficult to replicate advantage.
What are your goals for VOLO in 2019?
Grow our partner community and get more people actively volunteering.
Our ultimate vision is for VOLO to make volunteering an integrated part of career development from education into employment, connecting individuals and organizations all over the world.
How does VOLO aid the disabled workforce population?
We work with a wide range of charitable and not-for-profit organizations, many of which work with the disabled workforce in London. For instance, we work with the Royal Society for Blind Children and have delivered both training sessions and provided volunteers to help the organization to do more great work. It’s an embedded part of our mission to enable everyone, regardless of situation or background, to develop the skills, experience and insight to get ahead in their careers. Because of this, we are continually working to meet the AA level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and look for ways to engage and support people from underrepresented groups.
Walk us through the process of acquiring a VOLO partner.
We spend a lot of time making sure that the organizations we partner with are right for our volunteers. Our basic criteria is that they must offer skill-building roles in areas such as marketing, finance, healthcare or other areas of need that support beneficiaries, like mentoring, employability training, or befriending.
Unlike other volunteering platforms where anyone can log on, create an account and post any activity that they want, at VOLO we build personal relationships with our partners and review and validate every opportunity that is posted to the site. Our technology makes this process very simple to manage and allows our clients to easily bring on and manage hundreds of organizations and opportunities on their own-brand portals.
VOLO is based in London. Tell us about the startup ecosystem there.
London has a buzzing startup scene, including our very own Silicone Roundabout! Tons of young startups and older tech giants are based here, but there are also lots of hubs popping up all over Central London.
There’s definitely been a noticeable shift in the last few years towards the startup life with more and more people–young and old–ready to forego the traditional 9 to 5 for a more exciting and rewarding career path. It very much speaks to our company ethos and we’re super excited to be supporting many of them through VOLO!
What do you enjoy most and least about the startup experience?
What’s really exciting about doing your own startup is the ability to focus on working on something you really care about; for us, that’s being able to improve other people’s lives. The chance to also create your very own culture, which for VOLO is one that that focuses on personal and community growth, rather than solely financial performance is so empowering!
We strongly believe it’s important for everyone on our team to be in the driver’s seat of their career, planning their own time and efforts. We’ve learned that it’s a really specific life skill that a lot of people struggle with, but we think is so key! The freedom we’ve gained from taking this approach has also made it even clearer how important it is for everyone to have something they really care about getting up for in the morning. It seems like cliche, common sense, but no one wants to leave the comfort of a warm bed to spend the day being told what to do and how to do it.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
The best things in life are worth waiting for.
There seems to be a big myth around startup-land that unicorns are built in a month, which is just absolutely not the case. Many of the most enduring and life-changing companies we know today have needed at least two years to really ‘cross that chasm.’ We’re coming up to that point ourselves, and it will have been nearly three years since we really put our team effort behind this.
What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d had that you’d give to others joining the startup journey?
Put your ego aside, be truthful about where you’re at, and listen more than you speak. While it’s definitely a good thing to have the confidence, it really slows things down when you’re blind-sighted by your own idea and won’t lay out the unembellished facts to move things forward.
At VOLO we have a really open and transparent culture where most ideas are given free reign and the space to grow, but it’s certainly taken time to get there. When we built VOLO, we spoke to as many potential clients as possible to figure out what we should be building before we got started. We also spent a lot of time with our early users adapting and refining the technology, which continually leads us in the right direction.
We see it a lot with other startups, especially in Edtech, where supposedly life-changing businesses are created without ever asking the end user whether or not the product is something they’d be willing to use for free, let alone pay for! For us, it’s super important to always keep that at the front of our minds: will this actually make a difference to our clients? And if we’re not sure, we always ask!
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
