MEASURING STICK: GreenPlaces helps clients put sustainability dreams into action.

• Author: Gentry, Connie

When other kids were dreaming of being superheroes or astronauts, Alex Lassiter could never pick one career --he wanted to do everything.

"Doing just one thing is like my idea of hell," says Lassiter. Fresh out of UNC Chapel Hill with a business degree in 2010, he worked at a Seattle start-up, followed by a couple of years at consultants Bain & Co. in Atlanta. Then, he had a "life-altering" interview at a venture capital firm in San Francisco.

"The VC partner told me, 'Your whole career has been around taking the least risky choice,' and that's when I realized I had to do something irrational. I had to get off of the path I was on and explore."

In early 2012, he and a buddy, Nicholas Miller, founded their first company, Frequentr, a software project that didn't take off. "We would have an idea, run with it, and get absolutely zero traction," he recalls. "It reached this point where I'd say: 'I don't know what success looks like, but I definitely know what success doesn't look like.'"

Fortunately, some of the ideas coalesced into Gather Technologies, which he co-founded in 2013 with Miller and Tom Merrihew, another UNC Chapel Hill alum. Gather was a customer relationship management platform that enabled restaurants, hotels and hospitality spaces to book wedding receptions, corporate events, reunions and other large parties. It also provided operators with the tools to manage large events.

When the partners sold majority control of Gather to Austin, Texas-based Vista Equity Partners in 2017, it was on track to top $1 billion in reservations booked at about 3,500 venues. In 2020, Vista Equity bought Concord, Massachusetts-based Tripleseat, merging the two platforms into a company with $2.6 billion in bookings.

Earlier this year, the New York-based General Atlantic PE firm invested $500 million in Tripleseat, which included acquiring the remaining stake held by Lassiter and Miller. Merrihew continues as a vice president of engineering at Tripleseat.

Now, Lassiter knew what success looked like. After Gather, he took various projects, including consulting with utilities and lumberyards, raising an investment fund, and working on a personal-protective equipment project during the pandemic.

"It was all fun, but I didn't want to be a retired 33-year-old, I wanted to get back to actually building something," Lassiter says.

Seeking to make more of a social impact, he started GreenPlaces, an open-source platform that wants to "democratize" access to...