Nonstop Connections

Always on the move enjoying the ride. Commuting in my beloved white 1990 Acura Integra down the 280. Riding waves in SD and the slopes in Tahoe.

How I got Here

Neil Betterton

Fresh out of San Diego State with a degree in geography, I landed in the Bay Area eager to make something of myself. I was digitizing maps and knew I was in the right place, but in the wrong job. I loved the energy in the Valley that was constantly creating what was next in tech and wanted to be a part of it.

I had friends that were in sales. They were young like me, but had found their groove in tech. So I course corrected into a sales position with a company called TeleAdapt. We were selling Fortune 500 companies adapter kits with kinds of MacGyver gadgets so sales teams in the field could hook-up their laptop & modem from any country in any situation and get connected. Even the long 50 mile commute down the 280 from San Francisco through the foothills of the peninsula breezed by. There were endless opportunities in sales to learn about the market, customers, new products and how to bring them all together.

Beautiful views took the edge off of a fifty mile commute down south from San Francisco on the 280.

One of those early connections I made was with the founder of 1-800-Batteries, a start-up selling rechargeable batteries for what seemed like every mobile device under the sun. They had just gotten funding and were rebranding as iGo and moving to Reno. My wife and I had just started our family and we wanted to make a move, so I joined the new iGo heading up corporate sales.  The wild dot com IPO ride ensued and I learned a ton about what’s possible when you put together a team of motivated people… until eventually a buyout shook everything up.

Next Chapter

It was time for me to move on and after making a call into the owner at TeleAdapt (never burn a bridge, right?), I discovered a different opportunity with the same company.   This time I was heading up a new internal venture of the business catered to the hospitality market. and I jumped into the new market eager to learn, meet new people and help solve their tech problems. We built a strong team and as the business grew, we positioned ourselves well to take advantage of the first wave of smartphones that needed a whole new ecosystem of accessories to support it in hotel rooms. We moved quickly and stretched from a sales and sourcing model into development and were able to get our products placed in millions of rooms.

At TeleAdapt I found my passion not only for making sales connections but for really looking deeper at the needs of the market and creating new products. One of the more compelling products that we took on at TeleAdapt was a design-driven Bluetooth alarm clock from a consumer electronics company called Soundfreaq. I started to see the full value chain from design, production through sales and knew there was even more opportunities to bring all those pieces together to holistically innovate for hotels.

Matthew Paprocki was the creative director at Soundfreaq when we first met. You know how sometimes you meet someone that you’re just in sync with?  Where you feel like you’re learning a little something and sharing a little something in every interaction? We both got excited about the same things and saw similar opportunities in the ever-changing tech landscape.

With the next wave of new wireless charging and smart products technology coming, I wanted to focus more broadly on development as well as sales. Matthew saw the opportunity as well to develop new products that bring consumer and decor-driven design to the hospitality industry. We pitched the opportunity to some of our long-time manufacturing partners and launched our new venture

The beginnings of Nonstop, chatting with Matthew over a cup of coffee in the rather loud Las Vegas terminal.

Sitting in an airport terminal in Vegas earlier this year, Matthew pitched me our name- Nonstop. Click. The name brought it all together. It gets right at the heart of technology and travel.  It’s a constant evolution, about constant discovery and opportunity; always a new landscape to map out and new connections to find. So ya, I'm super excited about our new team. What's next? What will guests expect to see in their room next year? In 5 years? That's my focus- nonstop.