Wil Geller

My name is Will Geller. I'm the COO and co-founder of Foodfluence.

So Foodfluence is a all-in-one AI, basically toolkit for restaurants and SMBs to automate influencer marketing. So it's all experience driven and whether it's restaurant, escape rooms, anything experience, we automate their marketing.

So our target audience and customer base is predominantly SMBs within the United States, whether that be again restaurants, escape rooms, anything experience driven, is who we go after and who we work with.

Yeah. So experience wise, I grew up in a pretty entrepreneurial household. So I've always been kind of selling sneakers or selling trail mix, anything I can to kind of ignite the entrepreneurial spirit.

And in terms of what I've learned kind of along the way here is really when you're a startup, you have to find ways to differentiate yourself and be scrappy, whether that be driving, dropping pamphlets to people, standing in the middle of the street, wearing all branded clothing, just basically screaming to sign up for the platform, or just cold emailing is, you know, hundreds of thousands of businesses to get them on your platform.

This year, I'm really excited about AI.

The reason for that is 2025 was kind of the year of everyone adopting AI and learning about it. And 2026 is really for me about putting it in place and actually automating a lot of the previously manual tasks that people would have to hire multiple positions for.

The biggest challenge in 2026,

I would say is actually implementing AI, but specifically into how to grow the business itself. So less about how do I use it to automate like customer tickets, but more about how can I automate this to make the customer experience better? How can I use this to make the product better? As AI kind of grows, more companies are popping up out of nowhere. So that kind of drives competition and you have to be able to adopt it in order to obviously stay ahead of competition.

The most important thing I look for in building a team is just their personality.

Resumes is whatever to me, but truly how they fit within our company. Do they mesh with all the other employees? Are they fun? Outgoing is really the most important part because we want someone that likes what they do for work and everything falls in place after that.

Working at another startup is definitely the biggest red flag, having two jobs in the startup world at least. The other one would be just not being proactive and waiting to the last minute to say, "Oh, hey, I haven't been able to finish this yet." It's probably the other biggest one.

Let's see. Lessons I've learned the hard way in terms of hiring.

I would say, again, taking someone part-time that has another job, I definitely would not recommend that, at least in the startup world.

The other one would be...

Oh, I know this one stumped me a little bit. There's a lot of problems that I've had with hiring.

Yeah, I would say having part-time work is really, really difficult, especially as a growing fast-paced startup.

I would also say someone that cares too much about how much they're making above fair market value. If that's their end-all, be-all is how much they're making and not how much they're working or who they're working for or with, that's been another challenging problem that we've encountered, especially in the software engineering world.

I'd say really, really important. It just makes scanning through resumes and different people a lot easier. It tends to actually find things when prompted correctly that you may have missed or may not see on the surface level.

AI fluency is really important for us just because with an AI-dominant product, being able to use it from anything from sales to customer support is pretty critical. It's probably the number one thing we look for now.

I've been a Founders League member for one year.

The Founders League membership in terms of benefits that I've found is actual... The networking is so much better versus other groups that get together because they promise networking, but no one's actually interacting with each other. During the league here, it's been great. We've been able to go outside, sit around, and everyone wants to talk to each other. I've met people from bankers to software founders to even influencers.

The connections I've made in Founders League professionally have really helped. We've actually closed two customers through people we connected through at Founders League. We've also signed multiple influencers as well through Founders League just from connecting with them.

I've been playing Pickleball for about three years.

My athletic background is I've basically played basketball for 15 years and then went into tennis. Obviously, when I moved to Austin, Pickleball was kind of the whole... Basically, it was just Pickleball. I picked it up and hadn't stopped since.

Yeah, this last one.

In terms of the tournament last year, we didn't finish where we wanted to. We were a fresh team, still kind of learning how we worked together. Maybe could have learned that a little bit faster. I think we lost in the third round in kind of the intermediate group.

Not what we wanted, but we'll get up next year.

The competition is 100% maybe a better Pickleball player. It's definitely friendly off the courts, but when you step on, it's definitely very, very serious. It's almost intimidating at first, but it's been incredible, and I'm a super competitive guy, so I love being competitive.

This year's tournament, we're going to dominate. That's my goal. The goal is to win it all. There's nothing else.

Branson Packard. He's my co-founder.

This year, I'm playing with Branson Packard, who is my co-founder.

Yeah, in terms of feuds, there's been pretty much every single time, at least within our team, there's definitely a lot of arguments on whose ball is in the middle, who should be playing on the left or who should be playing on the right. We still haven't found that form yet, but we'll get it figured out before the season starts.

Me, as a Pickleball player, I'm very aggressive, so I just try to hit everything as hard as I can. I think they call it a banger, is what the term is. I don't like to dink, so if the ball is anywhere near hip height, it's getting hit as hard as seemingly possible.

In terms of my membership, Founders League, I really just look to get genuine connections out of it. I moved to Austin two or three years ago, and finding my business community, in a sense, was really important to me. This just accelerated it by 10x.

For me, connections and competition are really the two most important things, and it accomplishes both.

Washington, DC.

Originally, it was called Story It, which was around for two years prior, and then we pivoted. Now, it's about four years.

Yeah. Food Fluence started originally at Story It about two and a half, three years ago. We raised a pre-seed round, and then we pivoted into Food Fluence about two years ago. Now, we have a team of about 15 people, some based in the US, some based internationally.

We're looking to grow to around 30 people in the next year and a half.

My favorite one in Austin? That's a good question.

My favorite one in Austin is probably Kirby Lane Cafe. They were one of the first customers that took a chance on us. To this day, I might be biased, but their food is great. They treat us really well, and I love working with them.