Founder Spotlight: Stonny Liu

From Chemistry to Hospitality

Mike: "Well, Stonny, hey, thank you so much for your time. I'm really curious. Why don't we just start from the top? Like, who are you? Tell me the story. What are you building?"

Stonny: "Yeah, so my name is Stonny, obviously. My company is called Venue Hopper. We're building an AI event planner. It kind of just grew on me, this hospitality industry, because I think it's something that nobody goes out and seeks. It's something that finds you, and then when you eventually get into it, you get drawn into it further and further. So for me, when I was in college, I planned a lot of events, whether it was for companies, for clubs. And then after I graduated, when I was looking for an idea, I was working on AI stuff. And I realized that there's this intersection that's missing between AI and hospitality, especially in the event planning industry. And so we started this maybe a year and a half ago. So it took us a little bit to draw on it. Because honestly, I really wanted to avoid hospitality for the longest time."

Mike: "Why?"

Stonny: "It's very hard to move industry. It's a very sticky industry and people are very set in their ways. But on one hand, it makes it really difficult to work in, but on the other, it's very rewarding. When you start to make progress and you actually get people on board like we have already, people like what you do and they stay with it. So the stickiness works for and against you, right? But yeah, coming back to how I ended up on this, it was me doing these events and really realizing, it's so difficult to get people together. It really is. It's something that, especially post-grad, it's not something that happens naturally anymore. It's something that you really need to put a lot of effort into. And so, I studied chemical and biomolecular engineering in college. It's a complete 180 from what I actually studied in university. But on a conceptual level in chemistry, there's this term called activation energy. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's like what it takes to get a reaction started, right? And what a catalyst does — things that speed up reactions — all it does is make it easier for that reaction to happen. And so on a conceptual level, I thought if I can make a company that brings down the activation energy for letting people engage in person, making events happen, letting people have a reason to get together, then we should conceptually see way more in-person events and engagements in real life. So that's the idea of it. That's what we do."

Getting Started

Mike: "You're a chemical engineer who's throwing events on the side. You have this idea in hospitality. What is the first thing you do? How do you start?"

Stonny: "So I guess you start with just talking to the people who are already in the industry. You kind of start with a really small solution to a really small subsection of the problem. I was on two sides of the problem when I was in college. So first I started planning events for orgs. In fact, I planned events for a lot of startups who are trying to make events as part of their go-to market. So like dating apps who wanted to go to NYU and say, 'Hey, we want to use this as our initial ICP. Let's do some parties in New York for NYU and actually have this, the ICP.' So yeah, booking out venues, making the ticketing work, having everybody come together — everything was a huge pain in the ass. And so it was ridiculous. And we had maybe five or six students who would just work on that. And so the reason it was difficult was not because it was technologically difficult. It was just coordination. It was just a huge coordination problem. And so what I started with is actually working on the event director side, working again for the venues and seeing — is the coordination problem one-sided? Is it just the organizer that's having this problem or is it on both sides? And when I went to the event director side, I realized, yeah, the coordination problem here is visceral because the venues, they very much need the revenue from private events, but they need to hire additional staff to do it. They need to get more hands on board. And it just becomes this problem that the more people you hire, the slower it gets. And so the first thing I actually built was super simple. It was just a couple of responses that are templated for the venue so that they could answer all the basic questions for any inquiry that's coming in for a private event. And that actually allowed us to handle three to four times more venues than the normal event directors. The normal event director maybe handles like four or five places. We're able to handle like 20. And so I was like, okay, clearly just making a small change to allow us to have extra tooling gave us a huge boost. And so that's where I started. And then some of our earliest investors were event directors and owners who realized, 'Oh, this is really good. We work with you already. We like what you're doing. Why don't you try to turn this into something bigger?' And then here we are."

Building the Marketplace

Mike: "Wow, and it's also a two-sided marketplace, right? Because you had to get venues on board, but you also had to get event planners on board? So how did you go about finding both?"

Stonny: "Yeah, event planners, organizers. In the beginning, we did this — it was great because it kind of fed into itself, but it's also a little bit hacky. When we work with a venue, we take in all their inquiries. We don't just help the venue find inquiries, we handle their entire event planning logistics. And so most of the venues we work with are pretty high-named. So the inquiries that already come in, the close rate on a typical inquiry for a venue is in the single digits. Mostly because if you're inquiring for a venue and they're booked, that's it. There's nothing you can do, right? The person's not changing their wedding because your venue is booked. They're going to go find something else. And so there's this great scale efficiency that comes with being able to offer them multiple selections and say, 'Hey, any inquiry that comes to us, if it comes from any of our 20 venues, we can then send it to any of the other 20 venues.' And so we increase our close rate — we're in like the 20s now. Most of the times we end up closing these leads. And so the leads that come to us, we get more leads. And then because we get more leads, we can close more stuff for more venues. And the venues love us and they promote us to other venues and it becomes this really virtuous cycle."

Mike: "Wow, that's so interesting because there's like a virality to it and a network effect, right? You get a high-name venue on board, they get a bunch of event planners trying to book with them. If you can't fulfill those, you can attach those events to other people within your network."

Stonny: "Yeah, so like even to this day, most of our inquiries are just this big network of inquiries we get from all the venues we work with."

Lessons Learned

Mike: "Right, right, right, right. Wow, that's amazing. Well, you've been at it for, I think you said a little bit over a year, right?"

Stonny: "Yeah, yeah."

Mike: "What's been your biggest—"

Stonny: "A year and a half now."

Mike: "Yeah, what's been your biggest lesson so far? What's been like the biggest surprise? You look very good. I don't see as many scars on you, you know?"

Stonny: "I have this blessing or curse where I have a fantastic memory when it comes to numbers and statistics and really tangible things. When it comes to vagaries, basically in one ear and out the other. And so I really don't remember a lot of the challenges we faced. And it takes a lot of my team members to be like, 'Oh, remember this thing that we struggled with?' And I was like, 'Oh, yeah, we did struggle with that. I've completely forgotten about it because we overcame it.' And then I'm just on to the next thing. So to this day, I still think the hardest thing is always going to be the thing that you're unfamiliar with. When you're breaking into a problem at first and you're not familiar with it, it's so difficult. For example, the venues that we work with, I had a lot of initial relationships already with. But then when we needed to expand and learn how to actually go to market to get venues more virally without needing to spend my time on it, that took a lot of effort to build out a process that works for most venues. Now we have that pretty well-rounded. But when I first started that, I remember my first conversation with — it wasn't even the venue owner, it was the general manager assistant. And I was just doing such a terrible job of explaining what we do to him. Because it was just like, I wasn't sure how to put it. And I didn't really think about it in the terms of presenting what the valuable thing is to them. So it took me a couple of conversations to break that. But now that it's broken, it's so easy. It takes very little time for us to actually onboard venues. You're like, 'Hey, look, we're offering you free money. Take it?'"

Mike: "Yeah, okay, great."

Stonny: "It's very, very—"

Mike: "That's a good pitch."

Stonny: "Yeah, yeah, they really understand that. Whereas if you talk about AI, they immediately are like, 'I don't even want to hear this.' But everyone understands free money."

Mike: "Yep."

Stonny: "Everyone understands the bottom line. And so we tell them, we're able to boost your sales very significantly. And we actually increase revenue by up to 40 percent for some places. So they understand that very well. The challenge is it's really just breaking through the first thing. And so even now, whether it's a technical challenge, hiring challenge, fundraising challenge, go to market challenge, all of them just have a ton of little breakthroughs that you need to make. But then once you do it once, the problem is solved, which is something that I think I didn't realize before. Because when you're first in the problem, you're like, 'Oh my God, if every conversation goes like this, it's over. It's never going to work.' But you need to realize that once you start, and then once you get over that first activation energy again, once you're able to start it and solve the problem once, you're really able to do it again and again and again, and then it gets easier. And then the hard part becomes a thing that you haven't done yet. And so that's also what makes it fun. I think it's what makes the day-to-day fun, being able to solve new challenges like this."

Mike: "I think you're totally right because when you're first tackling a problem, it's unknown. It feels insurmountable. You don't even know how hard it is. But after you do it once or twice, it becomes a little bit familiar. And then you look at the next new problem and then it feels insurmountable again. And then you kind of repeat and go along."

Stonny: "Yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It feels insurmountable because you don't have enough information. You just have to try things. You have to — not try a solution because you're so far from the solution, you don't even have potential solutions yet. You just have potential paths that might lead you to a solution. And it's fun. And it's something that I also tell my team. They ask me a lot of questions and sometimes my answer is literally like, I don't know. We don't know. And I'm a chemical engineer by trade. So when I was in college, I actually spent a lot of time in a research lab doing semiconductors. So maybe that would have been a more lucrative path looking back, but also working in a lab —"

Mike: "Don't tell your parents that."

Stonny: "It's a bit slower, and when you're working on the forefront at a lab, you face that very frequently. You're like, 'How do we increase the nitrogen concentration in this specific material?' And the answer is no — not even the PhD student knows, right? Nobody knows. And when you're at that point, especially as a student, you're usually guided through all the hoops in life. You're told 'this is the next thing. There's a solution. There is a solution.' But then when you're faced with a problem where you don't know if there's a solution, you don't even know anyone who knows there's a solution, then you get to really think, 'Oh wow, wait, I have so many options available to me. I have so many things I can try.' And it really is just constrained to what I can come up with. And I think that even though I joke and I say, like, 'Oh, I went from engineering to hospitality,' I really think I went from engineering in material science to engineering in a company in a social sense. And so they're both problem solving. They're both exploring novel solutions. It's just the solution space looks different now."

Advice for Founders

Mike: "Right, right. So it sounds like you say your superpower is a fast, quick memory. I'm going to say it's your internal optimism. I am curious, having been through a startup now for over a year, what are the biggest lessons? What are the biggest surprises you've had?"

Stonny: "I want to give out all the trite advice, which is like, just do the thing, try the thing, talk to more people, always talk to more people, don't take no for an answer, all that. But I actually think a really interesting piece of advice that I don't see very often is a little bit meta — don't try to apply advice that doesn't apply to you. For the longest time, I kept trying to — people are like, 'Oh, just build the thing.' And I was like, a lot of people have a problem building the thing. I don't have a problem building the thing. I have a problem — stop building and go sell, right? And I'm looking back and I see that the problem is that most people, everyone's different, right? Everyone has a different skillset. And so it makes sense that the advice that would work best for you is going to be the opposite of what helps somebody else. And so being able to look at yourself and think, 'Okay, what advice do I actually need? What actually feeds back into me?' — that is critical. It's basically like your bullshit detector — does this make sense for me? Am I able to actually evaluate, is this the advice I need? That's really helpful because then when you go and consume as much advice as possible, you're able to actually filter out for the stuff that's helpful to you. And I consume a lot of them. I try to consume as much firsthand information as possible. So I'm trying not to look at X posts where AI rewrites someone else's post, which rewrites someone else's post. It's like a copy of a copy of a copy. It's just not concentrated enough for you to learn from. But if you go to the firsthand source, whether it's a long form interview or a really respected founder in the field — or even just somebody who's, for my example in hospitality, heads of hospitality groups — really useful to just hear them talk and then take in, maybe not advice, but perspectives that you are missing. But also try not to reinforce only on the things that you know, and you'll become a little bit more well-rounded. I guess my advice is be careful on your advice."

Mike: "No, I think you pointed out something really interesting. It's something I struggled with also, which is when I first started my startup, I had this vision of what a founder should be. And it was based off of like Steve Jobs, Brian Chesky — they were so into details, they're so design-oriented. That's what I thought a founder did. I forced myself to do that. But if you know me, I'm terrible at design and I'm not detail-oriented. So my team really suffered for it and I hated every second of it. And I just through those scars, I've kind of learned that I need to be my best version of a founder, which is not necessarily what someone else's definition would be. And it sounds like you've learned those same lessons."

Stonny: "Yeah, exactly. Like you can't try to emulate the ideal of a founder, also because if that was the ideal of the founder that made them successful 15 years ago, it's probably not going to work today. The environment changed, you know, so I think you're absolutely right. You can't just copy. You have to really look at your own skill sets."

Staying Grounded

Mike: "Got it. Well, that's a lot of the business and founder questions. I want to talk about more of the personal questions. I'm curious. So even though you're an eternal optimist, what do you do to keep sane? What do you do to be as happy as you are? You're like the happiest person I've met."

Stonny: "Thank you. I do try to be happy because in the process, I always wanted to be a founder. So I'm already living the dream, even if it disagrees with me. I was thinking about when we were talking about advice just now — I have a list as part of my language, like dog shit advice, which is advice that works for me, but I could not fathomably give it to anybody else."

Mike: "Now I want to hear these. This sounds great."

Stonny: "And one of them is make your bed every morning. I'm like, that's not real advice I could give to somebody. But for me, when I came out of college, I was living such an unstructured life. I am fortunate enough that I have huge bouts of motivation, but also it's not consistent. It's a fluctuating curve. And so for me, it was very important to build in structure independent of other people. And so it started with make my bed every morning — just make the bed. And there was like a two-week period where I was like, 'I made my bed. That's it. I've succeeded today.' And it's good to actually have one thing that grounds you and then start building structure from nothing. I can't really tell people to make your bed in the morning. It's helpful, you know, it's dog shit advice, but it worked really well for me. I also track my time, which is something I can't suggest."

Mike: "How do you do that?"

Stonny: "I literally have a notes app and I write current time. 'Today I started work at 10 o'clock.' Work and then 12 o'clock lunch — it's very messy, unorganized data and then I give it to Claude and I have an agent that just fixes all my data for me and then it produces a calendar that tells me okay, this percentage of time has been spent on certain categories and I bucket them into four categories: work, life, personal health, and friendship. Just so that I can have some sort of tangible thing."

Mike: "Have you changed your behavior based on this?"

Stonny: "Yes, and so one or two weeks I was like, 'I spent a total of eight minutes with friends.'"

Mike: "Oh wow."

Stonny: "This is something that I don't notice. But also social health — especially the company I'm building is designed to help social health systemically, so of course I need to be more aware of my social health too. And so it does help, but also it's just kind of too in the weeds. I don't recommend people do this because it's also just kind of scary to look at like, 'Oh my God, I sleep a third of my life.' It makes you really want to cut down on sleep. And one of the things that I initially started it for — my hypothesis was travel, like I hate commuting because I think it's a waste of time. And like, how much time do you spend commuting? It's like one percent, some negligible amount. And so again, I can't recommend people track time — for me it worked because again I needed to add structure. But it's just helpful. It helps keep me grounded even if the effects are not necessarily that potent."

Why New York

Mike: "Man, that's so interesting. Stonny, I'm so curious. I know you went to school here, right? But like, why are you still in New York City? What keeps you here?"

Stonny: "Oh man, it's the best city in the world."

Mike: "I know, it is. Seriously, it is the best city in the world."

Stonny: "I also really love Shanghai. Don't get me wrong. I spent a lot of time in Shanghai as a kid. And I went to school there too. And Shanghai is also amazing, but they're amazing for different reasons. Sometimes I wish the customer service in New York City was a little bit better. That Asian hospitality is very, very different."

Mike: "That's true."

Stonny: "For example, I got a turtle the other day. And I had nothing — no equipment, no nothing. I just went out, bought everything within a two-block radius from the tank to the filter to the substrate. And then I was back in an hour and a half. That's just some efficiency that comes from having such a density that has everything. It's everything. And then also the nightlife is so good. I went to SF for a bit. There's no nightlife there."

Mike: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing."

Stonny: "New York is awesome. Why wouldn't I want to be here in New York? I don't know if I'll be here in like 10 years, but also there's the company side. My customers are here. And, you know, it's the best place, I think, to start a hospitality company."

Mike: "Have you guys thought about expanding outside of New York? Or are you just all in on New York for now?"

Stonny: "We have a real plan where we're setting out seeds for some select cities that might not be the cities you're thinking about, but I think work really well for our business model."

Mike: "Interesting, all right."

Stonny: "We'll talk about that when the news comes out. Hopefully you just see it."

Mike: "There we go."

The Best Event

Mike: "I'm so curious. What's the best event or most unique event that you've seen thrown? And it's okay if you don't say the Founders Club. I know we're a bunch of founders and our parties are fun, but it may not be the most unique. What's the best one you've seen?"

Stonny: "I can't give too many details, but initially before we focused on the segment that we focused on, we had a period of time where we would take any event just to see every single type of organizer. And I think some of the best ones were — it's a big company in New York City, and they were doing their event with us, and it was a cosmetics company, and the stuff that they had there was unbelievable. And I mentally took notes for all of this because they, in addition to using us, also had other people to help plan out some of the vendors and things. And so their event was just amazing. It was a holiday party and their budget was obviously also crazy. But to be there in that space, I was thinking, 'Wow, this is something that startups are missing. We don't get holiday parties the way they do.' And they had some headline performers there too. And it was really cool to see it. And that's the dream. Like, ideally, if you could get some people together, or if you could get events like that to be beyond just the company size, or if you could bring the cost down so that more people could do it, that'd be an amazing world to live in."

Mike: "Wow, okay. Well, that's what we can all aspire to be one day. And when Venue Hopper takes over the world, maybe that's what your corporate events will look like."

Stonny: "We'll see, we'll see."

Stonny Liu is Co-founder and CEO of VenueHopper, a platform that connects event planners and individuals with unique venues across New York City. VenueHopper’s intelligent platform is transforming the events industry by handling the full venue booking experience, from discovery to onboarding to event execution, and works closely with hospitality operators to fill private dining rooms, rooftops, and event spaces.