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[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] a [Music] oh [Music] [Music] o [Music] oh [Music] [Music] a [Music] n [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] hi everyone I can't see you but I'm so excited to see you um this is actually
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my first time back in the Bay Area in more than a year um I've been living in England for the past year with my family and I just could not miss this day so here I am back for 24 hours jet lag and all so hopefully I can deliver this okay
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in one piece um before I get started I just would love to just take a moment to thank the women who've recently come forward um so bravely on the record to speak out about the sexual harassment they've faced working in Silicon Valley um I just cannot thank them enough they're my heroes um hopefully their actions will cause more women to speak up and help put an end to the discrimination and the harassment that we as women can face working in the
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startup community so one more round of applause so so awesome all right where am I here all right here we go so last year if you were here you'll remember that I spoke about all the problems that can arise in a startup and how to avoid them and to
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be honest I think last year's talk was the best General startup advice I could give you uh so if you haven't read it please go to this link and read it and even if you have read it it's worth a reread because these are the type of
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problems that can get you even when you think you're already watching out for them so there's the link uh last year I ended by saying that I want there to be more women founders of the big companies um of the so-called unicorns and these are the founders who
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make the most influential role models and role models are what we need most if you want to encourage more women to start their own companies um in recent years there's been an increase in the number of women who are starting
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startups and in the number of women who've raised significant seed and series a rounds and this is good uh but now we've got to focus on the next Target we need to have more women of who are founding billion dooll startups
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so that's what I'm going to talk about today um what it takes to start a startup that's not merely successful but is massively successful um and I'm not saying everyone has to do this you don't have to start a startup and if you do
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you don't have to start a Google but if you do want to start a Google what does it take what's the difference between a successful startup and a massively successful startup and fortunately I've seen enough of both types at closeand
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that I can see patterns of differences so I've made a list of things that I think are different about the unicorns and there are nine of them I want to get this one out of the way from the very start um in addition to having everything else that they need
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the Unicorn s are lucky and one of the most important kinds of luck is timing the most successful Founders have the right idea at the right time and you have less control over that than you might think actually because the best ideas are not deliberate they tend to grow organically out of the founders lives uh however while the most successful Founders are all Lucky they're not merely lucky it's never like they have this great idea and then boom
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a few years later they're a billionaire far far from that one of the most noticeable difference between founders of the super successful startups and the moderately successful startups is their motives and in particular the founders of the super
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successful startups never are in it mainly to get rich or to seem cool they're always fanatically interested in what the company is doing incidentally it's perfectly fine to start a startup mainly for the money but uh unless your motives change
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throughout the course of it it probably won't wind up being one of the big ones there are multiple reasons why startups do better when the founders are truly interested in the idea um they work harder because they love the work
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and their enthusiasm is infectious they think longer term and they're much harder for another company to capture with an acquisition offer because they don't actually want to quit so this one is going to sound really obvious um be to be a huge
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startup you have to have a huge Market you have to make something that a lot of people will pay for or that people will pay a lot for um and this is one place luck actually has a very big effect because Market sizes are impossible to
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predict uh for example the airbnbs didn't know how many people would want to stay in other people's homes um all they knew was that enough W to make it an idea that was worth working on um the founders of most successful startups
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never realize early on how big they're going to get uh so our advice at Y combinator is not even to try try to hit a big Market early on uh since you can't predict these things it's better just to work on something you yourself want and
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then hope that there are lots more people like you when you describe the biggest startups most all of them are doing something very basic uh Google is how you find information Facebook is where your friends are Uber gives you rides
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Airbnb gives you somewhere to sleep I mean these are all things you could explain in a few words to a 5-year-old um however don't use this as a test for what to work on because ideas often start out less General um at first
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Facebook wasn't where everyone's friends were they were where a couple thousand Harvard students were a site for a couple thousand students at one college doesn't sound like a very promising idea does it um it may seem promising now because we all
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know how the story turned out um but at the time it did not um almost all the really big startup ideas seemed dubious at at first um I know exactly how airbnb's idea seemed at first because I was one of the people whose job it was
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to judge it and I didn't think much of it at the time to be perfectly honest um and it's not just that these ideas don't seem as big at first as they eventually turn out to be they seem to most people like bad ideas um you need to be a
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certain type of person who can work on one of these bad ideas that eventually turns into a good one you need to be independent-minded you cannot care what other people think um it's now kind of part of the conventional picture of a
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successful founder to be a Maverick and that part of the conventional picture is accurate I really I can't think of one that I would describe as a conformist you also have to be ambitious um because what happens with these
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initially unpromising ideas is that they blossom into terrifyingly big ones you start a site for college students and pretty soon you realize you could sign up the whole world if you wanted to um and at at this point most people's
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reaction is fear um signing up the whole world seems like a lot of work and it also seems like a valuable prize and you have to fight to win those um the fear of Big Ideas prevents most people from even realizing they could start uh you
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know a site for for college students and turn that into a site for the whole world but a few people are more excited than afraid when this happens another thing I noticed about the founders of the really huge startups is that I would not want to stand
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between something they wanted and them um all 100 100% of them um have exceptional exceptional drive but it's not always straightforward to tell how driven someone is um Drive can be suppressed when someone else has authority over you
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like in most schools or in a job and in these situations people who are really driven um may even read as less promising than people who are merely obedient so not only is it hard for me to tell how driven someone is people
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often can't even tell themselves um you can tell after they start a startup though um no one has authority over you in a startup most people find the authority vacuum uncomfortable um but a few people expand into it and those few people
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think this is what life is supposed to be like drive by itself is not enough though you have to be driven to work on this particular company in all the really huge startups the company is at least one of the founders life's work so
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they'd never willingly be acquired for example uh if you sell your life's work then what are you going to do early on starting a startup is all about the product but that changes as a startup get gets really big a Founder
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who wants to keep running the company has to become a manager you don't have to have management ability initially there's plenty of empirical evidence to show that you can learn this on the job um but you have to be able to learn it
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and you probably even have to like it designing cool products and managing people are really different things um most people who like building building things dislike the idea of being a manager probably know some people like
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that uh it's a rare person who can be great at both but you have to be if you want to create one of the really big startups those are the nine things as far as I can tell that are the differences between startups that are merely successful and the ones that
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become really big but they're not just a list uh when you put them all together together they make a story of how a unicorn happens the founders work on something their experience shows shows them that the world needs it wouldn't
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seem like a promising idea to most people but the founders work on it anyway partly because they understand the promise of the idea a little bit better and partly just because they think it's cool um they work on the idea
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and they realize they become even bigger than they had realized um in instead of shrinking from this realization they embrace it eagerly and they realize this is what they want to do with their lives and they're so committed to the company
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that they're willing to morph themselves into whatever the company needs there's a lot of variety in startups but this is the most common path for the really big ones so remember you don't have to start a startup and if you do it doesn't have
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to be a unicorn but if you do this is probably what it's going to look like an unpromising idea that blossoms into a frighteningly big one and the driven Founders who see the opportunity and run with it and I'm hoping that there are some of
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you in this audience who hear this description and think to themselves oh my gosh it's like she's describing me um the people on the path to becoming huge don't usually realize it themselves early on but I'm hoping if I can
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encourage even a few of you to keep going then when you're successful your example will encourage more new more new women to start their own companies and yes this is a very long-term plan but after all it's my life's work so thank
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you again I'm just so happy you're all here today and so excited to hear the talks um the next speaker I'd like to introduce is Anne Patel Thompson she is the founder and CEO of poppy um they are ond demand Child Care notice I said that
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in five words or less um so she went through y commentator in the winter of 2006 and she is here to tell us all about her story thank you hi everyone good afternoon how's everyone doing oh this is really great I'm so excited to be here today my name
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is Anne I'm the co-founder and CEO of poppy we're building the modern Village by connecting vetted caregivers to families when they need child child care I started poppy not because I'm an expert in the field or because I have a
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deep passion for child care I started poppy for two people these two uh the older is my daughter Saia and the younger is my daughter Arya I was so tired of feeling panicked and anxious every time I wasn't a th% sure of who was taking care of my
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girls and I couldn't believe that so many of us are dealing with this every single week and then I couldn't believe that all the people all the amazing people that are taking care of our kids they need more recognition and opportunities so I decided to build it with poppy so I decided to build it with poppy we're serving thousands of families in Seattle right now and it's incredible thing to be a part of especially because Poppy almost didn't
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exist one of the reasons I'm so excited to be here today is because two years ago I sat in your seats at the 2015 FFC I sat there and I listened to all these incredible women telling their stories about bold visions and amazing
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companies and I desperately wanted to be like them only in that moment nothing seemed further from reality I was in the middle of shutting down my first startup after spending years working on it and sying thousands of my own personal
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dollars into it I was so ready to give up and just head back to my successful career in brand management only this afternoon just inspired me so much and I headed back and I decided to give it another shot but not only that I set a
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goal and this is a little bit crazy but this is my journal from that night and I said crazily in 2017 I want to be on that stage giving the talk instead of sitting in the audience thank you so when cat sent me this email um asking me to be um one of the speakers
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you'll notice the date and says April 30th um I was so honored obviously because this was a goal and it was just one of the biggest parts of my story to actually try again but the other crazy kind of ironic part was that she had
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sent me a different kind of email two years earlier and this one was when she told me and she crushed my dreams and she told me that YC wasn't going to be funding uh Poppy and so this is the story I want to tell you a little
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bit about today what happened between my first failed startup and Poppy which is funded and growing today and what happened between cat's first email and then me standing in front of you today my hope is that maybe you'll learn a
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little bit from my mistakes but I hope that in hearing my journey you'll be able to connect it to yours and figure out a way to start and then just keep going so my startup Journey starts about five years ago I had my first daughter
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and I was struggling to figure out a way how to pass on my rich Indian Heritage and the traditions on to my girls a friend and I started talking and we thought well we could figure out a solution to this it was um the time it
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was about 2012 so subscription boxes were all the rage and so we thought well if we just curate something you know it could do with culture and it would have language and food and all these amazing things why couldn't we do that and so we
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worked on it we worked on on the side um while we still kept our jobs and we built business plans and financial models for two years we worked on it on the side then finally in March 2014 we both decided we were going to quit our jobs
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and work on this full-time it felt incredible um but the at the beginning it was what are we going to focus on well I'd heard all of these things about MVPs and working on product and getting it out and so we worked on the product and we thought
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about what we would want to have in this box and we figured it out in three months we were able to put this beautiful curated box together of things that we thought were going to solve the problem because that's what we wanted
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and we thought that was exactly what you were supposed to do so in June we launched and it felt incredible we had friends and family everyone texting us and emailing us and saying oh wow this looks amazing we even had a bunch of
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orders and so we thought this is amazing few weeks go on and the orders start to trickle a little bit they slow and we're like that I mean it's a little bit concerning but we think you know that's probably just because we don't
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have enough product so let's work on more products and get them into the shop so we work on that now it's the fall and we're quickly running out of money we had both invested about $20,000 of our own savings and we had figured if we
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launched then we'll just be able to raise money then it'll all be wonderful that wasn't the case and we were so we were quickly running out of money we decided to try everything we possibly could we did Facebook campaigns
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we did Google adword campaigns we even went and partnered with some of the best Brands out there like the tea collection just trying to figure out how we could Kickstart growth and get people to buy this amazing box that we had done
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after the holidays it became clear that it wasn't working the cost of acquiring these Niche customers was just way too high and it didn't make sense for the one or two boxes that they were buying so we made the hard but right decision to shut it
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down I don't think we talk about this enough but this was some of the hardest times of my life I felt like a failure I felt like I let everyone down including myself and I had lost money that our family could use for the mortgage and
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The Nanny and college funds and I couldn't really see my way forward the worst part was was that I didn't know why I failed I think it's one thing to make a wrong decision or a wrong term but I think it's another thing to not learn from it and so where
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do you go when you need to figure something out the internet I started reading everything I could about how to start a startup or how do successful startups do this and I came across a whole slew of Paul Grahams essays and how to start a
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startup from YC and I devoured everything and I started to realize just some of the ways that I might have been thinking about this in a little bit of the wrong way instead of following your passion you know this whole concept of living in the
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future and building what's missing this whole idea of talking to your users instead of other folks and just building using that to build your product and then I led this one but just finding the hundred people that really
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loved what you were doing versus focusing on everybody else that were out there and then the simplest but hardest one I think was just grow 10% every single week just grow based on this I thought you know what this is the blueprint that I've
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been missing the whole time and I wanted to try again by this time I'd come to the female founder conference and I was so inspired and I decided Ed I needed to try again so I started talking to parents parents that had bought some of our
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boxes parents that were just in the neighborhood I talked to them and I asked them if papaya and post if this box is not what you need and it's not solving a big problem then what are some of the big problems in your life I think you'll find if you've ever worked on a product that people just don't really need you start you have this real intense drive to then work on something that everybody needs and so the topic just kept on coming back to
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child care and I couldn't believe it because I mean I I lived that with two careers and two kids and no family in town I like my husband and I would just wake up every morning and hope we didn't have to do the calendar Shuffle you know
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the thing where you know your Nanny texts at 7 a.m. says I'm sick and then you and your husband pull out your phones and said okay if I can move this meeting I'll take the morning and you can cancel that and I'll take the
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afternoon and it sucked and the fact that so many of us were doing this for me was just it just caught my curiosity and I wanted to figure out what would it take to fix it and sure this is one of the most crowded categories you can find out there and so
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I had a lot of people saying are you sure this is what you want to be looking into but for me it was that if it was solved if all these people were doing it then we wouldn't have such pain over here and as I started talking to
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different people I realized that the thing that they didn't need was a parent connecting to a sitter the thing that wasn't being said was that we were all missing our village everyone says it takes a village to raise a child but with all of us moving around for our careers and our jobs we're all missing our village and so I thought well how do you recreate something so human and so emotional as village with something so rational as data and
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code well I found my undergraduate degree in chemistry coming back to me and I broke it down into a tidy equation I thought if Village is a function of trust someone you trust is a fit for your family and is available when you
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need them to be then could I approximate it with something that provides vetting a matching algorithm of some sort and then a scheduling mechanism it started to come all together in my head and I could see how this could be a beautiful app there's
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only one problem I wasn't then and I'm not now a programmer and I really struggled for weeks I tried to figure out how can I build this without a programmer I'd spent the $220,000 that I had devoted to startups and I had about
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$200 left in my business bank account not enough by the way to pay a programmer to build you an app and so I was about to give up because I mean what are you supposed to do and in the dark of putting my five-month-old dis sleep you know it
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takes a long time there's a lot of time to think it came to me SMS why couldn't I use SMS because parents and sitters are already using texting to and so why couldn't I use that to approximate The Experience so I sat down and I wrote out
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the whole flow and I tried to figure out if I could somehow approximate The Experience using already available tools and tools that were either free or had free four-week trial periods so I could stretch my $200 for just a 4-week test
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to see if I was on to something so this is my Tex stack I had a landing page on Squarespace signups and feedbacks that word forms were done through type form stripe handled the payments I did scheduling via Google Calendar communication with with SMS and
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my database was Excel so I could see how all of this was going to come together I got to work finding and vetting three University of Washington students and I found 15 families in my local neighborhood on a posting board that was
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just posted about needing child care and I sent them an email and I just said hey I know you need child care I've got these three amazing people if you need someone this week just text this phone number and I gave them my personal phone
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number that day I got my first booking and that week I got my first four every single week I just set the goal to see if I just could just grow 10 or 20% well that next week instead of just five I hit six the week after 7even the
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week after 10 I was blowing past these 10 20% a week goals and I can't tell you how different that felt versus my first startup and the whole time I was trying to push this boulder up the hill and this one it was just parents were
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telling other parents and it wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination but it just felt different the end of the four weeks as luck would have it YC was accepted applications for their sum summer 15 batch and so I thought what the hell I'm
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going to apply because I I knew I was early I knew I didn't have a co-founder and a team but I also knew that I was building something that people wanted so I applied and truth be told I didn't put a lot of Hope into it because
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I'd applied for my first startup I'd spent weeks writing the perfect application and I didn't even get an interview I'd also heard that YC was the place for that 23-year-old white programmer but which clearly I'm not but still I applied because I
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believed in the truth that i' had read in some of those essays so imagine my shock when I got invited down for an interview I excitedly got all ready and went down for my 10-minute chance and I sold my heart out to cat Kevin and
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Aaron nonetheless at the end of the day I had this email waiting for me in my inbox and I'd be lying if I didn't say I was disappointed but the next day I woke up and I decided to focus on that last paragraph the one that said we would
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love to see you reapply next batch and I focused on two things one they thought I was on to something and that if I just showed more growth and brought a team on that I could reapply and the second thing was regardless of
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what YC thought or said I had a growing company and I had growing I had customers to serve so I got to work I pretended as if I got into YC anyways and I set myself the goal to just grow by 10 to 20% every single week for that whole
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summer parents would text my phone number and ask me you know hey is someone available tomorrow from noon to 4 I would consult my high-tech day planner and I'd see who's available and I text the sitter and then i' text the
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parent back and if you want to know what my first product looked [Laughter] like I'm almost embarrassed to show this but if you can see in the leftand margin the numbers that are circled that was my goal so every single time I hit the goal
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and in the boxes were all the bookings I don't remember what the color coding was now this was crazy but this was all I needed to get this up and off the ground and then I started to outgrow the day planner shocking I know and so I moved
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on to excel again it was super simple and it was just enough to get the job done by now I knew that we were continuing to grow and I knew that I had to find that technical partner to help me build this but it's not as easy as it might
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sound and I'm sure there's some of you out there that are you know struggling with the same thing about how to find that perfect co-founder there's a reason that YC says not to start working with someone that you've just met you're
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trying to find someone that is a good compliment for you and is a good fit with your personality somebody has the right experience and can have a passion for the mission and then finally can be a partner in the trenches through the
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ups and downs it's a pretty tall order so I talked to everyone I asked for every single intro to any engineer I talked to tens hundreds of people and still nothing by now was about August and I was exceeding my ability to just do all this
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on my own and the crazy ironic thing was I was about to grow my company to death I couldn't handle anymore and so I doubled down and I asked I kept on asking people for more intros finally through a friend of a friend of a friend I finally met
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Richard and when I met him what struck me was that our backgrounds were really different but the thing that connected us was that we had both spent our career in pursuing the things that made us curious he had done really interesting but different
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things he' worked on a social media company a dating app and a Bitcoin gambling company which I know what you're thinking is the perfect match for my wholesome family company but when I started talking to him there there was
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just a fit it was just easy we would just connect on what the vision was and how this could all be built and it wasn't until later that I actually realized his experience was just perfect what is Poppy if not building Community when there's a matching algorithm
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involved and we're definitely taking payments but in those early days it was really just a leap of faith and all of this is just a leap of faith so we decided to just work together for six weeks just like a project and see how it
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would go he built the first version of our platform in a way that was just more nuanced in more sophisticated than I could have even imagined and in that I found a partner to be able to build poppy in October we decided to make it
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official we even hired our first employee Sarah she actually comes from the child care industry and so she was tasked with the most important part of our company which is finding those really amazing caregivers where they are what they what
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kind of experience they have what kind of vetting needs to be done so she came on and joined the team I'd always thought of hoppy as sort of a threep part thing there's a parents side there's a sitter side and then there's
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the tech that connects it between it we now had the team finally I felt like we were getting some momentum we had the team we had the ability to build the platform now though we didn't have any money I couldn't believe I was in this
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position again this time we had payroll and we had just the regular expenses of a growing company and we needed cash as luck would have it winter YC's winter 16 application was just open and so we reapplied and this time the application
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basically wrote itself I mean we had done everything that YC had asked us to do and more than that we just pretended as if we had done YC and we just continued to grow we had even more users that loved what we were doing and we had
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the team so we were so excited when we again got the chance to interview Richard and I practiced all the questions and we made our way down to Mountain View I knew that the hardest part of our application was the fact that we had
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only worked together for three months so I was prepared for those questions what I wasn't prepared for though was that as we were walking in to register for the interviews in behind us walked the founders of our key competition
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I walked into the restroom to just gather myself and I thought we had just come too far to just quit and I thought if I was going to go down I was going to go down swinging so so we got in there and we just told the partners about poppy about what we
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were building about what we saw about our growth about our how our users just loved what we were building and needed it and then about our team and how we were the perfect people to build this we walked out and I didn't know how
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it was going to go but I knew that we had given it our all I hopped on a plane because I had to get back and I checked my email like a lunatic just waiting for that inevitable rejection email by the time I got home it was just
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gotten time for bedtime and I figured you know what what will be will be and I got ready to just take get my kids ready with our pajamas and I heard the phone ring whyc wanted to fund us I didn't really hear the rest but it was a stay
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of execution I knew that we had bought the time to be able to figure out the next thing and as luck and hard work would have it a seed VC firm in Seattle also decided to fund us so the the week before heading into YC that was the bank
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balance in my business banking account and my brother over the holidays asked me why weren't you more happy excited celebratory and it didn't hit me then that the money is not something to be celebrating it was more relief because
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the money buys us time and time to run those valuable kind of experiments and to be able to figure out the next thing so we started YC and even when you find reprieves they're only temporary so we just focused on putting our heads
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down and just continuing to grow I talked to the users and parents and Sarah just kept the great caregivers coming and Richard just built the product Slowly by slowly we kept on growing by demo day sure we had the really nice growth curve but more
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importantly woven into our company's DNA we had this really nice two we drum beat of building and then hitting a goal building and then hitting a goal our company still has that drum beat we still use that Loop that two-e Loop of building and
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advancing we closed our seed round shortly after demo day a little bit over $2 million and we went came back to Seattle in May and we moved into our first official offices and I remember being just so Greatful that after all of that
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we now had this incredible team and we had the money and most importantly we had the time to be able to just work on Poppy and prove what it could be so is it all roses now definitely not every day our job is to build
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something that people want as measured by our growth every day we're working on just growing the company and putting our heads down even now there's things that we're working on that I can't see how it's going to all work out but I know that if
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we return to our roots of talking to our users and starting with just something really small and then iterating our way forward we're going to figure it out so I wanted to leave you with the Five Lessons that I've learned between my first startup and my
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second the first is when you're get just getting started you're trying to figure out is this an idea I should be working on and I think you should ask yourself whether it's passion driving you or curiosity and frustration the tricky
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thing about passion is that it can make you confident it can make you feel like you know the answer but with curiosity it keeps you humble and it keeps you asking the questions and frustration just gives you the motivation to get
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going in the beginning being a Founder as I'm sure so many of you guys know is lonely you need to talk to people but just which people in the very beginning because we were both first-time Founders we thought you know what we're going to
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talk to The Experts we're going to talk to advisers and investors and people who have been in the startup space Here's the thing you're trying to do something that's never been done before there are no experts the only way you can do this is
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by talking to your users and then iterating your way forward inching forward product I've talked about this so I I but I can't emphasize it enough building a startup is not about building a product it's about solving a problem so
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the product can be far from pretty and definitely far from perfect it just needs to be the thing that can solve the problem when it comes to funding I think I approached the my first startup a little bit more like my big company days I thought of it like a budget to spend so it wasn't really a shock when we ran out of money relatively quickly I now know that the money is just this valuable time to run these experiments these experiments are
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hopefully so that you figure out a way to get to either profitability or to showing the things that you need to to be able to raise that next round and get to that next level the last thing is about Focus as Founders I think this is the hardest
1:04:16
thing what do I focus my time on in the early days with my first startup I thought it was all about product launches and there was something tangible and I could do that but I've since realized that it's all about
1:04:30
growth you need to pick that one metric that is just so important for your company and then decide to grow it just consistently week by week for my company that's bookings filled if I if I if we are bu growing our bookings filled
1:04:46
number then we're doing our job that means we're bringing on more great sitters and we've got a lot of great families and we're connecting them together really effectively so pick your one number and choose to grow it consistently the thing that I want to
1:05:04
end with is that I think you guys as Founders have two really important jobs the first is to start and the second is to keep going I know how hard it is to start and then stop and then start again and I know how daunting it can be
1:05:26
but my challenge to you if you haven't started can you find a four-week period this summer and just commit just try to launch something and see if you can grow it by 10 20% every single week the second is to keep going I applied to YC three times before
1:05:49
getting in poppy is my second startup I'm standing here on the stage age because every morning I choose to be a Founder I choose to keep going and I know for so many so many of you you might be in a place that you're not sure
1:06:07
whether you can just keep going and there's just so much adversity and there's so many setbacks but part of it is on you to figure out how can you just keep going and part of that that makes that easier is you have to find your
1:06:20
people I definitely would not be here today if not for my incredible team that has devoted their days to join me in this journey to build this thing but for me personally it's also about my family my husband my kids my parents and our
1:06:39
incredible nanny for me they're the ones that enable me to create the space for me to be the founder that I need to be so if you guys are in anywhere in the similar situation you need to find your people and build your own village so that you
1:06:55
can create the space to be the founder and keep going it's been an incredible 3year journey so far and if there's one thing that I know for sure it's that the world needs more female Founders two years ago I sat in your
1:07:19
seats with nothing more than a desire to be a Founder there's nothing special about me and I am proof that if you set a goal and you start and you choose to keep going then you'll figure it out thank [Applause] you do I come with you what's that am I
1:07:51
coming with you yeah please hi guys hi I am Amy beer from Y combinator and I have the distinct pleasure of introducing Emily Weiss here thank you so much for joining us today thank you for having me it's so good to see everybody so Emily you founded two brands that have a pretty beautiful symbiotic relationship your first was into the gloss which began as a beauty focused blog in 2010 as a side project um when you were a fashion assistant at
1:08:24
Vogue and you later use the audience the audience and the content that you built there to launch glossier in 2014 and glossier is a direct to Consumer Beauty brand with a stunning line of products which basically power the external
1:08:38
appearance of all women who work at ycombinator so thank you so much for making us all feel beautiful every single day um so you've said that both into the gloss and glossier focus on beauty as an element of personal style and celebrate
1:08:53
women sharing their own makeup reviews product recommendations and Beauty routines with one another and into the gloss now attracts nearly 1.5 million unique visitors every month so something that you're doing is really resonating
1:09:06
with women how did you first identify that women needed a platform to have these kinds of conversations um yeah it's a it's a good question uh so the one common thread um that still motivates all of us at glossier today and we're you know 95 uh
1:09:23
uh people in SoHo in New York we're actually 77% women um we have over uh 40% female Tech Team um and also just before I dive right into it I walked in here when you guys were all like lining up around the front and first it was
1:09:38
actually unfortunately probably all the women in San Francisco I feel like we're are all in this audience so like God forbid something happens like we're all human race is going to like um but no it's really cool I mean I I go to a lot
1:09:52
of these things as I'm sure many of you do and to see like this just the whole thing flipped and the energy in here is just so awesome so um it's great great to be here um but the the conversation around Beauty it's a really interesting
1:10:04
time to be in um not just in startups and and in technology but in Beauty and beauty is something that you know when we were pitching when I was pitching by myself you know our seed round like back in 2013 Beauty was not you know this
1:10:18
like hot thing that it is right now like I had meetings with like a couple Venture capitalists yesterday and like um and it's it's it's a good time to be in Beauty but I think the reason why is because beauty is this great conduit so
1:10:29
you asked like how did I recognize that there should be this platform um beaut is this great kind of like activator for women to connect with each other and share with each other and to really develop and hone a voice um and and that
1:10:43
might sound silly but um everybody has something to share about beauty right like uh I remember this woman Jean Godfrey June she was the beauty editor at Lucky Magazine for a really long time and when I interviewed her um she was
1:10:54
like Beauty this like great connect equalizer like among women you can be you know like meeting someone for the first time really nervous but if you're like oh I love your lip gloss like what color is that like you know you're like
1:11:06
oh I love this lip gloss I have like 10 of them been wearing it for 10 years um so everyone has something to say so I think it's a really cool uh time to be in Beauty because um technology has just completely upended the traditional you
1:11:20
know Paradigm of like brand to customer kind of like these you know Mega brands to have this perfect look and this whole range of products and you have to sit down at a counter and they do your whole face and then they make you guilt trip
1:11:32
you into buying all the products and they expect that those are the only products you'll ever have in your bathroom really you've got like you know an assortment um and so I think it's really cool that right now uh you should
1:11:42
be encouraged to be your own curator of your own life in every Arena you know whether that's um you know what food you're eating or uh what blender you're buying like I always use the blender analogy that if you're going to buy like
1:11:54
a Vitamix on Amon Amazon I'm never going to read what Vitamix has to say about it I'm going to go straight to like the stars and the reviews and everything and um that's really cool that like Commerce is being so democratized and beauty is
1:12:06
just another you know category where it's all about um you know the woman electing Brands and electing her products and you know searching for the best and I think into the gloss is really just a a reaction of that and
1:12:19
sort of an aggregator and like a instigator of that behavior yeah glossier is really well known now for listening to customer feedback in your product development cycle and essentially now uh anyone on your team can put a blog post up on into
1:12:33
the gloss saying we have this brand new product idea what are your opinions what do you all want how would you describe the most ideal texture or fragrance or shade or price point and how do you know uh whose opinions to listen to uh I
1:12:49
don't know how do you listen to your gut what is that like for you yeah so so it's interesting I mean you know traditionally I'm not sure how Beauty Brands arrived at what products to make but for us there's really only one um
1:13:02
logical conclusion which is like talk to people um whether that's you know I mean I have my opinions about products that I like but um having interviewed you know hundreds of the most influential women from you know politics to Art to Fashion
1:13:15
to you know girls on the street who have like cool pink hair color and you want to know where where why um uh I I have certainly like a lot of opinions but what's really interesting more interesting is again that like just just
1:13:30
having a lot of conversations and what's better than you know posting something on Instagram and within like 20 minutes having a thousand responses about you know whether that red lipstick that we're working on is like skewing a
1:13:40
little too blue or a little too red and you know you've got everyone from like a girl in her bedroom in Ohio with 200 followers to like makeup by Mario who's like Kim Kardashian's makeup artist who has like you know 10 million followers
1:13:51
writing like I think it's a little blue so I mean someone's paying him like a lot of money to like give that feedback but he's giving us us for free on our Instagram so I think it's nice that um you know you can kind of sift through
1:14:02
that and it's really an art and a more of an art than a science like we don't one for one crowdsource we don't say like you know tell us exactly what to make and we'll shade match it and we'll send it to you um we we really kind of
1:14:13
combine our editorial background as Beauty editors with um you know hearing you know 30% of those people saying it's too blue and then you're like oh okay well I guess it's a little too blue mhm was there ever a time when sort of the
1:14:28
beauty hive mind was incorrect and you followed an opinion that in fact turned out to be wrong um I don't think I mean beauty is so subjective we were just debating this backstage we got into a big fight over mascara cuz I was like
1:14:40
nobody needs a mascara and she was like oh I really need one but you know you're not talking about like you know underwear it's like you you you can skip mascara so you can't be writer you you you you can't be like writer wrong um so
1:14:57
we haven't been like LED astray but we've definitely had to make some tough calls like you know we when we were making our priming moisturizer Rich we uh a bunch of you know respondents said oh we really want it in a um pump instead of a jar but when we worked with
1:15:11
our chemist and developed this formula that included a lot of their responses about ingredients um we realized we couldn't fit the product into a pump it wouldn't come out so we had to go the jar rout and that was then we explained
1:15:23
to everyone this is why it's not in a jar and you know and now it's one of our bestselling products so I think it's just about that transparency with the customer and like you know really letting people know that we're indexing
1:15:33
on quality like always above everything else and um I think that goes a long way yeah um what have into the gloss and glossier taught you about women in Beauty over the past seven years so much I mean again I think you know personally
1:15:48
I love products I mean I grew up really liking like Stila and like you know a lot of beauty products and trying a bunch of stuff but Beauty pre- Instagram pre youube really YouTube you know it's like the number one or two category
1:16:01
after like Tech unboxing or unboxing of other things which I I didn't know um but uh I think pre pre that it was really this this very solitary Endeavor like it's you in the morning kind of like just you by yourself like doing
1:16:17
your thing um and and now it's such a connected like shared activity or you know like uh knowledge knowledge resource but the one thing um that I think overarchingly has been interesting is the number of women who like I I
1:16:32
start the sentence you know when I'm like when I used to do these interviews in their bathrooms and I'd be like hey can I come over and like you know rifle through your medicine cabinet and you know ask you about your beauty routine
1:16:41
and you'd have these really powerful women from like you know Ariana Huffington to like Jen Lions being like Oh me like no I'm I'm really low maintenance and I'd have to be like well like really I mean okay like let's let's
1:16:53
talk about it was that mean for you you know can I come over and then you go there and you open the cabinet it's like flowing it's like there's so many products and and so I'm like why is there this weird like Beauty shaming kind of like deeply ingrained thing
1:17:05
where you have to be like oh like you know like no I don't really like me Beauty what and and I think I think that's really like funny and I think it's because you know we're made to feel so much like we don't know like we can't
1:17:18
have these opinions like there's some you know brand or makeup artist or someone somewhere who like knows way more about you know you and also if you like product then that means you're not just waking up naturally just looking
1:17:31
beautiful you're actually using many things and you know that's kind of like frowned on by Society so I think there's a lot of cool like anthropological like things around beauty that are getting unpacked now thanks to things like glossy a in gloss and
1:17:47
YouTube um and I'm curious about those intervie those interviews that you conducted because as you're saying you are asking really high-profile powerful women to let them you're asking them to let you into their house like into their
1:18:02
bathroom with them um and essentially those interviews created a really beautifully detailed snapshot of that woman's relationship with themselves um that as you as you mentioned is usually a secret maybe only a significant other
1:18:16
or a really close family member might know what that woman does to take care of herself and when you were first starting out how other than pestering them it sounds like Did you sort of get to the yes um the I mean asking is something
1:18:32
I've always For Better or For Worse like it's it's I just always do it so I'm not very self-conscious about um like putting myself out there and getting rejected and we still get turned down I mean I'm personally not doing the
1:18:44
interviews anymore but we get you know turned down all the time I think I think you know you know especially where with where technology is right now and social media is every you know there's it's Edge sore this idea that everyone can
1:18:56
start something right and and you're all here because I'm sure you're many many entrepreneurs and um uh and I think just like a product of quality is it really speaks for itself so I think when you're you know trying to get that that yes I
1:19:10
mean for us a lot of it was like look at this art look at this here's a link to something we did with this person like here's you know you could will you will also look and sound you know like hopefully there'll be something you'll
1:19:22
be proud of um if you if you do this and so I think quality really begets quality and um again in this kind of like Fast fashion age where everyone can like put up an Instagram in like 10 seconds and you know you can really make a lot of
1:19:34
content um quickly I think that kind of like premium attention to detail uh content or product is just goes a long way you've spoken a bit about how glossier is really Reinventing the traditional Beauty experience can you
1:19:50
describe that and explain how you plan to transform it yeah so we're I mean we're really um a pretty young company it's like 2 and a half years old almost three years old in October um we are purely direct to Consumer so um all sold
1:20:04
through glossier.com and um have many hundreds of thousands of customers now in in the in the United States and soon uh internationally we're launching in in October in the um fall and actually uh my business partner and I Henry he's our
1:20:19
our president and coo he came from index ventures in London and we've worked together since since launching and it was funny CU we were doing our board deck yesterday we in town for a board meeting and um he's always said and we've kind of always said you know
1:20:32
sometimes you just say things over and over and then you wake up sometimes you say and you're like wait that's not true he said he said us being direct to Consumer is the value proposition to the to the customer and and I was like I
1:20:43
know we always say that but like she doesn't care that she's getting it like directly from us that's not like the value proposition like maybe she even wants to just go get it right you know at Sephora like the next day but what
1:20:54
what is you know really interesting about how we're Reinventing the beauty experience is that relationship she feels with glossier because um we have such a direct one-to-one connection with her so we have everyone's emails we're
1:21:07
able to you know offer special like access to things promotions to things we're able to make replenishment easier um we're able to ask her specific questions about what product she wants all of which you know a brand that's
1:21:19
sold through Sephora or sold um at the drugstore is unable to do because they don't know you they don't you know they don't have any of your data and um they can't make that experience really special for you so I think um you know
1:21:32
that's kind of the business case but the the impact case which is you know why those 95 77% female you know employees are all doing this is the impact with glossier is that you know I was I was doing all these Beauty interviews and I
1:21:46
was realizing that there was this big disconnect between like the affinity for the beauty brand and the actual product so you might say for for example like I really love Maybelline great lash but like do you really have a relationship
1:21:59
to Maybelline like are you like you know do you like ascribe to their set of values do you like understand like you know where they came from or like what they're up to like in the background um and so I thought there was just this
1:22:12
this great opportunity really to have this super connected um really modern brand in every sense of the word so you know I guess we've reinvented it in the sense of direct consumer online but we also are you know know going into like
1:22:25
our own retail and we have a showroom in New York that's more like an art gallery or like a clubhouse than it is like a you know Sephora there's actually barely any product in it we have 22 products so you know it's it's few and far between
1:22:37
and um it's become this meeting place for women to actually like meet up before brunch or like you know help each other kind of pick their shade and there's like almost little need for actual sales people um so I think the
1:22:50
opportunity to think about like what what is beauty offline and and kind of like you know I think that's really interesting too um how it can bring women together yeah sort of in listening to you speak it sounds like you're starting
1:23:05
like your starting point was having women create a relationship with themselves then you're you're sort of sharing that outward with other women and there's sort of this big question is like how do you scale that relationship
1:23:18
that relationship that you have with your clients that they have with one another and I've heard you name a couple things but just like how do you think about that cuz it again it's such an intimate thing that you're hoping to
1:23:30
scale to the masses so we think about it all the time and like my head of comms will kill me because I'm going to say something really weird right now but um like I think I think about it a little bit like um like how are like religions
1:23:42
scaled right like you have like you have um like we always say about glossier like it's it's the first Beauty Lifestyle brand and the reason we say that is because not only are we like addressing like multiple categories and
1:23:53
kind of like you know know uh maybe there'll be a glossier deodorant uh maybe there'll be like a glossier lip you know like um I don't know tampon like I it's our our our customers want kind of the they trust us and they really want like the gloss version of X
1:24:08
um but the other thing is you know you're you're interacting with engaging with glossier throughout the day in ways that you choose so it's like okay I want to follow on Instagram okay I want like X number of emails okay or you're just
1:24:19
like just shut up and give me my moisturizer and I like don't want to talk to you but and how you scale that like um I mean technology certainly helps but I think like every woman can have whatever relationship she wants
1:24:30
like with glossier you know and whether that's like stickers on the back of her phone to remind her like throughout the day like she likes this like brand or um you know like uh whether she wants to come every Saturday to like our showroom
1:24:43
um I think it's up to her to like really decide like what kind of how involved she wants to be in in the brand and in the building of the brand and I think um that's what's really interesting too in terms of the relationship it's like the
1:24:56
relationship to the customer in terms of creating Brands I think is going to be Beyond just glossier and Beauty like something that most of the great be next Generation like you know cpg companies are going to be built around this notion
1:25:08
of like this these relationships with customers and and and this this real like two-way street um late last year you raised a $24 million series B late congrats on that um how are you planning to take over the world with that what's your
1:25:23
being planed actually we're planning on keeping it all in the bank like literally I looked at our balance sheet yesterday and it like was all there and I was like this is good um we've been really conservative actually so we've
1:25:34
we've raised um I guess I probably like 40 something million but um we were actually like accidentally profitable a couple months last last year which was like like cool to see I mean I don't know if we should clap or not that's the
1:25:49
other thing I'm like is that good and my partner is like well it depends like we could always like spend more on marketing like so I went to Art School by the way so I I I did not I did not go to business school um but to the point
1:26:00
of our of of um someone on stage before like that curiosity is really important right that kind of like naivity of being like huh um like explain this to me that's served us well but in terms of what we're doing with with the money I
1:26:12
think I mean we're really lucky we've had 600% growth in the last 12 months 600% growth year before that um and it's really been a result of two things I would say like incredible focus and discipline we say no to way more things
1:26:26
than we say yes to that's really hard um especially because we could put ourselves in a saphora you know tomorrow and probably like 4X Revenue like but I I don't know that that would really help us achieve the long-term impact we want
1:26:40
um in women's lives um and the other thing that's really driven that has had nothing to do with the money we've raised I mean 79% of our growth last year was all based on peer-to-peer recommendations so it's it's it's not through through paid um it's not through like an acquisition you know machine it's just been through women telling each other how much they love our products and um and and for that we're really grateful so um we're investing
1:27:07
much more in community efforts much more in um uh a little bit a little bit in offline but but um really just on continuing to you know make amazing product that people want to talk about um yeah and I know one of the things that you said is that you're
1:27:25
opening some some retail and that's super exciting and when you think about the glossier retail experience um in your own mind what is your fantasy of that like H what do you want it to look like in a dream Emily world I mean well
1:27:42
that's a hard that's a really uh scary question um because I want like birds and like like um uh like candy I I I actually we do we just had a kickoff meeting about this and I referenced um Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and like
1:27:58
the wallpaper that you can lick so I'm not saying we should have lickable wallpaper but I like the excitement and the energy of like going into something that's like this Mecca and this kind of like um because who needs stores anymore
1:28:12
you know like why are you opening like an offline like store if if you can just order it and it'll get there in an hour or like the next day like truly like that is the question we should all be asking ourselves because if we really
1:28:23
take take a hard look and think about like you know what you're doing in shopping this weekend uh it should be cool like it shouldn't just be about like procuring you know there should be more birds yeah I mean I don't know if
1:28:36
there's going to be Birds but I think it should be more it's much more experiential and so I think more about Hospitality um than I do about like you know sales per square foot um yeah for sure uh when you think about the beauty space what is it that
1:28:51
sort of makes you the most energized thinking about the future what are you most looking forward to um I'm most looking forward to the customer just like always being right I think I think it's so cool um and she's always been
1:29:05
right uh and that's why that phrase exists but I think it's the phrase has never been trer than it is today so it's actually um not even from like the CEO founder perspective but just from like a consumer perspective like how cool that
1:29:20
there are so many um options but more importantly there's always been so many options that's been the problem like there's too many options more importantly it's like there's just so much great information there's so many way to cut through those those options
1:29:32
there's like you know so many ways to connect if you want to know how to do a black cat eye you know you can find like you know 50,000 videos and like 10 minutes on how to do that so I love that the power um the power dynamics and
1:29:46
Beauty have just completely shifted and I think they're going to shift more and more and more and um maybe it's like some weird Anarchist streak that like I didn't know I have it I just think it's really cool that um women are really um
1:30:00
like the authors of their own lives when it comes to uh you know Beauty and many other things uh around the time that you first launched glossier right you were sort of launching into a hardware space like a a company that had now a physical product
1:30:15
um which is traditionally very difficult was there ever a time that you thought you wouldn't make it that it was the wrong thing what am I doing here um I don't think so um and that's not to say that I was not so you asked two
1:30:34
questions like is it wrong is it the wrong thing never uh always knew it was the right thing um um Would we not make it like sure I mean there's a million things you know we like scraped by for I mean into the gloss was totally bootstrapped I spent
1:30:50
like $700 of like my own money to you know get it get it off the ground and then we just relied on Advertiser dollars and you don't know when it was basically like freelancing you don't know when the next thing is going to
1:31:00
come through and of course when we first launched glossier we pressed I'm not an engineer but whenever the site went live I don't know what we pressed um uh it was 6 it was 6:00 in the morning and like we didn't know who was going to
1:31:13
come or if anyone was going to order anything like there we didn't start with a wait list there were no pre-sales like it's just like it's on you know does anyone does anybody want it so there's definitely been like those moments
1:31:26
um um so yeah it's it's been scary but we just you just keep going like there's no other option I don't know what I would be doing if I weren't doing this yeah that's a good that's a good point yeah um what has it been like for you
1:31:39
sort of your Evolution as a manager and a CEO what has that been like um that's a great question uh um presentation right before was saying some she was saying you know the best sometimes the best creators are not the us
1:31:54
managers uh I'm not a good manager but I'm a very good hire hirer is that a word yeah hire um and it's because I love people and I really believe in women and I really believe in people and I love when women especially like really
1:32:14
surprise themselves um yeah and so so I I my job changes every I would say like three months as a CEO like I really go f focus on something else so for example the next like 3 months I'm going to be really focused on opening our European
1:32:28
headquarters in London and I'll be you know over there all the time but as of now and probably for the last 12 months I've spent over 50% of my day on uh HR people and hiring um so that's everything from interviewing every
1:32:41
single new employee from intern level to coo level um to uh you know taking people out for coffee I have probably two to three I probably have three to four job interviews a day and one to two coffees a day with different members of our team from you know
1:32:58
associate level you know uh graphic designers to um our senior engineers in in Tech and um and I think that's just really important like I sit with everybody like sometimes I say I'm like the mom and mean girls who comes in
1:33:12
she's like you kids need anything condoms like they're all like we're good like leave leave us alone um but but I think it's good to some of the best I there's no like hierarchy in ideas you know so you can be an intern and have
1:33:29
some great observation about you know workflow management um and your idea really needs to be listened to um so and and the other thing I would say glot we do really well at glossier and I don't take credit for this this is really like
1:33:43
ingrained in our culture is we take big bets on people so like our SV of marketing Ali Weiss no relational though I always wish there were because she's really smart um she graduated HBS like two years ago and had never worked in
1:33:55
marketing but given the nature of marketing today and uh how quickly it's evolving and you know um The Playbook people with playbooks um it's not so much about a Playbook right you have to say like what matters right now like what matters today and what
1:34:12
matters for your product and your company and Which social Channel matters and Which social channels don't matter um and Ally uh had never done marketing but now she's you know our s of marketing and she's she's she's crushing
1:34:23
it so we we take really big bets on people and I think given especially in fields like marketing you know it's changing so much that experience is you know sometimes not even the most important indicator of
1:34:36
success thank you so much for sharing that all with us today thank you thanks [Applause] [Music] everybody hello I'm Carolyn Ley a partner white combinator and I'm delighted to introduce our next speaker Laura Baron woo founder and CEO of shipo
1:35:02
shipo makes it easier and more AFF more affordable for e-commerce companies to ship goods Laura and her co-founder started shipo in 2013 and they currently process millions of shipments every month Laura had her first experience
1:35:17
with the startup while working as an intern at YC alumni company lendup she grew up in German Germany China Ecuador and Cairo went to school in Switzerland and started shipo in the US please welcome [Applause] Laura hi ladies my name is
1:35:40
Laura I'm the CEO of a company called chippo let me see if this works um oh now it works great so I'm Laura I run a company called ch we power shipping for e-commerce I am so humbled to be able to be here today I attended every other
1:36:00
female founder conference before this as a participant and I would have never dreamt to be able to stand here on stage today to tell you my story my story in the last three and a half years while it's been a roller coaster ride there
1:36:12
have been a lots of there there have been a lot of ups and downs but there have been a lot of good stories to share as well unfortunately there won't be time for Q&A after this but this is my Twitter handle so feel free to tweet at me and I
1:36:26
have a couple of hours reserved after the speech to answer all of your questions my goal for today is to help everyone understand that there is no magic formula to entrepreneurship there is no one single way how a great founder
1:36:40
should look like there is no overnight success it's a lot about hard work it's about being persistent it's about standing up again after you fall and I think the most important part about being a Founder is making a decision to get started but in order to
1:36:59
get started you have to have the courage you have to have the confidence and this is one of my favorite quotes confidence was Cash you had to have some to get some and people were loath to give it to you I hope with this talk I can help you
1:37:12
all get a little more confident by hearing my story so what is my story how did I get here well I did not grow up I'm having oh I did not grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur back in 2013 I was stuck in a M's program back
1:37:30
in Switzerland that I did not enjoy by pure chance I ran into a YC alumnist who was also a Silicon Valley investor and when he offered that he would help me find a summer internship I jumped on it I really didn't know what I was getting
1:37:42
myself into I had no idea what Silicon Valley was like but it sounded exciting it sounded like something I wanted to be a part of so by pure chance my CV got forwarded to the YC found mailing list and overnight I had a bunch of interview
1:37:56
requests in my inbox it was truly about being at the right place at the right time and then not shying away from taking that opportunity I ended up with a summer internship at a company called lendup they do socially responsible payday
1:38:10
loans back then they were right before series a and I was I was so in awe about the fast-paced culture that I was experiencing there I knew that I did not want to go back so I dropped out of my grad studies and I decided to stay
1:38:25
staying here I really wanted to start something something by myself so I reached back out to my now co-founder Simon and together we decided to work on an e-commerce store it was a curated Marketplace for emerging designers and
1:38:40
artists from all around the world we wanted to tell their stories this was something that's been done before it wasn't very Innovative but we didn't care we just wanted to get started working on something anything and I think that is the most important
1:38:57
decision that a Founder can make the decision about getting started there is no need to overthink it you don't need to come up with a grand idea just start working on something on anything and eventually you'll find the right problem to
1:39:10
solve so with my idea with the e-commerce idea I approached U my CEO back then Zasha from Lev and asked him for his feedback for his advice and one of the things that he shared with me that I remember very clearly is to work
1:39:25
on painkillers and not vitamins what he meant by that was to find an idea to work on a product that people can't live without that solves a real pain Point don't build something that is nice to have but not must have like a like a
1:39:39
vitamin the e-commerce store we were working on back then was for sure a vitamin not a painkiller but while working on the e-commerce store we discovered how much of a paino shipping is to e-commerce we realized that shipping
1:39:54
rates are intransparent that they're hard to compare that shipping eats into the margins of e-commerce store owners we also realized that shipping Technologies are difficult to integrate that they're old and outdated working with these shipping Technologies was a
1:40:09
very different experience compared to working with the Technologies of Shopify or stripe and we were surprised that there was no strip for shipping so that's what we set out to build shipo is an API that connects our
1:40:25
customers who are e-commerce stores marketplaces and platforms to a network of different shipping providers we help them get access to that Network we help them optimize providers we help them get we we help them get shipping labels get
1:40:38
tracking numbers in short we take the pain out of shipping we turn shipping into a competitive Advantage instead of a cost center so now that we had an idea that we thought was worth working on we had to get funded both my co-founder and
1:40:52
I are first-time Founders we didn't have any savings so we had to rely on outside Capital to make this work I guess everyone here in this room is either seeking funding now or will be seeking funding at some time at some point in
1:41:04
the future so let me share my fundraising story with you my fundraising story is a lot about rejection we applied to Y combinator and we got rejected we applied to 500 startups and we got rejected as well we applied another time and we got lucky
1:41:20
and got into 500 startups batch a the reason why we wanted to be part of an accelerator is to get access to their network of investors so we can so we could raise a series seat for the series seed I pitched 125 angels and investors
1:41:38
and I heard5 NOS in the end we raised $2 million from 10 investors that's a whole lot of NOS to go through before we got the 2 million together and to be honest we put pitched a lot of the wrong VCS we pitched VCS that weren't the right fit either
1:41:57
because they weren't the right fit for the stage that we were in or for the space that shipo is in but I don't regret pitching all of these investors practice really makes perfect at the end of pitching all these people
1:42:11
I had my pitch nailed down and when we finally met the right investors I knew exactly what to stay all investors tend to ask the same kinds of questions so at the end of this I knew the answers to all the these questions by
1:42:26
heart while going through that fundraise unfortunately we had to go separate ways with our third co-founder and that's the kind of situation that can kill a deal easily in that situation I also fur the first time learned about the power of
1:42:40
being transparent and straightforward with prospective investors we communicated that change right away upfront direct and honest and we also communicated that this was the kind of we also set the expectation right that this was the kind of communication style they could be expecting us moving forward if they do end up if they do decide to invest and in the end we were able to close round from the same investors despite the change in the founding
1:43:08
team leading up to the Seri seat we were growing our business 40% week over week and that was in terms of shipping volume and I think one of the most important pieces of advice we got back then was to focus on one single kpi to to find one
1:43:23
kpi that defines success for your business best and to focus on growing that one instead instead of like getting overwhelmed by all the other metrics out there today of course we're optimizing a bunch of other metrics as well but
1:43:36
shipping volume is still our is still our main kpi for the series a we did a lot better we were able to get 30 warm introductions to investors we were able to set the timeline and drive the timeline ourselves instead of having investors Drive
1:43:53
that means that we set one week up for first meetings a second week for second meetings one week for partner meetings and then another week for due diligence it was important for us that we had everyone lined up at the same pace so at
1:44:07
the end of this process we would be able to get to competitive term sheets and at the end we raised $7 million from Union score Ventures so from the outside it looked like a really tight run and smooth process but behind the scenes a lot was
1:44:23
going wrong again we again had to go separate ways with our back then most senior technical leader and guess what we got our first lawsuit during due diligence wait once one back yeah we got our first lawsuit during due
1:44:42
diligence who would have thought like that was that was really crazy well anyway again we were able to we were able to use that situation to like to use that bad situation and turn it into into an opportunity to build trust build
1:44:56
trust with the prospective investors by communicating clearly thoughtfully and directly and I think like you're going to build a long-term relationship with that investor investors are like employees that you can't fire they're going to stick around until until there
1:45:11
is a liquidity event so you better turn the table around and do do diligence on your prospective investors as well because you want to be able to expect the same kind of Integrity from them investors will be well they'll be fast
1:45:26
to offer you references but make sure that you also do back Channel references and you that you're able to talk to people to Founders that have worked with this investor when they failed you want to know how the investor behaves when things go
1:45:42
wrong so by from pitching all these people my most important takeaways are be be authentic be passionate and be honest and I think the one thing that us female Founders are really good at is to under promise but to overd
1:45:58
deliver and that's a great characteristic to be known for then there are some situations while pitching that are just totally out of your control weird things happen but they make for great stories to tell later on one of my favorite stories to
1:46:15
tell is how I went into a partner meeting at Kleiner Perkins well a lot of the Kleiner Partners were were attending including John door all the ciner partners were at one side of the table and I was at the other side of the table
1:46:28
as the only person there I said right across the table of John door we had a super engaged conversation I felt great about it it was intense it was a lot of back and forth but I was excited I felt like I was able to answer all of their
1:46:41
questions very well at the very end of this conversation when we were starting to wrap things up John door leaned forward he pushed forward his note notepad and pen and he said to me Laura draw me a picture of your team and I was
1:46:56
so confused I did not know what he wanted from me I thought this could be some sort of psychology trick question or he's going to look into you know if I draw myself bigger than all my other team members that could mean that I'm
1:47:11
egocentric or maybe if I draw myself gender neutral that could mean that I'm not confident in my own skin so I decided to draw a little stick figure girl complete with a dress long hair and a smiley face and uh I was just about to
1:47:26
start drawing my other team members when I realized people in the room were laughing and I looked up and John door was smiling at me he was like Laura all I was looking for was an orc [Laughter] chard yep I that happened it's a real
1:47:45
story I felt like a complete and then afterwards whenever I go into the Kleiner office they they know me as the stick fig figer girl anyway um stuff like that happens it happens to anyone and these make these make for great stories to tell
1:48:00
don't worry too much about it when stuff like that happens to you so today we are 70 people all working out of our San Francisco office we have six thank you we have 16,000 customers and we've been able to Triple our business in
1:48:19
terms of shipping volume every single year since we started we're still growing we're still hiring however I still don't have everything figured out yet and I think when people tell you that they have everything figured out
1:48:31
they're lying however there are a bunch of really great learnings that have impacted my life for the better in the last couple of years and I want to share a couple of my favorite learnings with you first of all it's a marathon and not
1:48:45
a Sprint in fact I think it's more like it's more like one of these crazy 100 m races that only insane people sign up to do it's going to be a lot of ups and downs and sometimes these ups and downs happen from one hour to another one hour you
1:49:01
you receive a term sheet the other hour you receive a lawsuit during these ups and downs it's important to keep in mind that your company worth is not equal to your self worth and I think that is easy to forget here in Silicon Valley because whenever
1:49:19
you go out and socialize people are going to ask you what is youry company how much money have you raised how who are your investors and then they're going to judge you by that but keep in mind that you are more than your company's success don't let that Define you while going through all of these ups and downs it's important to remain persistent however persistence does not mean being stubborn I think it's important to be persistent about the
1:49:46
right things and what has worked for us really well is to be persistent about the goals but to be creative flexible about the tactics of how to get there there will be times when you think that you are failing when a failure happens to me
1:50:04
what I like to do is to take a step back and look at the look at the big picture I like to treat that one point of failure as a piece for a big puzzle and then try to see what the big puzzle will look like sometimes that takes a couple
1:50:17
of years before you'll you'll be able to see the bigger picture but I think failure leads to new opportunities opportunities that wouldn't have been there otherwise for example I was super devastated when we got rejected by YC
1:50:29
back then but I'm still standing on stage here today and everything that happened in between was great I wouldn't have wanted it any other way my second point is all about you be Unapologetic about who you are be authentic be yourself there are so many
1:50:47
expectations about what the perfect founder should look like and what the perfect female founder should look look like I used to try to be like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg but that's ridiculous and impossible because I'm Laura and I'm proud of that oops no and I'm and I think it's like it's completely fine not to be great at everything but you need to know your strengths and your weaknesses and then you'll be able to hire for complimentary
1:51:20
skills being Unapologetic also means that you won't be able to work with everyone having clicker problems yeah that you won't be able to work with everyone and again that's completely fine better a hole in the organization than an in the
1:51:41
organization this is your company that you're building and you're defining company culture don't end up building a company that you'll hate working at 5 years from now you can be completely Unapologetic about the kind of culture
1:51:56
that you want to build at your own company that also means to hire slow and to fire fast my next Point again is about you a lot of people think when you start a company you need to sacrifice everything for your company and I agree it's about
1:52:14
a lot of hard work it's about being persistent and all those other things but you need to take the time to take care of yourself because taking care of yourself is taking care of your company at the very beginning you are your
1:52:27
company make sure that you know what gives you energy and what drains you and then do less of what drains you there is no bad boss that you can blame for being miserable it's up to you if you're not happy you're the one who can drive that
1:52:44
change taking care of yourself also means it's completely okay to ask for help in fact it's smart to ask for help I've been fortunate that have a that I have a great group of investors that are super supportive that I have an amazing
1:52:58
executive coach that I have an amazing group of friends that I can relate to I love hanging out with other CEOs and Founders because hanging out with them teaches me that the struggles that I'm going through are completely normal that
1:53:11
they've gone through the same struggles as well that these struggles aren't unique to me but that they're just part of normal startup life the autom more personal not last year I made this great decision to adopt this grumpy looking
1:53:28
cat she's really the grumpiest that's her that's her everyday face and when I come home from work and things aren't going that well because we're not shipping enough packages I see her face and everything is a little better
1:53:46
again more important than my relationship with my cat is my relationship with my co-founder Simon sometimes we fight but we never get hurt permanently my co-founder Simon well he's 100% complimentary to my skills he's able to do all the things that I
1:54:04
can't do or don't like to do and he does them really well I wouldn't be able to be here without him so find yourself a partner in crime for me it's a partner in shipping to share the burden of running a company with you Simon's been
1:54:19
supportive through the ups and downs both of my private both in my work life and in my private life Simon's the one I called when I was going through a bad breakup and he was the one who brought me a bottle of whiskey he was also the one who
1:54:35
remembered to take the bottle of whiskey away from me when he left and that was important because next morning at 700 a.m. I had a recorded podcast interview where I was supposed to tell how awesome it is to be a founder
1:54:53
and I do think it is awesome to be a Founder however it also means that you're going to be one of the few females in a male dominated industry and given that we're at a female founder conference today I think it's important to acknowledge the brave
1:55:07
women that have been speaking up in the last couple of months to drive change into this industry I've been lucky that I've never experienced direct sexual harassment like that however I've gotten used to being one of the I've gotten used to
1:55:29
being one of the few females in the room especially at B2B CEO dinners somehow there are not that many B2B female Founders and many times when I'm outside of the office and people ask me what I do for shipo they're surprised to hear
1:55:44
that I'm the founder and CEO and I never quite understand why what did they expect the founder and CEO of shipo should look like there was one time when I was pitching a male a male VC for my series a and after
1:55:58
the pitch his first comment was this is a cute little business you've built and there is really nothing cute about a shipping API so I used to hate um I used to hate talking about being a female founder I used to hate being put into that box I
1:56:18
dislike being part of these female founder lists because the market really does not care if this company's run by a female or not customers choose to go with the product that's best and I want to ship out to the to be the best period
1:56:32
independent of my gender I used to live by the Mantra to be so good that they can't ignore you in the last in the last year my attitude to that has changed a little I realized it's naive to believe that if you work really hard you won't be
1:56:50
discriminated I realized I realized that I realized that it's not always on the women to prove themselves it's a problem with a system and good news is that we everyone here in this room is able to make a difference We Can Make a Difference by
1:57:10
starting companies and Building Company cultures that women enjoy working at We Can Make a Difference by being role models for the next generation of female entrepreneurs and me we can make a difference by generating outstanding
1:57:24
returns for the investors that have placed a bet on us and I'm excited for everyone here to help us make that difference I could keep talking about this endlessly but I'm running out of time and there is still so much to do so
1:57:45
much to learn I want to leave you with one final quote if you're following your calling the fatigue will be easier to bear the disappointments will be fuel The Heist will be like nothing you've ever felt and I hope that you find your calling
1:58:00
and I hope that when you find your calling you take that opportunity so best of luck everyone and feel free to tweet at me with any questions that you have thank [Applause] you thank you Laura that was said incredible talk and I'm sure lots of lessons
1:58:40
learned from that experience uh next you're going to be meet padmashri Warrior uh Forbes calls her the queen of electric car business uh padmashri is the CEO of Neo and also the chief development officer uh Neo designs smart
1:58:58
autonomous vehicles and prior to this padmashri held uh sea level positions at Cisco as well as motola and is on the board of Microsoft and Spotify uh thank you for being here so I think the first um you know
1:59:18
question that a lot of them really have is you've spent more more than two decades in really successful scaled companies why Neo so yeah that's right um for over two decades I worked uh I started my career actually as an engineer I'm an engineer
1:59:35
I uh started in the semiconductor conductor industry as a line engineer uh working in Fabs and eventually worked my way up to become the chief technology officer for Motorola semiconductor business then eventually the whole
1:59:47
company and then moved to Cisco in 2008 and I was CTO first and then CSO and then eventually CTO and CSO and I left and um Cisco about a year and a half ago I left in um September of 2015 um when I left I didn't know what I was going to do but I knew that what I
2:00:10
didn't want to do I knew I didn't want to do the same job twice in other words I didn't want to go um as uh into another large tech company um in a sea level position cuz I felt like I have done that in two very large companies I
2:00:25
this time wanted to go somewhere where I could impact a whole industry and change the whole industry so I was kind of thinking I wanted to start my own company either in the education vertical or in the transportation vertical both I
2:00:38
felt were industries that have by and large been stagnant and have always had technology on the periphery never Central to the industry um and then I joined the Neo we work on um building autonomous electric vehicles but the
2:00:55
focus is really on how we would all spend our time um when we're not driving anymore so the focus is really about how do we improve people's uh how do we give people time back um from driving and freeing you from the chores of driving
2:01:09
so we focus a lot of user on user experience um so it's a fascinating time to be really in this industry and rethink everything yeah and I remember like one of the things we had discussed before you said that even though the
2:01:22
industry you know the car seems like something that men purchase you said actually the consumer buying decision uh in most many cases is done by women so how do you bring that in the product design or as you think about um you know
2:01:37
the evolution of the car even under Neo like how do you think about building a team around that yeah so when when I started in this role um I didn't know anything about building cars I you know obviously I was a consumer and um not
2:01:50
really a car guy but I love I love I think of it as a consumer product so we spent about 6 months doing a lot of user research you know what do people buy vehicles for what do they look for um and it's interesting actually in the
2:02:03
United States uh more than 50% of the buyers for vehicles are women um and many of the women that we interviewed said that even when they go to a dealership today uh and they go with their spouse or boyfriend and that person says this my my wife or my
2:02:20
partner is actually buying the car in the dealership the sale is actually made to the man and they ignore the woman they talk to the guys and they tell them about all the features that they think the men like um and and so
2:02:33
that was one interesting find and the second thing we found was women always struggle um because they're sold minivans um and they labeled soccer moms and you know and ignore the professional side of what a woman want and many of us
2:02:48
work and have families and so many people told us I don't want want to be a I don't want to drive a vehicle that kind of pigeon hols me in the soccer mom image I want something that is also beautiful in the vehicle and is got space inside uh for my children or for
2:03:04
my bags or whatever so their needs were not being met in the product category and this is the largest buying um Power in the country today for vehicles so it was sort of like interesting to think how a one of the most aspirational
2:03:16
consumer product completely ignores um more than half to population and the more than half the demographic that's actually consuming that product um so we are taking a lot of these factors into our design criteria as we look at it uh
2:03:32
obviously you never build a product for a particular gender but it's more for the utility and what people are looking for um so I think that's uh that was a big eye opener for me and it's very true I think you have to either choose
2:03:45
between a uh beautiful car but it's very Compact and has no space or something that's giant and looks ugly there isn't anything that's in train yeah so where do you think self-driving is headed and what is your vision for Neo so we are
2:04:00
targeting to have uh what is known in the industry as a level for self-driving car by 2020 meaning that the vehicle will be uh fully capable of driving itself but we are building our car with the steering and pedals and so to allow
2:04:14
you to drive if you want to drive it um and we think that actually allows us to overcome any regulation barriers that might get in the way because there is a human in the loop and you are driving um I think fully autonomous level five
2:04:26
vehicles are probably further away maybe 2025 maybe even 2030 expectations vary I think the technology will be there I think to me there are three uh axes that have to all come together one is the technology has to be matured and
2:04:40
developed and be reliable and safe the second is the cost of the technology has to come down and it will come down over time Lars and Radars and uh sensors have to come down in the compute platform is very powerful in this vehicle and the
2:04:54
third is actually human behavior itself right like my generation a lot of people we grew up uh where we were taught a particular way to drive and you have to take a driver's license test and you pass a test and you hold the wheel and
2:05:06
you're to taught how to hold the wheel um there'll be a generation coming now right who will bypass that they don't need to drive and so there will be a transition period just as we went in the mobile Internet space and so iPhone is
2:05:20
now celebrating yeah right now so before iPhone I when I worked at morola phones were very different and we didn't expect something uh like a phone to look like a smartphone back then similarly I think cars in the future will be very very
2:05:33
different so all these three things I think will intersect in the future will be very exciting for all of us imagine um I work in San my company is there and I was coming up here imagine if I could just sit back and do whatever I wanted
2:05:47
to do take a nap on my way back um you know instead of worrying about traffic and driving yeah I've seen the video of your product which is very exciting I can't wait for the car to come yeah um now you've built you know uh you've been
2:06:01
at successful companies but you've also built them at scale and you've talked a lot about how great teens are what makes a company great so what tactical advice do you have for Founders here in terms of their first 10 or those first 50
2:06:17
hires because you've stressed a lot about how that is really important in how you build a company culture that you also treasure yeah I think when you're a founder of a company there are I think it's much harder by the way to start a
2:06:30
company than to be in a big company and lead a big company in the following ways when I started at Neo um I was employee number 16 there were 15 people that were kind of already there um but I didn't I think I only had like one engineering uh
2:06:45
person and we have two trailers in a parking lot in San Jose and you basically are starting from nothing um in a vision all right I think so to me tactically the first 10 uh first 10 highers 20 highers 50 highers 100
2:06:58
highers are very very important um in my company I I personally interviewed the first 150 people that we hired and made offers too because the first 100 people hire the next thousand people and if you want to scale the company right each of
2:07:12
them will hire 10 people and so your bar has to continue to remain very very high uh so my advis is as a Founder really pay attention to the people that you're bringing in I think the previous speaker talked about it I love the way she said
2:07:25
it's better to have a hole in the organization than an so I think it's like very very true I think you really have to be very uh selective and look for uh the right kind of talent but also the right kind of a fit the second
2:07:39
thing that I watch out for and this I realized as we were scaling now we're about 350 people in the company um you know one of the other things that happens is as you scale the organization you go from like 100 people to 3 00
2:07:51
people at that stage you're not hiring anymore your leaders are hiring and the tendency would be for them to bring people they know right and so you create these islands of micr culture which you don't want to have so in my company we
2:08:04
have a rule that every hire has to have a diverse panel that uh hires the people so diverse in terms of the gender it can be all an all male panel or an all female panel that interviews does the interviewing but also people that are
2:08:20
from the hiring group but also people from outside the group that can ask people different questions um so obviously you ask you know in our case we look for a lot of specific technical skills um you know so you test them for
2:08:32
those technical skills but people from Finance or Corp Dev also interview them to ask them general questions so we look for technical depth um behavioral leadership skills and so you ask them things like in your life what's the
2:08:45
toughest thing you faced and how did you overcome that has may not really have direct relevance to the role um because one of the things we believe is the person's true character is tested when they're faced with a very traumatic situation so how did you overcome that
2:08:59
so we ask things like that and then we make decisions so that's the second very tactical advice that I would give because we actually learned it by way the hard way we were doing it and we found we were creating micro cultures
2:09:10
where people were hiring from the place they came from and so soon we had like this group that group and these little Islands which which all stuck together um and then the other thing I would say is culture is extremely important and it
2:09:23
starts from the very from the very beginning um so in my company um one Wednesday a month um and we pick Wednesday because happens to be the middle of the week we take time out 4: to 6:00 in the afternoon we call it team time and we go to our cafeteria the whole company comes and we do some fun activity and you know it's not just to have fun but be the intent behind that is to institutionalize the fact that it's okay to take a break uh we don't
2:09:49
want people to burn out everybody works hard uh we have to take care of ourselves when we do this and we do this as a whole company we all take a break together and we're under very tight pressure right now we're shipping the
2:10:01
car it's going into production so people teams are under a lot of pressure so we still do this and you know we still do two hours you know and it's legitimate take a break the second reason we do it is allows people from different
2:10:13
functions to come together so you don't become siloed in the company um and so the intent is that but we obviously don't do it we don't state that we do some fun activity and team activity so that's one simple way you can build
2:10:26
something fun in the culture it's a people look forward to it it actually gets fairly competitive we have people rotating to host team time and so everybody comes up with their own theme sometimes it's a competition it's a treasure hunt it's kind of something
2:10:40
goofy one day we build toy cars and we race them to see which car goes so vehicle engineering team in my company was very competitive and they W actually the software team won the race um which was interesting so I think we do things
2:10:53
like this that uh that I think it's very important as you scale the company you're focusing on the right things and you also have quite a distributed team is Right geographically so how do you make sure that they are all sort of
2:11:05
aligned and with a shared purpose sh yeah this is interesting our company also has a very different model we uh we are what we call a global startup and if we figure this out I think there'll be a case study I was telling on new uh
2:11:18
that'll be taught in business school someday and the the thesis is you know we feel like the two biggest markets are China and us for uh vehicles and each one is going through a major transformation in China it's a big movement from internal combustion to EV
2:11:33
it's now the largest ev Market in the world and the US have rapidly adopting autonomy and self-driving cars um so when we started the company we said okay how do we create a company structure that can win in both markets you know
2:11:45
today it's very difficult to do that um so we started two companies essentially there China company and a US company and we share very Capital intensive things like um manufacturing and supply chain and Design Studio the car design studio
2:12:00
um it has pluses and minuses right now one of the complex things is to manage um you know the requirements that we developed technology for the company in China they support us for manufacturing um how do we keep everybody coordinated
2:12:14
um so it again goes back to culture and values we describe values for the company four very simple values um we say it's Vision it's action it's care and honesty um and so we go back and the way that's interpreted in China is very
2:12:29
different than here obviously but we go back to that um and then we make sure roles are very clear which team is doing what and that we're not stepping on each other's toes so we'll see how it works you know we it's sort of an experiment
2:12:41
in its own way yeah um I also want to go back and sort of trace your career path because that's something which is really fascinating so you uh did your engineering from IIT Delhi uh in chemical engineering and then went to
2:12:56
Cornell how did you make the decision from that to go to Motorola yeah so I'm a chemical engineer academ my academic background is in chemical engineering my Master's Degree was though in materials and so when I um I was actually when I came to the US
2:13:11
from India as a graduate student I came on a student visa um my goal that time I thought I wanted to be a professor I was going to do my PhD and go back to India and teach um and then it was quite accidental that I ended up working for
2:13:27
Motorola it's a very funny story I actually I don't know if you know cor Cornell is in Upstate New York and I left a snowstorm and came to interview with Motorola back then in Arizona no bright sunshine and I said God and I was
2:13:40
from India back then I wasn't used to snow and stuff I said okay whatever job they give me I'm moving here uh I'm going to take a break from my PhD and I thought I'd work for a year and go back and I never did um because I really
2:13:53
found working and creating concrete products was to me actually much more interesting so I as I said I started as a line engineer and worked my way up to become the chief technology officer you stayed there for 23 years yeah I stayed
2:14:05
there for 23 years and you know but back then morola was a very diverse company so I got to do many different jobs so every two three years almost I was doing something very different I started in manufacturing then went into technology
2:14:18
transfer and then research and event became CTO got it so you uh and then did you come to Silicon Valley for Cisco right so I moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 um I moved to become the CTO for Cisco got it so you've been an engineer
2:14:35
you know in the late 1980s you've been in the Valley now for a while has anything changed being a woman engineer um so there are very few women Engineers I'd love to see more women Engineers it's um I think in the technical areas there still the ratios
2:14:50
are very roughly the same I think when I went to school it was about 14% in engineering and now it's about the same so in some ways it hasn't changed any at all you know if you just look at the numbers in the last 20 years um it's
2:15:03
still very difficult I think for women in technical field and I've been an engineer pretty much my whole career I just moved to different roles in engineering um I just spoke at Microsoft with their with their women engineers
2:15:17
and I think you know roughly the numbers are the same across multiple companies um so if you just look at that you feel like okay nothing's really changed um the fact that now we are speaking up more um is I think the right you know
2:15:32
that has changed I think in the past probably we would not have said all the things we are saying and calling out and I think that's great we should continue to do more more of that I think we shouldn't let anybody at no matter what
2:15:43
level they are in in any company get away with things that sometimes they think they have a license to get away with um that I'm very proud of I think in just the last year we've read and we've all followed all of the stories
2:15:56
that have been coming out not stories they reality actually um right which is shocking in some ways and you think like wow and but in other ways you feel like we knew this was happening now we're acknowledging this is happening and now
2:16:08
calling it out and holding people accountable I think that's a great step forward um now we need to say how do we stop these things from happening in the first place right yeah and as a woman engineer you've talked about about this
2:16:21
before um how did you you know did you feel you had to behave like a man sometimes or change your style of work absolutely when I started um I was I think there probably very few engineers in factories and semiconductor factories
2:16:34
I started as a factory engineer um we were actually told to dress a particular way we couldn't wear any color we were told to wear I think I was to time wear gray and try to blend in um the wall like and and again I came from India I grew
2:16:53
up with a lot of color it was very alien for me to be that way but I forced myself to do it because I thought like oh my gosh I had to do this otherwise I won't get a job or I won't be you know recognized for the work I do but it made
2:17:06
me very uncomfortable and you know after a few months of that I stopped you know I said I can't be who I'm not really as a person and now I always talk about how women should be women first whatever it is that makes you comfortable you should
2:17:20
dress the way you want to dress and then you know let your work Define you I mean in my company actually we do this at Team time one of the things men and women do this by the way all of us do this as as human beings when we
2:17:32
introduce ourselves notice this we all introduce ourselves with a job title and say hi I'm padmashri Warrior I'm CEO for Neo we never say who we are as a person um so when we hire new employees when we do our team time we introduce all our
2:17:47
new hires and we have them come up and say one some fun fact about themselves I love cooking I I have a 2-year-old or I play the guitar I love rock climbing I have a motor cycle that I love to ride on whatever it is right you know why
2:18:02
don't we say that about ourselves and you know we have to give ourselves permission to be authentic and who we are um so that's something that I I encourage all everyone to do both men and women and given all the recent events what tactical advice would you
2:18:16
have for companies to sort of address this you know what can organizations even you know Founders here what can they do from day one to make sure yeah firstly I think have your pulse on the organization it's not an excuse to say I
2:18:29
didn't know this was happening it's obviously impossible to keep track of everything and when someone raises an issue make it a priority make it you know we in my company now we're 350 people um you know I I have a complete
2:18:45
open policy people come talk to me and when they talk to me it's not that I just don't ignore it you know if they complaining about something we try to do something you know we fix it um if we can't fix it we have to go back and say
2:18:56
we can't fix it uh I think it's very important if you're the founder and CEO you have personal accountability for everything that happens in your company and you have to take accountability for that um thank you um and and I think it's important to
2:19:15
have a follow up right um we have very you know there there'll be a lots of of complaints like oh the cafeteria is too cold today or the food came late some things are small some things are more serious uh but you have to pay attention
2:19:29
to all of them so I think don't minimize that and I think actually I feel like we compete for talent right and the space we are in it's very difficult to find the right kind of talent a lot of people come to work for our company for the
2:19:42
mission for the culture I think it is definitely a factor well thank you so much for taking the time today and for sharing uh these insights thank you so much thanks for having me you hi everyone Hi everyone I'm cat a
2:20:19
partner at w minator uh you might have seen my face on screen earlier today cuz I'm the partner who rejected poppy U but also uh I redeem myself by asking her to speak so I feel I'm you know I'm back um so we are going to take
2:20:37
a quick break and uh if you could be back in here it'll be 25 minutes to about 4:25 um and I just wanted to remind you of a few things first we're doing a partner panel at the very end of the day with all the YC Partners so if you have
2:20:50
any questions questions for us please send them to ask ask ycombinator docomo uh there is a Snapchat filter just in case any of you are snap fans um and that is all so we'll see you back here at 4:25 and hope to uh get some of your questions
2:21:13
[Music] bye the club isn't the best place to find the lover so the bar is where I [Music] go [Music] [Music] [Music] m [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] o [Music] m [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] h [Music]
2:38:15
[Music] oh [Music] m [Music] [Music] a [Music] o [Music] [Music] oh [Music] n it is really hard to see okay welcome back everybody so I'm Kirsty nathu I'm a partner at White combinator and also the CFO and our next speaker is aen Lee and
2:45:33
aen is the founder of cowboy Ventures which is a fund that invests in seed stage companies before starting Cowboy alien was at kleina Perkins and she's also spent time at Gap and Morgan Stanley uh Alien is also famous for coining the
2:45:52
term unicorn which you're probably sick to death of hearing about now inFAMOUS or famous um and we actually invite aien to talk to uh our Founders at YC every batch and the reason why is that we just love that she gives this amazing
2:46:09
non-nonsense advice to our female Founders about about talking to investors so I'm excited to be able to to chat with her today in front of everybody thank you okay so aen we've I gave a little bit of your history there but why don't
2:46:28
you go into a little bit more detail and about how you what made you decide to go off on your own and start Cowboy um so Cowboy Ventures is still kind of a startup we started five years ago and I had been at Kleiner for a long time
2:46:42
actually almost 13 years um and I part of the time um from 07 to 09 I actually kind of left part-time and went to go run one of our portfolio companies as CEO and when I came back I just had a different feeling about the firm um and
2:46:58
the work and I found that I was I was fortunate to be a senior partner at Kleiner at the time and as you for as for these large firms you spend just like large companies as you kind of get into Senior Management you spend more
2:47:08
and more your time in meetings uh less kind of doing the functional work and more around kind of trying to help run the firm a bit and I just really love working Hands-On with Founders and with portfolio companies and I just felt like
2:47:22
our firm had kind of grown um quite large and I was spending more time on internal meetings than actually just spending time with companies and the industry had changed a lot too I mean as you all probably know uh there are a lot
2:47:36
more funds now there are a lot more startups they can be all around the country and so Venture investors really have to be kind of open for business and available to meet with companies all the time um because you just don't really
2:47:47
you know you never really know what under the hood unless you have a meeting and you get to meet people and so I just I felt like having a job where all I really did was just meet with companies get to know talented people who might
2:47:59
start companies who might want to work at portfolio companies and helping portfolio companies is really all I wanted to do with less overhead and Seed was this new category that was still pretty small in terms of the number of firms and also the number
2:48:12
of well-respected brands in the seed category that were known for giving Hands-On help um and yet it was it's the biggest it's kind of the the the biggest part of the funnel and so it seemed like a great opportunity to both start
2:48:24
something new make it more personal make it very small with very little overhead where really all we do is is very pure uh and very focused and so what did you what did you see at Kleiner and places like that that you decided you were
2:48:37
going to do differently with your fund many um um it did get quite large and I think this isn't specific to Kleiner but in general the math of venture capital is such that um Venture capitalists make money through a combination of fee income and
2:48:56
what is called carried interest which is basically profit sharing with their investors once you've return the capital and when you do the math on funds if you have a 500 800 billion dollar um 800 million or billion dollar fund the
2:49:09
number of multi-billion dollar companies that you have to be an investor in per fund is quite large it's it when you do the math it seems very unlikely that most venture capit Capital firms will be able to generate the kinds of returns to
2:49:21
investors and to themselves that they have in the past um and so the math I think just works much better and it's much more aligned with entrepreneurs if the funds are smaller so that was one thing um but I won't I won't I mean
2:49:35
having the chance to be a female founder and to hopefully build a brand that gets very hopefully well respected by entrepreneurs and investors for being a blue chip top tier firm in terms of the quality of work the quality of
2:49:48
relationship sh the integrity and the outcomes and helping to put numbers on the board and move the needle for women in Tech is something that really motivates me yeah yeah and you mentioned that that one of the things was that you
2:50:00
wanted to have more of a Hands-On approach with with helping the founders that you that you invested in what kind of things do founders ask you for help with and how how can you help them well at seed stage I know it's hard to for us
2:50:12
to see but how many of you out there are founders holy cow that is awesome um so it's and how many of you are seed stage or preed Founders okay a lot so at stage age as you know you're you know you have not enough time not enough
2:50:28
money not enough people and so Founders generally want advice or help or guidance on a mult multiple fronts one is on hiring um many times a Founder has never hired certain types of people before they've never hired a head of
2:50:40
sales or they've never had hired a ux designer or things like that so they look advice and both introductions and help filtering and knowing kind of where to set the bar in terms of who to hire when and how to know they're the right
2:50:51
people on the financial plan um as many of you may know the bar has kind of been raised in terms of how much series a investors want to see you accomplish from seed stage before you raise an A and then from A to B and B to C because
2:51:04
a lot of these funds have gotten bigger they have more money so they can kind of wait and write a bigger check at a higher valuation for more traction and so I think at seed or even preedee getting good advice from experienced folks on what you really need to
2:51:17
prioritize and accomplish with the money and the time that you have at seed can be important um and customer introductions feedback on roadmaps help with positioning and strategic messaging and PR so just kind of across the board
2:51:32
that's the way we like to help yeah yeah and so you know if if one of the things that you're doing is working so closely with the founders what what kind of what traits are you looking for in the founders what what really attracts you
2:51:44
to the companies that you invest in because it at this stage it is all about the people yes a lot of it is about the people and so um you know high integrity High Intelligence people who have also shown a certain amount of of hustle and
2:51:56
scrappiness and figuring stuff out before they've raised money and then having um kind of an aggressive but doable plan for what they're going to do with the money and making and within a reasonable period of time so we usually
2:52:09
um suggest that your seed round lasts you at least 18 months if not 24 months or more than that um you know going a big a big mission and vision that's quite ambitious um that can be backed up by here's where we want to be and here's
2:52:24
how we're going to get there over time this is what we want to get done the next 12 months or the next 18 months um you know relevant backgrounds if possible or at least a personal connection to the problem that that the
2:52:35
person and the team is trying to solve uh we love to see ideally some kind of a techn technical angle or a technical uh solution um that's that's kind of it um and we we also talk sometimes when we meet with the the women in each class uh
2:52:52
so I will just say it I do think it can be harder for women to raise money than men um and so I think kind of that kind of sucks and we will fix it over time but for now the thing we have to do is know what you're up against being a
2:53:04
woman entrepreneur raising money in a largely male industry of VCS and understanding then kind of where you are and what you need to work on because a lot of pitching well the other thing I'd say is storytelling is really important
2:53:16
and being a great Storyteller is important and if you are not a great story you can become one I have seen so many people who started out not being great storytellers become excellent ones and it's just a matter of feedback and
2:53:27
practice especially at that early stage where you're really selling a dream yes so important yes so you know you mentioned that it's it's potentially harder for for female entrepreneurs to be pitching to to male investors how
2:53:41
does somebody pitch to to somebody who is not necessarily their target market um well hopefully there are plenty of I mean hopefully you can pitch women um and the more we can do to get more women into the Venture industry the more women you'll have to pitch um but
2:53:58
you look it's a 95% male industry so you're very like denying it right now yes to have many men in the room and but I look if you look at Pinterest or house or Stitch fix I mean the majority of the investors in those companies are men so
2:54:15
obviously there are men in the industry who understand problems that they may not personally relate to right well I mean it goes to show doesn't it if you have an Enterprise startup then the people who you're pitching to aren't
2:54:25
your users in that situation either so exactly it is possible it's just all about that storytelling definitely and and the folks at YC publish a lot of great things about um like tips and tricks for uh how how to go about doing
2:54:38
it but I think uh for many of you if you're going into a fundraising next you know generally starting out with what is the mission and vision of the company how big is the market Venture invest are looking for large addressable markets
2:54:51
what is the problem that you're trying to solve who's on your team and how relevant is the team what is the product that you that you've built if you have built something or what do the wire frames look like what kind of traction
2:55:01
or feedback have you gotten from the market in terms of whether people are going to like the product or whether they do like the product and what is the financial model and the economic model look like and what are you going to do
2:55:11
with the money like that's pretty much how I think those are the main elements of the story and just how you tell the story and the personal narrative that goes along with that and I think is is what investors are really looking for
2:55:25
yeah and I think a lot of it just comes with confidence as well just walking into that room with confidence so yes how how would you advise the the women in the audience to to be able to internalize that and and project it in
2:55:37
those meetings uh I mean it's exactly what you said kiry which is you all there are some great examples of women Founders out there who have raised a lot of money or building quite valuable companies so we we know it's possible
2:55:51
and I think um especially with a lot of the news that's come out in the past week we hopefully have a better window than ever more openness more support than ever I think there is a gathering Army of not just women but also men who
2:56:07
realize that uh the deck has been somewhat stacked against women in the industry for since the beginning of the industry and that it needs to change um and so those are all good things and there's also just such an amazing ecosystem of people who have raised
2:56:21
money who can who you can friendly pitch your story to and get feedback and iterate I mean nobody comes up with a perfect pitch right away everybody iterates on it and gets feedback and practices and it gets better yeah and I
2:56:35
think that's that's one of the things that that people don't necessarily realize that you know there's there's a lot of people that can help you with the pitch that have been there and Seed stage investors are very much focused on
2:56:46
helping their companies get to the next stage and will will help with those pictures yes we do like to do that yeah so I'm going to go there all this news that you you just mentioned um you know what does anyone know about the news
2:56:58
yeah has anyone has anyone heard some stuff going on recently um you know as as a female VC what's what's your take on it what what can we do um I'm pretty pissed off uh but I think we have to use it you know we can't just be mad right we have
2:57:18
to be constructive we have to use this an opportunity to come up with new new ways of doing things new Solutions um using it as an opportunity that it both is I think a carrot and a stick right like there's going to be
2:57:32
there's not going to be one answer there's going to be multiple things that we can hopefully do to be constructive with what we've learned in the past week um and I don't think that this is I don't think the story is over right I think
2:57:45
more sad sto will come out over the coming weeks about behavior that shouldn't happen in the industry that's unprofessional that's unacceptable um that will piss us off even more and so we have to you know all of you hopefully you know this will give you more
2:58:02
motivation to be successful to kick some major butt with your companies to build modern inclusive cultures um to bring like to hire a diverse team to to nurture and develop a fantastic slate of lots of women and people of color on
2:58:20
your management teams and in your ranks that will become the next generation of CEOs and then and also we need more women investors you know so I you know something that I had I had the fortune of having breakfast this morning with a
2:58:38
bunch of um General Partners at a bunch of women General Partners at different firms and we talked about what can we do to help the associates and principles the women and people of color at other firms so that we have more people
2:58:48
becoming General Partners faster uh so there are more people to call when we have a successful company that's going to have choices raising an A or a b or a c we at Cowboy Ventures are going to try and steer those companies to Modern
2:59:02
firms that have women and people of color in the investing positions and if you all have only men at your firm and we and the the founders it's their decision but our most of our Founders feel this way if they have a
2:59:13
choice they would rather work with a modern firm like why should we make money for ass holes you know like yeah yeah for sure and you know when if if a VC misses a deal that turns into a hot deal because the founders have said no I'm not going to
2:59:30
work with you that's how change can happen yeah so I think you know if you have a company that's successful for entrepreneurs or friends of yours who are have successful companies or if you're a great operating executive that has is going to have lots of opportunities to be recruited to be a VP at different companies you're making a choice kind of with your feet or with your wallet by who you make successful and so I hope that you will use your
2:59:53
leverage to steer people and steer yourself to firms and teams that are inclusive and and diverse yeah for sure it's uh it's going to take a concerted effort but we can we can get there so you know we've talked a bit there about um choosing these modern
3:00:12
modern firms to work with but how else how else does does a founder um you know what what should they be looking for an investor how do they decide who they should be working with I do think being networked with other women and other
3:00:26
entrepreneurs you know there were some a bunch of articles about how the information that came both from the information that came out has been kind of an Open Secret in Silicon Valley for years and some people knew about it and
3:00:38
some people didn't but you have to ask right so you have to ask we investors do references on entrepreneurs before we invest entrepreneurs and executives who are thinking about joining startups do references on the folks that you
3:00:51
considering joining and hopefully you'll figure out are they people of Integrity do they have skeletons in their closet what do I need to know that I'm getting into how's the culture um and I'm hoping that we'll come up with some way I mean
3:01:04
I think the great thing is that women and other people are starting to come forward and name names and talk specifically about people or firms they've had bad experiences with and all this stuff has just been I mean it's
3:01:18
happened to probably most women in this room you just eat it you know it just it just makes this little pit in your stomach that causes you to doubt whether you're welcome in technology whether that firm really wants you to be there I
3:01:30
mean so there's so many microaggressions and little cuts that people um people do because subconsciously they're trying to make you feel uncomfortable or they really just don't they don't have confidence in you but you should all have confidence in
3:01:44
yourselves um and I'm hoping that more people will be encourage encouraged that that you'll be a hero or a heroine by coming forward and being brave because it's a hard thing to do but you know factually and using data and evidence
3:01:58
showing what's happened and that it's not okay because there are many people that have your back because it's not okay yeah yeah I mean we we get that we we ask Founders to to tell us if if investors have have behaved badly
3:02:11
because we have the power to be able to do something to help you know we can we can stop them coming to demo day or we can we can you know there's numerous things but it's so hard to get women to to tell us who they talk who who they
3:02:24
are talking about and it just requires so much bravery but the more that it happens yes the the less bravery it will require yes I really appreciate I think in the last batch that we talked to a woman said something about a male VC who
3:02:38
had said some very inappropriate things and you all found out his name and dis invited him to demo day so I was pretty psyched about that thank you you're welcome so we haven't really talked much about your portfolio and and the kinds of
3:02:57
companies that that you look at you know where where do your interests lie so being a being we we are a generalist you know there are some vertical specific funds like the only invest in healthc care or big data or um robotics like
3:03:10
we're generalist funds our our goal is to hopefully identify and work with the most promising startups at Ste stage that are technology oriented startups um every year whether they're Enterprise or consumer oriented um and so we have a I
3:03:25
think a really interesting mix of of Founders and companies that we've gotten to back um some of them are consumer oriented uh like Britain Co brandless which is a company that's launching on July 11th that we're super excited about
3:03:40
um and and both female CEOs and Founders um and also security um companies infrastructure texo is an is an Enterprise SAS company that we've backed also founded by a fantastic uh woman's CEO so it's it's really I think hopefully we can be
3:03:57
helpful and Hands-On in all the things that I mentioned like team building and go to market strategies and helping you get ready for your series a regardless of what type of company you are and do you think that that Founders should
3:04:09
consider you know how should they consider these funds that say that they're vertical specific versus the the generalist approach I mean the fun thing seed is one of the reasons why I also decided to move earlier from being a
3:04:22
series a investor to a seed investor a seed is collaborative so at series a generally the way the industry works is you're going to pick one series a lead investor and that firm is going to own 20 to 30% of of your fir your company
3:04:37
going forward and and hopefully your prior seed investors will invest Pata but you can't you don't split your your series a usually between two different series a firms at seed we we always co-invest with other people so we can
3:04:49
partner with a data oriented firm or an Enterprise focused firm or a consumer oriented firm and we do that quite and also with with angels um individuals who have special expertise or relationships with the founders so it's kind it's more
3:05:03
of like a village um and it's a team approach to trying to help the company because it's the riskiest time so we feel like having lots of good people around the table to help the company and support them is more fun for us and it's
3:05:14
going to help the company more yeah yeah it's definitely difference at series where you have one investor who's on your board and and they're the ones that are that are driving it the yes the seed stage it it just takes like you say a
3:05:25
village yeah yeah and I I also think hopefully our village tries to help guide and advise the founders on who is the best series a board member because that is really a big decision it's really hard to get divorced from your series a board member right you should treat it like a like a marriage it is a marriage it's a dating process yes and that person is going to help you grow as a CEO and if you want to be a CEO that lasts for the next 10 years
3:05:50
running your company making sure that you develop a relationship of trust with your series a investor who's really who could try and get rid of you or could help you develop is a is a big deal and that's one of the things that we work
3:06:01
with our Founders on is trying to help them find that right person so we're we're running out of time but uh so you know we have we have a room full of women here so many of them as we've seen are founders what's the you know biggest piece of advice you
3:06:16
can you can give to them to to help them pitch to to a seed investor and be successful so uh as I mentioned I do think that women have to walk a finer line in today's environment of mostly male VCS than guys do like as you may have heard me I try and say this
3:06:35
whenever I have the opportunity like what if my trigger phras is is he's such a good guy yeah I can't understand that phrase like this the phrase good guy people say it all the time and it doesn't really mean much other than like
3:06:49
high five we love that bro yeah let's go and shoot some hoops yeah exactly and I see this all the time you know in meetings with v VCS where if we have a company that's doing well and we're thinking about who we're going to call
3:07:02
for our series a and it's mostly men around the table and myself and we make a Google doc of like who are the you know who who are the target investors for the round and someone will be like oh what about Scott Jones and someone else will
3:07:17
be like like oh I love that dude he's such a good guy and then someone else will say oh What about Brian Smith it's like ah love that dude love that guy put him on the list and it doesn't mean anything like it doesn't mean that he's going to be a great board member and that we should get married to him for 10 years but then if I bring up a woman what about Susie Smith They'll say oh does she invest in security like there's no oh she's such a
3:07:44
great girl or she's such a great woman like it just it's infuriating yeah um but that's kind of what but the same thing happens to entrepreneurs like if you pitch or a group of guys pitch in the closed session after you leave the
3:08:01
VCS be like I just love those guys and someone else to be like yeah such good guys love those guys so fun to work with and you're just like but it's just not fair because they don't say they can't say that about a women like it's such a it's like what if
3:08:16
I say something that's offensive or like I just love that woman what does that mean like but women don't say it's about women either it's I know it's not fair so like we should stop saying it um but that's kind of the world that we live in
3:08:29
right so the advice we I like to give women entrepreneurs is you know be confident but don't stretch like if you are a little too arrogant or you if you kind of puff things up a little bit too much they will they will ding you for
3:08:46
being exag Fator um so that's one thing but you know don't be too shy or underc confident because to be honest I think guys can get away with being oh he's just an introvert whereas women and there was an article recently that
3:08:59
basically showed a Quant like quantitative study that showed that women and men get get different judgments and they get different questions depending on like basically by investors so it is not fair we just have to know how the deck deck is stacked and
3:09:13
work around it um so you know practi your pitch you come across as confident but not overconfident and not spinning because they will ding women for over spinning uh know your numbers women are overly dinged for not being quantitative
3:09:29
enough I have a friend who works at a unicorn company who uh her father is a math professor she was a math major uh she was the COO for a company doing $100 million in revenue and like in charge of quantitative acquisition marketing all
3:09:44
these things When She interviewed at this unicorn company first of all all of her interviews with with men and every single person asked her how do I get the confidence that you're quantitative enough like there's just no way that men
3:09:56
get those kinds of questions no so just know your numbers it's not you know so if someone asks you what's the CAC what's the LTV what are the margins what's the revenue plan for next year just know it just practice it um and if
3:10:08
those are things that you don't know about or you're not sure how to how to um calculate then these are the things that you can ask for help from from so many people around and and yeah you know women really do have to know those
3:10:20
numbers back to front because they will get pushed on them much more so that is so important be good at followup like if you if someone asks if people are asking you questions or there's some follow-up things take notes send an email the next
3:10:32
day and say here here the things that we discussed I wanted to follow up on these points like showing that you're super conscientious and that you're on it well actually there like I think there are some women who get put into this
3:10:43
category of like she's a killer like that's kind of category want to be in that's how men think about there's like women and there's like women Killers um and like oh my God she's an animal like she just like was all over
3:10:58
her and she just knew her numbers she followed up like she's an animal and I mean to be honest it's so true like VC firms that are mostly male do want to they want to show the world that they are that they get it that there's with
3:11:12
it and they also know that it's just women and like if they don't attract women Founders they going to be leaving a lot on the table and it's going to be harder for their firm and for their portfolio companies to attract women or
3:11:23
people of color if if they don't walk the talk in some way and so I think they are more open for business than ever to back a more diverse set of entrepreneurs so that's great for us right we can we can do this you just need to know what
3:11:34
you need to do fantastic well thank you so much for this thank you all right thank you thank you it's been great hi everyone hi I'm cat um and I'm really excited to introduce you to three YC alumni Founders um and this is actually
3:12:08
going to dovetail really nicely with uh what KY and aen were just talking about because um we're going to be talking a little bit about fundraising uh because we all know that that's a big Challenge and then hopefully we can get to a
3:12:19
couple questions beyond that but um uh these three women are running companies that uh you know cover a wide range of categories we have you know something from The Sciences Marketplace feminine hygiene um we also have companies here
3:12:33
at different stages so um Erica uh from Flex just went through YC in the summer uh last summer um and raised a seed um Elizabeth went through uh in uh what was it summer 2011 summer 2011 and she um just announced her series C Ray uh today
3:12:55
so congratulations that's huge news um and Vanessa with gold belly went through YC in winter 2013 and uh raised a series a right series a last year um so we have a wide range of categories we have a um a wide range of you know kind
3:13:12
of stages um so I'm really excited um for you all to kind of tell your story so can you each introduce yourselves uh talk a little bit about what your company does uh and where you're at today great so I'm Elizabeth science I'm
3:13:25
the founder and CEO of science exchange science exchange is a Marketplace for outsourced research and development we work with some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies as well as agroscience Cosmetics Aerospace and food
3:13:39
science companies to help them manage their outsourced research and development we have just raised our series C we have been an operation for six years and um through that process have built the company now to a global stage so it's it's very exciting that's
3:13:55
awesome all right Vanessa yeah um my name is Vanessa Toria and I am the co-founder and chief creative officer of goldbelly um as cat said we did winter 2013 um we are a marketplace where you can discover the greatest most iconic
3:14:18
regional foods from everywhere in the country shipped to your door um through us you can experience places like momu fuku milk bar and Magnolia Bakery in New York uh Salt Lake barbecue in Texas and we ship it to you no matter uh where
3:14:35
you're located um we recently raised $10 million uh series a uh and yeah we're we're doing pretty well right now Erica uh I'm Erica I'm the co-founder of the flex company like cat said we went through YC actually twice last year um
3:14:56
and we closed a $4 million seed round in September um our product is called Flex it's a new menstrual product that replaces tampons pads and menstrual cups um you can wear it for 12 hours it's disposable you can have mess-free period
3:15:10
sex while wearing it um and we started shipping to customers in October and we're currently on a multi-million dollar run rate [Applause] awesome so I wanted to do one really quick uh survey in in the audience how many of you have raised
3:15:28
money okay okay how many of you raised a seed series a okay series B okay okay so now we know where we're at okay so on a scale from 1 to 10 where one is easy peasy and 10 is the hardest thing you've ever had to do
3:15:45
as Founders um how hard do you think say raising your series your seed was on that scale uh for us it was probably a four okay so not the hardest no definitely not the hardest I feel like it was more like a nine uh raising a seed because it
3:16:08
fundraising it's not something that you want to do you didn't start a company to fundraise so I would give it like a nine I think the first check is the hardest check you ever going to close and that was for sure a really solid
3:16:20
nine um and everything beyond that was kind of a four so how far long were your products when you first raised money well so we manufacture a type two medical device that's regulated by the FDA so we weren't very far at all because as you can imagine that costs a
3:16:37
lot of money um so we were really an idea and a design and an early prototype and a founding team oh we had customers and we were Dem demonstrating growth and you know we were generating some good Revenue so we were super early so we our first
3:16:54
money in was white combinator actually and um we had nothing so we didn't we didn't have even a website um and then after way combinator we built a website and built initial customers and had some revenue and at that stage was when we
3:17:08
raised our Angel round so you mentioned that getting that first check was really hard uh how many investors do you have to talk to or or what was that experience like before you closed Erica talk to countless investors
3:17:25
um for us fundraising is a lot like hiring like you really want to align yourself with people that you want to continue working with and that you genuinely like I think eileene said don't work with right um and so it was important to find people in the
3:17:42
beginning who not only believed in us but really believed in the product and believed in the mission that the product would achieve so how did you practice for those first investor meetings what did practice look like I think for us um
3:17:57
we got a lot of practice during YC uh we were pitching to our peers we pitched to PG um he gave us some amazing tips on you know some things that we should really put out front and center um so it was mostly um talking to people
3:18:15
who were going through similar you know fundraising instances that we really learned how to do it so you tried to talk to pitch to as many other Founders who could give you feedback yeah we wanted to uh focus on things that people
3:18:27
were reacting to and they were like nodding to so you wanted them to respond with a question yes not just have glazed yeah they look confused it was not a good thing what we were saying and what did that you're kind of practice process
3:18:42
look like so part of the challenge here um for for many of you is is sort of selling this company to people often you know a lot of investors are white men who aren't necessarily your users right most investors aren't scientists or you know they're not women
3:18:57
who have periods so how did you hone that messaging like how did you get to the right uh you know kind of uh message that story to tell investors yeah I think the storytelling is really important particularly in the early
3:19:11
phases um and for us I'm not sure that we were very good at it at the beginning so definitely for us um it was a journey evolution of trying to understand what would resonate with investors as an audience and what we ultimately came
3:19:24
down to was really describing the business so instead of being very focused on what's most exciting to me which is enabling breakthrough research um that was not you know people got excited about it but it wasn't to them
3:19:37
something that they really wanted to invest money in and what really resonated with people was when they understood the market size and they understood that this was a new market that was wide open where no software existed and that there was a huge um transactional cost that science exchange would eliminate that they could really see that the economic benefit of science exchange was so compelling that this would be something that could create a
3:20:02
truly billion dollar business and so that's where um we were able to really start to raise significant financing did it take you a few tries so did you pitch to a few investors who you know you were pitching your you know as a scientist
3:20:14
with someone at you know from your background the things that excite you as you said aren't the things that excite investors so did you uh sort of have a couple people to practice on like uh or did you make a few mistakes before you
3:20:26
got to the right message made lots of mistakes for sure um yeah I think for us we tried to tell some interesting stories about use cases that had happened on science exchange like one of our favorite ones was NASA used science
3:20:39
exchange to develop the blackest material ever measured and we were like that is so cool people should really care about this and it's a great great story but it's not a great investor story and so not clearly describing why
3:20:52
that could create a valuable business opportunity was definitely a mistake and we sort of evolved from that and actually developed much more of an economic based pitch which resonated much much more strongly and Erica you're
3:21:05
going to have to tell us how you pitched a period product how did you get comfortable doing that even I don't know that I am comfortable here um it was just something that we really believed in and if we didn't talk about it with everyone we knew that we
3:21:23
wouldn't see it come to life so that it was something that we had to talk about with everyone and like you said a lot of the investors that we are pitching don't have vaginas don't have periods and are frankly afraid of both so when you go in
3:21:37
and you're talking about both things simultaneously um they just don't understand it and so we really focused on and like the best advice I feel like I can give is like focus on building a really incredible business that speaks
3:21:51
for itself and that they can't avoid um and at that point the product kind of becomes irrelevant although we definitely had conversations where they were like like I can't even tell you guys how many times I've heard like let
3:22:03
me ask my wife or like can you send a box to my assistant I'll see what she thinks and those AR aren't people that you want to work with anyways so take that as like I'm not interested and move on and find someone that is and Vanessa
3:22:17
was every investor just like food no actually um at the time that we were pitching the the hyper like local delivery space was pretty crowded so we really wanted to make it very clear that you were getting specialty things from
3:22:34
someplace else uh so um what we did is that we made sure that we had food present you know to illustrate what we were trying to what we were trying to do so we would bring a key line pie from Key West uh we would also do a lot of
3:22:49
research uh of the about the investor that we were talking to we'd find out where where they went to school or where they were from and we made sure to have something there that maybe they had a nostalgic connection to that's a good
3:23:02
hack yeah and it was really cool because by the time they arrived everyone's like yes bring us some keilon pie by the time they arrived at the meeting and sat down like they saw the food item and they understood what we were trying to do um
3:23:17
so that was we didn't have to like go through all of this explaining anymore then the other thing that we used to do is that then we'd follow up with like another food item delivered to them so food man it food sells so when you are trying to figure
3:23:35
out you're getting ready to pitch to investors for the first time how did you know what metrics they wanted to see how did you figure that out we just asked like before like if Sequoia is your like super hot dream boat don't set
3:23:49
that up as your first meeting go into like find an angel that you're also interested in but like it's not your number one pick and start practicing there and ask them like what metrics do you need to see in a company at my stage
3:24:04
and like what would you be looking for and they'll tell you I think in our instance uh our seed was raised on Vision we were talking about our vision our experience the team the mark Market size so it was less about like how what
3:24:19
our metrics were and it's more about like how are you guys going to win and why are you guys going to win I think that um by the time we went to raise our series a our seed investors were really key in giving us guidance on like what
3:24:34
were the like the kpis that were really relevant that would make uh you know investors interested in us so it was through our seed investors that we learned uh what metrics to really put front and center yeah and I think related to that um
3:24:48
those kpis are going to be critical for your business anyway so really understanding what those kpis are based on the business type and then tracking those rigorously as you're growing the company and then those will give you
3:25:00
sort of benchmarks for where you need to be when you're going to each raise of uh round of fundraising so how has it changed as you you know you went through a seed you know an a a b and now C how has it changed throughout that process
3:25:13
yeah for me I think actually the industry has also changed a lot in that time as well so I think when we started science exchange 2011 it was right at that kind of bubble when people were starting to think about becoming
3:25:25
entrepreneurs but definitely not at the level of interest that there is now that you see the huge number of people in the audience today um and so that's that's amazing to see so many people wanting to become entrepreneurs but it also creates
3:25:40
a different level of expectation around where you should be as a company at each round of financing so for us when we raised our series a we our series a was like $3 or4 million and that was great that was like totally normal back then
3:25:54
and now I think the median is close to 10 million so it's a very different type of expectation around where you should be what stage of company you should be when you're raising each of these rounds um certainly for us we saw that same
3:26:07
focus on Vision on um Market opportunity and on team being very important in the early stages and then much more focus on okay how are you showing true product Market fit and in in our series C that was very critical that you had very
3:26:22
large Enterprise clients that were actually using this platform extensively and that you had genuinely proved out the business model and the cost of acquisition and all of those components that investing this money would actually
3:26:33
immediately go into creating an Roi for those investors right um so you know as you know you've all gone through the fundraising process we've seen the numbers not you know a huge percentage of women get funded um do you think that
3:26:48
at any point in the process you face specific challenges because you're women um sure like absolutely right like we Face unique challenges being women I think I really struggle with this question because raising money is hard like hard stop it is hard for anyone
3:27:14
um and you don't want to go into a negotiation or into a meeting thinking like oh this is going to be harder for me because I'm a woman because you're giving that person the upper hand so it's not to say that it's not happening but it's like
3:27:29
how do you not think about that so that you can go into that meeting and you can actually be the one who is changing that percentage or that statistic um it's it's a little bit hard for me to answer that question because
3:27:43
my co-founder is my was my boyfriend now he's my husband um so I I just feel like you know for us is as as long as we're you know focusing on growth and we're showing you know demonstrating like product Market fit like that we're going
3:28:00
to do well I I didn't feel like my agender had anything to do with where we are today yeah and I think as you get into later stages um of financing you see perhaps less because there is much more focus on metrics so being able to Quant
3:28:17
quantitatively show that your business is actually at a point where it deserves to raise a certain amount of financing kind of removes um an element of bias even if it's unconscious so my suspicion is that those earliest rounds the angel
3:28:30
rounds are probably where it's most difficult and where you might face some bias um and I think we were very fortunate I also have a co-founder who's a man I don't know if that helped us or or not but I certainly think that um if
3:28:44
you can push through and get that initial funding then you start to get traction and that traction actually you know trumps any kind of weird gender issues yeah so that's an interesting uh you know I've had a lot of conversations
3:28:58
and it seems like getting those first checks are the hardest for women and then also um that's probably the most vulnerable so for for things that happen it's usually at that stage before you already have a network of investors who
3:29:11
kind of can help you through the later stages of the process so um for folks that um you know are maybe raising their first you know their C their a what uh do you have advice what what is it if someone were to come to you and say hey
3:29:26
can you help me I'm I'm pitching investors next week what uh what one or two things would you want to impart to them um I think that uh about a series a what we did differently is that we prepared um much better for our series a
3:29:43
than we did for our seed um we made sure that we had our financial model you know pretty ready to go all of our data was ready all of our kpis were um on display and we made sure to study up on all of the key metrics that investors at a
3:30:01
series a level would be interested in so by the time we had our meetings um we already had all of the information that they were going to ask we weren't like scrambling to like you know we weren't having different conversations at
3:30:13
different times we were having the same conversation with every showing everyone the same information uh and we you know we we just studied up and prepared before we had our first series a meeting so that's uh Echo is something that
3:30:27
eileene was saying you just you have to know those numbers cold and by heart yeah yeah and and it's um and it's not just your numbers by the series a you should also know who you want to talk to um most of the time uh you're going to
3:30:44
start talking to people that have already invested in you and at the seed level uh or you're going to reach out to firms that you know can help you you know get to the next stage so you're going to have to do a lot more preparing
3:30:57
before doing doing a series a than you would a seed yeah I agree I mean even at the seed stage I think that being prepared is so important like there's so much research that you can do there's so many I mean all of you in this room there's
3:31:10
so many people you can talk to about like what has their experience been like you you know what are the averages like what should I be looking for go talk to other investors like I said ask them what they're looking for and put that
3:31:23
together for the people that you really really want on your cap table and so what um how do you identify those people that you that you want to talk to right so how do you uh figure out who might be interested in funding a
3:31:39
feminine care product well there aren't many that fund f and care products um but look for look for companies that are similar like if not in your category similar to what you're trying to achieve so like we have a you know a feminine
3:31:55
hygiene product but we're also an e-commerce company so like what investors are have like a really strong presence in e-commerce what investors have invested in female Founders um stuff like that yeah we were looking for um investors that had expertise in like
3:32:13
consumer Brands and marketplaces so we did a lot of research about like who could uh really um give us some like really great advice right where do you go is it like you just go to like crunch base or angelist yeah you literally like
3:32:29
stock the investor you look at their link see what boards they're on yeah yeah and if I mean if you're in part of the startup Community you already know what kind of firms you know focus on different um Industries so and how much
3:32:44
did fellow Founders kind of you know help you out like did did some did folks offer to introduce you to their uh investors or they said hey I know someone like did that ever work reaching out to you know folks in your community
3:32:57
um so one thing that I've uh that we've always done is uh if um if we needed an intro uh to an investor we would either reach out to a YC partner or to any of our peers that maybe had some kind of connection like through Linkedin you can
3:33:14
figure out who connected to so um yeah we we would just ask for personal intros and how did you divide responsibility on your team so a lot of you as a lot of you know when you fund raise it sort of takes so much of your
3:33:31
time and focus so how did you keep the company running um while you were out there pitching investors what did that breakdown of uh what did that breakdown look like yeah that's definitely very challenging at the earliest stages and
3:33:43
again I think that's that's something where minimizing the time at which you're actually fundraising and being very focused about when you're fundraising and when you're not fundraising is very important because you have to have you
3:33:55
know really strong metrics going into the fundraise and then if it's just you know three co-founders and you know two of you are fundraising you're going to have a dip in your metrics because you're doing nothing else except fundraising and so that's very
3:34:09
challenging I think once you get beyond that initial phase of only having a few people in the company hopefully you're at a point point where the company should continue to operate more or less seamlessly without you being in the
3:34:20
office every day um and that's a lot easier so definitely our series C was so much easier from that from that regard but I think it would be great to hear you know how you guys handled that so for our seed Round We everything slowed
3:34:35
down right our entire team was uh focused on and somehow uh helping raise the round um but by the time we did the series a uh our CEO uh Joe he did he basically did the round as I focused on operations I made sure that we were
3:34:54
still running and that we were still growing that we were sticking to um to our our goals and our metrics month to month uh so we could you know keep making money the the vast majority of like running the company was up to you for a
3:35:09
while yes for the amount how how long did it take um we did it pretty quickly uh um the reason we did it pretty quickly is because we had gotten profitable before we went out for our series a which I forgot to mention like
3:35:24
that also helped speed up the process if you've already worked out your unit economics and you you've become profitable then you know you have a little bit more leverage to have you know I feel like a faster uh fund raise um process so probably I would say just
3:35:41
a couple months yeah but I was basically Bally involved in the day-to-day for our product and our marketing and BD as he was focusing on uh talking to investors Erica yeah similar for us we have three co-founders um our CEO Lauren really
3:35:59
focused on fundraising um and we always say I kind of stayed home and like made sure that the kids were still growing um which like meant that keeping the company running keeping the traction that we were showing investors making
3:36:11
sure that it was continuing if you could go back in time and give yourself a piece of advice uh to when you were first starting a company uh you know first starting the company what would you tell yourself doesn't have to be about
3:36:27
fundraising just generally um I think a lesson that I've learned uh being a Founder is when you start your company you're pretty obsessed and you put your everything and your all into your work into your product to what you're trying to build
3:36:47
uh and you kind of Lose Yourself you feel that if you work 24/7 uh you're going to be better and you're going to like help your company take off but what you don't realize is that you can burn out if you're just working 24/7 if what if you leave work
3:37:02
and go home and continue to work you're not going to um make better decisions for your company it's actually going to slow you down so it took me a couple of years to figure out how to um have a good uh life and work
3:37:19
balance I think I had like no idea how hard being a Founder was going to be um and not that that's advice but more so like how like I wish I could have or I wish I would have met more Founders in the beginning to have talked to about it
3:37:36
and like learned from them and just like be able to about like everything that you have to go through um because it's hard it's really hard I hope you all use each other for that I do yeah I do yeah I definitely think that learning
3:37:51
process of um trying to get advice earlier trying to not be afraid to sort of talk about the challenges you're facing and and you know everyone is always like crashing it and doing so well on the outside and that's you know
3:38:04
at times you feel like well maybe I'm not doing well enough and like you don't know who you can really talk to about it and I think the reality is everybody feels like that and that if you're just really honest about that people will say
3:38:16
oh yeah you know what I had the exact same thing and I'm so worried about it as well and you can realize that every single company is so messed up and you have and I remember Jessica talking about this at one of the female
3:38:29
Founders conferences and I was like that's really true I mean you always think that everything that you're doing is so much worse than everybody else but the reality is everybody is just trying their best and creating these amazing
3:38:40
companies in the process but it's not perfect it's not perfect for anybody along the way cool thank you guys so much for taking the time thank you I'm going to move feel free to yes and now I'm really really excited to introduce you to our next speaker Morgan
3:39:00
Deon she's the founder of blavity so blavity um has you know grown into the largest Media company and Lifestyle brand for black Millennials um so Morgan started blavity in 2014 and since then they've built a community of over 7
3:39:16
million readers um and they've raised a million dollars which they announced last year so I'm really excited to introduce her to you and hear more of her story so welcome Morgan hi hello I I I moved on to this couch so we could get real cozy I love it hi hi um okay so I want to um so for folks who might not know uh you very well um I'd like to just kick it off tell us a little bit about yourself yeah uh maybe where you're from and what you were
3:39:49
doing before you started blavity totally so I'm from St Louis Missouri St Louis out there no yeah oh okay um so I went to school at wasu in St Louis as did my three other co-founders and I actually started off wanting to be a teacher um
3:40:05
that's how I was going to change the world and particularly like black youth and gave me more access and then I got in the classrooms and very quickly realized that even the best principls and the best teachers were totally
3:40:15
restricted by laws regulations Etc and so I was like I'll be a politician no problem um and so I switched my major I became a polyi major I was in student government and then um realized that everyone was influenced by money right
3:40:33
that that you know we all know that now especially after what's going on but um and so I was like okay well this is interesting how do I both help the people that I care about in my community make enough money so that can influence other people and make better decisions
3:40:49
um and technology and Entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to do that and um so that kind of started my journey and then after I graduated from college moved to Silicon Valley and to Mountain View specifically and um worked into it
3:41:03
as a product manager so I went you know big culture shock I think moving from St Louis to the Bay but here we are so what um what was the original Vision like what point did you decide to leave into it yeah and start so that's a
3:41:20
great question I think part of it was I've always been tinkering I've always been kind of making things um blavity is just the first one you've heard of right so you had a bunch of side projects tons of side projects websites and I think
3:41:34
when I was can you tell us about one random one that didn't work of course okay um let's see which do we want the biggest failure one that I think is still a really good idea okay can we do both really quick okay the biggest
3:41:47
failure um was so personal finance so basically when you graduate when you're in college you have no money right like maybe you have like a couple thousand dollars but like you know you don't really have any money then you graduate
3:41:59
and you go work at a Google or an into it and you're making $50,000 plus like out of nowhere right and a lot of people don't know what the allocation should be for savings or spending on rent or if you want to buy a car and so it was a
3:42:13
personal finance calculator um you know there's like thousands of those there's like there's no differentiation or anything so it's a good idea but like not really a business um and then the one that I still think is a really good idea I did in college with two other um of my friends one is now my CTO and the other one has gone on to raise millions of dollars Emanuel bamfo um and it was called quad connect and so it was basically um you could
3:42:42
find free food on campus so this is what or Facebook events like really were thing so we were like scraping all these campus calendars and then aggregating it and because at the end of the semester you run out of food you know meal points
3:42:54
and so you're trying to find all these free food events yeah no one's done it so if someone decides to do it just let me know this is this is like a classic college student problem I'm I'm surprised actually no one has solved it
3:43:06
yet like yeah um okay but going back to blavity what was the original vision for blavity that you had and and how has it evolved yeah so the original vision which is is still actually the same today is to create products and experiences in which like we're
3:43:21
celebrating black people and it's like the the problem that we saw and the problem that I saw was a few different things one like we can get into it what was really exciting was they're really great at designing they're really good
3:43:34
at creating experiences um like Turbo Tax is supposed to be really boring but it's like not that bad you know it's not that painful QuickBook same thing right now that I'm on the other side I'm like oh I love QuickBooks right um
3:43:49
but that process of learning like how to design for Delight how to be really specific about creating a product for a specific user and being like ruthless about who you're creating for um what I realized was that no one was doing that
3:44:02
for me and so there's a thousand problems that black people have and people of color have and women have that this entire industry ignores and so with blavity we wanted to create different products and we wanted to create
3:44:15
different experiences to kind of fix that um and then you know the thing on the personal side is that Mike Brown happened when I was working at into it um and I was actually at demand force it was a startup that into it had bought
3:44:27
and it's like it's a great company um and but it's very white and very bro and it's a sales company and so I was in business development so I was kind of like sitting on the floor and I was like okay this is interesting they didn't
3:44:39
really know what to do with me my hair was like really big there's like I don't really know where you came from I came from like the motherland CU I came from into it you know so it was just like it was a lot I think for people and I I
3:44:50
felt that and um I kind of carried it with me and then when Mike Brown happened and my world was exploding you know being from St Louis and watching things happen on Facebook and and again you have to remember that this was two
3:45:02
three years ago so this is before trending topics on Facebook right so it was very difficult to find information so you had to go to Twitter and Periscope and Vine and there was a lot of things happening where there was no um Central there was no Central way to
3:45:17
find out what was happening in a city and then things started to explode across the country right things were happening in Baltimore things were happening in Cleveland things were happening in St Louis and so individual
3:45:26
people became our sources of information now these people you know we know who they are D Neta Sean right um but back then they were like just normal people and so to find them was really difficult um and so blavity had started like we
3:45:42
had started to Tinker a little bit um but that's when ultimately quit and and said we need to do this black media is moving too slow because they're Antiquated in terms of magazines and newspapers they never really made the
3:45:55
switch to mobile first and digital first and then Millennial media they don't care yeah you know um we know we care a little bit more now but back then nobody was really paying attention so that's that's the beginning yeah so um since
3:46:09
then you know so basically maybe going back to that first moment how did you get your very first users yeah so we started as an email newsletter um and one one of the insights was that black people and people of color actually over
3:46:22
index and watching television so it's about eight hours a day on average it's a lot the average person watches about five and at the same time we're huge content creators like anything on Twitter the funniest stuff on Twitter probably came from black person the
3:46:36
memes like all of that stuff right and so it was interesting to me that you take both of those things and yet we don't really have a a place to find that in one place you kind of have to like be a cool kid and like be able to find it
3:46:50
um and so blavity what we were doing was curating an email newsletter that was your top 10 things you needed to see this week and they were videos and did it start out as just you curating everything oh yeah and like there's
3:47:02
probably some people in the audience where um I just scraped your email and put it on the newsletter um so yeah and then we went straight to YouTube from the newsletter um and then we spent like you know two months building this like
3:47:16
really cool website it had all the algorithms and stuff until instead of from the newsletter to YouTube you went to the website again this is back when like Upworthy was a thing and like you know Facebook right there's all these
3:47:27
different things happening um Everybody hated it they did not like going to this other website they're like no we're just going to go to YouTube um and so that was our first fail um and you know we kept iterating from there but yeah it
3:47:42
was an email newsletter in the beginning so how did you real realized that people weren't into the video aspect of this and really wanted that text they wanted to read right so um I thought that it was just cuz the site was ugly cuz it
3:47:55
was you know you always launch things really ugly in the beginning cuz like why make it pretty if you don't know if that's what they want um so then I made it prettier right I was like okay fine we'll go lighter We'll add some call to
3:48:06
action buttons like all these things nobody cared so then it was like okay how do we drive traffic maybe people just need to learn learn how to type in blavity.com like they're not used to the brand so we started doing content
3:48:19
marketing so we created a Blog and then wrote stories about the people actually behind the videos um and I hired bloggers we didn't hire I didn't P them because we didn't have any money but I brought on bloggers and um and then the
3:48:33
blog was getting like a thousand times more traffic than the videos themselves and the URL was like insane right it was like blog. blavity.com blog like it was ridiculous um and so I was looking I track everything religiously like every
3:48:47
day Google analytics every hour looking at realtime analytics and you can see the difference and you just I just didn't ignore it and so we switched it so blavity.com became the blog and then videos. blavity.com became the video
3:49:00
site and that just site just died just like dead but the blog I spent you know a weekend making a WordPress site versus another site that we spent two months and hardcoded everything it was you know supposed to be this big Tech thing so
3:49:13
how do you that's like how do you Kill Your Darlings like something you spent two months birthing basically and then suddenly you realize you know it's not going to work out I kill my darlings all the time left and right all the time I mean
3:49:27
I think failing fast is like part of of how you move in this world particularly in technology space um and and especially consumer social media engagement Community um so yeah it I am agnostic about how we reach people I
3:49:45
just want to make sure that we do so you have built this incredibly passionate Community uh I see people tweeting about ly all the time and like how did you how how did you go about growing and nurturing that community and keeping
3:49:56
them coming back so the first thing um which is part of our values is that we don't make it about us so blavity we always try to ask ourselves how does this help someone else is it information that they can use is it a video that's
3:50:10
going to make them laugh while they're sitting at work feeling lonely is it information in the morning that they would never get if they were just scrolling through their Twitter feeds unless they followed us of course um and
3:50:22
once you remove yourself from what do I think people need versus what is it that will help them because they've said that they need this or they've indicated through behaviors that they needed then it actually becomes really like refreshing and easy because you just
3:50:35
have to listen so in the beginning with blavity what we heard was that creators like young people who have these amazing products or Creations weren't getting the press and weren't able to get on stage and do the things that they needed
3:50:48
to do to get to the next level and to really ultimately monetize you know that's every Creator's kind of kind of make money right um and so we said okay we're going to be about the culture like we're going to promote the artist in
3:51:00
Brooklyn we're going to promote the EP that just launched that the fader is not going to cover um we're going to give them cameras we're going to give them resources and we're going to try to train them and give them money even and
3:51:13
um that was the beginning and then what's interesting is as they've grown we've grown right so Quinta be who's huge at buzfeed well three years ago we put a camera in quint's hand and we're like go run it was a GoPro we're like go
3:51:25
run around and like just show us your life and then we'll make a video out of it right and now she's one of my best friends and and so she's got literally millions and millions of followers um but back then she maybe had like 50,000
3:51:37
right so I think focusing on the community and focusing on um building from the ground up as opposed from the top down it's really about empowering the creators and the community and it's not about like your editorial Vision anymore
3:51:50
and right let's get out of the way huh right and so we've invested a lot of time and money on building out the platform of lavity we're not on WordPress anymore we've built our own website and our own CMS a Content management system so that we can enable
3:52:03
user generated content so about 50% of our content today is actually from the community which has its own problems um but in the long run you know it does all communities definitely right I hear you derating oh yeah you know um so but in
3:52:19
the long run it's it's way better it's scalable it's empowering you can build things systems and processes that make it efficient and frictionless for people to share their stories and their their ideas so you raised a million dollars a
3:52:31
little bit more actually oh awesome well you raised more than a million dollars yeah yeah I had I had another round that hasn't really been announced oh well awesome congrats and uh so uh you know as we've been talking about it's it's
3:52:45
particularly difficult for women or people of color to raise and so did you you know feel like there were barriers that you faced um and what was your strategy for getting around them yeah um absolutely so I think I made the mistake
3:52:59
that a lot of first-time Founders make which is you raise um you go and look at your competitors right you go look stock them on angelist you look at them in crunch Bas and you're like okay well who invested in them we're like them but for
3:53:11
us and so I'm going to go talk to them they're going to get it no that's not true they might get it but they're like well I already did that or um you're you're compare they're going to compare your numbers to their numbers
3:53:25
and so for me uh like thinking about Mike or hello giggles or um Refinery way back in the day like they had already raised money some of them even before they launched right so my numbers and their numbers not going to match up
3:53:41
right um so I'm like well can you take out all that money they SP on Facebook Facebook ads and then compare me you know no the investors that's too that's too far down and so in the beginning um I definitely made the mistake of going
3:53:53
after and I'm sharing my mistakes intentionally so you guys we all make mistakes right it's just part of it um and then quickly realized and that I wasn't ready I didn't have the right story my story was way off people couldn't understand the the ecosystem
3:54:08
that I was trying to build with glity they just saw so you're a Blog on WordPress mhm and you don't even write like you aren't a journalist right and I'm like I mean like yes technically that is what I am today but the vision
3:54:22
is this entire world of products and websites and Brands and experiences and I can't tell you what those are yet but because it's in such an underserved community and because we're going to work really hard we're going to figure
3:54:34
it out and I just needs a little bit more time a little bit more space um so you hadn't uh you were like here's where we're at today but you didn't have that like and here's the bigger BS had ideas but then they said oh you're doing too
3:54:46
many things you're not focused right I was like well no I am focused you know like I'm here but you have to sell it right and so I didn't do it well I mean it flat out I did not sell the story very well and so I went back into my
3:55:01
little cave with our team and kept building um and built to a place where it was so ridiculous that we had not raised money where it was like we walk into the room and people were like that those cannot be your numbers and like
3:55:12
they are right and so then people had to make a choice do you want to invest in me or not do you believe my numbers or not right and do you think that this is a business um that's worth over two three 400 million or not and there was
3:55:29
there was no ambiguity there and some people the answer was no right and they're like no I don't believe it okay bye right um because I believed it and and I think you know now obviously three years later there's some people who have been like hey yeah and I'm like M right no you don't get in this deal absolutely not absolutely not it's true so you made it so good they couldn't ignore you absolutely which is hard when you're bootstrapping it's
3:56:01
expensive right so how long did you bootstrap bootstrapped for a year um living in San Francisco which is really hard um I was on that oal and how big was your team then um paid zero unpaid we had probably around six or seven people um or paid by via
3:56:19
what I could pay them at the time $100 a month $500 a month I mean it was very much a community and Mission driven company you had to really believe in it to be here um but yeah and so when I raised our first round it really went to
3:56:31
just pay for all the things that I was already personally paying for and to hire the people that were already working for free so it didn't it didn't actually go very far um but I it was a you know it's a success indicator that I
3:56:44
think the market get then say okay now we can go give them some more money so how has uh your job changed from the time you were bootstrapping to now yeah I mean I would have never done this when I was bootstrapping like I'm working I
3:56:56
can't on stage um yeah I think that now it's very much about people and hiring and um sharing the story of lavity because we are so different than a lot of companies we're a mix of media we're a mix of tech we're definitely a lot of
3:57:11
culture and Trends um and so yeah I spent a lot of my time just trying to remove barriers from my team make it easier for them to do their jobs and then storytelling and making sure that people know what we're up to so what is
3:57:26
what are the next steps for blavity like what is the the big Vision or yeah so just to kind of share a little bit more about what we do so blavity is a media company and Lifestyle brand like you said um we have two conferences afrotech
3:57:38
which is a Tech conference here in San Francisco and we have Empower her which is a Women's Conference um which moves around it was just in Chicago a few weeks ago we have three websites so we have blavity.com 2190 which is a new
3:57:52
brand that we just launched for black women specifically Lifestyle brand and then the conference ladders up underneath it and then we actually acquired a third company that we just announced last quarter called Shadow and act which is focused on it's like a
3:58:04
black Hollywood Reporter so you know what's Abra duver doing what's is doing with the trailer that just got released um but also because of such a huge kind of energy around video creation and black creators we can curate engage with
3:58:19
people with web series all the new web series releases and things like that um and then we've tested a lot of things like e-commerce and um others so that's kind of the world that we are right now um and how do you um decide what to test
3:58:36
out or what what to sort of keep and what to kill yeah it's very much based off of numbers it's very much based off of um like speech of traction and then comparing different things at once so what for example with
3:58:50
our women's brand which started off called blavity lifestyle so it's just a separate Instagram account because we knew that you know if we posted women and their afro and like all this stuff on our blavity account all the guys
3:59:00
would be like right um and so we're like okay cool we'll create a separate brand it deserves its own space it deserves his own voice um and then that was actually growing faster than blavity so and we're like of course it is right women are amazing
3:59:16
and very much like you know and I'm a woman right like all these things um and so then we're like okay we we'll launch a Twitter account right and we didn't have separate websites at all it was all going back to blavity.com um but we had
3:59:31
separate voices on social and then from there um we're like okay well maybe we should start writing content specifically for this demographic and then that was growing like crazy and then we said okay well maybe we should
3:59:42
just launch a separate brand because some of the things that we want to do really don't fit under the blavity brand like if I want to release um like a make a notebook that's like a day planner that's talking about living your best
3:59:54
life for women and like put afro in the in the cover and like all this stuff like that's not going to work on blavity it warrants its own brand um and so we went back to the drawing board and said okay what would a company for black
4:00:07
women look like what would a brand for a black woman look like what are what are what's in the space already um and then we went back from the from the scratch and designed it and launched cool so you uh so you have all these different
4:00:22
properties and so kind of longer term um are you just going to keep experimenting and see what works um or is you know are you driving towards a specific you know one specific goal yeah so the future of blavity like way far away from now is
4:00:37
that blavity is a brand that when you see it or you feel it or you're around it you know exactly what you're going to get and it's a positive impression and energy around black people so um and if you're black it's like oh this was designed exactly
4:00:51
for me so for example if blavity throws a party you know what you're probably going to get right if we're like we're going to do a music festival you know you're probably going to get Salon Chance the Rapper Donald Glover right
4:01:02
like you can kind of say in your mind what we're going to do um or what that might look like what that experience might look like if we're like we're going to do a Netflix show right um people might like okay like maybe a dear white people vibe like you know there's there's some things that um that we can do and expand into as from a brand perspective that will just be an extension of who we are um on the website side and on the media company
4:01:27
side I certainly think there's plenty of communities that have not been touched so for example music there's not many music media brands that focus on Black Culture which is ironic considering how much black musicians run the music
4:01:42
industry right um are the creators of the music industry and so that's certainly an area that we're thinking about um and trying to figure out what is our voice in kind of the Indie black Creator space for Founders who are building Brands right now um and
4:01:56
focusing on that what do you have specific advice for them yeah I think um be Unapologetic about having a big Vision um I think in the beginning I felt like the world couldn't take all of me they were like it's a little much right like you're doing a lot
4:02:14
um and so I I I sliced it down so that they could understand me um and I think I did that too long sometimes you might have to do it to get to a certain person but I think that I like from a mental perspective it took me too long to just
4:02:28
Embrace everything that I wanted us to be um and and now that we have as a company that I think everyone feels much more empowered to think big and to try things and not be as scared of failure was there a fear that you were going to
4:02:43
lose focus with was that it like that you edit it down because you were like I want you know maybe investors to believe that we are focused on this particular abely yeah I mean you solve for what you think is your biggest pain point and
4:02:54
when you act out of fear I think that you limit yourself um and that's a problem how do you get over that fear I don't know I'm still working on it I mean I think I think that it's it's being self-aware and surrounding yourself with people who believe in you um you know I'm lucky to have a very like strong tribe of people who are always pushing me and always saying keep going go bigger go harder go faster um and I think that's really important
4:03:20
particularly for women to have that Community because it is tough it's very difficult so so um if you could give advice to female Founders especially black female Founders out there who are just starting out like what would you
4:03:32
tell them oh I would say um it's you don't have to ask for permission like I think sometimes we wait for other people to validate us because we've spent a lot of time not being validated and not seeing ourselves in places like for example um when I was
4:03:51
said I was going to quit my job and run a startup everyone was like name me a black female founder and I was [Music] like and they're like okay now name me a black CEO a black female CEO who doesn't have a law degree or an engineering
4:04:09
degree or a business degree and I was like ooh you you know and so there's all these reasons and all this data that shows that we shouldn't exist right if you look at the numbers like you literally wouldn't go outside yeah um so
4:04:23
it's true so it's like you know so don't just like don't listen to them um don't ask for permission don't wait for someone to tell you that it's okay to be great and to do what you want to do um so that's my advice that's
4:04:37
awesome I right on time thank you so much thank you thanks thank you to Morgan [Applause] hi everyone I guess I'm miked up I can stand right here um I'm just here to introduce our next speaker uh who's one of my just favorite people um Diane
4:05:05
Green she is you all I'm sure know her so she needs no introduction but she's the chief of um Google's Cloud businesses and prior to that amongst many of the things she did she was the founder and CEO of VMware um so she's going to come out say
4:05:21
a few words then I'm going to come out and join her and do some Q&A for her talk so welcome Diane hi I I was trying to figure out what to do because I like to read my notes and the electrum was too high for my 5 foot one self um
4:05:44
so um you know it's just such a total pleasure for me to be here you know more than 800 female Founders from all over the world some of you just Pro yeah yeah so some of you probably starting your careers and many of you in the
4:06:03
early stages of your uh developing your companies and I think it's just like incredibly exciting you know there's so much possibility sitting in this room this one Auditorium and imagine all the interesting challenges that you're going to uh
4:06:23
surmount and all that's going to be you're going to be required to navigate so little bit about myself I've been a co-founder and CEO of three startups and the first was V extreme in 1995 where we developed a low bandwidth
4:06:39
streaming video um technology we could stream sort of postage sized uh videos across the internet and we sold this to Microsoft in 1997 for 75 million and that became the basis of Microsoft's movie player my second startup was VMR and we
4:07:01
launched with that we launched the virtualization Revolution and um that we we founded that in 1998 and we took it public in 2007 and the market cap closed that day at $1 19.1 billion so my last startup uh to date was bbop which we founded in
4:07:30
2013 and then we sold it to Google in 2015 for 380 million and I committed my portion of the proceeds to a nonprofits through a donor advice fund okay thank you um okay so before these startup I don't usually get so much Applause you're a
4:07:55
great audience um before these startups I I uh build inside of larger companies at sbase the first tech company I worked at before that I was a naval architect um I developed asynchronous input output software uh to make the database run
4:08:13
faster and actually we were able to beat uh Oracle and Ingress and all the other database companies at the benchmarks and and yeah it was cool and and then I I went to Tandem they actually uh fired my boss who was a
4:08:33
woman and she went to it was a mistake she was running engineering and I went to tandom with her and uh anyhow there I helped create a hybrid architecture to run an uh open Unix based world uh tanm had the best transaction processing
4:08:48
system in the world but it was proprietary and then at SGI I developed streaming video Solutions and uh that was part of the Time Warner Interactive uh television project which was actually a precursor to the worldwide web and a lot of people
4:09:05
in that group went out Netscape was one of the companies um a lot of companies started out of that and then as a tech investor I've advised and put seed money into a lot of startups and they include two companies that are now public uh Cloud era and
4:09:22
Pure Storage and also uh Unity Technologies which is the gaming uh developer platform and several others unfortunately my schedule's now such that I no longer have the time to provide seam money or or or or advice to
4:09:39
startups um but anyhow I've learned a lot of lessons along the way and I'm going to now look back and attempt to identify and and share them with you uh my first lessons were at a very young age my mother was the latest and a
4:09:54
pretty strong principled Midwestern school teacher uh lineage and my father was a brilliant uh hard driving engineer and entrepreneur and I was the second youngest in my family uh a little girl in a crowd of very competitive and and dominating Brothers
4:10:14
and we lived on a creek that fed into the ches peak Bay and my father conveyed his love of the water to me and I soon found myself taking off on Long sails in my little sailing dingy and this was formative I suddenly you know was the
4:10:33
Mistress of my world in in charge of a boat and on my own you know facing overcoming the challenges uh that the sea would present to me and later on I would race bigger boats and wind Surfers I won the Women's National dingy
4:10:51
sailing championships I raced long distance to Bermuda and and down both of America's coasts and I wind surfed across the open ocean uh from Maui to mikai and back it's actually an amazing story but I'm not going to go into it but um but
4:11:12
more than any anything I think my connection to the sea has really helped me develop my Independence and a sense of importance and value of my own vision and to S successfully uh you need to observe with great care you need to identify what the
4:11:28
wind and the water are telling you and then find a way to execute to reach whatever goal you've set be it's simply making it Home Deport or or winning a race and building a company is so much like racing a sailboat
4:11:43
you need a plan and then the ability to re-evaluate the plan in real time as new information is acquired suddenly the wind changes or a competitor is stronger than you thought they'd be and each Mark in the race is a mil Stone where you
4:11:59
need to look up and evaluate what you're doing how you're doing and so when you campaign a sailboat you need to be in the moment you need to let go of your self-doubt and yet you can't lose the ability to question your decisions so
4:12:15
most of all when it's time to make a decision a competitors come upon you or the wind shifted you make it the race won't wait for you and finally when you race a sailboat the selection of your crew is just completely Paramount it's impossible to
4:12:33
Be an Effective Skipper if you don't have the right people working harmoniously in the right roles so what does all this mean in terms when founding or running a company at V extrem I learned that the founders need to be solidly aligned and
4:12:50
that a startup maybe has a better chance of success when the number of Founders is limited too many cooks can spoil the broth most of all I learned that no one is indispensable and it's essential to get the right mix of people talents and
4:13:08
personalities the mware was really the beginning of the of an industry Revolution and from that I learned what it takes to induce the market to accept a profound Innovation it's essential to design and market a major innovation in a way that
4:13:25
makes its adoption non-disruptive that makes it easy to integrate with an established order an established way of doing things even if the Innovation ultimately supplants that order so for example one of the things
4:13:42
that made our sales take off you know we had this virtualization layer but we we we built a tool that would take a a workload running in a physical machine and just magically put it in a virtual machine and everything just ran the same
4:13:57
and that was a phenomenal sales tool for us at VMware I also was reminded not to let step backs make you stop thinking if a puzzle can't be solved one way there's always another it's just a matter of navigation we were really disappointed when we
4:14:16
learned that VMware would not be able to sell through I IBM due to IP issues but then we turned it into an advantage where we were able to work with IBM to enlist all of their star resellers to take us to Market finally at VMware I learned how
4:14:34
essential it is to create the right corporate culture we worked hard to foster a sense of the importance of each and every person person and the importance of each and every person and also what their role was in
4:14:52
in the furtherance of the company's objectives and to create an open culture that would make it easy for people to communicate collaborate and share ideas and indeed we designed our corporate campus with exactly these goals in mind if any of you have ever been to vmw um and then bbop also provided an interesting set of lessons I think it may be my last startup but you really learn every time uh my original co-founder didn't stay with the company
4:15:23
and I was at first sort of a bit out of my element we were attempting to revent how Enterprise applications are built so they'd be simple to use and more effective in attaining their objectives but the basic look and feel the design of our first attempts was
4:15:42
just off and we persevered and be bbop became a Powerhouse for design thinking and for tools to build Enterprise applications tenaciousness really pays off and now finally as head of Google Cloud I'm learning that it's possible to
4:16:00
build an Enterprise startup inside a mega company once again the cultures of both the parent and the in-house startup are crucial and we're a pretty big startup and yeah we serve seven apps that have over a billion active users anyhow we're big but and once again it is all about having the right people in the right roles and finally it's about never taking your eye off creating value for customers and partners so the bottom line when sailing
4:16:36
a boat or building a company is that you give it your all you give it your all not because you're supposed to not because that's what make you makes you win but because you have respect for your goal and you enjoy the process as a company founder enjoy
4:16:54
building things you enjoy creating value and the commitment that comes from loving what you do is what will nourish you it will satisfy you and will make you unafraid of failure you may lose this race or that one but sailing ahead
4:17:10
with everything you you have will still be a pleasure you may make a fortune but the fortune will be incidental if your goals are worthy it's the process that will count and that understanding will be your greatest source of strength no matter what the
4:17:27
adversity so thank you and now Jessica's gonna come out and ask me questions yeah let's I'm going to sit here oh okay sit right there come over here all right well we'll just get into this because I have a whole list of
4:17:42
question questions and we'll see how many we'll get through um so I'm going to selfishly ask a question because I'm very interested when you started VMware it was in the late late '90s but a very exciting time how many were any of you
4:17:58
in Silicon Valley in 98 raise your hand okay we got some hands we got some hands I want to hear more about it I want to hear what what was Silicon Valley like and sort of how did you get started with VMware yeah well the way it was
4:18:13
interesting the way I got started I was um I co-founded VMware with my husband as a professor at Stamford and he was doing research and he had he had sent me an em I was actually the one startup I didn't mention I was working on at the
4:18:27
time and um he sent me this mail uh because I I was a sort of a advisor to that so I never count it but um it actually went public but but anyhow um I was uh he got this email from all these people up at Microsoft about a paper that was
4:18:49
supposedly under blind review and I'm like oh man you really got to get a Patent filed here and um and then I'm like you know this is just so valuable your research we should take it to Market and and and and then we kind of
4:19:01
did it with our grad students and we weren't you know it turned out it was just we did this thing and it was right at the beginning of the.com era and and there was pets.com and web band.com and and uh you know these companies that
4:19:20
were raising huge amounts of money and I can remember I went to some party and I'm talking to this guy and he's like what do you do and I'm like well we're building this software that you can put on your machine it'll let you run
4:19:34
multiple you know it'll Multiplex all the resources and he just looked at me and he goes this is hopeless you know and and like you really got it a dubious idea dub in fact I couldn't even get a PR firm to come and work with us um
4:19:48
because it was all about thinking big and this whole dot thing it was a and it was um it wasn't that hard to get Engineers because we were such deep technology they understood what we did but but getting business side people was
4:20:04
pretty much impossible and so companies were just sort of getting slapped together and going public well I don't know if they were slapped together but they were going public right and left that's for sure yeah um in fact the company that I advised the went public I
4:20:20
was stunned did you have any Equity I did I I that was bizarre so so then did your husband how did tell me how you got started specifically with VM or did he say okay come on board now as like we're making well with me I was like I think you
4:20:39
should do a company and and um I said said I'll help you and and uh famous last words and then I found out I was pregnant and I said look I really I'll get it going but then I you know I'm I was about to have our second kid and I
4:20:56
was like can't do a startup and uh and and I and then we had his two grad students that were going to join us and and so I said I better tell them I'm going to have a baby and I did and they were like so and and and so I'm like okay so we did it
4:21:16
and then six months into it I had my baby and it was kind of cool because we didn't have any customers and we were in this little building that you could open the windows and so I just brought my baby to work and hung out with her in
4:21:30
like a little bassinet or something where was the was the office in down oh it was funny it was you know yeah you know near Town and Country there's a car wash yeah so it was right behind there and um uh healthy on had been there before and
4:21:45
they moved out and they called it the crack house because people were doing drug deals in front of right next to your baby and um but it was a it's the building is not there any longer so did you then were were did you fund raise
4:22:01
for VMR early on or how did that work because I'm interested in what fundraising was like back in well you know um so I'd made money from the extreme the video the streaming video company from Microsoft and I always delighted in telling Steve bomber and whatnot that um they paid for V extreme because they didn't it wasn't really a great company for them because we got in between Intel and Microsoft um in the stack so we disintermediated them
4:22:36
a little bit and so um but anyhow so we had money so we what we did was we did our friends and family and we only allowed friends and immediate family to do a seed fund okay and then and I held back on how much I put in to kind of be fair to you know
4:22:56
all the founders and then we said okay let's do an outside just to get some credibility and and this is sort of advice I've always giving people is you want to find investors that really deeply understand what you're doing and
4:23:14
so and and you want to get rich people that deeply understand what you're doing and so that's what we did we got Andy Beal shim and a few other PE uh people John Hennessey so how did you get did you know a Andy like well we kind of knew him we were a bunch of um you know pretty deep engineers and you know we were kind of knew the knew the engineers and and's a really a phenomenal engineer and and David his partner David Sheridan was a professor
4:23:49
at Stanford that I wind surfed withf with them he was my wind surfing buddy and and so we just called them up and we told them what we were doing and yeah they were seed investors in Google too yeah and and uh and it took an hour oh my God because they they they got it they're like whoa yeah so was it kind of like that famous Google story where Andy wrote the $100,000 check and said here you go yeah we got 300,000 oh even better story that is so
4:24:24
great yeah he he he said you know I got the checkbooks at my house and he's like I'm going to leave it you know like um in my driveway you know and I got his address and I'm like is this his house and it was like newspapers all over the
4:24:43
the driveway like he hadn't even been there I'm like is this really the right and there was the envelope oh my God amongst a sorry I live for this stuff all these random little details make things so colorful um so then you you stayed on after the birth
4:25:00
of yeah it was working so well and and I was having fun and I convinced my mother to come live with me part of the village to to raise to help with my daughter and but I and I brought her with me as long in fact she was raised she's like the same age as VMware really interesting and so I can always remember how old VMware is and and and uh I just brought her everywhere like when we got more advanced and started having customers and partners
4:25:34
all over the you know selling all over the world uh she went all over the world with me and then I would just um stay at a really high-end hotel and have them hire a really high-end Nanny to take her care of her and take her around she just
4:25:50
loved it oh wow I can imagine really high end Hotel um okay so things are are going looking back on VMware what were there any mistakes that you made there that you said gosh for my next startup I'm going to be sure not to do this I'm
4:26:07
always interested in I think the biggest mistake I made was getting you know feeling like it was selfish of me to not sell you know cuz everybody else wanted to and I I was like thought it would your co-founders or who El my co-founders wanted to sell
4:26:22
and and I thought it would be selfish not to although they would have thanked me had I not but in hindsight I'm actually really glad that I ended up leaving VMR because I I probably wouldn't have left and I had several
4:26:38
years with my kids just home with them that I really valued but but um which I might not have got after it was acquired after afterwards yeah did your investors want you to sell were you the only one that want well we didn't have
4:26:51
VCS so yeah we didn't have VCS so I took money after after we took the money from Andy and David um and John we uh we raised money from Dell and and um from Dell and and a few banks that were wanting to take us public okay so you were really in
4:27:14
control of like yeah we were totally in totally in control which is obviously the kind of place without having to do the 10 to one um so then 10 to one voting rights you had some time with your kids and then you joined the board of Google and
4:27:32
yeah right after I left fmr I joined the board of intu and and then a few years later I joined the board of Google yeah okay so I'm curious being on these Boards of these super successful companies in addition to running your
4:27:45
own super successful company what kind of things did they have in common or not in common that that make them I wouldn't say too many companies have much in common with Google yeah that's true well what if is it about things about so but
4:28:01
people it's about the people that's what I mean certainly in Silicon valy everybody focuses on the people and and so maybe it's just across all of silicon Valley and um but those are you know in it and Google you know it's funny they had Bill
4:28:22
Campbell in common kind of but they were so different the board meetings and everything and were you the only female board no Google uh when I joined had and still does Shirley Tilman who's president of not anymore but she was
4:28:40
president of Princeton and then an Mather who was who still is chair of the audit committee phenomenal board member and so I'm I'm the third woman to join that board which is it makes a huge difference to have three instead of two
4:28:55
um we actually you know have conversations in the bathroom that that's probably very rare um okay so in 2012 you started bbop and you were very much in stealth mode right if I remember I was saying like what are you well because it was such a
4:29:15
big ambitious open you know sort of Investigation I saw no reason and there was too much interest yeah everyone wanted to know what Diane Green was working on so what what made you how did you come up with the idea what made you want to work on
4:29:31
this and sort of how did that one well I had actually been trying to convince anybody that would listen that they should go start a company to do what people did sounds very familiar my husband is like that yeah I just like I
4:29:45
really thought you know this layer of the stack where you build the applications for the Enterprise you know because it's so much more complicated where you have multiple users and access controls and it's really hard to do it
4:29:58
well and I was like it really needs some attention and I kept that was sort of the vision so you were bugging other people like this great you really should focus on this there's a need so you saw this need and did you finally say well
4:30:11
if the co-founder I found uh professor at Stamford he was like yeah let's just do it and I'm like well okay if you'll do it I I guess I'll do it and then he didn't stay and then he bailed and then then I but your husband like thanks a
4:30:29
lot wasn't your husband Co well no he didn't he came in after I'd been kind of working on it for a while couple years a solo founder well then I convinced uh some of my friends from VMware to come in and I said oh why don't we'll just
4:30:45
call you a Founder okay um so what what was it about this and they were great people and they're still there and you had worked with them before just phenomenal had that relationship so what was it that you that made you think this is an
4:31:00
important thing that needs to be working on what was missing currently why what there weren't good Solutions out there well like have you ever used some of the no no no has anybody ever used enterprise software I mean you knows so
4:31:16
broken it's um you know it's layers and layers of clicking through these screens you know where really like maybe you just talk to slack I mean do you really have to you know it's just so convoluted and complex and and for power users you
4:31:33
have to have all this Rich functionality um but it doesn't have to be you know this this layer of of screens that you know like you can use machine learning and things and know what the person's trying to do and help
4:31:49
them do it and you can automatically fill in everything and you know you can just make it like when you're using it you're just going how did it know that's what I was about to do and it just makes it there for you and that's what you you
4:32:00
know it's it's just incredible what you can do today that is radically different from what you know back when we certainly when we found it it I think people are doing that now I even think Google G Suite is doing it um but uh you know everybody's doing it more
4:32:18
and more now and especially the phone drove a lot of it because you if you didn't do it on the phone nobody was going to use it um but back then it was a lot worse yeah so then what made you decide you're working on this super
4:32:31
ambitious plan that you know is it's broken and you're going to you're going to do this what made you sell to Google well so I so one thing was there were a few things going on one was that in terms of being on the alphabet board by then no
4:32:51
it was still Google it was just become no it was still the Google board anyhow as part of my work on the Google board I got involved in Google's Cloud efforts just said hey Diane can we ask a few questions about this and so I I really
4:33:08
made very good friends with orz huzzle who is the guy that really he's employee number eight at Google he built all their he's an amazing person and really enjoy and I mean I tell this he lives near me we started walking our dogs
4:33:22
every Saturday we became very good friends and talked about and it was just fascinating so that was good and then I was getting to learn all about Google's technology and and the AI and the Machine learning and the you know just
4:33:36
everything that Google has the maps and the knowledge graphs and so forth and I realized that if you combine that with what bbop was doing it would be pretty special so they were so and I was busy kind of helping them find someone to
4:33:54
come in and run Google cloud and and we worked really hard on that and sounds like it no I gave them so many names I'm like this is the person you know and because I really wasn't interested at all [Music] and how did they convince you then and
4:34:14
and and then I just started well was a combination of bbop both things kind of but anyhow the last person I thought they were going to hire I thought the person was great they decided not to they're um thought maybe they weren't googly enough or something and it was it in hind anyhow so so at that point I I just said okay if we can make this work for bbop and I talked to everybody at bbop you know to make sure they would be okay with it and
4:34:49
uh yeah we had just raised a lot of money from a16z and Mark had joined my board oh my God yeah were they supportive yeah I mean they weren't that thrilled but but they weren't going to problem they certainly respected we
4:35:11
wanted to do and and it's and it has worked out super well and I have to say I'm glad I did it the cloud is like is really interesting yeah tell me about what it's like running running this the class so I I mean for me being in the
4:35:27
Enterprise for so long and and seeing what's happening in the cloud is is it's just I mean I VMware was like a big sort of mini Revolution this is like a giant Revolution ution and everything and the Enterprise is just moving so fast and
4:35:47
and you know everything's going to be in just a few maybe four clouds or so you know there's not going to be that many of them because like we spend about 10 billion a year in infrastructure and so it's not going to get disrupted by a
4:36:00
startup unless they invent Quantum Computing or something but um um uh I mean it's been invented but they make it work but we have a pro we have a project to make it work too but um but uh the or make it it works actually now but it's hard to use it's
4:36:22
hard to program like almost impossible and but it'll get there sorry did digress but um okay so anyhow it's just you know because you know with mobile and being able to bring all the data together and have the security of the
4:36:38
cloud like like our world you know you look at these ransomware attacks I mean we need more security and you're going to get it in the cloud and uh you know you look at something like you know you want your OS in the cloud updated
4:36:54
constantly and Tiny and and monitored you know and you know it's it's like Gmail you know we over 1.2 billion users so we can see everything going on and respond immediately and and we can be constantly Vigilant and you just you
4:37:09
know that kind of security you can get in the cloud isn't isn't available to to a company and and then uh you know the Advanced Technologies are there so every you know everybody's going to move to the cloud and then once you have that scale what you can build because of what you're seeing is kind of revolutionary so it's it's fascinating oh wow we're running we have one sec I have to ask one last question even though we've just run out of time
4:37:38
if you could warn firsttime founders of about a mistake that they're going to make what might it be you might not make any mistakes oh everyone makes mistakes well I don't like to say you're going to make a mistake learn the hard way what's
4:37:53
something they might learn the hard way that if you tell them about maybe they'll try to avoid that um well one thing I was I was listening to all these incredible answers that people were giving to this question so one thing I didn't and they
4:38:08
were all great um the one thing I didn't hear people talk about was sort of board your board of directors which I think is I mean it can be something you manage or it can be something that helps you and and you really want to try and have a
4:38:23
board that you don't have to manage but that helps you like at VMware I was able to select my board it's a I we don't have time to go into the story of how I did it how I pulled it together but I picked the people that really had the unique kind
4:38:39
of expertise I I wanted and then my board meetings I never wrote slides I just wrote a document and it and it it had a few metrics about how we were doing if you know we were doing well but the whole rest of it was things I was
4:38:55
worried about or trying to figure out and so I had a board that I could trust so much that I could just say look here's the things I'm I'm wrestling with let's talk about it and I don't have to impress you at first with all I never
4:39:08
tried to impress any of them yeah okay so the board and how so you you did you are there any uh is there any advice on selecting those people it's just people that well like I'll give an example of what I did you know I decided
4:39:22
so because we sat between the Intel hardware and the Microsoft operating system they were both monopolies and so it was a little bit sobering and and so I'm like wow we got to do all these deals and we got to struggle with Intel and Microsoft and
4:39:40
and we were and wanted to do all these Partnerships with the hardware vendor big companies like IBM so I thought I need someone that's really seen a lot of deals and knows how to structure a deal and at the time you know Larry sansini
4:39:55
was the managing partner at Wilson sansini he was I remember on the cover of American lawyer or something as the ultimate power broker and everything anyhow I decided that was who I needed on my board and um we don't have time
4:40:09
where I'd go into it was a really you know fun little vignette when I got him to drain my board but you know that was the example so when I went into him I just I explained to him why I needed him and what I was doing and why you were
4:40:25
specifically because when I walked into his office and said I wanted him on my board he said well I'm pretty busy getting off boards oh and there's a long but then I showed him how what he knew how to do was unique a and he had no idea who I
4:40:39
was and how what I knew what he knew was a unique fit to what I was trying to do and you got him to say yes you Clos the deal well he's it was really funny cuz he's like okay well I'll think about it you know kind of thing it was a Friday
4:40:53
late and I came in Monday morning and I got in at 7 a.m. and I my phone was already and I'd been in on Sunday so my phone was lit up you know back then before cell phones and um I listen he goes hello Diane or I can't mimic him
4:41:10
but um anyhow he said I'm inclined to join your board and I'm like what is inclined mean and he goes all drawing oh my gosh that's great oh wow well we'll end on that that happy note thank you so thank you see you later I'm going to
4:41:34
stay out here so awesome so I think I'm staying out here because we're doing a panel should I sit here yes okay all right so I'm really excited to introduce you to all the uh not all but many of the incredible um women that I
4:41:57
get to work with every day um these are the partners of why combinator um and so yeah so I would love for um we're going to be answering um some of the questions that you sent us and so I'd love for each of you to introduce yourselves and
4:42:13
then we'll just jump in okay shall I stop okay hi again everyone uh I'm Kirsty nathu I'm the CFO here at YC combinator and I've been involved with YC now since 2010 so seen it go through a lot of changes uh I'm Carolyn Levy I'm partner
4:42:31
and general counsel at yator and I've been uh here for about five years hi everyone I'm Anu hariharan I'm a partner at Y Community ERS continuity fund I joined YC last year uh the continuity fund is fairly new we uh invest primarily in gr stage companies and help uh with company building at scale hi my name is Adora Chung I have I'm a partner at YC one of the group Partners meaning I work directly with the startups um I've been here for about
4:43:02
a year now a little over a year and I went through YC myself in 2010 I guess when Kirsty started yep I'm Jessica living and I'm a co-founder of YC uh and I'm cat and I've been at YC for about four years now um and started
4:43:17
out as the first director of Outreach so me working with a lot of potential applicants like you guys all right let's just dive into the questions um so how much industry experience you typically recommend Founders have zero zero yeah no well no actually
4:43:34
I think for um for biotech it's pretty important that the uh founder have industry experience but not not true for other well also it's how do you interpret that question because in my talk earlier I said that ideas grow organically out of Founders lives and
4:43:52
usually they're working in some given industry and they're an expert in it and they say gosh this aspect is totally broken I know how to fix it and so we love funding people with domain expertise I guess yeah usually these
4:44:07
people are have been in the industry for just just a little bit not too not too long so that they are so entrenched in it that they don't know how to fix it or know how to build um to fix it uh but yeah just long enough to kind of
4:44:21
experience the problem and say like this is insane I have to fix it right yeah um and so yeah I think at at YC I've seen folks that have had zero industry experience in something that they're were launching and then some folks that
4:44:33
have had years many years so I guess it really just depends um but there's no I guess there's no simple answer to that question no simple answer I don't think Drew hon had a whole lot of experience in storage when he got frustrated
4:44:46
because he'd left his talk you know back and he was on the the bus to New York you know um so uh here's a stats question what percentage of applications have a female co-founder or how many what percentage of you know I guess the
4:45:03
overall population are women so I'll take this one yeah I obsessive I obsess over the stats um so right now we're seeing about 133% of the founders that apply to YC are women um and so I just want to let that sink in because I want
4:45:20
that to be closer to 50% of the population of people applying um thank you um and then so about 22 23% of the companies have a female founder um and there are very very few companies that apply that are you know female only teams and so I would love to see more of
4:45:38
that as well um what is a myth about starting startups or about YC that you wish you could dispel I cannot answer that question I'm have to write an essay on that one I'll I'll probably take start with that and we all can fill in I think um
4:46:00
especially because I joined YC only a year ago and I remember after um going through all the interview process I'm super excited about having gotten the offer when I was talking to other people and what what are some of the myths that
4:46:12
I think now that I've spent a year I can say so one is I think it's a myth that we don't invest in non-technical Founders we do um I think the other myth um is that we don't invest in Solo Founders I think we encourage having
4:46:25
co-founders for various reasons uh but there is no strict rule that says it's an absolute no and the third thing which actually really surprised me because I had never thought that in my head is that YC has no women so and I when I
4:46:39
went through the TV process I actually met or or doesn't have a women founder founder yes so I think that uh that's uh you know that I never had that doubt especially because I had met all of them through the interview experience and now
4:46:54
that I worked at YC for almost a year I can certainly say with conviction that you know women play a central role in every decision in YC I I think I get frustrated because I feel like women often get written out of a
4:47:08
lot of stories right um I mean this is this is a thing that we've seen time and time again and and um I was just telling someone this morning about this um back when I started at YC uh all these reporters would write about YC and they
4:47:21
would refer to Jessica as like Paul Graham's wife only described as Paul Graham's wife in YC you know that Jessica is a founder of YC right and it's it's such and it was like that she and she like is like half of the operating part of YC and so it would
4:47:37
just frustrate us internally and then yesterday's story came out that referen Jessica's co-founder there was no mention of why for anything and I was like progress like I was just so thrilled that you were given like you're due
4:47:51
there was some article that came out that said Paul Graham Jessica Livingston's husband I almost had a heart attack I don't remember which one it was but I remember oh look at this we laughed um can I say something on the whole my
4:48:05
thing cuz there there are too many for me to even address and some I get very emotional about but when I hear things like people come up and say oh but you don't uh fund solo Founders like it breaks my heart what I'd love for just
4:48:21
people who who would like to give us a chance is to say okay I've read a lot of these articles I think this is the case let me make sure let me just ask if that's true with someone who went through YC and see what their experience
4:48:35
was like so that that's my only request if you do come across a myth that you think is true remember that there's always several sides to a story and not to believe everything you read on Twitter or in the Press you know
4:48:47
actually I just want to say one thing um even after we fund solo female Founders they still don't believe it I was having a dinner with one of our uh female Founders from uh last winter and she said to me why did you guys fund me and
4:49:01
I'm like what a weird question what do you mean why did we fund you she's like well I'm female I don't have a co-founder I was like seriously it was like four weeks into the program and she was still doubting it was depressing a
4:49:11
little bit but um there's a question that this actually nicely dovetails into is that you know YC has funded non-technical Founders and sometimes even non-technical solo Founders what was it about those Founders when they applied and interviewed at YC that
4:49:25
impressed you um and you know I guess convinced everyone um for me it's they have a clear vision of what they want to build and they have a clear road map of how to get there step by step and they understand that today I I need to I
4:49:40
maybe I lack a technical co-founder uh but I know how to hack my way into those next steps um another good indication is uh if you've been a product manager or head of P like a PM somewhere and you've worked with a lot of Engineers and
4:49:55
you've directed an orchestrated um product building before I think that's a really good historical reference to that you can build product without needing a technical co-founder I think it depends on the kind of products as well not not
4:50:07
all products that get built need to have super technical f and as long as you you have like you say the language to be able to understand what takes a long time what doesn't to be able to talk to Engineers to be able to to set out the
4:50:20
product then then that's that's what's needed and you don't not all founders have to be deeply deeply Technical and I lastly I'll just wrap this up there is no one type of founder we fund that we never say never about anything there are
4:50:34
just so many different things we do so I wouldn't want anyone to think why see never funds blank because that's not true okay uh does YC fund and work with later stage companies um I will you want me to kick that over to you yeah sure um
4:50:51
so yes yes we do so the YC continuity fund that was launched two years ago uh our primary goal is to really help support uh the companies in the growth state so we do invest uh in companies in the later stage uh what we're really at
4:51:07
that stage what we're really looking for is has the company sort of figured out its product Market fit and um you know they're really raising money for scale and many of the activities that we help uh in that stage is really with company
4:51:20
building right because the early stage program does a fantastic job of really uh helping you figure out how to get product Market fit and you know really you're just starting in the initial phase of the company which is you know 1 to 10 employees or 20 but when you get to 30 people and you're scaling now to 100 or 200 or even 500 people the problems are different your job as a c o changes so we help uh along with a lot of elements in that
4:51:45
face I think it's also it coming back to the idea of myths that people make up their own myths about why combinator that bear no resemblance to anything and so they convince themselves that I'm too early for why combinator or I'm too late
4:51:57
for why combinator and again there's there's no there's no too early and there's no too late we fund companies at all all stages and so people put them people make the our decisions for us by not applying let let us make that
4:52:14
decision okay next question is what advice do you have for a mom who wants to start a company you want some of the moms prepared to have another baby cuz that's what startups are like that's my that's what I always think when I'm
4:52:27
talking to Founders I think God this sounds like having a another kid because they take that much work so that's I that's the way I would think about it like it's like having more kids I actually asked Diane green this at our first female Founders conference when
4:52:43
she came to spoke I took was behind backstage with her and I said how did you do this CU I at this point had two My Two children one was just a baby and I was struggling a little bit it's a lot lot of work to juggle everything and I
4:52:56
said how did you run VMware and you know have kids while you were doing all that and she gave me some good advice um which was she really made an effort to Outsource a lot of things that didn't have to do with specifically her
4:53:10
children so she had a gardener and she had someone who came in to clean her house and did all these things cuz she didn't couldn't do everything so Outsource the stuff that can be done by someone else you know I used instacart
4:53:23
all the time religiously um like got anything that could be delivered I had delivered save me a drive to the grocery store a drive wherever and so I always I always appreciated that advice because it seems reasonable but I hadn't really
4:53:36
implemented it yeah I would say you know if you're really really passionate about something do it it doesn't matter the timing is never right there is no perfect time to start something um you know three years ago I met uh Nicole
4:53:51
sharat farb uh she started a company and I actually met her because she was pitching her startup to us at that time and I had just delivered a baby at that time and I thought my life was crazy and so I kept I finished the pitch meeting
4:54:05
and I told her Nicole my kid is really sick is it okay if I get back to you in two days and she understood and she never mentioned anything I later got to know that she had just delivered twins two days after my kid and I was like wow
4:54:18
what was I thinking right so I just think that you know there are a lot of uh women who I have seen quite a few I mean it's not in Mass numbers but who at least in recent years have seen it doesn't there's no right time and you
4:54:32
cannot wait for the perfect time so if you are really committed and you know that is the thing you want to work go do it there's actually really good example backstage the two uh The Proven Founders so we just accepted this batch and um
4:54:47
when they interviewed us I had no clue but they were both pregnant um and so they're hbling backstage hustling and like talking to people and trying to um get users for their product but they're like pregnant but they're doing it so um
4:54:59
if you're passionate about you can how far apart are their due dates I think one month like both that will probably be hectic one thing they said they're going to share babysitter are going to share everything so we'll see um so next
4:55:14
question is if you're working on a side project um at what point would you feel comfortable going full-time on it when should you bail out of your job or think about taking time off school I think uh I think there's two
4:55:28
pieces to that one is you feel like it's um you're ready to go all in obviously and it's like getting some traction that's a good sign two is I mean financial concern so if you if you're if you have low personal burn I mean this is why really young people
4:55:42
start startups probably more than maybe older folks but um if you're in a financially good place to take off for a year that's probably a good place to start and I'd say try to focus fulltime as soon as you can if it's okay with you
4:55:58
financially um try to do it sooner than later we always say like you got to burn the boat before you can really um make the kind of progress you can but then again I'm I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth cuz a lot of times I say
4:56:11
don't quit your job if you're thinking of starting a startup work on something on the side and see how it goes but the point is once it starts getting a little traction the sooner you can focus full-time the better obviously it is for
4:56:22
that company and I really liked um what Morgan had said she was well she was working out into it she'd started you know the the first version of blavity and then re there was like that moment where you know she'd started to build
4:56:34
you know an audience but also was so passionate it just like pulled her out um I thought that was pretty cool it's also one of the reasons why YC exists cuz you can if you're ready come apply get in you can quit your job it's a forcing
4:56:48
function um so here's a question about Investors so um this person says I'm told much of the small talk that investors do um is really a disguised way of identifying distractions so specifically when investors ask about your kids or your social life um are is
4:57:05
that just a way that you know they're trying to identify red flags um so and what's the best way to handle those questions or handle this like casual seeming chitchat you have a good answer for this okay um I can I can take it I mean it's
4:57:20
not just I think the question is actually broader than investor um I actually started my career as an engineer and went to the east coast and then came back to Silicon Valley so I've gotten this question many times meaning
4:57:32
when I was married they wanted to know if I was on mommy track um I had a baby 10 years later and um you know when was pregnant it was like am I going to quit um and now that I have a child sometimes you know there are there are questions
4:57:46
that aren't how much time I can give but to be like honest like if you pick the right uh work setting you don't run into that right so but how do you handle these questions one if these questions are with an intention of they're trying
4:58:00
to find distractions it's a red flag like you may not want to work with that person because they truly don't understand where you come from and how committed you are to doing what you're doing um so in those cases like if you
4:58:11
know someone asked me about Staffing on a project and whether I was going to be pregnant I would just and if I felt that it was an uncomfortable question because they're trying to figure it out I just asked you know openly like why is it a
4:58:22
concern and you know and often when you put people on the spot they sometimes give it to you Asis and you know one of these managers had told me well I'm a little concerned because this project is really intense so I just want to be sure
4:58:35
and I I just respond I knew the situation so I just said look I won't be standing up for this if I didn't know I could do it and that was enough to you know shut the you know shut the problem aside and move on so I think it depends
4:58:48
on the situation some of them I do think maybe they're just asking just to get to know you and that's sort of their way to break the eyes you have to tease apart what what why the question came but if you sense that they're doing this
4:59:00
because they want to figure out if that's your destruction just ask them openly and that has always worked for me and you know more often after a few years there was a joke within our FR nobody would ever ask me that question
4:59:11
so that's another way to do that there's a there's a flip side to this which is that I think we have heard um from some Founders that married co-founders that they didn't disclose to investors that they were married and then it kind of
4:59:26
went on for too long and then they didn't actually know when to disclose it without it being super awkward so that's something to navigate as well I don't know what the exact right answer is there but that can come up so it's
4:59:36
probably best to sort of be upfront about some of this stuff kind of depends but you don't want to hide the ball on this stuff because it can get awkward later yeah I was I mean I think what uh Laura was saying in her talk about transparency and being really
4:59:49
transparent with investors is important because that's you know she was saying that she hopes like that you know she expects the same from them like they'll be honest with her and so uh I think probably it's best to bring up sooner
5:00:00
than later and if they don't you know invest in married couples then like forget them if you right um but we I most of the investors I've talked to are not concerned by that they just want to know um right I guess so um so we only have a
5:00:17
couple minutes left so um one question is who are your mentors and uh what is is there anything I guess really quick that they've taught you that's stuck with you I'll go first I I um I think that I H I don't have a specific Mentor um that
5:00:34
I can point to and I that it kind of makes me laugh this question because when I was at um the law firm where I worked before why combinator I was in a women's group and we endlessly debated the whole topic of mentorship because
5:00:46
there's this whole debate like should it be organic or should you connect people we just all we did was talk about it um but I didn't actually have a specific Mentor but I realized like I learned a lot of stuff from every single one of my
5:00:57
colleagues I continue to learn from my colleagues at YC and one of my biggest takeaways that I've learned from my colleagues is customer service and that applies in the legal world as well as everywhere else always give good
5:01:08
customer service always put your client customer whatever it is first yeah it's it's it's kind of hard I guess in when doing what we're doing which is such an unusual thing that a lot of you know you you kind of pick pieces of information up
5:01:27
from lots of different people and it's all pieces of a jigsaw that you piece together but definitely the people that we work with is I'm the same way I pick up different things from different people and I just have this Patchwork
5:01:38
quilt of like fabulous lessons that I've learned from people and I'm when when the dinners are going on at YC and there's a a Founder telling their story I am listening just as intently as all the founders in the group I mean I
5:01:50
learned so much from the people that come through the doors of YC and my colleagues um when I was starting my startup there were when I first came to cicon Valley there were some people that were influential um and helped me along
5:02:03
the way um so my former boss at first startup Max Len he helped me a lot um and he he in fact funded part of my startup um then Paul Graham of course uh um but I would say in terms of running my startup and um like someone to talk to on a
5:02:21
weekly or even monthly basis I didn't have that person and I wish I did and I wish I had um seek that person out I guess um and I think it's helpful to have someone who's not your investor um who you're not related to who's not your
5:02:32
friend per se like a personal friend who you can talk to about these things and bounce ideas off of is do you have any tips for uh folks looking for those people finding those people um so I didn't find one so debate debate debate
5:02:48
how do you find the person it's tough because you do want it to be organic right to some extent um but I think for me the the some of the most important like recurring people in my life have been um Advocates so like not just
5:03:00
mentors but people have always advocated for me I think um I used to work with a Lexis oan and the founder of Reddit he's always been uh like a cheerleader like a supporter um you know I uh but I think I would say the same thing I um pick up a
5:03:13
lot from everyone I work with especially you guys and then also the the founders that come in I'm constantly learning and then I also uh as their companies grow I also learn um as as you know they kind of share their experience with me so um
5:03:28
I I guess we are out of time and so I hope you've learned as much as we have learned today um listening to the founders here and thank you for coming ladies I'm excited to see all of you apply um and I want to ask you guys um
5:03:43
just one more quick favor we want to bring all the ladies who work at YC up on stage can you come up and we want to take a photo with you so we we're going to have a photographer come out and then if you guys don't mind being in the
5:03:57
background of our photo we'd love to take a photo with all of us Co we'll turn around this way uh but yes I also want to just like a round of applause for all the women that work at YC which is not even all of them yeah okay
5:04:22
cool sounds good okay this will be brief and how about a round of of Applause for Dom yeah Dominique she's okay get up here ladies facing this yes we're facing this way first and then everyone is going to be in everyone turns around let's do it
5:04:45
quickly CU people are probably get out of here okay all right and if everyone wants to if you want to like should they come this way back okay okay we're losing patience we're losing patience okay so so you're gonna we're gonna face this way and do you want
5:05:21
everyone to like crowd around if they can stage yeah right get up on the stage ladies we'll just uh what's up how you [Music] doing this is not sure this is the greatest idea it'll be fine yeah e e [Music] e [Music] [Music]