Urska Srsen

Next up, we have Kka Sersen, who is the co-founder of Bella Beat. Bella Beat helps pregnant women have a healthy pregnancy using the Quantified Self Technologies, and Bella Beat has recently been recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative products of the year, thanks in part to Eska's amazing branding strategy.

Now, Ura offers a different perspective to the stereotypical Silicon Valley founder. She attended the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, and by the age of 22, had exhibited her work throughout the world. So, welcome! [Applause]

Eska: "Um, hello, my name is Ura Kasin, and I'm the co-founder of Bella Beat. Bella Beat is a company developing systems for self-tracking during pregnancy in order to help expectant mothers lead a healthier lifestyle during pregnancy. So, Bella Beat as a product is a device and an app that allows future moms to listen to their baby's heartbeat and share the experience with their loved ones. So, in other words, we're bringing the Quantified Self movement to pregnancy. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm very happy that I've gotten the opportunity to share our story with you.

Um, Sandra and I started the company in 2012, a year and a half ago, somewhere between Slovenia and Croatia because that's where we're from. Writing this pitch was actually a really hard thing to do, as you often hear, and also PG said that having a startup is like being repeatedly punched in your face. So, writing this speech was basically reflecting upon the beating that we have already received then, and that we know won't stop for a very long time still.

It was actually also Sandro that was supposed to write a speech for me because I'm the head designer, head of product. As we're going into prototyping of our new products next week, I literally didn't have a second to think about anything else other than just that. Sandro, on the contrary, as the CEO, could afford a little bit more time, but anyways, even as he is the main, the bigger visionary behind our company and a bit more experienced founder, the only thing he could come up with was just 'good luck.'

So, I'll just try to describe how we started. We are still a pretty early-stage startup. As I said, we started a year and a half ago. Right now, we are a team of 20 people. We are present in the European, American, and Australian markets and have sold our devices in thousands. But still, that's still pretty early stage, and I'll just try to describe from the beginning of how we started and how we managed to survive through this year and a half.

My background is a bit, sorry, how did I get myself into this? I've always thought that I am the most unlikely person to start a tech company. I dropped out of med school to study fine art sculpture. Yes, my parents are very proud about it because I thought that you can only work on something that you really love and care about. That's the only way you can reach your full potential, and I thought that everything else is just a waste of mine and everybody else's time.

So, when I got myself into med school, I kind of let myself down because that was one of those decisions that you easily make when things are expected of you. Anyhow, I never repeated any of the conformist mistakes again, and I was well on my way to becoming a sculptor. In my work, I was really obsessed with imprinting my body strength upon physical material, and I wanted to transfer my thoughts and emotions into other people's minds. As it happened, I liked doing that with a chainsaw. Yes, I did this intro just so that I can show this picture, but I also wanted to talk about my background a bit, because I think it does reflect upon my work as a founder today. It has taught me a few things, and that is that working as a founder or as an artist is very personal.

That's why it can get very emotionally stressful, and also you can find yourself very alone in it. It's also very hard to let other people see your work and evaluate it because often they're just going to shred it to pieces, and you have to crawl back to your garage and do it all over again and again or try to fix it until you succeed. Even though there's no general recipe for success because startups are such an unpredictable mixture of material, people, execution, and momentum, it's really hard to predict the outcome. But the prospect of this really amazing outcome that we see over and over again is something that really drives founders.

The other thing that really drives founders to start their own company is working on their own ideas, so trying to realize something they've come up with, or fix something, build something from their own need. We haven't really started Bella Beat from our own need. We started Bella Beat because Sandro, my founder, wanted to find a way of how to get me back from Finland and work with him. So, he thought that the best way to do that was just to get my whole family involved, because my mom's an OBGYN. When he heard that she's head of the parentology department in a university clinical center in Yana, Slovenia, he started to sniff around like, 'What can we do there?'

He figured that care providers at this institution have been talking about a remote patient monitoring system for a really long time, as they wanted to better the care for the patients while reducing the cost of public health care. But as this is public health care, they didn't really have any initiative or resources to build something real. So, Sandro thought, 'We'll just build a professional remote patient monitoring system and save the world, like fix the problem.'

I'll just make this really long story short of how he managed to convince me to drop off my aspiring career as an artist and go buy a computer. Yes, I didn't have a computer before. I learned how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, start working on user interface design, and I'll also cut the part when we had no idea what we were doing—like completely no idea. We were mostly just getting on my mom's nerves with stupid questions and impossible solutions.

But anyways, we kind of managed to get to a working prototype. We managed to build something that could someday become a remote patient monitoring system, and there we sat with this prototype and thought if we're building such an important system that's fixing such a big problem, why aren't people just calling us? And then we realized that we were doing everything completely wrong.

We were building something from a professional care provider perspective, so technically it was perfect, but it was also very complicated and almost impossible to implement. The other problem that we had were the patients. They didn't feel motivated to start using something like that. They didn't feel they were engaged enough in prenatal care to trust something like that. They also felt that prenatal care was lacking an emotional and social aspect.

So, we thought, all right, we can fix this problem by approaching it from another perspective. So, we scaled it all down, turned it around, and started to build it, again from the bottom up. So, we scaled down to a consumer product that would slowly start introducing patients to self-tracking during pregnancy through an easy-to-understand emotional experience, allowing them to include other people also in their prenatal care and their experience of pregnancy.

Then we found ourselves before an even greater challenge, like basically in deep trouble. We were building hardware, and we were entering one of the most competitive markets right now—the wearables market. We have learned a couple of things about wearables already, and that is that we're still pretty early on with them, and that's why it's very hard to predict what the real future for them is.

But having built something such as a remote patient monitoring system and then scaling it down to a consumer product, we kind of came to a thought: maybe wearables are just that, they are consumer products that are paving the way for digitalization in professional healthcare. The only thing that has to happen is that these devices start providing reliable data, and they become so seamlessly integrated into a user's wear and lifestyle and habits that they become a part of our everyday life and start transforming the way we take care of our health.

We also think that pregnancy might be the best entry point for that, as well as preventive care can start minimizing the risks of complications that are becoming more frequent due to the consequences of our modern lifestyle, such as obesity and sedentary lifestyle and stress.

Well, I am very enthusiastic about wearables and changing healthcare and how it can transform our lifestyle, but I also wanted to touch a little about the other side of building a startup—more exactly, how it feels to be a European founder and then transferring to the States, or more likely how to be a young European founder.

There is a conception that it's very hard for people to build tech companies in Europe, and that it's also very hard to build startups in the States as a European founder, and it's both very true. Unfortunately, I think that Europe still hasn't fully grasped the potential of technology and the way startups are built today. Starting our company from the Uncharted part of Europe practically in a business sense, we realized that Europe is a very tough market to crack.

It's very fragmented, it's very stiff, and having a shady passport and educational background does not help you get to talk to the right people. Connections do matter, and getting to the right people needs a lot of resource-scheming. But the other thing that happens in Europe is that having been brought up in a place where it's virtually really hard to get any resources, you learn how to build stuff from basically scratch.

You don't need a lot of things, so you become very resourceful. But then we thought, if we could only bridge over to the States, things will become so much easier. So, as it happened, this is the point that the biggest luck factor in our history happened, and it was while we applied for the Pioneers Festival competition in late 2013.

That was also the point where we were kind of running out of money. We did have a product on the market, and we were gaining traction, but to cover all the things that come with it, we needed to hire more people, and we didn't have any money. We didn't have any knowledge of marketing or PR, so we had this great product that we really believed in, but we didn't know how to get the word out.

That's why we applied for the Pioneers competition, which is one of the biggest startup challenges in Europe. As it happened, we were there pitching. I was in the finals—the only girl pitching against, you know, guys building stuff with NASA. Not that you don't believe in your product or your team; we really believed in it. But still, those moments are times when you start thinking that everybody's building amazing products, and there are so many people that are starting startups today.

How can I compete with them? How can I even be competitive? And you know, those are just the things that when the moments when you have to just suck it up and do your thing. And we did. As a matter of fact, we didn't only win the competition, this is also when we met one of the coolest guys that we ever met, and that's Michael Seil.

He invited us to apply for Y Combinator. So, I won the competition and came down from the stage, and Michael was like, 'Have you ever considered applying for Y Combinator?' And I had no idea what he was talking about. Later on, I went to Sarah and I was like, 'There was this guy, and he asked me do we want to go to Y Combinator?' And Sarah was like, 'Dude, this is one of the biggest accelerators for startups.'

So, he obviously knows a lot more about startups than I do, but anyway, so luckily we did apply, and we did get accepted, and we moved to the States in a matter of two weeks after meeting Michael. Then, all of a sudden, we were part of this much more open discourse on technology and this accepting environment. Like everybody's building amazing companies and everybody's succeeding.

There's so much money to give, but then I thought, well, at least everything is not going to be that hard now. Well, I was completely wrong. Like, all of a sudden, you find yourself competing on the market with people who are native in just about everything you're not native in. Like, you can't literally even answer an email right, and imagine doing customer service to pregnant women when your English is a bit sketchy—it's a complete distress factor.

But anyways, we kind of tried to compete on the market, and the market is very—it's much more homogenous. And okay, I'll just stop that, it's too painful. Anyway, we started to compete on the market, and we were gaining traction. We were gaining a lot of interest from distributors as well and investors, and we just stuck to the recipe that YC partners like to give: that any problem is best overcome with working more.

By the time we moved to YC, we were living together as a team for five months already—like living together, eating together, not showering, but still everything together. So, we never really scaled down on the work part. They also advise people to exercise; we kind of cheated on that. But still, we stuck to the work hard, talk to customers, write your code, and it kind of did the magic.

By the time we were pitching at YC demo day, we had already sold more than 8,000 devices, so we had really good traction. We managed to expand to the US market, and like I said before, we were getting a lot of interest from investors. So, everything after demo day led to closing a seed round in just a matter of two weeks.

We were kind of like—we didn't get very many no's, like we weren't rejected very much. At the time, we were kind of a bit freaked out because we always listen to these stories of, you know, this amazing founders being through all this rejection before they made it, and we were just there, you know, like receiving this funding.

Then we reflected a bit on our history that led up to that moment, and we actually realized that we did receive a lot of rejection. It's just that we got—we were very used to it, and we kind of forgot by that time. You see, when you're starting a company somewhere where it's very hard to get any support, you just learn how to take rejection, and you learn how to do things from how to build things from nothing.

We basically built our prototype—a working prototype—with less than 5,000. And that also makes you very strong as a founder and as a person. So, kind of like in conclusion, I would like to say that the things that we've learned through our journey that led up to this day is that what really kept us surviving is a really strong team.

We always stuck together; we always pulled it through somehow. Really good execution, we have a good product that customers like, and we're making it better every day by talking to them and finding ways of how we can impress them more. And then also, like I said before, Europe is a very good place to breed resilient and resourceful founders. Thank you very much.