With our events startup dinner in partnership with evvnt happening next week, we wanted to showcase some of the wonderful businesses that are joining the dinner. Next up is Pearlshare and its co-founder, James O’Day.

What’s the elevator pitch for your startup?

Personal recommendations are the most powerful indicator of quality and people naturally seek them from people they know and trust. Yet current electronic solutions are not designed to support capture and sharing of peer-to-peer recommendations in a way that supports normal conversations.

Pearlshare aims to be the ubiquitous platform to do this – through a series of mobile apps – and enable people to quickly and easily capture, manage, share and request recommendations from people they know and trust, their friends.

What were you doing before you launched your startup?

I was working for a global management consultancy (BCG), as a project leader in their TMT practice here in London.

Where did you meet your co-founders?

I have two co-founders, Oliver Brooks and Michael Liebreich. Oli is a friend of a great friend from business school. Michael and I were introduced by a mutual friend at the end of last year.

What’s your biggest ‘hindsight’ moment?

As a founding team you have to be 100% aligned on your mission for the company and your priorities. These influence your ability to commit. Prior to Pearlshare I worked on another startup and I thought, naively, that I could get over the slightly lack of initial alignment. In the end, no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t.

What will 2014 bring?

We are just closing our seed round of funding and we are building our beta product. We will launch early in Q2 and hope to continue to build momentum through the year.

1 piece of advice for someone starting a business in the events space?

Everything takes longer than you think. You have to be able to stay “in the game” for long enough to make it a success so be prepared, both professionally and personally.

Convince someone to use your product/service in under 50 words.

Who do you ask when you need a recommendation for something important? If your friends, Pearlshare is the best way to ask, capture and share these trusted, word-of-mouth recommendations amongst your friends. No more posts in Facebook feeds. 

What’s your favourite startup in the events space (not including your own)?

Is it wrong to say TableCrowd? 

What’s your favourite London restaurant?

The River Cafe.

No James, it is definitely NOT wrong to say TableCrowd. Extra dessert is coming your way at dinner next week.

If you have an events startup and you haven’t received an invite to Monday’s dinner, we apologise about that, and please do send us a reprimanding email to hello@tablecrowd.

Thanks to our dinner sponsors: