Selina Tobaccowala at the Female Founders Conference 2016

All right, Cellino. We have so much to talk about, and you know I'm very excited for this because, um, I know you were just introduced as the CTO and president of SurveyMonkey, which is where you’ve been for the past most seven years now—six now, six and a half. Who's counting? Um, but you also just announced that you're doing something new.

Yes, my last day at SurveyMonkey is Wednesday, and I'm teaming backed up with my co-founder from evite, which was nineteen years ago that we started evite, and we're gonna start something again. Great, so very exciting! And so just to start, I want to go back to those early, early days because, as you mentioned, Selina was a co-founder of evite, which is really one of the more enduring brands, I feel like, from, you know, the past 20 years in consumer internet. Everyone knows what evite is; everyone still uses evite. It's pretty amazing.

So, just to the earliest days, you know, when you were growing up, did you always know that you were going to be an engineer or that you were going to found a company? How did this start?

So, as far as the engineering side, that was something I did always know. I mean, I was kind of on computers right from an early age, developing my own programs for kind of to play with. And it was something that was just in my household because my father was also a technologist, is also a technologist. But as far as starting a company, it was really, you know, we were graduating in '98 from Stanford. '97 was when we started the company. But there were lots of companies; there was Yahoo, Excite, some that made it, some that didn't. But you kind of—there was the ethos on the Stanford campus which was, if you were doing computer science, like, you should start a company.

And our first idea was pretty bad. We decided we were gonna do like an object-oriented coding language, and we were, you know, working through a bunch of ideas. Eventually, in about the summer of '98, so we really were at it for over a year, we came up with you, Buddy! Wow! And how did you team up with your co-founder? Do you have any advice? Because obviously, it worked out because it's the same co-founder that you're starting your new thing with.

Yes, so I mean, I knew him quite well. He was my dorm neighbor in my freshman dorm, and we had worked on a project together. But I think the real thing that I've learned from that experience and kind of how we really kind of had the conversation now is really aligning upfront in terms of what are the important things for you to consider with your co-founder.

And that goes right from the start of: Are you trying to build a company? Are you trying to exit? And if you're gonna exit, what is that, you know, amount or that dollar amount that you're willing to do that for? Because trying to make that decision in the heat of the moment is very different than trying to actually think about that upfront. Similarly, is what is the type of values that you actually want to build? So when we got together now and we had the conversation, bringing technology to consumers that can make a difference in their real lives is something that's important to us.

And so, what are those characteristics of a company, of a culture? What are the things that you want to decide on the financial outcome? Like deciding those things upfront with your co-founder as early as possible, which I think is really, really important.

Were there any things that you learned the hard way the first time around that you didn't quite do in the early days that now you’d know to do?

I think that it was how much money we raised. We took 37 million dollars for online invitations; it sounds crazy! I'm sure even Chris, you know. So I think thinking about that now—or, you know, we're looking at saying obviously we have an opportunity to fund it ourselves for a little bit in comparison—but also just thinking about where do we want to raise capital and so forth and kind of having those conversations, right?

Um, and I want to talk about scaling as well because you built evite, and then you really—it was sold to Ticketmaster; you really scaled it. And then all of your work really at SurveyMonkey has seen some incredible overseeing, some incredible scaling.

Um, what kind of advice do you have for that for like the early-stage folks in the room? What can they think about in the longer term?

Sure, so I'll talk a little bit about scaling. I mean, to give a little bit of backstory, at SurveyMonkey when I joined, SurveyMonkey there were about 20 people and we were doing—and I didn't—we're now we're at about 600 people and we're doing about 200 million revenue in about 70 million in EBITDA. So we’ve, you know, really about 6x the revenue side in this last six and a half years.

And so, in terms of scaling, there are some things which you realize, like, you know, especially watching a company and scaling out a company that I wish, both the founders, you know, we had thought of at the beginning of SurveyMonkey and also kind of learned from my experience at Ticketmaster.

And so one thing I would kind of really, really, really advise everybody to do is think about global and international from the beginning because if you have to go back and retrofit your application, retrofit your entire experience, when you think about life, and the average non-U.S. language is 1.3x. How do you think about that upfront when you're sort of divided and designing your engineering stack as well as your user experience design?

Another thing that I've found was really, really important when you're thinking about scaling is how you use that quantitative and qualitative data and how you build that into the culture of the company. And I'll give you an example from evite, but, you know, at the time where you would have sort of everyone's email address listed out for everybody else to see it—which nowadays would have so many privacy issues—but this was, you know, in 1999-2000, and we A/B tested constantly, and we added a little length that said, like, if you want to see your name here, and that just changed the trajectory of how many people were registering and that viral coefficient of getting the invitees to become creators.

And at the time, there was tons of competition; there was literally a site called "invite me to"—time, dance, you name it. And so, you know, kind of building that culture of A/B testing right into both technically into the platform as well as into the company is something that I think is absolutely important, both from the beginning but then also when you're scaling.

Because, you know, now it's SurveyMonkey, we have a, you know, a mantra that you should always be testing, and the amount of, you know, improvement we've been able to make, whether it's in conversion rate, engagement rates is just enormous over the past six years.

I want to go back really quickly because you mentioned, you know, really building for international from the very beginning; that sounds really hard to do or like such a massive problem. I mean, there are so many countries in the world; there are. There's so many different things. Is there an easy—a couple of easy steps that you would give specifically?

Sure, so again, I don't think you necessarily need to think about, you know, right away as, “Let's support the 16 languages, let's support the 28 different currencies,” but I think, you know, if you're an e-commerce site or taking people's money just right from the start, knowing that I am gonna have to support different currencies when you're thinking about language and design, again, you know, the English is much shorter, so how do you think about it flexible when you think about mobile? You know, obviously, iOS is much larger in the U.S. market, but when you think about globally, over 75% of the mobile devices are Android, and there's a very different ecosystem on Android than iOS.

So I think it's just right away starting to make sure that when you're building, you're building for kind of the global market, especially when you think about, you know, now even in the large countries—I mean, the large companies, over 80% of their user base is international.

And I also want to talk about boards because you've obviously been a part of companies, and you're also on the board of directors of several companies.

I'm on the board of directors of Redfin, right? And a couple of advisory boards, right?

Right, and a couple of advisory boards. How do you think about—what would your advice be to founders who are assembling their own advisory boards or boards of directors?

So I think assembling a board, people often do it too late. And then the only people that they'll have on their board will be the venture capitalists. And the difficulty with that is, I mean, ultimately the venture capitalists, they're there to give you money, but if they've gained control, they can also obviously fire you. So thinking about how do you actually is a makeup of that board so you're both getting the best input and advice on your startup but also somebody that you can have as a mentor for you.

And so finding that independent board member right from fairly early on is generally extremely, extremely helpful. And if you're looking for strong women, there's also the board list to check out, which you can—there's started—that has great women leaders to also add to your board.

But just in general, whether it's thinking about your advisory board or you're thinking about your board of directors, like, making sure that makeup is extremely is varied but also how is bringing you that level of mentorship and experience—super, super important.

How would you advise people, besides looking at things like the board list and coming to events like this? I mean, how would you advise especially female founders to find a great mentor?

I mean, I think in general it is like—it is things like coming to events like this, looking on the board list. You can get executive recruiters to help you, but it is important that that person doesn’t necessarily just come from your investor. Like it is important that that person is coming from some network ideally that you've made. I mean, and you want to make sure you're spending enough time with that person to have them—so that they can give you that straight opinion of what's actually going on.

Okay, and to change gears a little bit here too—there are so many things to cover. I want to talk about leading a technical team because the CTO of SurveyMonkey, you've done a phenomenal, phenomenal job in this regard. What advice would you have to founders?

So, you know, I’m still an engineer at heart, and I would say that, you know, the most important thing I feel with engineers is everybody wants to understand why they're building what they're building. And when your team is small, you know, you get your quarterly team together, you have your weekly scrums, and everybody's covering what they're doing, and everybody's really excited. And you, as a leader, as a CEO, as a president, you can communicate to everybody of every single thing that they're working on so every person knows how what they're doing is impacting the company.

As that starts to grow and that starts to scale, that becomes harder. I remember two years ago, I walked up to this one engineer, and I said to her, I said, "Oh, it's so awesome you got this feature out the door; it's gonna have such a great business impact." And she looked at me and she's like, "Thank you, but why?" And my, you know, heart sort of dropped in my stomach. I thought, "Okay, we've kind of lost the communication down to the engineer of why they're building and the impact that they can have."

And if you think about engineers—again, I'm a little biased here—but I generally believe they're going to be the most innovative people you have in your organization. So empowering engineers with the business metrics is very, very important.

So, you know, at SurveyMonkey we embed a business analyst on every single team, and they read out kind of the weekly metrics that's happening. We try when people—when something launches—to do, you know, a seven-day or 28-day readout of this was the impact, and you know, that’s something that I think is really, really important for engineers. It's like if you want engineers to love your product and be there because they believe in the mission of your company, making sure they understand the impact of what they're doing is super important.

And going back to when you joined SurveyMonkey, how did that decision come about? I know there's a bit of an interesting story here—this is a pivotal time in your life—and how did you decide, you know, "I'm not gonna go and start something else myself; I'm gonna join this other thing"? So tell a little bit of the story.

I was at Ticketmaster in Europe; I was responsible for leading the European product engineering and the consumer marketing for Ticketmaster. And we were—we had—it was a fantastic experience. I'd been there for four years, we started in six markets, and we kind of got up to ten, and I'd done a bunch of technical and business diligence and did a bunch of acquisitions, and it was a really fantastic experience.

But I got to the point where I was missing the valley; I was missing the innovation in San Francisco, missing this startup and small company culture. And I was also traveling about sixty percent of the time, and I wanted to get started with a family. I knew that wasn't sustainable.

So I came and I looked at a bunch of different opportunities—from a really small company to SurveyMonkey; you know, something kind of similar to it. And it really comes down to me, when I'm choosing something, three different things. And I tell this to anybody that’s—whether it's like why I made the decision to start something what I did back then—but it comes down to people, product, and what you're gonna learn.

So the number one important thing is who are the people that you are going to work with—whether you're joining or your organization, or whether you're starting an organization. I had the good fortune of our CEO was a gentleman named Dave Goldberg, who unfortunately passed away about eleven months ago. But he was just one of the most phenomenal, inspirational leaders that one could ever imagine, and so that was, you know, really fantastic.

Second was the product. Like, for me, whether it was evite—like getting people together to go have fun—or Ticketmaster, where, you know, whatever you might say about the brand, in the end, you're trying to get people to really, really fairly go see a show that they love or help them go see a show and inform them about it through marketing channels of a long-running show. And you think about that, and it's like the end experience of going to see, like, U2 in Croke Park—I mean, it's fantastic.

And with SurveyMonkey, for me, it was about helping people use data to make great decisions and that was listening to your constituents, listening to your customers. I mean, I talked a little bit previously about quantitative data, but the importance of understanding the why from your customers or from your employees, whether they're satisfied or not satisfied, and taking that qualitative data into account is massively important.

I mean, when I was talking about running an engineering organization, I mean, I survey the team every quarter to find out what are the things that they have that they enjoy the most and one of the things that they want us to fix the most.

So for me, it's that product; it's having that passion around what you're doing, and you're all gonna be founders or founders, and so of course you're gonna have passion around what you're doing. But the third piece of it is what you're learning, and every year I literally write down and deliberately write down what I want to get and what I want to learn out of that year. I think that it's really, really important to do, and then there's going to be a point where you look at it and say, I'm not learning as quickly as I want to.

And then the fourth component, as I said, was where you are in your life. So when I—the day before I went to go interview at SurveyMonkey, I had flown here, I noticed something was—I had passed a certain date, and I, you know, found out I was pregnant the day before I interviewed. And I still went through the interview and flew. I was on my way home, and on my way home, Dave sent me sort of like, we want you in an offer.

And I wrote him back a three-part email, both negotiating for equity, telling him I need more time, and third, that I had early signs of pregnancy. And he wrote back to me almost immediately about how his goal was to build SurveyMonkey into a company and a culture where family was valued. And he said, "We'll work out the rest of it." And that, to me, again goes back to the first principle of like the people you're gonna work with.

But at that point, I said this is where I want to be; this is the company I want to work for! Wow, that's incredible! And you mentioned briefly Dave Goldberg's passing, and I was curious if now, you know, 11 months out, if there are any lessons or advice that you could share. You know, that was a pretty major impact on a company. Talk about an unexpected dramatic thing. I mean, have you had the time to think back about anything you've learned?

I think that, you know, one of the main things I learned was just how important that leader was. I mean, we’ve gone through a few leaders since then, and just when you think about the importance of that culture of the company, the executive team really pulled together and was able to, hopefully, you know, get the whole entire employee base through a really big grieving time.

And, you know, with the philosophy in terms of hiring was always, first and foremost, make sure that you had people who believed in the mission of the company, and then secondly, make sure that you had people who were often giving them a great opportunity in their career. We believed kind of in the philosophy as much as possible of promoting from within as much as possible.

Of giving people sort of the biggest job they've ever had. And, of course, there's those times you need to balance it by bringing in very specific talent, whether that's a creative director or whether that is a specific engineering mobile engineering, whatever. But in general, it was promote from within and get people that really sort of understood the culture of the company. And I think that really helped us get through a very, very difficult time.

Yeah, and what you're doing now—you're starting something new. I imagine you went through those four questions again. You know, why now? Why start a company now? There's a lot of people in here; everyone in here is making a similar decision as you right now, starting a company. What's so exciting about right now?

So, there's a few things—like one of the facts is that, you know, both my co-founder from evite and I kind of had—it was really just a good time—but it didn't come back a little bit to, you know, what I was learning. And I realized I've gained so much knowledge since, you know, we sold fifteen years ago and that doing a startup now would just be able to bring that knowledge to bear and drive it forward.

The other thing is I do think it's actually good that the capital markets have tightened a little bit because it means that the startups that are gonna make it, the startups that are gonna get funding actually are good ideas. I mean, there was just an influx of capital over the past couple of years.

So if you're debating whether doing it, I mean, I think the thing that you can hopefully be reassured is if you are able to raise that capital, more likely than not, it's been more vetted than I think it was a few years ago.

Okay, and I know you don't want to talk about ideas or it's still very, very early stage, but what advice do you have for people? I mean, when you went through those early stages of evite, of coming up with an idea that wasn't really—there's something so opposite from what evite came to. What's your process like when you're vetting different ideas?

And I can tell you what I mean. We are, as I said, I don't really believe in the concept of stealth. I kind of—I strongly believe in the idea that you should tell, you know, shout off the rooftops when you have your idea and talk to as many customers, as many investors, as many people as possible. Because if you truly believe somebody's gonna steal your idea and it's that easy, I mean, it's all about execution. Like the way that you execute your idea and the way that you build out that product, and if you have that vision, that's what matters.

So, it's not that I'm not standing up here and telling you my idea because I'm keeping it secret; it's because we still don’t have one yet. I’m still working at SurveyMonkey till Wednesday, and we sort of get our co-working space in a week. But, kind of our process in the process that we even went through at evite was as much as possible was that prototype and learn.

You know, obviously, at evite, we were right out of school, so we didn’t really have as much, you know, financial needs. So it was much easier just to say, "Hey, you know, let's try and just iterate on a bunch of different ideas; let’s get a lot of consumers and let's put it in front of a lot of customers." But as quickly as you can, tend to getting that product-market fit and getting as many customers in front of it is the right way to validate an idea.

And, you know, investors, they're very open to talking to you to see is the market size big enough because, like, you need to understand both, is the market size big enough that you're going after and then are you actually solving a problem for consumers? And the only way you can understand those two things is by talking to a load of consumers or businesses, obviously, if it's more of a business idea, and then talking to a load of people who understand that market.

And so we were just, you know, out there talking to a bunch of people about a variety of ideas. And how do you think about culture as well? Now you have a chance again, you know, 19 years later to start something from the ground up. What's important to you when it comes to the culture?

So, again, I think that one of the things we did extremely well and we've done extremely well at SurveyMonkey is build that culture. I mean, the fact that that was kind of one of Dave’s big important things, and I learned a lot from him from that. And it comes down to every detail: what is your compensation plan like? Are you gonna have a compensation plan that is performance-based or market-based?

Are you saying that, you know, we’re gonna put in a—I mean, if you have a market-based compensation, what it does is you're saying we have a collaborative culture; we're either all gonna make it or we're not going to make it. And you have that view, which is like, hey, everybody's paid equally. And yeah, you can use equity to kind of do your best performers, but that changes your culture.

If you think about, you know, what is your vacation policy? Is it that, you know, use what you need and it's like a very much trust-oriented policy or not? So if you think about right from what are the benefits you're offering. You know, are you doing sort of the fancy free lunch every day? It was like, well, what happens if that's what—what happens when you have to cut that back if you, you know, kind of aren't funding—if you aren't getting the funding you need? So from all of those little decisions to what are the type of people you hire.

I heard someone else when I was watching back there say, you know, kind of the role of hiring. No—and again, I think everybody now says that—but what does that actually mean? Like, what are the interview questions that you're asking? So, like, one of the important questions that I tend to ask—and this worked for us—is behavioral interviewing.

If you were in this situation, how would you actually handle it? If you were in a situation where you see somebody who has done something that doesn't have—that has treated somebody else poorly, what is your reaction? What is your responsibility to them? What is your responsibility to the person who actually saw do something that you thought was rude?

I mean, so trying as much as possible to put—to ask people behavioral questions when you're interviewing, you learn a little bit about how do you actually ensure you don't hire those. And how do you think about building—you mentioned that Dave Goldberg talked about building a family-friendly company at SurveyMonkey, and I’d imagine that's important for you now.

Yes, well, like, what does that mean specifically? How do you go about building a startup that's gonna grow quickly, a company that's gonna scale, but can also be family-friendly?

So again, I think that, you know, having that trust environment where you have key goals—key goals for every quarter, like, it is important to say this is what we're gonna get done over a quarter or this is what we're gonna get done in the next two weeks or the next month. Like, it is important to set out goals and milestones, but then it's a matter of trusting employees to get it done and how they need to get it done and leading by example.

Dave left every single day at five to six, and I took the 5:43 train home almost every single day. I jump back online at 8:39, and I worked almost midnight every night. But it let me be that two hours every single night with my kids. And so as long as, like, you're getting your work done and you're sending those milestones and you're communicating to everybody what their goals are, there's zero reason why you can't offer flexibility to employees to take the time they need with their family.

Do you have any other advice for people who are building a family? I mean, I don't want to dwell too much on that because obviously you're a businesswoman, but it seems like it's a big part of the balance and a part of your career story.

Yeah, I mean, I have—I think for it’s figuring out which one of those things are important to you. Like, for one of my friends, it's really important to her that she drops her kids off at school. For me, you know, I like having that time with them in the evening. And I—eating together as a family isn't as important because feeding a three-year-old is not super fun.

And so, like, I want him to be fed by the—I get home, but then we play for an hour and a half, you know? And so, it's figuring out what are the things that are important to you and what is that thing that you're unwilling to give on and just making sure that that's clear both for you as well as for, you know, the people on your team.

Yeah, and thinking back to when you started the business of evite, I guess you were how old? 21 or 22? Somewhere around this. If there was sort of one piece of advice that you could tell yourself then, going back now, what would it be when it comes to starting a company and having a long career in the business?

Yeah, so again, I think that the main thing is really thinking about that evite for us was how you're funding your company and how you are losing control of that as you take investment and what that actually means. Because, you know, we didn't need to take 37 million dollars, but at the time, you know, the board and everybody—it's not just our board, but everybody was saying, like how fast can you spend it, put a billboard on 101? And, you know, we definitely should have focused more on how are we driving revenue and we didn't necessarily need to take that much.

So just going back to basic business principles, and always making sure that no matter what advice somebody's got coming to you, have positive gross margin and that your business is working—like, to me, I think that's the most important lesson.

Do you have a rule of thumb for how much is too much if you're a company and, like, you know, at a certain stage, and someone wants to give you all this money? Shouldn't you just take it? How did you know?

But I think you can take it; it's a question of how you spend it, right?

Yeah, yeah, and it depends if you lose control.

Right. Great! Well, Selina, thank you so much! And we're so excited to see what you do!

No, thank you! Thanks, everybody!