Jennifer Brisman is the founder and CEO of VOW Digital Health, a health safety platform created specifically for the event industry. She's based in New York.
How she got her start: Brisman has been working in the event space for over 20 years. As an event producer, she always found herself looking for new tech-oriented solutions to systematize workflow for both her clients and collaborators—and actually built her own technology to improve event-related communication back in 2004.
"I really became quite obsessed with centralizing information and communications and details for an event across all collaborators," she remembers. "But it was too early. So I decided to continue to hone my craft and came back to it in 2018."
At its inception, VOW was a collaboration tool. Brisman describes it as similar to Slack or Trello, but built specifically for the event industry and the specific tools that event professionals need.
When the pandemic hit, Brisman realized she had the skill set, the team, and the background to help the event industry bring back live gatherings in a safe way. The result was VOW Digital Health, which officially launched in 2021 and bills itself as the first COVID-19 health safety platform created for the event industry. "Ultimately, we've saved over $1 billion in event revenue in 15 months," Brisman says. "That's a number we're really proud of."
VOW Digital Health now works with some of the biggest brands and events in the world, ranging from the U.S. Navy Seals to Peloton to the Pan American Games. And the platform is now expanding well beyond COVID-19-related concerns.
"It's allowing event organizers to really build their own app for an event," she says. "[Coordinating all of this] has traditionally been done on the lowest level in-house at these event companies, but that's not possible anymore due to lack of talent or lack of time. Too much data and information is getting repetitive, and it's really costing tremendous time and money. We want to fix that."
What innovation means to her: "I think about innovation every day," Brisman says. "It's about asking questions and taking a step back to look at the market and see things that nobody else can see."
For Brisman, VOW has been all about anticipating the needs of event producers and customizing the experience accordingly.
"We actually built 450 prototypes. So when we built something for Citibank, we tailored it to them. And when we built something for Marcy Blum, we tailored it to her, and when we built something for David Stark, we tailored it to him," she says. "It's really important from an innovation standpoint that when you want to do something new, you have to go out to the people you're doing it for—and you need to have trust and allow them to take a leap of faith with you. The industry built this product as much as we did. We spoke their language; we went out to them and said, 'This is what we're building. Are we crazy?'"
Ultimately, Brisman says, "It's OK to have a crazy idea, as long as it's crazy for the right people at the right time. ... Listen to your customers, look at the market, know what's next, and leverage those things to show them things they could never believe."
Career highlights: "If anyone told me that I would have a tech company, I wouldn't have believed them. If anyone said, 'You're going to have an international team of 16 people,' I never would have believed them. If anyone said, 'The biggest companies in the world are going to be your customers,' I wouldn't believe them. And if anyone said, 'The industry is going to die and eventually come back after 16 months amidst a pandemic, and the thing that you're going to build is going to help build the industry back,' I never would have believed that," she says. "It's been a surreal experience."
Vision for the future: Brisman hopes the future is about collaboration versus competition. "I hope we will understand that we will have more power collectively," she says. "Let's make our platforms more collaborative and make usage of the platforms more intuitive."
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