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 back 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.
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.
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 Evite. 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 store 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 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, what is the type of values that you actually want to build? So, when we got together now and had the conversation, bringing technology to consumers that can make a difference in their real lives is something that's important to us.
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 for online invitations; like, it sounds crazy, I’m sure even Chris knows. 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?
And I want to talk about scaling as well because you built Evite, and then you really—when it was sold to Ticketmaster—you really scaled it. And then all of your work really at SurveyMonkey...