Elli Sharef at Female Founders Conference 2014

Awesome! Hi everyone! I'm Kat Metallic, YCS Director of Outreach. I'm so super thrilled to see you all here. The next speaker that we have is Le Chef. Le is the founder of Higher Art, a tool that makes finding a job and recruiting employees less painful. When we asked Shelley about the most important lesson she learned from Higher Art so far, she talked about her first day at Y Combinator when she realized that done is better than perfect. Le was part of the Winter 2012 batch.

Here's Ali.

Hi everyone! It's so great to be here, and it's almost otherworldly because the last time I stood on this stage was probably the three most terrifying minutes of my life. It was just as we had finished our Y Combinator three-month stint and headed now to present to all these investors who are mostly male sitting here. So it's amazing to be here. I was telling Jessica earlier about one of the funny moments when you realize how different it is when you have to stand in line for the bathroom this time around, which I definitely did not have to last time.

Okay, so when Jessica asked me to come and talk, I thought, wow, this is such an amazing thing to be able to talk to a group of female founders, particularly in such an amazing setting as this event here. But I wanted to get a sense first about who all of you are. So my first question to you is, who here has actually started a company and is a founder today? Raise your hands. Wow, amazing! That's awesome! And who here is thinking about starting a company but hasn't quite done so yet? Okay, awesome, fantastic!

So, I'm going to say a bunch of stuff that is interesting to both of you, and I'll try to address them a little bit separately. I have three pieces of advice I want to give to you all today. The first of them is just do it! And if you've already started, keep doing it! I think Adoro's story is probably the most exemplary of how long it can take for you to achieve success. But the first step in starting that success story is actually putting your foot down and starting.

I decided I wanted to do a startup when I was in college, but it took me until I was 27 to actually get started. For a long time, I had jobs, and I thought, hey, I can't just quit my job and get started. The reality is that there's never a good moment to do it. There's never going to be a moment when you feel, oh, all the stars are aligned, I have a perfect idea, and I have a perfect co-founder, and I have a lot of money sitting in my bank account, and I have all this time to devote to this, and I don't need health care anymore, so I'm going to go do this.

For me, my story was one of luck. I wanted to start a company, and I was able to connect with Nick Saidlet, who is my co-founder. We had been friends in college but had sort of lost touch. A friend reintroduced us and said, "Hey, you guys are both interested in startups, why don't you talk?" I just simply remember the first time we talked on the phone. He was living in New York, and I was living here in San Francisco. We talked for five hours on the phone just about startups and ideas we had and thoughts with that thought. Actually, the company we started was the idea we talked about that very first time!

Luck is part of it, but part of it is also just saying, hey, I'm going to step in there. Nick called me one day out of the blue and said, "Hey, Ali, I quit my job at Goldman Sachs." And I thought, oh my goodness, we're actually doing this! Because I had not quit my job yet, but I did the next day. So just get started! For those of you who already have done the first step, keep trying.

It's hard to emphasize how long it can take for your ideas to take hold. Even though our idea at Higher Art has stayed more or less the same, the number of small pivots we've done is amazing. You have to keep smelling, trying to figure out, you know, where is what the customer is saying? Oh, I have to go that way! It always reminds me of playing Carmen Sandiego as a small child and figuring out what's the next clue.

For us at Higher Art, our experience was that we started the site, and two users came, and then we did this other little thing, and five users came. But it took a long time for where we are today. The next thing I think is really important, especially for women founders, is confidence—having a deep-rooted sense of confidence in your abilities and in your company and what you're trying to build.

Now, there are two aspects of confidence. The first is internal confidence—actually believing what you're saying. You guys saw Adoro get up here and say, "We're going to disrupt the cleaning services industry," which is a hundred billion dollar industry or however large it is. And I get up to my investors and I say, "We're a recruiting company, so we're going to disrupt the recruiting services industry."

You have to get to the point where you really believe that, and it's not immediate. If you're starting a company right now and you don't currently truly believe that, that's okay. I've felt that way too, but you have to get yourself to the point where your idea is formed fully enough in your head where you think, you know what? I know exactly what we're trying to do, I have the steps laid out in my head, and if it works out the way I wanted to, we're actually going to be able to do this.

Which leads me to that second point, which is being able to then externalize that to all your stakeholders—investors, hires, friends, your mom. She has to believe in you too! Eventually, you need to be able to say this is what we're trying to do, and this is why. One of the things I notice is that men are great at this. They come out there with so much bravado and just say, "We're going to kick ass, we're going to kill the competition, we're going to take over this industry."

At first, I thought they were just saying this, but they actually believe it! There's a reason why women don't do that. In my opinion, and I'm not stating this from a scientific perspective, I think the reason we don't do it comes from a good place. I think we're a little more humble. I think we're a little more realistic. I think we're practical; we think, "No, why would I be the one who's going to be able to disrupt the recruiting industry?"

I mean, others must have tried. But maybe others haven't tried, and maybe you do have a good idea. Believing, always having that sense of confidence is the only way that you're going to get through the really hard days.

This brings me to my third point, which is around failure and getting up from failure—or what I call getting up from near failure. I think that's actually more common. You know, you hear the stories of somebody who fails, and then they have to get back up again and pull themselves together. But what happens in startups is that you actually always feel like you're really close to failure, but you haven't quite failed yet.

Okay, so my best analogy for this is I was taking a flight to come here from New York. Our startup is based in New York, and I got to JFK Airport with 20 minutes before the flight was supposed to depart. When would that happen to you? Probably most of you have had this experience. You have one of two choices: you can either say, "I've missed the flight, you know what? I'll find a way to get there somehow anyway tomorrow," or you can say, "There's a security line, and I'm going to cross that security line and tell everybody I have to get there, and I'm just going to hustle my way until I make it to the airplane."

There's a small chance that I'll make it, and most likely I won't, but I'm going to try anyway. That's what a startup is like all the time! You're trying to get ahead of that security line. Everybody's mad at you and saying, "Why are you here? Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to get ahead of me?" Sorry, I have to get to Mountain View tomorrow.

Another great story I love about failure is one regarding Meg Whitman, who is the CEO of Hewlett-Packard today and was the CEO of eBay. One of the most amazing tech CEOs in history! She took eBay from 30 people to 15,000 people, which is amazing to me.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Meg at a conference in Singapore that I was also speaking at, but she was there too. I just remember the first time I saw Meg. I walked out of the elevator in Singapore at the Four Seasons Hotel, and I had sort of these Singaporean dumplings in one hand, my coffee in the other, my backpack. I was kind of straddling a long time to get to this conference, and then I saw this woman who was much, much taller than anybody else there.

She had this little army of people walking beside her, trying to just keep up. I immediately recognized this is Meg Whitman! She was so confident, strutting along with all my like accoutrements and marching top-forward.

That brings me to my point about confidence, right? Having that confidence, that presence, is important. But in her talk at that conference in Singapore, Meg told the story of what it was like to fail in the race for governor of California. So Meg ran for governor and she spent 140 million of her own dollars on this race. In her own words, it was one of the most humiliating and devastating experiences of her life.

Can you imagine putting yourself out there in that way after you've accomplished success and then failing? She talks about the next day after she lost. After the results were out, she said she just sat and watched daytime TV for the next month or so. It's probably what I would do too.

One day her husband came home while she was watching Oprah, and he said, "Meg, just maybe you should go do something." What's amazing to me—here's what's amazing to me about the story—not just that she failed and was watching TV, but what she did next was become the CEO of Hewlett-Packard right after that! In her story, she's like, "Well, Hewlett-Packard was really close, so I got in my car, and I already knew those guys, and I just drove over there."

Hewlett-Packard is not an easy company to be CEO of because it's in turnaround mode. There is a great risk that she will fail again, yet despite the fact that she had just had an enormous failure, she went out there and put herself in that position again. I just love that story!

I remember at one point at Higher Art I thought we were going to fail. It was right after Y Combinator. After the comedy, what everybody does is they go out and raise money, and so we did that as well. About three or four weeks out, almost all of our batch mates had raised their round of funding, and we had not raised a single dollar.

I remember talking to all these people, saying, "Oh yes, you know, Andreessen Horowitz just invested in Sequoia, disinvested! All this great things are happening." I thought, oh man, we have not yet raised anything. I remember sitting in my car at one point. I had just gotten the email from Sequoia telling us that they were not going to invest, and I just started crying. I thought, you know we're not gonna raise! I've let down my team! I was the one who was supposed to be fundraising, and this experiment is now over.

Then I got back to the house—we were all living in this house in Mountain View—and I got back to the house and told the guys, "You know, this isn't working." My co-founders at the time said, "No, we're going to do this! We're going to make it happen! You have to get up, and you have to keep pitching! You have to keep doing it!"

You know, I know you've already had 70 meetings, but you're going to have 70 more until we find somebody who's going to give us some money. Lo and behold, we did find somebody who believed in our mission, and it was an awesome set of investors.

But being able to get back up from feeling like you're about to fail is incredibly important, and that goes back to that point I said about having that confidence in your belly. Nothing can stop you if you really believe that what you're doing is going to work. Ultimately, because I want these investors, I’d say, “Why are you not investing? Seriously, this is going to work! I'm telling you!" And I really believe that.

Now, my final thought to you before I leave here is enjoy the ride! If you've already started, you're already doing it! If you're just about to begin, step in and start doing it, and really enjoy it because it's an otherworldly experience. Think that you're here in Mountain View in the center of technology, and you hear a Y Combinator female founders conference, and you're starting your own company, and you're the CEO of something or the co-founder of something, and you're part of this journey.

I remember driving down Sand Hill Road at one point, and it was miserable. I mean, I hate Sand Hill Road! But I was driving down Sand Hill Road, and I'm not even a great driver, but I thought, man, I am driving on Sand Hill Road. Daddy, badass! That's so cool! I am here, and this is like a movie. I mean, I should make a movie out of this!

There was another really out-of-this-world experience I had. I’m originally from Colombia, South America, and I moved to the US for free when I was 17. One of our large customers is Cisco, and they were doing recruiting globally. They were already recruiting with us in about 150 countries, but they emailed me and said, "Hey, we'd like to add another country to the list. We'd like to add Colombia!" Is this really happening? My peers that I went to school with in my country are going to be taking a Higher Art interview on this platform that my co-founders and I have built. That was one of the most amazing moments!

So enjoy the ride as you go through it. Enjoy Sand Hill Road! Enjoy the ups and the downs! Enjoy that you are really living life! You're not just sitting in an office; you're trying to do something! You're trying to accomplish something, and that is worth more than anything else that you can do. Thank you so much, and good luck!

[Applause]