YC Women in Tech: Breaking Into Product

All right, hi everyone! It's, uh, thanks for joining us today. I'm Captain Yala. I'm excited to have you join us for our work at a startup panel on getting into product. We have three PMs with us today and will be joined also by YC alumni Helena Merk, and we'll have some time at the end of the panel for questions.

Um, but if you have questions throughout, I'll be monitoring the chat, so feel free to leave them in the chat as well. After the panel, around 5 PM, each panelist will be in separate session rooms where you can meet them, you know, and ask them more questions.

Um, but let's just jump straight into it. I'd love to have the speakers join me, and we can have them all introduce themselves. That sounds good.

Thanks, Kat! So hey everyone, I'm Sylvia. I'm currently a PM at Brex, leading our identity team, which owns everything onboarding, both from a user experience standpoint as well as all of the decision making that happens behind the scenes. So, as you can imagine, it's probably a pretty complex space.

Um, I've been at Brex about eight months now, so relatively recent. Prior to this, I was at Facebook for quite a stand. I most recently spent a year and a half out in Facebook London, where I was leading growth on the Audience Network team. Before that was more on the consumer side of things, working on growth across Instagram, across Messenger engagement growth, and to some extent across News Feed as well.

So, more on the consumer side of things. Before Facebook, I actually spent a few years at Workday as a product manager more on the technical side, so working on platforms and frameworks in the enterprise space. Then before that, I was at school. So I started out more from an engineering background. I studied engineering in university and then actually moved straight to project management right out of college.

All right, all right, Colleen, you want to go next?

Happy to! You, um, let me know if you can't hear me. I'm not getting a ton of feedback from Hop In, but I will assume it's working. I’m Colleen Barkoski. I am a PM at Burbix, which is a Y Combinator company.

Um, we are also doing identity verification, so Sylvia, you and I should talk sometime. Um, and I've also been there for about eight months, so that's my current home. I'm the first PM there, so that's its own whole bag of tricks.

Uh, prior to Burbix, I was at another Y Combinator company called Ironclad, which does contract lifecycle management. Um, I was there for about two years in a role called legal engineering, where I also got to do a lot of product work and was very early there as well, so can talk about that ride.

And before that, I did a—I didn’t study CS actually in undergrad; I studied philosophy. But I did a Ruby on Rails boot camp, and that was kind of my technical training. Uh, prior to that, I was a journalist in DC, where I covered the Supreme Court.

Wow, very timely! Um, Helena, you want to go next?

Yeah, I'd love to! I love both your backgrounds. Just kind of a cool story how you got to PM. I'm excited to hear more about it through this panel.

Um, so I got into more of the technical things actually from loving products a lot. So I taught myself to code back in middle school, mostly because I loved app design, building things, and then got more and more involved in tech and, like, moving down the stack.

Um, and eventually dropped out of college to work at an API company. Um, and that lasted only a few months until I left to start my own company, largely driven by, you know, Y Combinator accepting Glimpse into the match. Uh, and that we, uh, we just completed actually in March—we were in the Winter '20 batch.

Um, and our platform Glimpse matches people for one-on-one speed conversations with an advanced matching system that'll pair you with people that are relevant. So, that's kind of how I got to here.

Um, and I think, unlike both of you, I am, yes, product, um, but also product and engineering and a CEO and all the things. So, very, very excited to learn from both of you in how to get more into product because I'm new to this.

Um, and I'm excited to be here. Thank you!

All right, and I think we're having some technical difficulties...