Inside Zeck — How Service, Software, and Smart Capital Are Reimagining the Board Meeting
This story is part of NVCA’s Startup Stories — an ongoing series on how venture-backed founders drive American jobs, innovation, and economic growth, and showcasing the importance of a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Robert Wolfe is on his third company, and he is uncommonly clear about why he is still doing this.
“I’ve never woken up once not excited to attack the day,” he told us. After Moosejaw (acquired by Walmart) and CrowdRise (acquired by GoFundMe), he and his brother Jeffrey could have stepped away. Instead, with co-founder Edward Norton, they went looking for the next broken process worth fixing. They found it in the boardroom — and the company they built to fix it, Zeck, is now reshaping how thousands of American companies and nonprofits run their most consequential meetings.
What stands out in a conversation with Robert is not the product. It is the operating philosophy underneath it.
A 1987 problem, still unsolved
PowerPoint was invented in 1987 — pre-iPhone, pre-cloud. Yet four decades later, America’s most important meetings still run on an extensive page slide deck emailed the night before.
“92% of our web traffic is mobile,” Robert said. “Most companies and non-profits are still delivering boards something they literally cannot read on their phones.”
Zeck replaces the static deck with a secure, interactive site built for how boards actually work today. Leadership teams reclaim roughly 80% of their prep time. Board members get a product that works on any device. And the live meeting itself shifts from a one-way lecture into a strategic conversation.
That’s the product. The harder part to build — and the part Robert speaks about with the most conviction — is what surrounds it.
The “S” most SaaS companies have forgotten
“We’re a SaaS company,” he said. “Software as a Service. Most SaaS companies have lost that service part. We are pretty relentless about it.”
At Zeck, onboarding is unlimited. Customer service is unlimited. There is no premium tier where a customer finally earns the right to speak with a human. Robert treats service as a growth engine, not a cost center — a conviction shaped by years of operating experience.
He points back to Moosejaw, where the team ran a 150-person customer service operation. Most calls were complaints. And yet the data was unambiguous: customers who reached out — even angry ones — returned and repurchased faster than those who never contacted the company at all. The lesson stuck. Great service does not just retain customers; it manufactures advocates.
That philosophy now defines Zeck’s competitive position. The company is not trying to win on features alone. It is trying to win on the part of the customer relationship most software companies treat as overhead.
A virtuous cycle, by design
Robert returns repeatedly to a single idea: build something good enough that the system compounds in your favor. Service creates loyalty. Loyalty creates word of mouth. Word of mouth produces customers the company never had to acquire.
“We don’t market to board members at all. Zero,” he said. “You can’t buy the network effect. You just have to do a good job, and your customers start telling their friends.”
The numbers reflect it. Zeck does not market to nonprofits, yet roughly 40% of its customers are nonprofits — a market with real scale. There are roughly 1.9 million U.S. nonprofits, according to Candid, each required to hold four board meetings annually, each involving ten to twenty people. That means millions of Americans are participating in a process almost none of them enjoy. Zeck is fixing it for more than 10,000 users today, and growing largely through referral.
The platform is SOC 2 certified — meaningful when an organization’s most sensitive documents still routinely travel the internet as PDF attachments. Zeck itself is a 40-person team, located across the country with its headquarters rooted in Detroit: the kind of venture-backed job creation that does not always surface in the coastal tech narrative but lands in real American communities.
Why the venture partnership mattered
This is the part of Zeck’s story policymakers should pay closest attention to.
Robert and Jeffrey are not first-time founders. They bootstrapped Moosejaw for 15 years before taking outside capital. They bootstrapped CrowdRise as well. With Zeck, they did something deliberately different: they raised early.
“We had a better understanding of the value of great systems,” Robert explained. “Salesforce and HubSpot from day one instead of waiting two years. Great engineers from day one instead of figuring it out ourselves.”
There was a product imperative as well. A board meeting platform cannot ship as a typical MVP. “We asked friends to test it with their boards. Their answer was no — ‘These are my four most important meetings a year. I’m not putting a half-baked product in front of my board.'” Building it correctly the first time required serious capital.
That capital came from NVCA member Detroit Venture Partners led by other investors including Salesforce Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Breyer Capital, and Brian Sheth, co-founder of Vista Equity. Zeck closed a $7.5M Series A in 2024.
And then the virtuous cycle extended to the cap table itself.
“Some of our investors have also become customers and strategic partners,” Robert said. “Salesforce Ventures and Detroit Venture Partners have helped introduce Zeck to relevant companies in their networks. I didn’t fully appreciate the value of having investors who also understand and use the product firsthand. That alignment has helped create valuable feedback, credibility, and introductions as we’ve grown.”
Zeck’s experience illustrates one way venture investors can support early-stage companies beyond capital: through introductions, operational insight, product feedback, and industry credibility. None of it is possible without a healthy venture ecosystem — and the policy environment that allows that ecosystem to function.
What this story says
Zeck is an innovation story — a serial founder choosing to take on a stagnant process the rest of the market had quietly accepted. And it is a venture capital story: a clear-eyed example of what early-stage capital, deployed by aligned partners, can unlock that bootstrapping alone cannot.
Robert built two companies the long, organic way. With Zeck, he is building one designed to compound — every customer a loyal recommender, strategic partners who understand the product firsthand, and every board meeting a measurable improvement on the last.
That is the kind of cycle worth protecting.
Zeck is backed by NVCA member firm Detroit Venture Partners. Certain investors and affiliated organizations are also users of the platform.