Shane Whitlatch is used to being on the ground floor when it comes to Tampa Bay startups.
He was roughly the fifth employee at OpenNetwork before becoming one of the first employees at FairWarning — both of which grew and sold in multimillion-dollar exits.
He then served as chief revenue officer for Omnivore, which was sold to publicly traded Olo in February for an undisclosed amount.
“There was like 700 employees [after the merger],” Whitlatch said. “And it’s just not me.”
He had been in discussions with Threshold 360 CEO Jordan Raynor on and off for years, and after the Olo buyout, decided the time was right to head back to the early-stage startup world.
“It was really the size of company that I’ve been used to growing and scaling,” he said. “I liked the tech, and I like that we’re in one market but can serve many industries.”
Whitlatch became CEO of the Tampa-based company in August and is now growing its team, clientele and pocketbook.
“There’s not an exit plan per se, and that’s one of the things that attracted me to the position,” Whitlatch said. “The goal is to have this tech everywhere, for industries to sell their experiences through virtual tours. With Omnivore, it was, ‘Let’s build this tech and ultimately, it will result in an exit.’ This is a very different story. It’s, ‘Let’s scale this to many industries and let’s make it another successful Tampa Bay tech company.”
The company was founded in 2016 and counts Marriott, Visit Austin, the San Francisco Travel Association and Embarc Collective among its clients.
Threshold 360 creates technology that allows the user to view spaces in a simple, guided manner. It is used for destination marketing organizations like Visit Tampa Bay, which can showcase their convention centers, hotels and amenities for the city, like Armature Works or ZooTampa.
“Destinations use it if they want to land major events like the Super Bowl or a big convention,” Whitlatch said. “It’s much better to send tours of, ‘Here’s the hotel lobby, the rooms, the view from the outside cafe.’”
The company has 100,000 locations already captured, utilizing a team of roughly 80 “creators” who capture the locations throughout the country. An interested client would buy a set number of locations and, within 72 hours, would have the 360-degree tours available on their site.
Whitlatch has plans to expand the company, which has 13 full-time employees, by an additional 10 to 15 people by mid-2023.
“I don’t see myself as a large company CEO; I love growing 10 to 100, then 100 to 200,” he said, adding the company could grow larger — he just may not remain CEO at that point. “I love that journey. I know what it looks like; there’s a lot of stuff that’s ugly, but a lot of fun in that.”
He believes he can grow the company right from the Tampa Bay area.
“It was so hard to sell tech to local financial institutions because it wasn’t known as a tech hub — like, ‘What tech is out of Tampa Bay?’” he said, acknowledging this was around 1999. “But that’s changed with ReliaQuest, KnowBe4 and many others. It’s fantastic; now I have to compete to hire the best talent because there are so many companies out there.”
