Female Founders Conference 2017

[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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 close and 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 $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 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 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 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 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 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 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 7 even the 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 left and margin the numbers that are circled that was my goal so every single time I hit the goal 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 can't be like writer wrong um so 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 few and far between 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 success thank you so much for sharing that all of 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 and I heard 5 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 diligence who would have thought like that was that was really crazy well anyhow again we were able to we were able to use that situation to like to use that bad situation and turn it into an opportunity to build trust build 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 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 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 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 over 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 org [Laughter] chard yep I that happened it's a real 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 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 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 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 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 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 you go out and socialize people are going to ask you what is your 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 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 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 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 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 expectations about what the perfect founder should look like and what the perfect female founder should 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 again more important than my relationship with my cat is my relationship