Kathryn Minshew at Startup School NY 2014

• Next you're gonna hear from Kathryn Minshew. Kathryn is the CEO and founder of The Muse. So, The Muse is a job discovery tool that's helping one million people a month find the career, find careers at awesome companies. So, Kathryn has heard me say this before but one of my favorite fun facts about her is that when she was a kid, she wanted to be Zorro when she grew up. But you know she, she's not Zorro today, but she didn't do too shabbily. Before she started The Muse, Kathryn worked with the Clinton Health Initiative focusing on vaccine access in Africa. And before that, she was in McKinsey and Company. So, I'm really happy to have her here today. Welcome, Kathryn. [applause]

• Hi, everyone. I'm very, very excited to be here with you a little bit today. Um, as she said, I'm Kathryn Minshew. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called The Muse. Um, and we help people figure out essentially what do they want to do with their lives and how do they get there. So, career advice, free classes, job opportunities, and behind the scene profiles into what it’s actually like to work at places like Facebook, Uber, Gucci...

But, what I wanna talk to you all about today is a perception issue that I think exists in this startup world. And that's very easy to look at companies two or three years down the line, sometimes companies that are quite a bit further than that. See everything they built... This is Facebook's profile of The Muse; you can see, you know, all of the different photo-videos, a lot of design we spent time on.

And it's easy to look at things like that and say, "Wow, you know, people must have these brilliant ideas that sort of hit them like a flash of lightning, and then instantly they start creating." It's much, much easier to show the successful growth than to talk about what often comes before, which, as I said, is a lot of failure. So, I'm a veteran of two companies; The Muse is my second startup, and I don't often talk about the first because it looked like this. Um, and in case you can't see it, that's nearly flat growth at around 3000 users a month over eight or nine months. So, it was repetitive and consistent failure.

And I think consistently when you look at startups, it's much easier to pretend that you're crushing it all the time than to show the work in progress. But make no mistakes, most startups are a work in progress. In fact, I like to say the word evolution from suck to suck-less.

So, I wanna take you through the early kind of suck of The Muse and walk you through some of the lessons we learned, a couple of "Oh God! Why did we do that mistake," and a few things that hopefully would be helpful for you all as you go around starting businesses or building companies.

So, The Muse's origin story starts with me as a three-year-old wanting to be a firefighter, and as Kat said I also desperately wanted to be Zorro, not realizing that that was perhaps not a viable career path. But my grandfather was a firefighter, and I had a pretty clear idea of what it meant to do that. And then as I got older, I thought to myself, well, for a while I wanted to be a CIA agent or an international woman of mystery.

For a long time as well, I thought that, you know, maybe I would be a Broadway actress, and so actually, it's quite fun to be back here on this sort of stage. Um, but when I started my first job, which was a management consulting job at McKinsey, I knew that that wasn't it. That wasn't what I wanted to be doing in two, three, four, five years, and so I set out to figure out, well, what do I want to be doing with my life.

I asked friends and family; a lot of them are in relatively traditional careers: banking, law, I didn't want to do those. And then I went to job boards, which is where a lot of people end up. And, oh geez, this is what I got. These are the sort of things I was seeing on a daily basis, including one search on Monster, I think it was for business strategy jobs, that told me I should be an assistant manager at a 7/11 in Secaucus, New Jersey. I was like, thank you very much.

Um, I took some career quizzes; one of them said I should be a merchant mariner, I think because I like to travel and I enjoy the outdoors. But ultimately, there was really nothing that gave me any sense of what it actually meant to do different jobs. And at the same time, I met my co-founders; one of them, Alex, is here today, and we started talking about some of these issues around the fact that the way people think about their career has changed so much.

People are no longer kind of looking for transactional "I show up at nine, I leave at five, you give me a paycheck". They're much more concerned with questions like, well, "What is the culture of the company?" "What will I do when I get there?" Um, "How will I play a part in the company's growth?" And you can't get that through a lot of platforms.

And I wish I could say that the kind of idea for The Muse hit us like a bolt of lightning or like Athena springing fully-formed out of the head of Zeus. But in reality, it was much, much more slow. In fact, this is our first website that we launched on September 6, 2011. And, honestly, it's kind of a piece of crap.

And we thought it was great at the time, and given that we were basically subsisting on ramen and hopes and dreams, it was I think a very good effort. In fact, we attracted 20,000 people in the first month, 26,000 in the second month, 70,000 people in the third. So clearly, we hit some sort of a chord, even though obviously, there was a lot to be desired.

We started out with career content because when you create a marketplace, where you have buyers and sellers, in this case, candidates and companies who want to hire them, it's a lot easier if you can get one side of the marketplace started first. And so we thought, well, if we don't wanna have a whole bunch of jobs on there first, if we can't get companies to work with us, what's one way to solve that problem? Career content.

We also started testing the appetite for jobs, and a lot of things I think is funny is the very first company that we ever worked with was Uber, when they had maybe 50 employees. They were active in two cities, and they were trying to launch Chicago. Um, and we did a little test with them, and it was really interesting because what it proved was, people said, you know, "This is a little bit hard to use," "The design's pretty ugly," but they got to see a bit more inside what it was actually like to work at Uber before they applied, and it was a pretty big success on both sides.

So then we really set about building word of mouth. Um, we, you know, we have this platform... Our original concept was actually geared at professional women, and so we thought to ourselves, alright, what are the ways to get users with no money? With absolutely no, we had no reputations, we had no connections.

Um, the four things we found to be super effective: one was just asking for word of mouth. Um, so when we launched The Muse, I scraped my Gmail for everyone that I emailed with over the past three years. I took out things like donotreply@paypal, I took out things that were clearly, you know, someone that was either a bot or that I hadn't communicated with.

And for everyone else, I sent a really nice short email that said "I wanna let you know we're launching The Muse." I had a one-line description. I said if you wanna share on social, here is a tweet, so people could literally copy-paste a post because if you ask people to tweet, you don't tell them what to tweet, a lot of people won't bother.

And I sent it to so many people that Google actually shut down my account because they thought I was a spammer. And that happens, FYI, at about 1200 emails in one day. Um, so I don't actually recommend doing that, but we asked a lot of people to help us.

Um, we also reached out to like-minded groups. So, since we were doing a woman's career site, I reached out to probably six, seven hundred groups individually. Small professional organizations, you know, massive industry groups, and I said this is what I'm doing and I'd love your feedback.

So if you just ask people to share, often it's, it's almost like you're asking for something from them instead of saying I would love your opinion, and we did get a lot of great opinions, and obviously, a lot of people shared it.

And then content can become your best friend. Again, when we were trying to get an audience and get awareness around what it was we were doing, one of the most effective things for us was creating great content on career issues. Because if I posted a site right now and I said I'm looking for people who want jobs in New York and San Francisco, that’d be a relatively small percentage of people in this room or in the general population.

But if I say, I have a really great article on how to be more effective at answering email or how to master the informational interview, there's a much wider population of people that that draws. And it was one of the reasons, I think, that as we grew we were able to create our own PR and our own buzz.

Um, and then, despite the fact that we were growing, we entered the fundraising trough of sorrow. So this is the fall of 2011, and we had this kind of baby site off the ground. We were seeing about 70,000 people a month coming in our first, you know, our third month alive, and yet we were kind of running into the same issues over and over and over again.

In fact, I pitched a hundred and forty-eight people, oh, sorry, a hundred and fifty people in New York City... I like to joke that I've pitched every single investor in New York City at least once. Um, I've pitched a hundred and fifty of them, and a hundred and forty-eight said no, and two said maybe, come back to us; I like what you're doing.

And it was interesting, I mean, content was very, very unsexy in 2011, so I think there's a lot of ways that the themes of the investment market can affect how people are interested in what you're doing. Job search was also not particularly sexy, and we were also running up against some really interesting long-held stereotypes.

So since at the time we were targeting professional women, I had a lot of people say to me like, "Well, aren't those women gonna lose interest in your site once they turn 30 and have babies?" I was like, "No, it doesn't actually work that way anymore but thank you for your input."

Um, we had a lot of really interesting feedback; I also had, you know, yeah, people said things like, "Well, I'm sure women from New York really care about their careers but once you get outside of that, you know..." Um, so we had to also do a little bit of, of kind of telling a lot of the investors we were speaking to that we weren't building necessarily a product for people like them.

We're building a product for someone who's 27 years old, living in Chicago or St. Louis or Boston who wants to do something different than what they're doing right now but doesn't necessarily have their personal network to get there. And what was interesting is the first people who gave us a 100% definitive yes was Y Combinator.

Um, so this is us on the day we interviewed... We were absolutely fucking terrified. Um, we were also a little bit though, I think we were a little bit, I don't know if raw is the right word, but by the time we did our YC application, I felt like I had been turned down by so many people, I didn't really give a fuck if anyone else turned us down.

And I think I actually put in our application, which is online if you Google "The Muse YC application," you can probably find it. We published our entire application and I think they actually wrote a line in there which was like "Even if you don't fund us, and we hope you fund us, but even if you don't fund us we're gonna do exactly this and we're gonna take over the world." And I basically told, you know, take it or leave it.

Um, and I think that sort of attitude that we were going to make this work, come hell or high water or anything, really resonated. Um, and, you know, we were watching that really terrible, I think it was a George Clooney movie, the Aides of March. I don't remember any of it, but we were sitting there and my phone was, you know, on the seat between Alex and I, and it lit up with the number from YC.

And you know if you, if they call you, you've gotten in. And if they email you, you haven't. And I just went tearing out of the theater with Alex and Melissa following me, and I put it on speaker, and of course when PG said, you know, we want to invite you to be in the next class, Melissa started screaming and I'm like "Shut up, shut up, shut up," and you know, put it back on mute.

Um, but it was really exciting and we felt like we had arrived. We have been funded by YC, and our troubles are over. And, as Zack said, that is never true. I don't think that it's ever possible to say like we're here, our troubles are completely over.

Um, in fact as soon as we got accepted to YC, we started thinking really big. And in fact, too big, because our first ideas were insanely complicated. Um, this is a mock-up that we made of what we wanted The Muse to look like in Ja-, what is it, January 2012, right when we started YC. And it has a ton going on.

There's seven different features here. It was going to, you know, pull in from all your different social networks, and be optimized for your personality, and a million other things. And I remember going into a meeting with PG and a couple other partners, and you know, we were so proud, and we started to kind of explain and put it on the whiteboard and within seconds, he's like "Whoa whoa. Just launch, already."

And that was, I mean, that was a big moment for us. He basically said, "This will never get off the ground, you will never be able to test which of these seven things people are excited about. Pick one, strip it down, and launch, and start to test demand." And so within the next 14 days, we redesigned the profiles, found five companies to be clients, sent photographers from our network into their offices, and launched on TechCrunch on February 22nd.

Now, it has obviously been a pretty crazy road since then. Um, we know, we were reaching about a hundred thousand people a month when we launched. We're seeing about a million and a half a month now. Um, we work with 200 friends which never would have happened if we had not obviously upgraded and iterated the design.

But there's basically a couple of key things that I feel like we learned some the hard ways, some luckily less so that I wanna run through in my last couple minutes. So the first is, is honoring your word and not just contracts, and I was actually thinking about this in the context of, you know... The startup community, people say it's often very, very small. It's also very informal.

And so I think it's very common sometimes for people to have handshake agreements; on one hand, I have been a victim of handshake agreements gone terribly wrong. So I like to tell people when you're doing an agreement, especially if it's founding a company or working for a company, to make sure to get things in writing.

But even if you are the one in the position of power, if you are the one with the company, I think it's incredibly important to be known as someone who will honor your word and not just the contract, especially because there are always unexpected bumps.

So one of the examples is our first hire ever was an amazing woman named Adrienne whose I think also in the audience tonight, and, you know, she... We really wanted to hire her early on, but we were dead broke. We had, you know, we didn't have the money to pay our own rent, I think we were like bartering for everything that we got.

And so, Adrienne and I talked, and I was like, "Look, we can pay you like this little bit amount of money consistently, and then in three or four months, once we've raised, we will pay you a little bit more, still not a lot. Um, but I was like, I'll get you that money, that second bit, by November 1st, 2011."

And October 2011, I started having stress ulcers because we're not yet in Y Combinator, we definitely do not have money, and we were seeing the numbers going the right way. I knew that the business had something at its core that was very, that could be successful, but we certainly weren't there now.

And so, I had to go to her and say this is exactly what's going on. If you, if you want, I will honor the agreement and we can essentially kind of, I'll figure out a way to get you the money by November 1st, or, if you're alright with it, you know, I think we'll have money by mid-December.

And, luckily, she was alright with it. We raised after when we got into YC, we got a little bit of capital, we were able to sort of make everything right. Um, but I think having that, having that reputation and making it be very core is something that I think could take you afar, a long way especially when, I mean, shit just sometimes doesn't go according to plan.

The second Zack also covered, but it's this idea that done is better than perfect and that you have to start somewhere, and if you cannot win if you don't pass go, and it's so easy especially if you have an idea and you know that some people are gonna say "that idea is stupid," "that will never work," like "why--" you know, "what are you thinking about," "why don't you just go back and get a nice job".

I think it is really easy to sort of sit in a corner and polish your idea and say "someday, someday," but ultimately I think the best ideas they need to be out in the world and survive the test of real customers. Because another thing that happens I think quite frequently is someone will have an idea and they only tell a few people close to them, but those are the people who love you.

You know, if you tell your mom, "I'm gonna start a company aimed at, you know, I don't know, being Zappos for dogs," like, your mom probably thinks it's an awesome idea. Um, it may be a great idea, but I don't think you can know that until you have real strangers who don't care about you, who don't know anything about you, look at it and use it.

Um, and obviously it's about finding the people that are the use case because if you, you know, find people who are cat lovers who hate dogs, like, they might not get your idea and that's totally okay. Um, yeah, and the final thing is, you know, this is The Muse now; that's The Muse then. Nobody looks at the site and thinks "Wow! That's gonna be a world-changing billion-dollar company." That's okay because we got it out there and we got just far enough to get to the next step, to get to the next step, and to get to a point where obviously we're still really far from being where I'd like us to go, but the path gets a little bit clear every time you move down it.

The next thing is to be insanely persistent but also very, very polite. Um, most things in a startup you will not get by asking once. In fact, for a lot of the partnerships that we've gotten, the deals that have made a massive success for our business, it was never the first time we ask for them, or very, very rarely was that first time someone said "Oh, why yes! Of course, I'll give you mass amounts of traffic from my media publication."

It's often about figuring out what it is that you have, even if you don't have much, that the other party gets excited about. Um, who's the right person to ask... When we first launched, one of the ways that we got a lot of early traffic to The Muse was that I noticed Forbes had a contributor program where they would publish content from outside sources.

And so I went to Forbes and I said "I wanna send you, I wanna give you career content that we're gonna write from The Muse, and in exchange I want you to put in the bottom this content was originally published on The Muse, link link link." And the first person I talked to or that I asked didn't answer my email.

And the second person that I asked, about a week or two later, didn't answer my email. The third, the fourth time, we found the right person, they made the deal happen, and again in our first month Forbes sent around 5000 people to The Muse, and a lot of those people stuck around because they had come for something that was very unbranded and then essentially been sucked into our ecosystem.

Um, similarly with investing, I think, you know, we certainly more than anyone else have felt like sometimes the best way is obviously it's not always about being persistent with the same people, but understanding that you just have to figure out what is it about what you're doing or what you're asking for or what you're offering that is gonna be most of interest to the other party.

And then find the right person, and be very polite but very, very persistent, until you make it happen. Um, this one I've touched on a little bit, but it is find the people who share your values otherwise it will ruin your life.

Um, my first company was not only a failure because we had flat growth and a relatively uninspired product, but it was also a failure because we had essentially a business dispute between founders that cost people a lot of money that led to, you know, my life savings and those some other people of being kind of sucked away.

And it was ultimately, relatively foreseeable because there were a couple of red flags around values issues, how you treat people that the people saw and people overlooked. And I'd absolutely do this because when you're so focused on the product, you're so focused on the vision, it's really easy to say "Oh" like, you know, "we don't really maybe share values but it'll all work out."

Um, and I can absolutely say I think one of the smartest things that I've ever done is make sure that I'm very, very focused on working with people both externally and internally. And this goes to investors, and we've turned down money from people who had very clear different value systems. We had to let people go for ethics lapses, but I think it keeps your core very strong and it attracts people to you who also value that than others.

Um, creating velocity, we talked about this a little bit before, but a lot of people, I think, think of startups kind of like the Field of Dreams, which is, you know, "If you build it, they will come." But actually, that is, in fact, not how a lot of startups work.

Um, you can have an amazing product, you can put it out there and if 20 people see it, unless those are the exact 20 people that are going to be excited about what you're offering that are going to be the core users and they tell others and they tell others. You may have something that's amazing, but you won't be able to get it in front of the right people.

And so I've been thinking not only about what you're going to create, how it will be built, what its growth plan is, but also who is it exactly, who are the right users, and how do you find them? How do you find the people that are going to become evangelists for your product, where are they now, how do you get in front of them, and how do you incentivize them to talk about it in front of other people?

It's the difference ultimately between being dead and not being dead, in my opinion. Um, six, build an amazing team. So, I love this picture because this in front is Doug, he's our director of sales. Um, on his first day of work was April first of this past year, April's Fools day, and so we decided it would be really fun to all dress up in formal wear for his first day in the office.

See how long it'll take for him to notice. Um, of course the first, you know, five people are in suits and button downs, he's like looking a little confused, his... Finally, I think, someone walked in and in like a full suit and bright blue sneakers and he's like, "Wait a second, you guys are pranking me."

Um, it was a really funny way to kind of welcome him, but for us, I think building, especially when you're asking people to go above and beyond to create something, I mean, creating something that hasn't existed before, building a company, it's really, really hard. And you often don't have a lot of cash to compensate people.

So I talk to people sometimes and they say, "Well, you know, I can't recruit people away from Google. They have so much more money than I do." If all people wanted was money, then yes, they would probably be working at Google instead of your startup, but there are so many things that motivate people.

Um, I love, when recruiting, to figure out, especially if you're, you wanna hire someone you're very excited about, figure out what motivates them. Like would they be excited to speak on a panel as a representative of your company? You know, would they be excited if you could help them meet other people in their industry? Or set them up with a class or a tutorial of some sort of expertise?

Is there a new skill that they are really interested in learning that you can help them learn because you're a small company and there's a lot of things that need to be done? When you figure out what it is that motivates people other than money and then help them achieve that, help them kind of achieve their professional goals, it is an unbelievably powerful way to build a team especially if you're very, very strapped for cash.

And if you're looking about where to find people, obviously there are classic examples of, you know, you can post your jobs on LinkedIn or Indeed, The Muse and AngelList are good for startup jobs. I really like kind of the dead pool.

Um, we only used this once or twice, but essentially keeping an eye out for on Hacker News, on TechCrunch whose startup is losing people, whose startup is not doing so well... Um, I remember once when we were really early and we're desperate for early hires; Grooveshark got hit by a massive lawsuit and I went to LinkedIn and I was looking at everyone in Grooveshark to see whether anyone seemed like they might be interesting and available.

Um, I call that lurking, but it can actually be an effective way. And also getting out there and networking and speaking. I think at least two of our awesome people on our team have come because they've been in the audience when I was giving some talk, rather, and they were like it's pretty interesting. Maybe I'll investigate more, and one month, three months, six months later they'll join your team.

And the last thing I wanna talk to you about today, the last point I want to make is you cannot, cannot believe the hype. Um, we are in an industry where everyone is raising ten million dollars on, you know, from [inaudible] or being on the front page of TechCrunch or succeeding in some other massive way, but it really is the most extreme version of that cliché that you're comparing, you know, your day to day with everyone else's highlight reel.

And that's why getting very close to your product and understanding your numbers and your users, and what drives them to come to you, what drives them to use your product and to tell their friends, and to come back every day is so powerful.

Because when a hundred and forty-eight investors told us no, it was really tempting to think that maybe they're right and we're wrong. I mean, who are we? Who are we to say that we actually think there's something powerful here?

But the closer you are to your users, and I think to that data, the easier it is to start to see that 300 people goes to 3000 goes to three million, and it's much, much, much harder to ignore. And it is very, very satisfying to smile at all the people who told you you couldn't do it.

So, thank you so much. [applause]