Clay Sifford

Founder & CEO LASSO

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

Clay Sifford is the founder and chief executive of LASSO, a Nashville software company that sells what it calls an operating system for live event businesses: crew scheduling and payroll, project management, inventory, quoting and payments for the production companies, AV crews, staffing firms, universities and broadcast operations that put on events. He built it as an operator’s answer to his own problem. After about 25 years in the event industry, including running a Nashville production company, he set out to fix the manual crew scheduling and staff management he had watched his own teams struggle with. Under his leadership LASSO has raised a Series A from McCarthy Capital, appeared on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 and the Inc. 5000, acquired Shoflo in 2025 and launched an event-specific AI agent in 2026.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of LASSO, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with offices it has listed in Atlanta, Charleston and Las Vegas.
• Closed a $5 million Series A led by McCarthy Capital in November 2022, after a $3 million seed round in December 2021.
• LASSO ranked No. 271 overall on Deloitte’s 2022 Technology Fast 500 and second among Tennessee-headquartered companies.
• Expanded the leadership team with five vice-president-level hires in January 2024, when the company reported 450% growth over three years.
• Acquired Shoflo, a run-of-show and teleprompter management software provider, in June 2025.
• Launched LASSO Intelligence and its AI agent, Lassie, in beta in May 2026.

Professional Journey

Sifford spent roughly a quarter of a century in live events before he wrote any software. In LASSO’s own podcast he describes taking over a company that supplied local audiovisual services to hotels and small corporate meetings, and later running a mid-sized production company that employed workers across 43 states. That second business taught him the compliance side of the industry, including the line between independent contractors and W-2 employees, which later shaped LASSO’s payroll and workforce features.

The catalyst for LASSO, as he tells it, was an expensive piece of logistics: his company flew a technician from Spokane, Washington to Atlanta for an event without realising that equally qualified crew were already available locally. The lack of visibility into who was available and where became the problem LASSO was built to solve. On the company’s About page he writes that, as CEO of a Nashville event production company, he watched his team struggle with manual crew scheduling, and that before building the product he spoke with more than 350 industry leaders to test how widespread the problem was.

LASSO began as a crew scheduling and management tool and widened steadily. It raised a $3 million seed round in December 2021 and a $5 million Series A led by McCarthy Capital in November 2022, when Sifford said the company was still in the early innings of transforming the event and entertainment industry. The same month it was named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. In 2023 it added project management, logistics, inventory and a mobile app, and in January 2024 it announced five vice-president-level hires across customer success, product and data, marketing, technical operations and sales.

The product line has continued to grow by building and buying. LASSO launched an event-specific payments product in August 2025 and a new quoting tool that December, partnered with Avalara on tax compliance in March 2026, and in June 2025 acquired Shoflo, adding run-of-show and teleprompter software to its suite. In May 2026 it launched LASSO Intelligence, an AI agent called Lassie trained on event industry workflows, with Sifford arguing that generic AI does not understand an event company’s crew, equipment or margins.

LASSO’s SEC filings name him as an executive officer and director of LASSO Software, Inc.; its board also includes Matthew Breunsbach and Jennifer Frist.

Education

No education record was found in LASSO’s materials or its SEC filings.