[ibimage==41632==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
“The idea first came to me when I was doing job interviews in school,” said Chicago entrepreneur Aaron Frazin. “I wanted to stand out, so I did lots of Googling before I walked into any interview. After doing this prep work over and over, I thought to myself, I'm wasting my time, is there anything that can do this for me? I Googled and found out the technology didn't exist, so I turned down the job and created Charlie.”
Charlie is a meeting-prep tool that uses a unique algorithm to spit out a one-page dossier on anyone you may have a meeting with, drawn from more than 100,000 sources. Frazin himself used it when meeting with potential investors, and has just received a $1.75 million seed round led by Lightbox Ventures, already a Charlie client. Hyde Park Venture Partners, Confluence Capital Partners, Hoovers founder and CEO Patrick Spain, Lon Chow, and Armando Pauker of Apex Venture Partners joined in, too.
“We noticed that the world's most powerful people all had assistants that prepared them before they walked into a meeting,” Frazin said. "So we thought, 'why can't the rest of us?' We watched many executives prep for their meetings, learned from them what research they did, and included that information in the briefings. Now the rest of us can all have the luxury of having a personal assistant there to have our back before any meeting.”
[ibimage==41615==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-left]The company plans to spend its new influx of cash hiring top-shelf engineers and further tightening Charlie's algorithm and deepening its research.
Frazin's team will also continue to host 'porch dinners' for local entrepreneurs seeking guidance and camaraderie in what can be a trying undertaking. This bespeaks Frazin's commitment to the local small-business community. “In the past year, many different entrepreneurs have started hosting similar dinners here in Chicago," Frazin said. “Now, any time you might go through a crisis, you always have someone to reach out to. From our 1871 community to our SPACE community, I've never felt so much support, and that's why we think Chicago is the best place in the world to create a startup.”
