RALLY | Beacons' Neal Jean on Building for the User Experience
A deep-dive with the CEO fueling the creator economy, opportunities at Expo West SXSW, and Gold Wins!
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Spotlight | Neal Jean, CEO of Beacons
We are thrilled to spotlight Neal Jean, co-founder and CEO of Beacons, an a16z-backed startup building tools for creators. At the beginning of 2025, Beacons was recently named as 1 of 30 early-stage startups most likely to become a unicorn by Business Insider. Congratulations to the team!
What inspired you to found Beacons?
I met my co-founders at Stanford while we were doing our PhDs in machine learning. We initially applied and got into Y Combinator with a smart lock company. During Y Combinator, we pivoted a few times before deciding to focus on the creator economy. I met someone at a wedding in Singapore who was managing influencer marketing campaigns—she shared how hard and time consuming it is to pick and evaluate creators for influencer marketing. We began working with her to build a tool that she could use, and that’s how we began building for the creator economy.
Tell us about Beacons; what makes Beacons unique?
Beacons is building software and AI to power every layer of the creator economy, from creators and talent agencies to brands that do influencer marketing. We have: an all in one platform for creators where creators can run their entire businesses on Beacons; a platform for creator managers who can manage and collaborate with their creators directly on Beacons; a marketplace where brands and marketing agencies can find and connect with Beacons creators.
What is your greatest strength as a founder? What is your advice for other founders who want to cultivate this superpower?
One thing that has helped me as a founder is having a growth mindset. As a first time founder, you’re going to encounter tons of challenges, opportunities, and new situations. Instead of feeling intimidated by these or ill equipped to tackle these, know that who you are today isn’t who you’ll be forever. Just because you don’t know how to do something today doesn’t mean you won’t have that skill or be that kind of person tomorrow.
What’s a small, step-change habit that has served you well, and you would recommend other founders to adopt?
One thing that I’ve done as a founder is tracking how I spend my time each week and reflecting on whether these are the ideal time allocations based on my and the company’s priorities. I bucket different meetings and tasks on my calendar into different categories of priorities and at the end of the week, review how much time I spent on each of my priorities and how I want to adjust for the next and future weeks.
What was the toughest challenge you overcame at Beacons? How did you overcome it; what were your biggest lessons coming out of that experience?
At Beacons, we’re going after an ambitious product roadmap. We’re always investing in product development and making the best product possible for our users. But that also means that the impact on metrics isn’t always immediate. We focus on value creation before value capture, and the latter doesn’t always immediately follow the former. We stayed patient and kept staying close to our users and eventually, the platform began coming together and the product investment began paying off.
What has surprised you the most about building your startup?
It’s incredibly helpful to actually dog food your product whenever you can. When we started building our product for creator managers, we felt it was important to start managing creators in house at Beacons to really feel the pain points of creator managers. Now as we launch our creator marketplace for marketing agencies and brands, we’re taking a similar approach through starting our own agency to help people find creators using our platform.
Upcoming Gold House Network Opportunities
For any CPG founders headed to Expo West: here are some events hosted by fellow founders and friendly partners:
Attending SXSW? Fill out this form if you’re interested in attending our Gold Filmmaker’s Showcase on 3/12. Made possible by WME and Adobe, the Gold Filmmaker Spotlight gives filmmakers the opportunity to pitch their films to a room of entertainment executives, producers and fellow filmmakers.
Recent Gold Wins
Datasaur recently shared about building in a portable fashion at the Open Data Science Conference. Learn more here.
Wildgrid.ai was recently accepted to the Halcyon DMV Climate Innovation Fellowship. Check out the cohort and learn more about the program here.
Gold House has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Elevate Prize, an award celebrating pioneering leaders and organizations that are “shifting culture to create a world where more people are inspired to take action.” We’re excited by the honor and grateful to our community!
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Ideas? Questions?
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