Urska Srsen Speaks at Y Combinator Female Founder Conference 2016

Hello. Before I actually started talking about myself for the next 20 minutes, I wanted to kick off this speech with a quote from a woman that I admire a lot, and who unfortunately died last week. For those of you who don't know her, Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-born, London-based architect, and just a formidable force in the world of design, architecture, and architectural business.

I chose this because I think so. She answered this quote as an answer to a question when they asked her if she thinks that she had it specifically hard during her career because her projects were particularly ambitious. So I chose this quote because I think that the legacy of her and women like her, and like you, is so inspiring. Women who are devoted to their passion and are not afraid of taking on particularly ambitious projects are the inspiration I draw from, and without that, I don't think that I would be here today.

So back to me. My name is Erika, and I'm the co-founder of Bella Beat, which is a company devoted to designing beautiful and easy-to-use technology for tracking the health of women. I'm Slovenian, and when I became a founder, I was 23 years old. Before that, I was actually studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland. I always wanted to study sculpture. I was really passionate about it, and I decided that I wanted to be a sculptor when I was nine.

So, this is me when I was nine or ten, and this is me in my last year of college, living the dream. I was really, really passionate about working with different materials and just art itself. But why I actually always mention my background as an artist is because I think that it influenced a lot about who I am as a founder today and how I approach designing our products. But also, because I think it was the passion that I always wanted to follow.

As you can imagine, I'm probably the least likely person to start a tech company, coming from studying art and then starting just a startup in the world of technology. I didn't go to business school, and I'm not a developer, so I'm not even a designer. The best way I could justify to others, and myself as well sometimes, is that I just try to follow my passion throughout all the twists and turns and wherever it takes me.

But even though becoming an artist wasn't really a conventional decision, you know, you don't just decide to go study art and expect to earn anything for the rest of your life. Even for me, like going into startups was a big step from my comfort zone because I struggled with the thought that I'm not qualified enough, that I don't have any idea what I'm doing. But at the end, I'm totally fine. I'm standing here, and I've realized, meeting a lot of the other founders, that nobody's really qualified to start this. It's just like there’s nothing—nobody can teach you what to do.

But you must probably be wondering what was that tipping point like? What made me decide to switch my careers? Well, like many young and naive girls, I met a dude. This dude in particular, I think he's watching and he'll be very angry that I put up this picture, but this is Sandra. He's my fiancé and co-founder, and I met him in my last year of college. Fast forward a year, he convinced me to drop my studies and move all the way back across Europe from Helsinki back to the Balkans, more particularly to Zagreb, Croatia, where he's from, and live and work with him. And I said yes.

So we actually just, you know, I moved to Zagreb, and we started to work on several projects individually and together, and they all failed. I mean, there weren't big projects, but when you're 23, everything feels, you know, big, especially at that transition when you're going from college to adult life. You think like, "Oh my god, I have to start earning something and like not draining my parents anymore." But actually, throughout that process, it was actually just like a year—we learned so much.

We stumbled just across different fields into the health space. There's no particular reason why we ended up in health space. It is true that my mother is an OB/GYN, and this is where we kind of got some, you know, crumbs from. But mostly, we found that we both found that health was really interesting, and our skills matched. I was really interested in how technology for tracking health was designed, which actually wasn't designed at all; it was just like crappy. He was interested in the technology itself.

A lot of the founders, you know, have a reason or are solving a problem that they've encountered through the technology that they're developing. But maybe our problem was just like how to stay and work together, and we solved that with Bella Beat. Out of that, our first product was born, which was an app and the device that allowed future moms to listen to their baby's heartbeat while they were pregnant and share the experience with their loved ones. It was a great product; it was really emotional. The users loved it. I mean, who doesn't want to hear their baby's heartbeat?

But essentially, it taught us a lot about women as users of technology, who have always been overlooked, and also about what kind of technology they need or want and how we can help them. This became a huge part of our development vision. Fast forward three years later, we are a team of more than 60 people, have offices in Zagreb, Croatia, London, San Francisco, and Dongguan, China. So, we're quite an operation right now, and we've already shipped 350,000 physical units of our hardware products, and we're already profitable.

So, we’ve learned quite a lot and have been through a lot of things. But I actually still avoid giving advice to anyone. A startup is just like sticking your head out of a driving window on a highway. It's like you're trying to keep your eyes in, you're like in your skull. So, I never really had the time to reflect on things and understand what actually happened. But I try to put together a couple of things that I think define us as a team and a company the most, and I think that some people might be able to relate to that.

The first one is that we're not American. It's like nothing really bad about it. It's just that we started Bella Beat in Croatia, which is like not even a fancy part of Europe, like London or Paris. It's just off the map—nobody knows where it is, and it's even more known than Slovenia. So that's why we went there first. But yeah, it's just that we built this great product; we knew that our users loved it, but we were stuck with no prospect of raising any money. Neither was the technology that we were developing a big deal with the users. All our users were in the States, and Europe, in general, is just not a very nurturing environment for early-stage startups because it's such a fragmented market and notoriously bureaucratic.

What it's lacking, what actually makes Silicon Valley the Hollywood of startups, is a couple of essential things lacking in Europe. The first of them is, of course, the money, and not just a concentration of it, but the knowledge of it. When you get a Silicon Valley investor, they've seen people go through what you're going through several times—like many times. Most likely, they've been through it as well. The other thing is talent. It’s not that Europe is lacking in talent, but it’s just lacking in very accomplished talent because they all moved to Silicon Valley.

The lack of really successful founders influences your perspective a lot. Before we came to the States, I never even thought that it was possible for you to get an investment bigger than what your mom gave you as pocket money. You know, you read about billion-dollar exits after a couple of years of working on something, but you don't really meet these people; you don't really see them in person. So, it's just out of the movies. That influences everything; it influences your perspective on things, the perspective of investors in Europe, which influences then your valuations and your scale as well.

But, you know, European founders are all aware of that, and they all want to move to Silicon Valley—well, most of them. But you can't just move. This is like emotional extortion or how it’s called. But even not counting the legal and emotional burdens, you can't just pack your bags and move to the States because you can't just start out of nothing. You need a base. For us, luckily, that base became Y Combinator when we got accepted into the winter 2014 batch. It was great; we were like "Yeah, we're gonna move." We packed all our bags and our product and moved into a house in Mountain View.

But, you know, we realized that we were complete idiots. I was literally scared to open my mouth at dinners in case somebody realized that I don’t belong there. I literally just felt like I don’t belong there, that I have no idea what's going on and I will never ever catch up. You don’t even know basic things like how to answer an email properly. Like Americans, I’m sorry—within less than 24 hours, I don't even answer my mother in 24 hours; a week is still normal.

But, once you start learning things like that, you know what really made us who we are today is that feeling of being kind of like idiots that made us obtain this underdog mentality. We just kept our mouths shut and our eyes and ears open. I think this is really important because building a startup is not an IQ test. It's not like who's the smartest; it's who can observe things better at best, who can recognize changes really fast and hack it.

This brings us to the last point: having the YC family support you is really incredible because you meet other founders who are prepared to work for you for beer—which brings me to the second really important thing: commitment. You will hear a lot how working hard is really important, but I think working hard is not the same as commitment. Being committed to something means that you're putting your team’s and your company's interests always first before your comfort or even your personal interests sometimes.

That means, you know, doing whatever it takes—moving wherever it takes, meaning that you have to call your angry customers or fire someone, or even move to China. Being committed as a founder is, I think, the hardest thing you have to do because it has to come from within yourself, and you have to maintain it. But even harder than that is transferring that commitment to your team.

In an operation larger than just founders, you need a committed team as well. We’ve just gone through a phase of really fast growth because we’ve been scaling our products pretty fast, and having a hardware product and all the rollercoaster of logistics that come with it, we needed to scale the team as well. It feels like the ground is shaking, like you're in a rocket launch, and people will fall off during that ground shake.

We’ve had an engineer come in and then quit in a week. He was like, “This is just too much, too much stress for me, guys.” And I’m like, “This was like vacation for me.” Literally, he just quit in a week. But then you will have harder things, like people quitting that were with you from the start, who worked with you for two years or a year, and who really participated in team work. But what you have to keep in mind is that that is normal because you have to imagine your startup as a rocket. Like, I couldn’t find a better picture, but you know with a rocket launch, all the debris is falling off—like not all parts were designed to go with you.

Unfortunately, some parts were designed to go to the moon, and the rest were parts that took place at the beginning or just made you grow as a founder. Being committed brings me to hardware. Hardware takes a lot of commitment. Jessica asked me to talk about some war stories from hardware, but I really don’t want to scare you.

I felt like this picture of our Chinese— that’s our office— is good enough. I know, but I think everybody has this perception of hardware that it’s really, really hard to build. It is hard to build, but what is even harder is to ship it. Unfortunately, you can't do it from the States; you can’t do it from Europe; you can't even do it from Hong Kong. The only place where you can do it from is from the factory floor.

So, if you're doing hardware, the essential thing is that you are prepared to move your operations to where you're making it, and that means yourself or a team that you really trust will go with it. That brings me to the last thing that really, really defines us, and that is the vision. This is me trying to present our vision to our team, and I swear that everybody gets it; we're totally on the same page—don’t worry.

But yeah, the vision is actually like a glue in everything else—in the cracks of your commitment, in the cracks of your team, even in cracks in your product. The vision is the one that fills it. Also, when you're getting blows, and you don’t know what's your next step, you should be able to play that vision in your head, and it should bring some answers.

For us, that vision is to change preventive care. I know that this is really abstract, but you will develop it as you go. It becomes more defined with each product, with each step, with each stage of your company, and the nicest thing about it is that you see how it evolves in front of your eyes. So, these are some of the sketches that we've done during designing our newest product called the Leaf.

It just holds a special magic to see that something that you've imagined is possible to create, and you don’t need a lot to do it. You don’t need fancy equipment. We are doing hardware, and we didn’t have any money to buy 3D printers or anything fancy, so I just made our first prototyping clay. You can make it in Play-Doh or whatever, or make sketches on paper—just enough so that you can communicate it to your team and other people that you're going to create your product with.

So, the Leaf is our newest product, and we just launched it in October. It’s designed as a beautiful piece of jewelry that women can wear in any way they want: as a bracelet, as a necklace, or as a clip. It helps them track their activity, their sleep, their menstrual cycle, and overcome stress through breathing exercises. I know that this product is just a small part of our bigger vision, but all the little pieces that you put together are going towards developing the future of your company. Thank you.