Female Founders Conference - Mountain View

Right now that you all know each other, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. Okay, I would like to welcome our first speaker, Phaedra Ellis Lumpkins, who's the founder and CEO of Promise. Now, Promise went through the Winter 2018 batch of YC and is working on a solution to reduce the jail population. Prior to founding Promise, Phaedra ran revenue and operations at Honor, a company that offers in-home care to senior citizens. And before Honor, Phaedra worked with the musician Prince. She's a labor and community organizer by trade who is committed to making measurable change in the world. So welcome, Phaedra!

Hello, can you hear me in the back? Okay, great. First, how exciting is it to be in a room full of phenomenal women who have started companies or are starting companies? I just feel like I want to walk around and just like rub everyone and say, “Oh, it's so exciting!” Just the energy in the air. My name is Phaedra Ellis Lumpkins, and I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Promise, and I'm just incredibly thrilled to be here today.

So I thought I would start out and talk a little bit about myself and why we ended up starting a company. So this is my mom, Gail Lumpkins, and my mom, when I was growing up, was a waitress. We grew up pretty poor. My mom worked at Dave's restaurant in San Francisco; if you've ever had a great burger, you've probably been there. And growing up with a mom who's a waitress, you really rely on tips. There was a very physical feeling—like you know you're broke when you're a kid—as you get older, and I knew things. Like when I went shopping and my mom used food stamps, people treated us differently. I remember the first time I saw people eating meat and sandwiches, and I was like, "Wait, you don't eat cheese and pickle sandwiches?"

It wasn't until I was older that I realized, "Oh, that's because we didn't have meat money," as we called it. I spent a lot of time really understanding what happens, I think, when you're just broke. Then something changed, which is when I was 12 years old, my mom went back to school, and she got her degree and she got a job with the county. You know, you have moments that you remember as a child, and I remember the moment she got the call, and it was like $10 an hour. I remember my mom saying, "What are we gonna do with all that money?" I just knew like our life had shifted.

What became very clear to me is that when you have a little bit more money—as I think about—I went from free lunch to reduced lunch at school, which meant I was in a different line. You just feel differently. People treated us differently. My mom carried herself differently. What I knew was that there was this feeling in what was transformative for me.

So as I grew older, I just said, “I want that for all kids. I want all kids to feel like no shame when they go to the grocery store, not different because they have free lunch or they get free peanut butter." But really, how do we create a feeling for all kids where they get to feel equal and they get to feel proud? So that was really what I set out to do.

I spent the first kind of 15 years of my professional life working in the labor movement, working with janitors on behalf of janitors, Teamsters, teachers, and really trying to understand how did we create opportunity for working families and how did we create dignity in work? Then I started to run a Labor Federation in Silicon Valley, and all of a sudden, the way that people went to work changed. It used to be that people had one employer; they stayed at a company for a long time. But increasingly, work began to be contracted out.

What was most striking to me was that some of those jobs got worse, not better. We would see these covers of like these people who are like a receptionist at Google, and all of a sudden they had a Ferrari on the cover of Newsweek. But in my world, I represented janitors who were working two jobs, living in Stockton, driving in, and cleaning the waste back at space packets of some of these folks. So in fact, technology had not yet transformed the lives of a lot of working people that I knew.

So I was really in this moment. I spent a lot of time doing that, and then I just—all of a sudden—this man, Barack Obama, ran for president. As a woman of color, I was like, “I can't not be in that moment.” So I went to go do some stuff to really think about how this economy grew. How did working people actually get opportunity? While doing that, I met Diana Frapp Pierre.

So Diana is my co-founder. You might think because I've started a company, I'd have some really thoughtful photos. Instead, I have a photo from her 40th birthday because frankly, why not? So this is us in the office. When I met Diana, she was very different than myself, and the reason was I grew up poor; my dad was violent. So I thought all people that committed crimes were horrific, right? You go to jail—good, you are neighborhoods where we had drug dealings—good, go to jail. Then I met Diana, and Diana was a criminal defense lawyer by trade.

We'd be walking down the street in Oakland, and I’d kind of be a little bit like, “Okay.” Then some dude will come running up to us and be like, “Die, die!” And I'd say like, “Who's that?” And she'd be like, “Oh yeah, I represented him; he's a pimp.” And I’d say like, “Oh, okay, but he's a good pimp, Phaedra.” And I’d say, “Oh, okay, cool, cool, Dad, let's just keep going.” And then I would be walking down the street more—hey! And I, “Oh, who's that? Oh, a murder conviction?” He thought, I was like, “Oh, cool, cool, this is great."

We had a lot of things. We would see folks. We once went somewhere, and I saw someone, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that poor woman; she's probably abused.” I had this whole dialogue in my head. But what I learned, really, being with Diana for a decent amount of time is that I had always thought of people as the crimes they committed—not the humans that had become in an experience that led up to that. When I learned with Diana, watching the people that she represented, is that many people had grown up just like me but hadn't had the opportunities that I had had, right?

I've been lucky; I had a mom who looked out for me. I’d done an internship that got me in the labor movement. But there were a lot of folks who didn't have those opportunities. I began to realize that, in fact, foster youth were the population most likely to end up incarcerated. When we looked at these things, in fact, people had had these incredibly challenging lives without a lot of opportunity and ended up in some awful situations.

So Diana and I worked together at Green for All. Then we met through a friend named Van Jones. If you ever watched CNN, you can see him on TV. Shout out to Van! Van then introduced me to the musician Prince. I was pregnant, and so I was like, "I'm on maternity leave." And Van, just like all good friends do, said, “I'm sure you have too much time on your hands while you're pregnant, so come be with Prince.” I go to meet Prince, and I have to say I, as a kid, hadn't been a fan because I'd watched that movie "Purple Rain," and he hit a woman in it. When you watch those movies as a kid, and because my dad was violent, I was like, “I'm just not, you know, like he hit a woman; it's like, you know, not my people.”

And then I met him, and he quickly became my people. The first thing that we did is we worked on getting his masters back. I knew nothing about music, and we got his masters back relatively quickly. The way we got his masters back is because I didn't mind asking questions that everyone else thought were stupid. I started out, and I said, "Okay, well, why can't you have your masters?" "Okay, well, because they own it, and they don't want to give it to him; they already give me cash." "Cool. Okay, well then I asked questions and I learned that there were two sides of folks who owned music—there was one side which the record company owns which is 50%, and there's one side that the publisher or the writer owns. And so I was like, "Wait, we own that?” “Yeah, okay, cool!”

So let's just not let them make any money with it. What we discovered is by just asking people questions, we could just stop—We could say, "You just can't make money off of it." "You just like we're going to stop it 'cause he owns all of the publishing because he has written every song and he owns part of the recordings. We settled in 90 days, and so he'd been in this 30-year battle, and we got his masters back in 90 days. Then I had a baby, and I was like, “Okay, cool, going back to social change.” He was like, “No, no, that's not how this works; you're staying with me!”

I spent the next two years really working with him—with Diana and I working with him—and it was incredibly important because we learned a couple things. One is I've never met a human who sacrificed everything for his belief in truth, for his belief and stewardship of his own resources. He made me bold in a way that no one ever had before because there’s something unique when you know that someone believes you. Like in his world, we created magic, so that meant we were magical. So he was just like—I remember someone said, “Phaedra's so mean; I don't want to come there if she is there.” He was like, “Well then you can’t come here!”

I just had never had that type of commitment and that sense of just justice and just like we were a team. We spent two and a half more years together, and I learned something really important, which is I watched how technology was changing the way that artists of color especially were being paid. What happened is artists used to own their music, and they would make money off radio. But increasingly, what was happening is technology was devaluing the cost of music and what they would actually make. And in essence, it was decreasing because what happened is like Spotify was owned part in part by a record label; that record label then determined what who got paid what.

So what we decided to do is this deal called Tidal, and Tidal was really about artists owning their own music. But what I learned most importantly is technology wasn't working out great for the folks in the labor movement and for working people; it wasn't working out great for artists of color. So I became really interested in how do you make technology work well for working people and people who own their own stuff. I just love seeing him.

I went to work at a company called Honor, and the reason I went was because I couldn't afford business school; let me be clear. It's funny, it's like if you are in technology, it's the first place I hear people talk about where people went to college when they're adults. I never heard that before. When I get in tech, people were like, “Oh, HP, Stanford Business School. Yeah, that person went here.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh! Like aren’t we 30 or 40 years old? Got it, check, okay?" Clearly, this world works different than any place I've been in before.

I have a girlfriend who's at Apple, and we were like, “I think,” talking about like college football, and she's like, “No, that's how they talk about themselves.” “Oh God, that's how they talk about themselves." "Okay, cool." Okay, check. CSUN; that's right, Cal State Northridge—probably they don’t know. So I went to work at Honor, and Honor was a company funded by Marc Andreessen. He put 15 of the $20 million in for seed funding. I went in to run operations, and it was funny because when I went there, people were like, “Oh, she’s a labor organizer; I'm sure she's just gonna organize all the workers and screw your company.”

I think the team had faith, and I started there; we started running operations in an amazing technology company. I love, love them too—just amazing—and then I noticed the sales team wasn't producing quickly enough. So I was like, “Look, let's just go do sales.” So we started to do sales. Then the operations team was generating more sales than the sales team, and so I then became the head of sales and operations. So I ran revenue and operations at Honor. This is us setting up a store at Walmart in Texas here in the South. We were in Sam's Club going to East Bay, but this is it.

What I learned at Honor was really important. First, I learned as a woman of color I did not know how to communicate in a way that people who worked at McKinsey and went to Stanford Business School did. More importantly, I learned that I felt like an idiot because of it. I watched a lot of people of color and women and working people be in that environment and just say like, “I was like, okay, I remember one we were talking about churn and I was like, yeah, churn is when people leave.” And they were like, “No, churn is not when people leave; it's when people leave for negative reasons.” And I was like, "Okay, negative reasons."

I think it was one of those experiences where I was like, “I'm so smart in my regular life, but I don't feel like I have the tools and resources, even as a high-performing exec, to communicate in a way that's consistent with my values.” So I was like, “Okay, I want to learn that,” and it was clear to me because we'd have these conversations and we'd be talking about stuff, and I would know— I knew what I knew. The reason I raise that is because as I thought about going to raise money, I knew it was a problem I had to solve for.

The second thing that I learned at Honor was that people who were working in tech were desperate to feel connected and committed to a purpose greater than the technology they were building. I thought originally—when I'd been in the labor movement and when I had been in music, I was like, “Oh, it's these like 18-year-olds who don’t care what they’re doing, who don't care about anything.” Then when I realized there was a lot of really good humans who were trying to make the world better and were just trying to figure out how to do it well.

The last thing I learned is I was as smart as anyone who built a company and that I had only thought before about working somewhere because I'd never grown up in a world where people said start a company. I grew up in a world where people said, "Don't leave the job with benefits," right? Like when I left my first job that was a union job, my mom and my grandmother were like, “Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen to you. Will they take you back? Do you like them?” I don't know when I left Prince. My mom was like, “Oh my gosh! Like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. You're going to work for some random company that started two years ago. What is this?”

So I thought it was really, really important, and then Prince died. And when Prince died, I was his power of attorney and the officer First Corporations because when people love you, they don't let you go. Something really shifted in me when he died. I spent some time in Minneapolis where he lived, and there were things that really struck me. One is I knew I couldn't go back to just making money again, right? Like when you lose someone you love deeply, it impacts you. I knew that I wanted to feel good in a way that I didn't feel naturally because I just felt sad.

So I was like, “I gotta figure out how to do right in the world again.” The second thing that happened, which was incredibly empowering, was people got mad at me. Like random people who didn't know me were like, “Oh, you got fired by Prince; something must have happened.” And I was like, “Of course I didn't get fired; I'd never been fired in my life.” But being in a very public environment, having reporters come to Honor made me realize that I kind of always had not been my fullest self, right? As soon as people start attacking me, who didn't know me, who were random people, I felt like I had to defend myself.

Even though I knew that I had done well. It just made me realize that I was like, “I'm going to be fiercer than I've ever been before. I'm going to build a company because if these dudes can do it, I for sure can.” I'm also, I love the folks in Honor, of course, but it just made me realize I could do it.

Okay, so this is my daughter, and this is Diana's daughter. This is Grace and justice. And part of what I think is important is as women, we have to build companies differently—not pretend to be men. It doesn't mean if your behavior is whatever; it should be what it is. But like we want to create a sustainable company that actually creates the opportunity for women to use their best selves. So when I do that, I bring my kids with me. And so this is Grace and justice, and Diana and I had spent the last probably ten years killing ourselves, right?

We have that mentality where it's like if you don't answer the phone at 3:00 a.m., you're not down enough, brown enough, cool enough. You're not good, right? And like you would be like, “Oh, they're not cool, right? Oh, they're going on vacation? Losers, losers; what, they have sustainable relationships? Losers, losers, right? What, they're not a hundred pounds overweight? Losers, losers." Right? We were like, “Okay.” So part of what shifted is we said, “Can we build a company that actually meets us where we are?”

We think about it as an adult company, right? Because part of what being in technology taught me is I was like, “These people look like they're 17 years old.” And I was like, “Can we build a company and not be like seventeen?” And we just decided we would try.

Okay, so this is our company, it's called Promise. I'm proud to say we are YC graduates. I just saw Gustav, who's our partner in the back. Hey, Gustav, yay for Gustav! So Promise really was Diana's turn. As I think about it, like Diana had spent ten years with me. I'd been like, “We're at Green Frog; we're going to work for Prince; we're going to work at Honor.” So it was kind of her turn.

So really, the premise of Promise was how did we really work on the issues that Diana had always known were right, and so that was really about criminal justice reform. Here's what I learned: seventy-four percent of people in jail are awaiting trial. That means most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime—the crime that they were arrested for—and to me this was shocking, right? Because when I drove by jails, I imagined it was people who had been convicted of crimes. I didn't know that it was people who just got arrested. And not just arrested, but people who were arrested and couldn't afford to get out.

We are working in the Midwest right now in a state that I will not name, where eighty-five to ninety percent of those folks, most of who have bails under $500. What that told us is, “Wow, governments are spending a lot of money keeping people in jail who just got arrested and didn't do anything incredibly wrong.” Two-thirds of those folks are nonviolent offenders—mostly women—with technical violations. They missed a meeting; they didn't pay something. These are folks we're keeping in jail until they get them to get out.

So that felt fundamentally wrong. What's unique, too, is that counties mostly pay for jails, and so they see the consequences. So if, for example, if you're a woman who has a kid, first you lose your job. Three days is a thing that is awful about being in jails; it's cut first, you lose your job, then after you lose your job, you lose your housing because you can't pay rent. Then after you lose housing, you potentially lose your children or at least temporarily.

What was interesting in counties is they could walk you through how it happened. So what we knew is that the system we were building was basically imprisoning poor people and people of color and keeping them in jail because they couldn't afford to get out for mostly crimes that weren't significant—mostly people who paid five hundred dollars and walked out. It's important to know five hundred dollars because a DUI can cost five thousand dollars to fifty thousand if you have something in the car. So five hundred does not mean you've done something significant.

So this was the problem we set to solve. Basically, if you sit in jail, it sucks, and it sucks because you're most likely gonna lose many basic things that you hold true. And what we also learned is the longer you sit, the more likely you are to take a stupid deal. So part of what I learned is I thought, okay, so let's say I got arrested. Let's say I was in my car with my friend who did something stupid, but I didn't do anything; I didn't know about it. I can't afford bail. Four days in, I keep waiting, and I keep fighting.

Six days in, someone comes to me and says, “You can get out. You don't have to serve any time in jail. You'll just be on probation.” Then I take sure I'm getting now; it doesn't cost me anything. Then I get a ticket on probation, and I go back to jail. These are the things I think that just for most people—at least like me, besides, of course, brilliant Diana, we didn't know there was also this incredible moment happening in time, which is first there had been litigation in San Francisco called Humphrey, which basically said bail should go away. The second thing that happened in California is that legislation happened with Prop 47 SB 10 just passed here in California, which actually gets rid of bail—which for us was incredible news.

So you have an incredible moment; you have a big problem to solve; you have a lot of money being spent. What do you do? You start a company! So we started a company, and I just want to say to anyone that applies to YC, we thought we would never get in. I came in my minivan, and I like drove up. Diana came in these flower jeans with Birkenstocks, and we looked around, and they were like, “I swear, I swear there was like no one under 22 beside two other women,” and these people were like, "I’m freezing brains. I’m build a product that can tell you what to do at night."

And we were like, “Okay, cool.” Then this guy sat next to us; he’s like, “Let me see your prototype,” and we were like, “So we have an idea.” And he’s like, “Okay, who's going to build it?” “Yeah, we don't have a technical co-founder.” “How much have you raised?” “We don't have any money.” And he’s like, “Look, this is—I literally said to Diana that’s cool.” She’s like, “We’re already here.” I was like, “Let’s go home.” And we stayed. Then that night, we got no call, and so the way YC works is you’re supposed to get a call if you get in, but we got no call.

So then Diana died together, and I’m like, “I told you so embarrassing.” Then I like email in the morning, and I’m like, “So we didn’t get a call; we’d at least like the feedback,” you know, kind of, “ish,” in my mind. And then they email back, and they’re like, “Uh, is this your phone number? We tried to call you multiple times.” And I was like, “Oh, apparently I forgot there’s a one at the end.”

Then Michael calls me; he's like, “I've been trying to call you.” I’m like, “Great to hear; this is so surprising; this is wonderful!” So we got into YC, and I say that because we got in without a tech co-founder, we didn’t have a prototype, we didn’t have money. We fundamentally, though, understood the industry that we were going into. I think enough folks, especially women, don’t feel like, “I just have an idea; I deserve to be in that space,” and we deserved to be there.

That’s what we learned being there. But I would just say, like, it doesn’t hurt; and don’t make sure your phone numbers right! Okay, so then we raised money. And we didn't just raise money; we raised a lot of money. This is the seed round, and the part that was so exciting is we raised it before even demo day. Oh, we were like, we raised it! I will say a few things that I wish I would have known. One is I took money from brands that I thought validated me, which I don't think you have to do.

I thought, okay, I literally said, “Who’s the hottest VC?” And they were like, “First round.” I was like, “Okay, let’s get that money.” And then, okay, cool, we’re not about that. If we get, when we will; it’s working again. Okay, so then we got money from Kapor Capital, who’s amazing, and I highly recommend because they had values that were consistent with ours, 8 VC, and Rock Nation because what's a girlfriend in music to do without a little Jay-Z, right?

So Jay—and what I would say is we raised this money. It would have known raising money first. What that investors needed us more than we needed them, honey. Before, wait—wait, wait, they’re giving me directions: “Hold! I’m going to speak like that.” “My hand—oh, hello!” Does that help? It doesn’t help, but at least I got feedback; that’s always good. I’m going to keep going, ‘cause I don’t take up too much time!

So here’s what I would say: brands don’t matter as much as you think investors need you more than you need them. You need a good deck, and there's a lot of people who will give you feedback, and most decks are online. You can find you're welcome to talk to us. We raised, and I thought we needed a lot to raise, and I actually think it’s easier to raise without something than it is with something. I would say the greatest value of YC for us was helping us focus on growth, which we otherwise wouldn’t focused, and giving us timelines to get money by.

Okay, long-term, we’re building a company, and what we want to be able to do is bring evidence-based decision-making to criminal justice, meaning that right now we make decisions based on emotions in a punitive system that’s really one of the most unsuccessful systems in the world. But people who actually make decisions based on data actually don’t have these punitive systems.

So our hope is that as we continue to build, that's what we'll do and that also that data analytics can actually focus on equity because right now you don’t correct for equity, so you do things like "How many police interactions have you had?" Well, I can tell you where you’re most likely to get into arrested and who’s most likely to get arrested. You need to correct for those types of biases. The last thing I’ll say before I—and is that I didn’t know what machine learning was or React or Java before I started a company, and I don’t think you have to know those things to start a company. I don’t think you have to know those things to raise a lot of money. You just have to believe you’re worthy of hiring people to do those things with you.

So last, we are building a company that’s capable of a couple of things: one, we want to be ninjas, and the reason I say ninjas is because I think that unless we believe that anything is possible—like you’re looking at a girl who grew up in the projects who now runs a company with actual revenue, which is the best thing that ever happens to you as a company—what people pay you for your ideas.

But we've been able to hire a team, deliver a product. We’re doing a growth round right now because we actually had a lot of customers very quickly. We built a model with one client; we had six clients before we left YC, and those are government so it was pretty significant. But I would just say that our belief is that we can build a company that creates the space for women to be all of who they are—the best of what they are—and build companies that are sustainable, replicable, and also build generational wealth for families who don’t normally have it.

Thank you! [Applause]

And we're going to take some questions for Phaedra, so raise your hand if you have a question, please.

Hi, yes, what is the biggest challenge growing and scaling?

Um, yes, yes! The biggest challenge growing and scaling Promise, one is actually believing we could do it because there are these days where you think the product is not going to work. Sometimes Diana's the—I’m usually Pollyanna; she’s probably not—but I feel like this doesn’t, you know, like it doesn’t work. So you're always a little bit scared, and I think sometimes faking it until you make it.

I realized I needed to go sell this product ‘cause we’ll build it and it will have value. So that was hard, too, is figuring out things like how—what we should charge, because we were trying to figure out like people like, "What’s a model? What does your margin look like?" And we thought we needed these perfect things. Then we just were like, "Let’s just get a Google spreadsheet; let’s just add it all up. It’s gonna be a cash flow analysis with how much we need to make," and that worked.

But I would say really it was just knowing we could do it—‘cause then it happened because people want your product; so it’s just a question of actually selling it. And so, yeah, but that was hard!

Oh! For YC, you work at a startup?

What to engineer? Hold on, this is—I’m cool!

So we hired two engineers from YC who work at a startup. I also want to say to all of you that held up your hands as engineers, we’re always hiring engineers! So should you be interested in our mission, please feel free to connect with me.

Okay, other questions?

Yes, yes! Did we feel pressure to get a technical co-founder?

Yes, 'cause everyone told us to. When we went to meet with people, we didn't meet—we—this one person we liked when they asked for crazy equity, so we didn't not—we had a technical co-founder because we couldn't find one. And then by the time we’d been through it, I was like, "We raised all this money; why am I now gonna add a co-founder when we raised the money? We had the idea and we now have clients!"

So everyone told us—one YC partner who shall remain nameless said, "You need it. Just go find them." And when we did it, and I’m really happy we don’t have one, which I know is the worst advice everyone says. But it’s like we would be getting bossed around by that technical co-founder we wouldn't know how or talking about, so we would just let them lead. But now I understand the technology we've built, and it’s so much better that way.

Yes, I just had a question about selling to government as a early startup.

Yes, how hard was it? What were the challenges?

Really, it's really hard to sell to government, especially quickly. And then as a startup, she asked, “Are you guys heard?” One thing that’s hard is because some governments require that you have to have been in business for two years before they’ll contract with you, so that was difficult. The thing that we found, though, is that relationship-based sales was probably our best idea. So we didn't do outbound sales; we did relationship-based sales.

We still haven't done one cold email to anyone. And so that was the easiest, doing things like having insurance and being able to understand those things were also critically important. Understanding the way the government process works—we thought you had to like do all these RFPs, which are two-to-four year processes, and then we learned there were way different things that people did.

We also looked at companies that were growing very quickly like Palantir, and we were like, “What did they do?” 'Cause we were like, “Oh, we are going to apply for an RFP and that will take two years!” And we learned they were giving product away for free in the beginning. We started to learn what people did to get in quickly, and that was really, really important.

Yes!

Oh, I’m so happy to be here. Thank you! Yay! Where? Oh yes, yes!

Okay, yes! Did you feel different as a woman and person of color, being different, to actually secure funding?

One thing I did, I think, one, I was lucky because I had sold before! So our investors knew me from the last company where I ran revenue. So I think they didn’t have a fear that we wouldn’t build a venture company and that we wouldn’t sell, so that was one advantage.

I think the thing I was also cognizant of is I think YC helps give brand, right? So I had run revenue; I had brand. And then, last is I just was really confident and I didn’t apologize. If people didn’t know my space, I told them they didn’t do it. I had one investor who I met with who was really rude, and I said, “I think you’re wasting my time, and I’m wasting your time, so I’m going to leave.” And what was so crazy is then he wrote me a note that night being like, “Hey, I hope we didn’t get off on the wrong foot!”

So I just realized that there’s actually a lot of investors. The mistake I made, which I would say is now like I want people to understand me before I want to understand them. So as I think about my next round, and then I think also knowing people—like a lot of these intros are like go to female founder office hours—there’s a lot of ways that then the intro is not cold because even though they say they take all these ideas cold, I just don’t, like, it’s so relationship-based.

Sort of, I would just say this, but like if there is someone—I also think there’s incredible networks that you can get connected to. I think female founder office hours and other things. And then there’s incredible investors of color.

The one thing that I found that I didn't anticipate is that duty white guys were most likely to like me, which was not what I thought!

Right? Dominique is telling me to end, and we all love her, so I’ll do whatever she says. Thank you so much! Thank you! Thank you!

Hello, my name is Lador Chung. I'm one of the partners here at Y Combinator. I'm going to—we're gonna do a panel now on essential startup advice. I will introduce the fine panelists soon, so I'm going to be asking them questions, talking about applications of startup advice we often give to YC founders, and then we're going to do some Q&A from the audience afterwards, so please queue that up while we're talking.

Alright, so I’ll start with Christina. So Christina is a CEO and founder of Vanta. Welcome, Christina! And then Tiffany, who's a co-founder of Remix, and then Ashley, who is the founder of GemNote. Thank you!

Alright, please take a seat. Thank you guys so much for coming and sharing your thoughts. So I'm going to start off with the first piece of advice that YC is most known for—there's probably signs around everywhere about this—which is make something people want. So start with Christina. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about your company and how did you know, or why did you know that what you're making is something people wanted.

Sorry, so I work on Vanta. Vanta automates security compliance for other internet businesses. So practically, what that means is people who have internet businesses—and right now for us, that means startups—come to us, and we help them both be more secure, so protect whatever data customers have entrusted them with, and then actually prove that security through compliance certifications.

So things like SOC 2 or PCI or HIPAA or FedRAMP or like that alphabet soup of stuff you may have heard about. A few years ago, some of that was to be sorry.

And also, yes, so that's what Vanta does, and it's about the company’s about a year and a half old. And my co-founder and I really started working in earnest on it last, probably March, April—so March, April of 2017.

We’re both technical, but we basically spent the first six to nine months not coding until we started with interviews. Essentially, we did work in spreadsheets as consultants for three months, and to Adora’s point, too, when we knew we had something that people might want was when we were doing work in spreadsheets. Basically, what we did was we went to friends’ companies and we were like, “Hey, can we security audit you and make you a compliance roadmap?”

And they were like, “Yes! Like, I know I need one of those, and I don't know what you know that is!” And like just come in. We did that for two friends’ companies—like Series B startups in San Francisco. Then we actually started getting emails from people we didn’t know who were basically like, “I was at a party last weekend, and my friend told me you did this thing for this company. Will you come in and do it for my company?”

And it was really striking that because these people probably wanted you to go to better parties if they were talking about compliance at their parties, but because you know these are people who didn’t know us, we’d kind of parlayed our like friends to really basically kind of muck around in the corner of your company for a week, but now people who didn’t know us were coming in and asking like, “Hey, I heard you do a thing. Can you come do the thing for me?”

So that was our moment!

Tiffani?

Okay! So I run a company called Remix. So we work with about 300 cities around the world to help them plan out their transportation future, from public transit to street design to new.

I think the moment when we realized—a little bit unconventional. My three co-founders and I—we were all fellows at a nonprofit called Code for America, and we built a little prototype as citizens of San Francisco to suggest better transit routes for Muni, and it’s like a grassroots side project. And CFA tweeted it, and we were like, “Oh cool, people are like tweeting about this random prototype that we built.”

And the next day, we had gotten written up in maybe ten different publications, “Design your fantasy transit route for your city,” and after that, we got about 200, 250 emails from planners all around the world saying, “Saw your thing online. Can I use it for my 2040 transportation plan in like this random city we had never heard of in Europe?” And that was just kind of the beginning when we realized we had hit upon something.

We actually did not even know exactly what the pain point was that we were solving. So after this whole social media thing happened, we actually started doing user research in earnest. I have an urban planning background but not specifically transportation, and that was when our minds got like completely blown open to the entire world that we now work in today!

I’m Ashley Wong, and I’m the CEO and founder of GemNote. We help businesses connect with people through gift giving, and so we make it very easy for companies to send gifts to customers and employees to help appreciate them.

In the early days, we started off actually as a handwritten card service, and our customers liked us but they did not love us. So we got feedback, and we wondered—one of our first customers was actually Udemy—and they said, “Look, we like the handwriting service, but what we really need help with is this gift giving thing. We are HR managers. We’re sales managers; this is not part of our job description. We are not paid to do this, we are huddling around the conference room, everyone's trying to wrap gifts, some people suck at it, some people are good at it, and then we have to ship it out!”

Right? And so they told us, like, “This is what we want, especially during the holidays.” And so I kind of turned into Mrs. Doubtfire, and I was like, “Help is on the way!” And so that’s sort of how we came to what we do now, which is gift-giving, because our customers told us this is exactly what we need.

Cool! So Paul Graham wrote an essay called “Do Things That Don't Scale.” Another piece of advice we give a lot of founders, and often people interpret that as, you know, founders in the beginning, there's almost crazy things going on, and you're kind of running around with your head cut off doing things. So curious, like, what's that crazy story that you know every founder after a certain period has that crazy story of like something happened you did to make happen? What was that story for you?

Okay, Adorno's just working with us.

But everything in the entire product for like nine months—basically, so high level what kind of the Vanta product does today, what Vanta does today is get some amount of credential information and insight into your infrastructure account or a G Suite account or GitHub and then just checks a bunch of things to make sure you’re doing things reasonably.

When we got out of spreadsheet phase, the first kind of piece of software we built was a way to securely store folks’ credentials. So you know, they authenticate with a service—we have a token; we can go pull information. So we built that piece. We were pulling kind of raw JSON—so just like raw data from G Suite or GitHub—and then we turn around and we’d give people these really pretty, well-formatted security audits and security reports and a bunch of recommendations, and maybe like, “Oh, yeah, you can just put your credentials in, and then we’ll get you a report in like a day later.” And they’re like, “Oh, you know, this is so impressive; it’s so great; you can do so much.”

And really what was happening was people would give us their credentials, we’d pull the information programmatically; I would then look through this like kilobytes of JSON, basically, and write them a report manually using the information that I was like copying and pasting and then send them the report.

We did this for like—I mean, in some level, we’re still doing it for 10% of the product, you know, a year later. But, you know, the first version there's like pretty much everything we've built have been manual. And now we’re upfront with customers when onboarding folks, and our product is still—you know, “Hey, you know, we’re 80, 90% there; there's 10% that's not, but in the early days, I didn’t really tell them, but nothing was automated.

We’re just like, “Oh, we have this automated service. There are times when the internet’s a little slow, so don’t like take your day to get it, but definitely all technology!”

Go next!

So the thing with B2G—and I don’t know how many folks here have been to a trade show—is that for us, and especially for cities, it's really important to meet them where they are. You can’t just like email them because oftentimes, you know, random person emailing them is kind of weird and it's like uncomfortable. So we really at the beginning started to realize that we needed to invest more in the analog and the face-to-face.

So one of the things that we did at the very beginning was I scoured every single trade potential transportation conference and decided whether or not I should go personally. The first one that we decided to go to, we had decided two days before to go to somewhere in Texas I had never been to, and realized unbeknownst to me that when you're a company you’re trying to sell to people at this trade show you need like a booth or like a table or some sort of like president so people know where you were.

I had no idea this was like a thing. So I go and order like two of those banner stands and I like lug them myself to the airport. One of them gets like completely ruined in transit and it’s like broken and ripped. I’m like half sobbing at the airport and I set up a booth which I had decided to share with another startup, which was smart because it was way cheaper to share a booth.

And what was amazing was when we got there, I think our industry is not used to startups generally. They were looking at me like I was like this new random stranger on their scene that they had, you know, everyone else knew each other from years and decades of, you know, being in the industry, and I think the fact that we had a booth even had like kind of a chintzy banner it made us just look like we were trying and trying really hard.

The other amazing thing about having half a booth is that you just can cram more people into less, or you can cram less people into they say you have, so it looks like your booth is more crowded. So we just looked like it was super crowded because everyone wanted to talk to us, but in reality, it was because we had really pulled a lot of random strings to get there.

So that was my story!

Nice! So our first year when we were going through YC, we had closed a deal with Airbnb, and that was thrilling. The first order was about 500 gifts to be sent out the first week, and of course, in front of the client, I’m like, “Yes, absolutely, we can do this! I was super, super confident.”

But then I turn around, and I am like almost in tears sobbing to my YC partners, and I was like, “I don’t know if I can do this; I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I felt like I was drinking water from a fire hydrant.”

So I actually rallied my boyfriend at the time and Kami Aleck’s cousin, who’s here today; she was my first employee, and we ran with it! We fulfilled that first order; subsequently, the next month we fulfilled another order that was two X the volume.

What I realized was that Airbnb thought we were a 50-person company. It was me, it was another girl, and it was my boyfriend on the weekends filling boxes, which is crazy now that I think about it! And now he’s my husband!

And so that was like the true test of love, I feel. But I learned there that the founders are incredibly resilient, and I think what we need to do is have this sort of a mental strength that when challenges that are seemingly impossible come to you, you have to exercise that muscle in your brain where it’s like willpower, and I can get through anything. And so that's sort of a story that I learned, and I kind of bring to the team and just my life and making sure that there's constantly this “I can conquer; I can do it” mentality.

That's an awesome story!

Okay, so next piece of advice is instead of finding a ton of people who kind of like your product, find 10 to 200 customers who really love your product. And also related is growth as a result of great product, not the precursor. So for you guys up here, how did you know people loved your product?

How did you define that? Is there a metric that you used to kind of give you a guiding light of, “Okay, I’ve got people who love me”?

Yes! So we thought about looking at, you know, things like how often do people come back? Or my co-founder and I come from Dropbox, and it gives us a lot of consumer startup metrics—like, you know, how many times in the last seven days did someone come back? But the fact of the matter was, especially during YC, we had like 24 users, basically, and so we were like totally on a first-name basis with all of them and really kind of in constant communication.

So like a Slack channel, or like iMessage. But all of them, basically. So we weren't metric-driven at the time, and the communication and chatter helped. But, honestly—and this is kind of quite embarrassing—the way I think we both knew people loved us was they put up with a website that was like half functional—like basically unusable, like totally deep, like basically plain HTML.

One of our early customers called us the brutalist website; do you think it really speaks to our design chops? And there was this like horribly ugly, like unstyled thing that had a sidebar that, you know, had like 2012 things in it, right, which like anyone would tell you not to do—like don’t just keep throwing things in the sidebar!

And then you do things in sidebar, and then, you know, we didn't really have QA by any sense of, you know, what that word actually means. And so stuff would break, and people would email us! But the amazing thing was our users actually realized stuff broke and then cared enough to email us.

Then you'd get these things where we get these emails, and I’m like, “Feel terrible! So sorry! Like fix now! Like push going out to staging—just a, you know, and they like sent some quip back that was, you know, mostly friendly and a little bit like, “Why am I your QA tester?”

But overall, I think it was a testament to also the, like, “Okay, something in this like ugly, you know, mess of Raj TML people like enough to put up with all this other stuff.”

Tiffany?

So I think this concept of a metric to measure how much your users love you was something that we just had countless conversations at Remix about, especially because there were so many members of our team who came to join Remix because they cared about the social impact and the mission-driven part of it, so any, you know, any whiff of consumer startup metrics was like a little bit off-putting.

But then we started to realize that we could measure actually maybe the successes of our customers in a much clearer way, and we were also on first-name basis with all of them. And so what we ended up doing is we instituted this metric, which we call wins, and we have like a hashtag wins Slack channel.

So every single time a customer at Remix uses Remix to either communicate a new concept, send their plan out to the public, or to make the decision with Remix that has to do with making a policy decision or a future plan that will be implemented later, we counted that as a win.

We actually had our customer success team set goals around wins so we could really measure and figure out whether or not we were trying to achieve the impact that we wanted to achieve—not in like five to ten years’ timeline of infrastructure planning, but in this much shorter timeline that is startup-necessary to understand.

Cool!

Actually, yeah! So GemNote sort of has a Furby to be an enterprise. We sort of have a cult following, and I think it's because humans are naturally very selfish and so these people are getting gifts from their companies, and they’re not having to pay for it, right?

So they want nice things. Then we specialize in premium products rather than cheap tchotchkes like stress balls and bottle openers. And so people are telling their friends to also use us. So imagine an employee at Google got amazing swag; they're gonna tell their friends who work at Slack, and Slack is gonna use this, and then Slack, they have friends at Zendesk, and so Zenda starts to use this as well.

So I think it comes from a point where it’s like intrinsically we want really nice things, and so we want our companies to get us nice things. And how we measure it, I would say is number one LTV—that's really important. A lifetime value of that customer.

Number two, percent of repeat business. And so if that customer is constantly purchasing from us and not going elsewhere, that's a huge metric. And then number three, we also have our customer success team send out surveys to make sure that we have a rating of our Net Promoter Score: “How likely are they to promote us to their colleagues and to their customers?”

And then we also very much care about the qualitative feedback that we get. Like we want our customers to have this feedback loop with us to tell us why we suck, where are we sucking right so that we can get better and what are we doing very well that we can continue doing to make you happy and to make our service work for your company.

Cool!

So, on one side of the spectrum, we have customers that really love you. Maybe on the other side is customers that might be kind of killing your business. And so sometimes, though, advice is you just gotta fire a customer.

So, yes, I'm interested and have you been in that situation before that you think about it and how did you actually execute on getting rid of that customer?

Yeah, so I think for us there’s been two reasons to fire customer. Really think about fire a customer: one is just non-payment, which yes, but let me tell you, this can take so many forms! It can take up so much of your time, and this is more of a B2B thing, right? Especially when you don't have a credit card you can just charge; like that makes non-payment less likely, obviously.

But you know the invoicing and do they pay their invoice and how much do you have to go heckle that? You know? Anyway, there’s that whole world of stuff. And then from us, right, given we're so small—so small and still building out a product—I can regularly talk to folks who are like, “Oh yeah, the thing you’re building is great, but can you blah blah blah as well?”

Okay! And often they’re blah blah blah is totally reasonable and a thing we would like to do in like the next two years, right? So then we kind of have this conversation of, “Oh, you really want, for example, like full-featured mobile device management for all laptops and phones in your organization?” Like we would love to provide that for our customers at Vanta, but with the size of our engineering team, which is below single digits, like it's not on the critical path right now.

And it's not a thing we're working on until it's more of a—it’s kind of like winnowing into sales right now for us. So as I’ve kind of learned with those folks to just be like look, like we would love to do that, but our roadmap looks like this; here’s the thing you want; here’s what we have today. Do you still want to pay for that, you know, pay for what we have?

And I found that to be kind of very helpful, and like, you know, non-zero—you know, of them have walked away and been like “Cool, keep in touch if you have a product update list; put me on it.” But versus, you know, kind of the onboarding them and then being like, “Oh yes, MDM is definitely coming in 2019.” You know? Like that’s just not a good look.

So I guess one of one of the things that happen early on that I sometimes still have nightmares about is one of our very early customers like, you know, first 10 customers was the transit agency up in Vancouver. And we were so excited to bring them onboard because A, they were really cool, and Vancouver is awesome, and they have awesome bike lanes, and they’re just doing the trendiest stuff of any city in terms of urban planning.

And then after we signed them, I was like up there for a sales meeting, like it went really well. I was totally excited about it and really happy with myself. And then I came back and told the product team that we were about to bring on Vancouver, and they were like, “Tiffany, you realize they used the metric system up there.” And I was like, “But that’s just a conversion, right?”

And we were only working with U.S. cities at the time. We had like barely had our census data up and working, and you know, Canadian census is totally different. Basically, we brought them on board because I was really forceful, and they had a terrible experience for six months, and my co-founder still heckles me to this day about this.

We had countless phone conversations about how they really wanted us to do all these things with data that we couldn't do at the time because we were so busy servicing these other customers. And it basically just turned into a show. At the end of the pilot, I mean it still pains me to say it; they turned. And so we were not able to renew Vancouver, our first year.

But I guess what we're gonna say is they’re so interesting because you think conversion is such a simple thing, but it actually has massive impact!

Yeah, just like metric system! But it’s also like time zone changes, translations! Totally! And I’m like a designer; I’m not an engineer! So I was like, “Oh, obviously just like a converse!”

Anyways, fast-forward through like three years later, we ended up turning that around. They ended up signing on board to a very, very much more full-featured professional platform at the time, and they were actually one of our first customers for our second product around street design. So happy to say that we’ll turn that one around.

You’re fully international now, too?

Yeah, kind of pushed us past our backers.

Yeah.

So it’s very difficult for me to do because how do you say no to a paying customer? Like how do you say no to money?

Right?

And I think I’m the type of person who—in terms of customers—I’m definitely a people pleaser, and I think good leaders know when customers are taking advantage of you and when they’re worthwhile. And I think it’s helpful to have a second voice of reason on your team— and for me, that's my co-founder, and she is an absolute stickler for making money for our business.

And you would think that I would be a little bit more obsessed about making money for the company, but I’m not. I’m like obsessed with making the customer happy. And so how we sort of compromise is we ask ourselves like three questions. Number one, do the unit economics even work out? Like, are we making money on this?

Right? Number two, is the point of contact at this company going to be champions for us within their organization? Number two—or, sorry—number three, are they going to have repeat business? Because if they're not going to have repeat business, if you lose money on the first deal, then you’re just never going to get them back, right?

And then I would say number four, and very loosely, is that we have customers who are willing to give us open feedback, right? We are at a point in our company where if a customer is unwilling to get on a call with us to share feedback with us, or if the unit economics don’t work, we’re ready to say now, “We good. You’re gone,” kind of thing.

So make sense? If you don’t make me money, goodbye!

Okay, last question. Before we get to audience questions, so in terms of product development, I'm in the early days, you often need to iterate fast, you need to write code, build, talk to users in a big cycle.

So maybe I’ll start with Tiffany!

Action—on this question is how did you at Remix? You know, GovTech is known for notoriously long sales cycles and getting... you know, I just—I can imagine just getting feedback takes forever also.

So how did you guys, what was your product development like in the early days?

Yes, we were fortunate enough to have quite a few customers sign throughout the course of YC, which helped us raise around fairly easily. But I think what came down to was that the feedback was not based on the sales cycle at all—they were two completely different concepts and they could totally run in parallel in ways that benefited both our sales team and our product team.

So what we would do is we would make sure that we had some sort of touchpoint on a really regular basis, whether it's like visiting our customer in person or having weekly phone calls, and make sure that everything that they had maybe bottled up during the week of using our product would be able to have a space—like a container for it to be aired.

I think the worst question to ask when it comes to user research is like, “Oh, like what did you think?” and then like pause; 'cause they're going to be like, "Well, oh it was good!" because you know they want to please you; they want to have a good relationship with you! So you need to get really deep and be like, “What did you not like about this feature that I'm pointing to on the screen share right now?” And then like leave enough silence so that they’re uncomfortable enough so that they have to say something! And like all these different ways of like digging deep and kind of like assuming that our product like wasn’t good actually helped us give them the space to share the feedback that we need to get to make it better.

Christina?

So during YC, I think I was—my co-founder was building things, and I was partially building things and partially sales support, kind of mostly. And actually the best advice I got for that period in particular, of like trying to do everything at once very quickly, came from a solo founder who was in YC who sort of more sarcastically, I think, said something about how he had to work days—the like 9:00 to 5:00 one where he worked on emails, and then the like 5:00 to 11:00 one where he coded things.

I wasn’t—you know, I was fortunate to have a co-founder, so I didn’t have to be that extreme about it, but kind of looked at the like 9:00 to 5:00 as this is my email work; and you know, if somebody wants to schedule something at 2:00 p.m., like I’m going to have a thing on my calendar at 2:00 p.m. I, at this stage, have no leverage over like people who are being so kind as to talk to me about my nonexistent product, so like boss around their calendars.

So I started keeping kind of two lists; one was like small engineering tasks, which actually often came out of support. So when people were to email or like Slack us something that was confusing, and it was like, “Oh yeah, that’s just stupid copy,” right, it was like stuff like that I could fix in little 20-minute snippets between meetings.

And then the bigger projects, which were in the evenings around the weekends, and so I kind of still something I do today. So that helped!

I actually—one more question I’ll take from the audience first, right here! So the question is what are the—what is the thing that made—oh! What made them attract—okay, what do you think—why do you think YC accepted you?

So really, I asked Adora, but I think it helped that my co-founder and I come from technology, like technology companies and both are engineers. So we’re kind of following their like very classic kind of early YC archetype. I think it also helped that we had non-paying customers who very much liked us and referred to other people to us, and we had something of a product for them that was actually totally manual.

I think we may have told you guys that basically in the like look we were pretty sure we can build the thing; we decided not to build it because we wanted to make sure people wanted it. We think people want it; we think with the backgrounds to go build it.

Could you help us? The short version of our pitch for me, hazard a guess: before we applied, we had read through the YC call for startups, and there was a specific area around government and civic work and then also another area around transportation. We were kind of like the mix of both worlds, so I thought that was maybe one of the reasons why, in terms of the space—the uniqueness of the space.

And then also I had noticed YC hadn’t funded a lot of government-focused companies before, so maybe they took a chance on us for that. I don’t know! You’re gonna have to ask Pat.

Mahalik!

I know! I was a solo, but I went through YC, I was a solo female, non-technical founder, and so like literally all the odds were against me. And I would say, right now, looking back, it was very, very lonely being a solo founder, but I think because of that—and because all odds were against me—I made sure that before I applied to YC I had—and I was my goal, and I always remember this number—but it was 15 customers before I wrote my application.

I worked really, really hard on that. I hustled, and I needed to show growth if I was not technical, if I didn’t have another co-founder. And so I think that probably was quite impressive to them, but yeah, you would have to ask that!

Back there! So my question is focused more towards the early stages. So, you know, everything starts with a thought of maybe having a new product or a new service or something that’s focused towards resolving a problem or anything that exists. So with an idea, there can be a period of maybe stagnation, and then you have a product.

So how would you define that stage or the stages where you, you know, besides the leap of faith? How would you define that transforming transformation or that transition into a product?

So I think the question in a nutshell is it can take a lot of time to get good feedback to get customers—I tell you, there you're actually onto something. So how do you go through the product development cycle and iterate through all that, you know, long periods of no—maybe no good feedback?

Yeah, so I think this is really hard and I think kind of people don’t talk about it enough—I think there’s a lot of like you tell people or when we told people we’re and I’m coming up with an idea for a startup, and people like, “Oh, that’s so exciting! That must be super fun!”

And it is super fun to whiteboard for like a week, and then you start to get really twitchy. I used to do things in the world; now I just talk about who we're for taco trucks and like whether that’d be a good idea. You know, and if you, like, listen to my conversations or like we played this back or we overheard other people saying that—sweet, you know?

Yeah, but I think so much of that process is both, like, I mean kind of being kind to yourself—like yes, we’re gonna have some silly conversations about it for taco trucks—but keep having the conversations and keep learning and figuring out what that means for you guys, you know, your team when you're trying to figure out a startup idea.

For us that meant having lots and lots and lots of conversations with other people. So our first three months, we probably had—I don’t know—did what I was like 100 interviews with different people in and around the security space? It was like security engineers, CTOs, VPN jizz salespeople who sold security, who didn’t sell security, who had to deal with compliance—anyway, just all these people.

In the end, it ended up being this kind of like very crisp, pretty crisp articulation of like why compliance was so misunderstood and how compliance is actually great, right? Best form compliance is how you prove your security to other people, and third parties vetting, you know, companies’ security to make sure they do what they say is like something that's totally useful in any kind of—you would want companies to go through compliance today doesn’t quite, or like the experience of going through compliance today isn’t great.

Especially from an engineering perspective, and so it’s kind of a dirty word. But anyway it took us three months of these conversations to start to center around that idea, and there were totally times we could have stopped earlier where we just again had these weeks where you're like, “What did I do? Like somebody be like ‘Oh, you know, you’re working in a startup must be super intense,’ right? You’re like ‘Yeah, like really intense! Okay? What do you do?’”

Like I talked to like two people this week, and they told me some stuff and I like came up with some ideas and I googled them and I found startups founded in 2014 that do the things I thought of in 2017 and I’m gonna do this next week and like I promise I’m like a really useful human in society! And just kind of to like keep like this part—I think, no one talks about—but you kind of separately keep doing that because eventually, like you will learn things that people in the market don’t know and you will think of something that wasn’t founded in 2014 or even 2018.

And if you stop early, I think you end up stopping at something that you’re more likely to end up stopping at something where either you're not into, you don't actually want to work on, you don’t want to recruit for, which is actually the metric my co-founder and I do. The question was, “Do you want to go recruit other people to work on this thing?”

Like, how do you feel about, you know, impacting other people’s lives for this, literally? Or do you just end up working on something that, like, you know, again, there were three startups founded in 2014 that did it and maybe you can out-execute them, but like they’re probably not doofuses, and they have four years. So not a great thing; cool!

Okay! I have one last question before we get to audience questions. So in terms of product development, I’m in the early days. You often need to iterate fast, you need to write code, build, talk to users in a big cycle. So maybe I’ll start with Tiffany!

Action! On this question is how did you at Remix—GovTech is known for notoriously long sales cycles and getting... you know, I just—I can imagine just getting feedback takes forever also.

So how did you guys, what was your product development like in the early days?

Yes! We were fortunate enough to have quite a few customers sign throughout the course of YC, which helped us raise around fairly easily. But I think what came down to was that the feedback was not based on the sales cycle at all—they were two completely different concepts and they could totally run in parallel in ways that benefited both our sales team and our product team.

So what we would do is we would make sure that we had some sort of touchpoint on a really regular basis, whether it’s like visiting our customer in person or having weekly phone calls and make sure that everything that they had maybe bottled up during the week of using our product would be able to have a space, like a container for it to be aired.

I think the worst question to ask when it comes to user research is like, “Oh, what did you think?” and then like pause; 'cause they’re going to be like, “Well, oh, it was good!” because they want to please you; they want to have a good relationship with you! So you need to get really deep and be like, “What did you not like about this feature that I’m pointing to on the screen share right now?”

And then like leave enough silence so that they’re uncomfortable enough so that they have to say something! All these different ways of digging deep and kind of like assuming that our product like wasn’t good actually helped us give them the space to share the feedback that we need to get to make it better.

Christina?

So during YC, I think I was—my co-founder was building things, and I was partially building things and partially sales support, kind of mostly.

Actually, the best advice I got for that period in particular, of like trying to do everything at once very quickly, came from a solo founder who was in YC who sort of more sarcastically, I think, said something about how he had to work days—the like 9:00 to 5:00 one where he worked on emails, and then the like 5:00 to 11:00 one where he coded things.

I wasn’t—you know, I was fortunate to have a co-founder, so I didn’t have to be that extreme about it, but kind of looked at the like 9:00 to 5:00 as this is my email work, and you know, if somebody wants to schedule something at 2:00 p.m., like I’m going to have a thing on my calendar at 2:00 p.m. I, at this stage, have no leverage over people who are being so kind as to talk to me about my nonexistent product, so like boss around their calendars.

So I started keeping kind of two lists; one was like small engineering tasks, which actually often came out of support. So when people were to email or like slack us something that was confusing, it was like, “Oh yeah, that’s just stupid copy,” right? It was stuff like that I could fix in little 20-minute snippets between meetings, and then the bigger projects, which were in the evenings around the weekends.

So I kind of still something I do today. So that helped!

So I actually—one more question I’ll take from the audience first, right here! So the question is: what are the—what is the thing that made—oh! What made them attract—okay, what do you think—why do you think YC accepted you?

So really, I asked Adora, but I think it helped that my co-founder and I come from technology, like technology companies and both are engineers. So we’re kind of following their like very classic kind of early YC archetype. I think it also helped that we had non-paying customers who very much liked us and referred to other people to us, and we had something of a product for them that was actually totally manual.

I think we may have told you guys that basically in the like look we were pretty sure we can build the thing; we decided not to build it because we wanted to make sure people wanted it. We think people want it; we think with the backgrounds to go build it.

Could you help us? The short version of our pitch for me, hazard a guess: before we applied, we had read through the YC call for startups, and there was a specific area around government and civic work and then also another area around transportation. We were kind of like the mix of both worlds, so I thought that was maybe one of the reasons why, in terms of the space—the uniqueness of the space.

And then also I had noticed YC hadn’t funded a lot of government-focused companies before, so maybe they took a chance on us for that. I don’t know! You’re gonna have to ask Pat.

Mahalik!

I know! I was a solo, but I went through YC—I was a solo female, non-technical founder—and so like literally all the odds were against me. And I would say, right now, looking back, it was very, very lonely being a solo founder, but I think because of that—and because all odds were against me—I made sure that before I applied to YC I had—and I was my goal, and I always remember this number—but it was 15