Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from Tampa-St. Petersburg, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Steve Jorgenson, Founder of Poach Prevent, a first-of-its-kind non-solicit compliance monitoring SaaS platform to help companies that engage with external recruiters monitor them for breaches of their obligations.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

I was working my first day on the legal team for a multinational staffing company and going through contract terms. We got to the non-solicit obligations, and I asked what the company did for compliance with the obligation not to message our clients’ employees about other jobs, and the answer shocked me–there’s no mechanism or compliance for this obligation, even though it is in millions of agreements.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

We are helping build more transparent and trusted partnerships between clients and their external recruitment vendors through the creation of the first-ever tool to fill this enormous compliance gap.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenges were figuring out how to conceptually build a tool like this and then actually build a tool that worked. The present challenge is to figure out the most efficient way to market this tool, as there is nothing else like it on the market.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We would like to build a more integrated tool and also use the mechanism to pivot to parallel use cases.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with someone building or growing a company.

Keep grinding and be ready to pivot.

Why Florida?

My hometown, Tampa, is now a tech hub!