Jessica Mah at Female Founders Conference 2014

Jessica Ma is the founder and CEO of Indinero, a company that takes care of counting payroll and taxes for businesses. Jessica founded her very first company in middle school and started Indinero from her UC Berkeley dorm room, where she was studying computer science. Uh, Jessica was part of the YC summer 2010 batch.

"Welcome Jessica, thanks for the great intro. Let me just test this clicker out here. All right, so my name is Jess Kama. I am the founder and CEO of Indinero. I went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2010, and my story starts at UC Berkeley. I studied computer science, and while I was there, I was the president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association.

One thing that I really loved doing was inviting other founders to come speak to the students. I really wanted to get my CS classmates to think about starting their own startup. The first person I invited was Drew Houston, who was the founder and CEO of Dropbox. Then I got Sam Altman from Loopt; he's now the president of Y Combinator, as you all know. They said I should really consider applying to Y Combinator, and I hadn't really considered it at the time.

I thought, well, I'm not sure if I want to do Y Combinator. I don't know if I want to give up all that equity. And they say, just apply, and worst case you get in and then you decide not to do it; it's not such a bad worst case scenario. And that's what we did. My co-founder, his name is Andy; he was my best friend, and he's still my best friend. We did all of our computer science projects together; we're really close.

We knew that we didn't want to get real jobs after college; we just wanted to go straight into doing our own startup. And we're just friends; we're not dating, nothing crazy. A lot of people would ask, are you like siblings? Are you like married? What's the deal? And I'd say, we're just friends.

So, we put in our application for this idea called the Mint.com for businesses. A lot of people would say, why accounting? That sounds like such a boring idea. Why not like Facebook apps or something more exciting? I said, and I thought, well, I’d run my own small business before, and accounting was just really hard to do. How about we do something that could actually make a difference for others? So that was our idea, and we went through Y Combinator.

We were really excited; we weren't scared at all. We were on top of the world. We thought we’re going to get lots of PR; we’re going to raise all this money; everything's going to be great. And that's what we did. We got lots of PR. This is Fast Company interviewing me at our home office, and we thought we’ll get PR, we’ll get users, and we’ll use that to get even more PR.

Here’s Fox at our office, and after that, we raised a lot of funding. We raised 1.2 million in funding, and the first thing we did with all of this new money was, of course, get a fancy office. There’s the hot tub in the back, and I remember feeling like we’re going to be the next Intuit. We told people; I remember at Demo Day, one of my slides said we’re going to be the next Intuit. We were that confident.

I was able to get one employee who worked at Google; he was getting paid something like a quarter million dollars a year, and I got him to quit Google to work at Indinero for minimum wage and 1% equity. We both thought this was a great idea, but in hindsight, that was a terrible deal. Uh, needless to say, he didn’t stay there very long.

The biggest problem we all talk about is hiring, hiring, hiring. But there's one investor I was meeting with; his name's Anton. He was the VP of Business Development at Mint, and we became really good friends over the years. He asked me, “You're talking about hiring, but have you ever fired anyone before?”

I thought, no, I’ve never had to fire anyone before. He had this evil grin on his face. “Jessica, you're telling me that you have all A players? You don't have any B players? Your team is amazing?” I’m thinking, no, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I didn’t fire anyone, not because I didn’t have B pla...