Meet John: M13’s Venture Studio Leader on Heart, Hustle, and Turning Rejection into Triumph

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M13 Partner John Tabis is an expert in the business of business-building. He’s cultivated a wealth of knowledge across operations, e-commerce, brand strategy, and more, honed through years of hands-on leadership and time spent at industry giants like Bain & Company and Disney. 

When he pitched The Bouqs Company on ABC’s Shark Tank, he became the first entrepreneur to get a deal from a shark after being rejected on the show. Today, whether it’s a TV appearance or a venture partnership, John approaches every challenge with the resilience of someone who knows how to turn rejection into triumph.

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As the head of M13’s venture studio, Launchpad, John is a self-described “people-to-people connection engine.” He helps spark new ventures, bringing together high-quality founders, experts, and investors, catalyzing businesses through relationships, shared vision, and hustle.

In addition to his technical and operational expertise, John places a strong focus on the human side of business, particularly founders' mental health and personal development. Having faced the isolating challenges of entrepreneurship firsthand, he is a vocal advocate for preparing founders for the mental health struggles they may encounter—and a strong believer in Launchpad’s mission to make the founder journey less lonely. 

We sat down with John to talk about Shark Tank, Disney, Launchpad’s approach to evaluating founders and ideas, and more. 

John’s recent publications 

• 4 Lessons on Mental Wellness for Founders
• M13's venture studio: Never build alone.
• Our 2024 predictions 

Growing a venture studio and connecting with founders

You lead Launchpad, M13’s venture studio. Who does Launchpad work with? 

Our job is to meet interesting, high-quality people and then catalyze businesses among them. This means our audience is pretty broad, but a few specific groups include:

• Former and current founders
• Founders-in-waiting, meaning folks with the capability and desire to be a founder who just haven’t made the leap quite yet
• Experts, including operators, researchers, think tank leaders, and academics
• Investors at every level, from angel to corporate 
• Celebrities and people with unique influence in a particular space

In essence, my job is to talk to people. These conversations help us test out our hypotheses for different businesses. 

How do you break the ice to have meaningful conversations with people you’ve just met? 

I almost always use humor. A little joke or observation about the weather or my commute, or a little self-deprecation or over-the-top flattery goes a long way toward creating a connection beyond “Hello, my name is…” 

It catches people by surprise sometimes, but 90% of the time or more, it leads to a more intimate and personal conversation than we would have had otherwise. Now that we’ve laughed together, we’ve shared an emotional moment that goes beyond business business business. That’s when people let their guard down, and the group can really dig in.  

What are green flags you look for when talking to potential founders? 

We’re looking for founders who can engage with the creative process of experiment, iterate, fail, and learn—but there’s no “typical” profile. 

Obviously it’s great to work with someone who has been a founder before and learned firsthand how to build a product, gain traction, attract a great team, fundraise, etc. Being an operator at a scaling startup can also give you that experience.

But more generally, I’d say we look for unique insight, experience, or education in a given space——always paired with grit.

There’s also the more intangible “twinkle in the eye”—a confidence, and an attitude of, I’m going to figure this out. They might not know everything today, but there’s a determination to learn. That’s the founder magic.  

You’ve talked about the differences between being a founder or a CEO—tell us about that.  

I absolutely love building companies. It’s the coolest thing to attempt. But building a company is very different from running a company. 

Being a founder is a very creative and ambiguous job. Your role is to create belief, then try to do things with the limited resources you have so you can attract more resources to that belief. Don’t do the stuff that doesn’t work; do more of the stuff that does. 

The job of a CEO is literally the opposite: it’s to manage processes, people, and resources against a set of priorities and goals at scale. Every company that grows enough reaches a point where the founder transitions to being the CEO. There’s no avoiding it. But it’s strange, because those two roles have very little in common.  

Personally, being a CEO was almost soul-crushing for me, because it was about micro-optimizations and day-to-day management, while I’d always lived in the world of ideas. I used to tell people, “If I could just be a founder over and over, that would be the perfect job for me.”

In a way, that’s why Launchpad is such a great fit for me—I get to be a people-to-people connection engine and support amazing human beings with that same drive to build build build. 

{{appearances}}

Can you shout out some founders you’ve worked with? 

Yes! One I’d highlight is Mike Peregrina, the founder and CEO of Hey, Walt!, a real estate CRM product. He’s an extremely gritty, scrappy individual. He got his realtor’s license; he’s sold homes; and he’s a fantastic salesman, with a real talent for creating belief. Mike has also previously been through the founding journey, and he learned a lot from it—and still wanted to do it again! His determination and experience are a powerful combination. 

Another would be Karan Sakhuja, founder and CTO of Score Travel, a virtual travel agent. He was a founding CTO of a large business in the real estate space, where he scaled an engineering organization to 100+ engineers and helped get the company to a $1B valuation. He has a super relevant skillset in terms of the type of technology he’s built, but he’s also super intellectually curious about the travel space—two factors that made us really excited about working with him. 

Last Launchpad question: You’ve told us about evaluating potential founders. How do you evaluate potential business ideas? 

We have a specific scoring mechanism for evaluating ideas at Launchpad. It involves things like: 

• Problem-solution fit
• Founder and team
• Go-to-market and distribution advantages 
• Co-investment
• Technology

That technology bucket can massively swing an idea between “yes” and “no.” One thing it accounts for is the level of modernity in the tech stack. Having a very modern tech stack, including a strong AI approach, doesn’t just benefit the one company; it benefits Launchpad as an entity, because we can learn from that experiment and apply it to our other projects. A rising tide lifts all boats. 

Career lessons from Shark Tank, Finding Nemo, and beyond 

What was it like to pitch The Bouqs Co on ABC’s Shark Tank? 

Intense! We filmed for a few hours to get to a 7-minute segment, and they just grill you the whole time. Everybody talks at once to try to get you to make that famous “confused face.” And I got totally rejected. Barbara hated the name; Mr. Cuban didn’t want to invest with Valley VCs; and Mr. Wonderful said he’d send Bouqs to my grave, because “you died today.” That was classic.   

But even with that rejection, the impact of Shark Tank was huge. Before the episode aired, we had sold maybe $700K in the last six months. Right after it aired, we did $500,000 in 24 hours. We almost couldn’t keep up. 

The craziest part came months later, when one of the Sharks, Robert Herjavec, called me out of the blue. He was getting married, and said the quotes he was getting for flowers were insane—but he remembered how beautiful the Bouqs flowers were from my pitch and wanted to talk to me about doing his wedding. 

He was so floored by the price I gave him that he took the savings and invested them in our 2017 Series C. That’s how I became the first person to ever get denied a deal on Shark Tank, but still get a deal from a Shark.

Prior to Bouqs, you spent several years working on the Corporate Strategy & Brand Management team at Disney. Can you share some lessons from that time? 

Generally, people think of a brand as a collection of nuts and bolts: the logo, the colors, the catchphrase, the jingle. At Disney, we looked at it through a much more expansive lens: the brand was the sum of every experience you have ever had with Disney. 

This was built on a structure called the “Disney brand promise,” which is a statement of what Disney does, how they do it, and what makes it special. For example, one of the phrases that defines this brand promise is “with heart,” meaning something parents and children agree is cool. Something that kids love, but that annoys mom and dad—that’s not done with heart in the way that the Disney brand team defines it. 

This structure means you have a rubric to evaluate everything, from a franchise property to a theme park ride.

Another tenet we evaluated the brand on was storytelling. I remember the brand team riding the old submarine ride at Disneyland, and observing: there was no storytelling. You went underwater and looked at stuff, and that was the ride. But Finding Nemo had come out a couple years prior, so the team decided to work with Imagineers to build a story around this ride. And now instead of a random underwater adventure, it’s the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.  That’s how a brand gets codified and then implemented at scale.   

A high-quality brand isn’t a fluffy, subjective thing. It’s built on concrete language and structure that many people can use together to evaluate and improve bit-by-bit over time.  

Now that you work in VC, what’s a misconception about venture you want to clear up? 

Venture news can get very glamorized. We look at these huge winners and gloss over the stories behind them—including the fact that some 90% of companies don’t make it.  

The reality is, even the “overnight successes” are a shitshow most of the way. You’re always trying to stretch your resources; there’s always another fire; it’s always a tough journey. 

On that note: Raising money is something that gets celebrated a lot, but raising money is not an outcome. It means that your company, which early on is losing money, now has the chance to lose more money—in the hopes of eventually losing less money and then, maybe, finally, being profitable.

You’re a major champion of mental health for founders. Can you tell us about your own experience? 

The mental health journey of being a founder can be brutal, especially if you aren’t prepared for it. At Bouqs, I was lucky to have a great co-founder—but he was running the supply chain portion of our business, which was based out of Ecuador, while I was in the US. So even though I had a co-founder, I felt very, very lonely. 

Mental health wasn’t even on my radar until I found myself in a pretty deep depression after a particularly difficult stretch in both the company and my personal life. Broken technology, broken culture, a flooded house with twins on the way. One day I found myself sobbing in my car, looking in the rearview mirror literally and figuratively, wondering what the heck had happened to me. 

I think that ex post facto discovery is really hard on founders. I would love for early-stage creators to be educated around what the journey will really be like ahead of time and to learn what tools can make that journey easier. There’s no reason for people to suffer in confusion.

What can make the founder journey easier? 

You can’t go it alone. But the problem is, your board can be great, your investors can be great, lots of people can try to help—but none of them are going to be in the trenches with you. It can be unbelievably lonely and stressful, and if you don’t have someone to share that burden with, it’s exponentially harder. 

The good news is, with Launchpad, we really are in the trenches with our founders, working alongside them on their companies. We’re taking a leap with founders, saying we believe in the vision, and we’re here to help make it come true. 

You can also find support from a co-founder, a best friend, a therapist, or a coach. Identifying that resource and leaning on them, while also getting educated about mental health, is key.   

Lightning round

First job? 

Around sixth grade I started helping my dad tar the asphalt track at a park near our house. Working with tar was such dirty work that we’d throw our shoes away afterwards. 

Hidden talent? 

I used to be a very good football kicker. I walked onto the Notre Dame football team and was even on the roster for a hot minute.   

Guilty pleasure? 

I wouldn’t say I feel guilty about it, but I really like beer. Mostly IPAs. Something hoppy. 

Favorite Disney movie? 

Toy Story. It was the first of its kind in so many ways—just amazing storytelling about the bonds of childhood. Pure magic.  

Favorite app? 

Clash Royale. It’s like chess meets poker meets a video game.

Least-favorite app? 

X. It can be such a cesspool of terrible conversation.

What is something most people don’t know about you? 

I grew up in a very small town in the hills of Pennsylvania called Rural Ridge—total population 300. I was probably related to 20% of the town.

If you weren’t working in tech or venture, what would you be doing?

Purely hypothetically? I’d host American Idol.