Founder Visibility is an interview series that highlights founders that inspire us and shares how they found their firsts: co-founder, customer, capital, and confidence.
Meet Wayne, Co-Founder of GLOMADO (GLObal MAkers and DOers), an online learning platform that offers live, real-time, hands-on, small-group cultural workshops led by passionate artisans from around the world. As a community builder passionate about making cultural connections across the globe, Wayne built his very own startup and shared his inspiring journey with us. Read his story below.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Founder Visibility is an interview series that highlights founders that inspire us and shares how they found their firsts: co-founder, customer, capital, and confidence.
Meet Wayne, Co-Founder of GLOMADO (GLObal MAkers and DOers), an online learning platform that offers live, real-time, hands-on, small-group cultural workshops led by passionate artisans from around the world. As a community builder passionate about making cultural connections across the globe, Wayne built his very own startup and shared his inspiring journey with us. Read his story below.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
I’ve always been a wanderer. As a young boy growing up in a housing project in Staten Island, New York, I would frequently take the Staten Island Ferry out to Manhattan, which was always an eye-opening experience. I was intrigued to hear languages from Eastern Europe, Asia, West Africa, or South America, and it triggered a lifelong fascination with cultures from different parts of the world.
Life went on, but I always had the idea of connecting people across different cultures in the back of my mind. As I grew older, I had the great fortune of exploring international camps and traveling to over 100 countries and all 50 states. And while visiting famous landmarks was enjoyable, what stayed with me were the many wonderful micro experiences where the true exchange of culture and language took place — be it making a meal in Botswana, crafting a necklace in Guatemala, creating an instrument in Lithuania, and the like.
After I sold my last company, I revisited this concept. I was very keen on creating a company whose core mission is to make authentic cultural exploration and discovery accessible to everyone regardless of their physical location.
GLOMADO is rooted in the idea of cultural exploration and connection. Our goal is to increase the cultural competency of others and build a more global citizenry. We strive to use technology daily to connect people in a meaningful, positive, and constructive manner.
Technology is central to our business, which is what makes us stand out. Our product, in essence, is a catalog of online workshops that are unique in four different ways. First, they are synchronous. We believe that learning happens best when you can interact with someone, so our workshops are live over platforms like Zoom. Second, we learn in small groups. We limit the number of learners to six, in addition to the instructor, so that it is a meaningful and highly interactive experience for our users. The third distinctive element of our business is that our workshops are constructive and project-based in nature. You can’t learn math, Greek, or coding; you have to build something with your hands, and we use technology to enable that learning experience. So you’re making instruments from West Africa, you’re making a bracelet from Costa Rica, you’re making a candle from Latvia — that is the true magic of our platform. Lastly, it connects you. It is deeply culturally rooted in the sense that the instructor who is teaching you about a specific cultural craft is logging in live from their respective country or region.
The motivation really was that I had sold my last company and was looking for my next venture, and I had to get out of the house. I look at my four young children, and I think about the world I want them to live in. I think about creating the world that I want them to grow up in and contribute to.
I started GLOMADO because, while other opportunities were attractive, I asked myself how I would be able to ensure that my children grew up in a world where they have an ability to connect and build bridges, not walls.
Finding a partner to run your business with is one of the most important choices you’ll make—a lot of it is good fortune, which was my experience. I was looking for three things: mission alignment, experience, and personality.
My co-founder, Marie Antonelli, didn’t only align with the mission and vision but also complemented my experience and skill set. Marie is someone who has helped craft our mission. She is also well-traveled, has young children like myself, and deeply believes in the power of cultural competence and cultural exploration.
She also happens to be a Yale-trained artist and was one of the early artisans on Etsy. Having that background coupled with her strong advertising and marketing experience made her ideally suited for us.
Lastly, she has a very positive personality and is multi-talented. As a young company, you really need someone to be conversant and comfortable with many different roles. Fun is a huge aspect, too; our time here is limited, and you certainly want to surround yourself with people who can bring a smile to your face.
The first part of the challenge was finding the right people who have the relevant experience and truly believe in the vision. The second part was raising capital, especially given our unique and innovative idea.
At this stage, as we’re getting more traction, one of the key challenges we’re facing is our go-to-market strategy. In the very short period between our beta, which we launched last spring, and our launch in Q4 of 2020, we’ve seen many different customer types and audiences that have shown interest in our product and want to offer it to their members — whether it be schools, museums, foundations, company HR departments, Girl Scouts, you name it. And that’s on top of individual customers such as crafty kids and adults, friends and families who love to use our workshops as a time to connect and learn something new. As a company with a very limited budget, building the business, focusing on the right target audience, and ensuring that our technology platform is always serving our changing needs are our current challenges.
Through our beta. We launched our beta last spring; we opened it up to our friends and family and asked for honest feedback on what truly works and what doesn’t from a customer’s perspective, whether that be the purchase process, messaging, customer journey, booking a workshop, etc. Just from that, we were able to generate a tremendous response to our beta.
The key development was that one of our beta users, whose wife and son engaged in different workshops, loved the concept. He happened to be the CEO of a children’s museum in Milwaukee. The governor of Wisconsin had just closed his museum’s doors due to COVID-19, and he had 5,000 members to provide programming for, all of whom GLOMADO would resonate with, seeing as it is tech-enabled and culturally rooted. He was looking to offer his constituents our workshops, and I agreed, which then began the process for us to offer an enterprise solution.
The initial check came through a college friend. So the adage, “Always be kind to your college classmates,” holds!
A friend of mine from college heard about what we were doing, and she herself was very aligned with our mission — she had traveled a lot, had a great appreciation for different cultures and has three young children of her own. GLOMADO resonated with her because of the type of world she wants to raise her kids in. She introduced us to her father, and while ed-tech wasn’t his sector of expertise, he really liked the market opportunity. We pitched the business model to him, which he found very compelling. So he wrote the first pivotal check and has been a great advocate of ours since then.
Start earlier. Entrepreneurship is a difficult path to walk in life, and nothing is guaranteed. The earlier you can start, the better.
