portfolio (coming soon)
👋🏾 My name is Devan (day-vin) Sood.
I am a first-generation Indo-American. My father is a professor at UCLA Anderson and my mother is an entrepreneur who runs a small promotional products business, both of them are from India. I started helping my mom with her business tasks when I was 9 or 10, and I started attending my dad’s marketing classes when I was 12. I learned a ton from both of them, and understanding small-business entrepreneurship and big-business marketing ended up being an advantageous starting point for my future endeavors.
I grew up in LA and accidentally jumped into my first venture at age 14;Â Unlimited Ltd. Clothing, my first company, was launched in 9th grade. In less than three years, Unlimited Ltd. was sold in multiple countries, involved in four global charities, and endorsed by celebrities. It was a ton of fun, and I learned a ton of lessons the hard way. Time well spent.
After the slight success of my first company, I started to strengthen my marketing skills and started a marketing consulting firm specializing in creative growth strategies to market to millennials and gen-z. I worked for a handful of companies before I graduated high school, one of them was a messaging platform called onLoop.
A few weeks into the job at onLoop I told the CEO the platform couldn’t grow fast enough, and the data showed weak engagement. He already had this insight and told me he wanted to pivot to a live streaming platform, which was the most popular feature in the onLoop app. Live video was a hot space at the time, Persicope had just been acquired by Twitter and Meerkat had just launched at SXSW. They had a mediocre idea for the pivot and challenged me to come up with a better idea by the following Monday, so I created a new name and a concept for a fresh take on live streaming. They loved it.
I led onLoop's pivot to *Zapstream,* a social live streaming platform that launched the same year as Periscope. They hired me full time (a month after I graduated high school) as the Chief Marketing Officer where I was able to lead a marketing team responsible for almost 100k downloads. We were featured in Fox Business, Silicon Angle, AdWeek, LA Biz Journal, and more. After about a year and lots of learned lessons with the Zapstream team, we weren't able to continue, and I went on to attend Babson College to cultivate an entrepreneurial network.
I continued to work with other startups and fortuitously met Vernon and Kevin, two college dropouts who had created a compelling v1 of a hyper-local social app called Realtime, now called JOT and backed by 776. They ended up drafting me as the third cofounder, and we launched the app in February of 2020. Despite a pretty successful start, the pandemic began and nobody wanted to meet irl, so Realtime was shut down and we each went our separate ways soon after.
1 year after my return to LA, I came across Duffl via some sidewalk chalk in my college-town neighborhood. After reaching out to the team a few months after graduating YC, they brought me on to lead growth. I was hire #2, we raised a $13m Series A, and we went from 5 to 25 people in 9 months. Being up-close and personal for that stage of growth was an incredible learning experience
Already, I’ve been lucky enough to work with awesome startups backed by the world’s best investors. I’ve seen acquisitions and flops, good founders and not-so-good ones, and everything in between.