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Female Founders Conference 2017

5 hours 9 minutes 23 seconds

🇬🇧 English

S1

Speaker 1

00:15

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

S2

Speaker 2

14:07

You

S1

Speaker 1

14:15

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

S2

Speaker 2

24:03

Hi everyone. I can't see you but I'm so excited to see you. This is actually my first time back in the Bay Area in more than a year.

S2

Speaker 2

24:15

I've been living in England for the past year with my family and I just could not miss this day. So here I am back for 24 hours, jet lag and all. So hopefully I can deliver this okay in 1 piece. Before I get started, I just would love to just take a moment to thank the women who've recently come forward so bravely on the record to speak out about the sexual harassment they've faced working in Silicon Valley.

S2

Speaker 2

24:52

I just cannot thank them enough. They're my heroes. Hopefully their actions will cause more women to speak up and help put an end to the discrimination and the harassment that we as women can face working in the startup community. So 1 more round of applause.

S1

Speaker 1

25:09

That was so awesome. All right.

S2

Speaker 2

25:14

Where am I here? All right. Here we go.

S2

Speaker 2

25:17

So last year, if you were here, you'll remember that I spoke about all the problems that can arise in a startup and how to avoid them. And to be honest, I think last year's talk was the best general startup advice I could give you. So if you haven't read it, please go to this link and read it, and even if you have read it, it's worth a reread because these are the type of problems that can get you even when you think you're already watching out for them. So there's the link.

S2

Speaker 2

25:48

Last year I ended by saying that I want there to be more women founders of the big companies, of the so-called unicorns. And these are the founders who make the most influential role models. And role models are what we need most if we want to encourage more women to start their own companies. In recent years, there's been an increase in the number of women who are starting startups and in the number of women who've raised significant seed in Series A rounds, and this is good.

S2

Speaker 2

26:22

But now we've got to focus on the next target. We need to have more women who are founding billion-dollar startups. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. What it takes to start a startup that's not merely successful, but is massively successful.

S2

Speaker 2

26:45

And I'm not saying everyone has to do this. You don't have to start a startup. And if you do, you don't have to start a Google. But if you do want to start a Google, what does it take?

S2

Speaker 2

26:57

What's the difference between a successful startup and a massively successful startup? And fortunately, I've seen enough of both types at close hand that I can see patterns of differences. So I've made a list of things that I think are different about the unicorns, and there are 9 of them. I want to get this 1 out of the way from the very start.

S2

Speaker 2

27:24

In addition to having everything else that they need, the unicorns are lucky. And 1 of the most important kinds of luck is timing. The most successful founders have the right idea at the right time. And you have less control over that than you might think, actually, because The best ideas are not deliberate.

S2

Speaker 2

27:47

They tend to grow organically out of the founders' lives. However, while the most successful founders are all lucky, they're not merely lucky. It's never like They have this great idea and then, boom, a few years later, they're a billionaire. Far, far from that.

S2

Speaker 2

28:10

1 of the most noticeable difference between founders of the super successful startups and the moderately successful startups is their motives. And In particular, the founders of the super successful start-ups never are in it mainly to get rich or to seem cool. They're always fanatically interested in what the company is doing. Incidentally, it's perfectly fine to start a startup, mainly for the money, but unless your motives change throughout the course of it, it probably won't wind up being 1 of the big ones.

S2

Speaker 2

28:44

There are multiple reasons why startups do better when the founders are truly interested in the idea. They work harder because they love the work. And their enthusiasm is infectious. They think longer term.

S2

Speaker 2

28:59

And they're much harder for another company to capture with an acquisition offer, because they don't actually want to quit. So this 1 is going to sound really obvious. To be a huge startup, you have to have a huge market. You have to make something that a lot of people will pay for or that people will pay a lot for.

S2

Speaker 2

29:26

And this is 1 place luck actually has a very big effect, because market sizes are impossible to predict. For example, the Airbnbs didn't know how many people would want to stay in other people's homes. All they knew was that enough would to make it an idea that was worth working on. The founders of most successful startups never realize early on how big they're going to get.

S2

Speaker 2

29:54

So our advice at Y Combinator is not even to try to hit a big market early on. Since you can't predict these things, it's better just to work on something you yourself want and then hope that there are lots more people like you. When you describe the biggest startups, Most all of them are doing something very basic. Google is how you find information.

S2

Speaker 2

30:21

Facebook is where your friends are. Uber gives you rides. Airbnb gives you somewhere to sleep. I mean, these are all things you could explain in a few words to a five-year-old.

S2

Speaker 2

30:32

However, don't use this as a test for what to work on, because ideas often start out less general. At first, Facebook wasn't where everyone's friends were. They were where a couple thousand Harvard students were. A site for a couple thousand students at 1 college doesn't sound like a very promising idea, does it?

S2

Speaker 2

30:57

It may seem promising now because We all know how the story turned out. But at the time, it did not. Almost all the really big startup ideas seemed dubious at first. I know exactly how Airbnb's idea seemed at first because I was 1 of the people whose job it was to judge it.

S2

Speaker 2

31:19

And I didn't think much of it at the time, to be perfectly honest. And it's not just that these ideas don't seem as big at first as they eventually turn out to be. They seem to most people like bad ideas. You need to be a certain type of person who can work on 1 of these bad ideas that eventually turns into a good 1.

S2

Speaker 2

31:43

You need to be independent-minded. You cannot care what other people think. It's now kind of part of the conventional picture of a successful founder to be a maverick. And that part of the conventional picture is accurate.

S2

Speaker 2

31:59

I really I can't think of 1 that I would describe as a conformist. You also have to be ambitious, because what happens with these initially unpromising ideas is that they blossom into terrifyingly big ones. You start a site for college students and pretty soon you realize you could sign up the whole world if you wanted to. And at this point, most people's reaction is fear.

S2

Speaker 2

32:35

Signing up the whole world seems like a lot of work. And it also seems like a valuable prize. And you have to fight to win those. The fear of big ideas prevents most people from even realizing they could start a site for college students and turn that into a site for the whole world.

S2

Speaker 2

32:59

But a few people are more excited than afraid when this happens. Another thing I notice about the founders of the really huge start-ups is that I would not want to stand between something they wanted and them. All 100 per cent of them have exceptional, exceptional drive. But it's not always straightforward to tell how driven someone is.

S2

Speaker 2

33:31

Drive can be suppressed when someone else has authority over you, like in most schools or in a job. And in these situations, people who are really driven may even read as less promising than people who are merely obedient. So not only is it hard for me to tell how driven someone is, people often can't even tell themselves. You can tell after they start a startup, though.

S2

Speaker 2

34:02

No 1 has authority over you in a startup. Most people find the authority vacuum uncomfortable, but a few people expand into it. And those few people think, ah, this is what life is supposed to be like. Drive by itself is not enough, though.

S2

Speaker 2

34:29

You have to be driven to work on this particular company. In all the really huge startups, the company is at least 1 of the founders' life's work. So they'd never willingly be acquired, for example. If you sell your life's work, then what are you going to do?

S2

Speaker 2

34:52

Early on, starting a startup is all about the product. But that changes as a startup gets really big. A founder who wants to keep running the company has to become a manager. You don't have to have management ability initially.

S2

Speaker 2

35:08

There's plenty of empirical evidence to show that you can learn this on the job. But you have to be able to learn it, and you probably even have to like it. Designing cool products and managing people are really different things. Most people who like building things dislike the idea of being a manager.

S2

Speaker 2

35:31

Probably know some people like that. It's a rare person who can be great at both. But you have to be if you want to create 1 of the really big startups. Those are the 9 things as far as I can tell that are the differences between startups that are merely successful and the ones that become really big.

S2

Speaker 2

35:53

But they're not just a list. When you put them all together, they make a story of how a unicorn happens. The founders work on something their experience shows them that the world needs. It wouldn't seem like a promising idea to most people, but the founders work on it anyway, partly because they understand the promise of the idea a little bit better, and partly just because they think it's cool.

S2

Speaker 2

36:21

They work on the idea, and they realize they've become even bigger than they had realized. Instead of shrinking from this realization, They embrace it eagerly. And they realize this is what they want to do with their lives. And they're so committed to the company that they're willing to morph themselves into whatever the company needs.

S2

Speaker 2

36:45

There's a lot of variety in startups, but this is the most common path for the really big ones. So remember, you don't have to start a startup, and if you do, it doesn't have to be a unicorn. But if you do, this is probably what it's going to look like. An unpromising idea that blossoms into a frighteningly big 1 and driven founders who see the opportunity and run with it.

S2

Speaker 2

37:18

And I'm hoping that there are some of you in this audience who hear this description and think to themselves, oh my gosh, it's like she's describing me. The people on the path to becoming huge don't usually realize it themselves early on. But I'm hoping if I can encourage even a few of you to keep going, then when you're successful, your example will encourage more new women to start their own companies. And yes, this is a very long-term plan, but after all, it's my life's work.

S2

Speaker 2

37:57

So, thank you. So, thank you. Again, I'm just so happy you're all here today and so excited to hear the talks. The next speaker I'd like to introduce is Avni Patel-Thompson.

S2

Speaker 2

38:17

She is the founder and CEO of Poppy. They are on-demand childcare. Notice I said that in 5 words or less. So she went through Y Combinator in the winter of 2006, and she is here to tell us all about her story.

S2

Speaker 2

38:34

Thank you.

S1

Speaker 1

38:41

Hi everyone. Good afternoon. How's everyone doing.

S1

Speaker 1

38:45

Oh this is really great. I'm so excited to be here today. My name is Avni. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Poppy.

S1

Speaker 1

38:52

We're building the modern village by connecting vetted caregivers to families when they need childcare. I started Poppy not because I'm an expert in the field or because I have a deep passion for childcare. I started Poppy for 2 people, these 2. The older is my daughter, Saya, and the younger is my daughter, Aria.

S1

Speaker 1

39:17

I was so tired of feeling panicked and anxious every time I wasn't a thousand percent sure of who was taking care of my girls. And I couldn't believe that so many of us are dealing with this every single week. And then I couldn't believe that all the people, all the amazing people that are taking care of our kids, they need more recognition and opportunities. So I decided to build it with Poppy.

S1

Speaker 1

39:45

So I decided to build it with Poppy. We're serving thousands of families in Seattle right now, and it's an incredible thing to be a part of, especially because Poppy almost didn't exist. 1 of the reasons I'm so excited to be here today is because 2 years ago, I sat in your seats. At the 2015 FFC, I sat there and I listened to all these incredible women telling their stories about bold visions and amazing companies.

S1

Speaker 1

40:12

And I desperately wanted to be like them. Only in that moment, nothing seemed further from reality. I was in the middle of shutting down my first startup, after spending years working on it and sinking thousands of my own personal dollars into it. I was so ready to give up and just head back to my successful career in brand management.

S1

Speaker 1

40:33

Only this afternoon just inspired me so much, and I headed back. And I decided to give it another shot. But not only that, I set a goal, and this is a little bit crazy, but this is my journal from that night. And I said, crazily, in 2017, I want to be on that stage giving the talk instead of sitting in the audience.

S1

Speaker 1

40:58

Thank you. So when Kat sent me this email, asking me to be 1 of the speakers, you'll notice the date, it says April 30th, I was so honored, obviously, because this was a goal, and it was just 1 of the biggest parts of my story to actually try again. But the other crazy kind of ironic part was that she had sent me a different kind of email 2 years earlier. And this 1 was when she told me, and she crushed my dreams, and she told me that YC wasn't going to be funding Poppy.

S1

Speaker 1

41:35

And so this is the story I want to tell you a little bit about today. What happened between my first failed startup and Poppy which is funded and growing today and what happened between Kat's first email and then me standing in front of you today. My hope is that maybe you'll learn a little bit from my mistakes, but I hope that in hearing my journey, you'll be able to connect it to yours and figure out a way to start and then just keep going. So my startup journey starts about 5 years ago.

S1

Speaker 1

42:07

I had my first daughter, and I was struggling to figure out a way how to pass on my rich Indian heritage and the traditions onto my girls. A friend and I started talking and we thought, well, we could figure out a solution to this. It was the time, it was about 2012, so subscription boxes were all the rage. And so we thought, well, if we just curate something, you know, it could do with culture, and it would have the language and food and all these amazing things, why couldn't we do that?

S1

Speaker 1

42:37

And so we worked on it. We worked on it on the side while we still kept our jobs and we built business plans and financial models for 2 years, we worked on it on the side. Then finally, in March 2014, we both decided we were gonna quit our jobs and work on this full time. It felt incredible, but at the beginning, it was what are we gonna focus on?

S1

Speaker 1

43:00

Well, I'd heard all of these things about MVPs and working on product and getting it out. And so we worked on the product and we thought about what we would want to have in this box. And we figured it out in 3 months. We were able to put this beautiful curated box together of things that we thought were gonna solve the problem because that's what we wanted.

S1

Speaker 1

43:19

And we thought that was exactly what you're supposed to do. So in June we launched and it felt incredible. We had friends and family, everyone texting us and emailing us and saying, oh wow, this looks amazing. We even had a bunch of orders.

S1

Speaker 1

43:33

And so we thought, this is amazing. A few weeks go on and the orders start to trickle, a little bit they slow, and we're like, I mean, it's a little bit concerning, but we think, you know, that's probably just because we don't have enough products. So let's work on more products and get them into the shop. So we work on that.

S1

Speaker 1

43:52

Now it's the fall, and we're quickly running out of money. We had both invested about $20,000 of our own savings. And we had figured if we launched, then we'll just be able to raise money then. And it'll all be wonderful.

S1

Speaker 1

44:04

That wasn't the case. And so we were quickly running out of money. We decided to try everything we possibly could. We did Facebook campaigns.

S1

Speaker 1

44:14

We did Google AdWord campaigns. We even went and partnered with some of the best brands out there, like the tea collection, just trying to figure out how we could kickstart growth and get people to buy this amazing box that we had done. After the holidays, it became clear that it wasn't working. The cost of acquiring these niche customers was just way too high, and it didn't make sense for the 1 or 2 boxes that they were buying.

S1

Speaker 1

44:42

So we made the hard but right decision to shut it down. I don't think we talk about this enough, but this was some of the hardest times of my life. I felt like a failure. I felt like I let everyone down, including myself.

S1

Speaker 1

44:58

And I had lost money that our family could use for the mortgage and the nanny and college funds. I couldn't really see my way forward. The worst part was that I didn't know why I failed. I think it's 1 thing to make a wrong decision or a wrong turn, but I think it's another thing to not learn from it.

S1

Speaker 1

45:17

And so where do you go when you need to figure something out? The internet. I started reading everything I could about how to start a startup, or how do successful startups do this. And I came across a whole slew of Paul Graham's essays and how to start a startup from YC.

S1

Speaker 1

45:37

And I devoured everything, and I started to realize just some of the ways that I might have been thinking about this in a little bit of the wrong way. Instead of following your passion, you know, this whole concept of living in the future and building what's missing. This whole idea of talking to your users instead of other folks and just building using that to build your product. And then, I love this 1, but just finding the hundred people that really loved what you were doing versus focusing on everybody else that were out there.

S1

Speaker 1

46:07

And then the simplest but hardest 1, I think, was just grow 10%, every single week, just grow. Based on this, I thought, you know what, this is the blueprint that I've been missing the whole time and I wanted to try again. By this time, I'd come to the Female Founder Conference and I was so inspired and I decided I needed to try again. So I started talking to parents, parents that had bought some of our boxes, parents that were just in the neighborhood.

S1

Speaker 1

46:36

I talked to them and I asked them, if papaya in post, if this box is not what you need and it's not solving a big problem, then what are some of the big problems in your life? I think you'll find if you've ever worked on a product that people just don't really need you start you have this real intense drive to then work on something that everybody needs and so The topic just kept on coming back to child care And I couldn't believe it because I mean, I lived that. With 2 careers and 2 kids and no family in town, like my husband and I would just wake up every morning and hope we didn't have to do the calendar shuffle. You know the thing where your nanny texts at 7 a.m.

S1

Speaker 1

47:16

Says I'm sick and then you and your husband pull out your phones and say okay if I can move this meeting I'll take the morning and you can cancel that and I'll take the afternoon. And it sucked. And the fact that so many of us were doing this for me was just, it just caught my curiosity. And I wanted to figure out what would it take to fix it.

S1

Speaker 1

47:35

And sure, this is 1 of the most crowded categories you can find out there. And so I had a lot of people saying, are you sure this is what you want to be looking into? But for me, it was that if it was solved, if all these people were doing it, then we wouldn't have such pain over here. And as I started talking to different people, I realized that the thing that they didn't need was a parent connecting to a sitter.

S1

Speaker 1

47:57

The thing that wasn't being said was that we were all missing our village. Everyone says it takes a village to raise a child. But with all of us moving around for our careers and our jobs, we're all missing our village. And so I thought, well, how do you recreate something so human and so emotional as village with something so rational as data and code?

S1

Speaker 1

48:22

Well, I found my undergraduate degree in chemistry coming back to me and I broke it down into a tidy equation. I thought, if village is a function of trust, someone you trust, is a fit for your family, and is available when you need them to be, then could I approximate it with something that provides vetting, a matching algorithm of some sort, and then a scheduling mechanism? It started to come all together in my head, and I could see how this could be a beautiful app. There's only 1 problem.

S1

Speaker 1

48:54

I wasn't then, and I'm not now, a programmer. And I really struggled. For weeks, I tried to figure out, how can I build this without a programmer? I'd spent the $20,000 that I had devoted to startups, and I had about $200 left in my business bank account.

S1

Speaker 1

49:13

Not enough, by the way, to pay a programmer to build you an app. And so I was about to give up because, I mean, what are you supposed to do? And in the dark of putting my five-month-old to sleep, you know, it takes a long time, there's a lot of time to think, It came to me, SMS. Why couldn't I use SMS?

S1

Speaker 1

49:35

Because parents and sitters are already using texting, and so why couldn't I use that to approximate the experience? So I sat down, and I wrote out the whole flow. And I tried to figure out if I could somehow approximate the experience using already available tools and tools that were either free or had free four-week trial periods so I could stretch my $200 for just a four-week test to see if I was onto something. So this is my tech stack.

S1

Speaker 1

50:06

I had a landing page on Squarespace. Sign-ups and feedbacks and work forms were done through Typeform. Stripe handled the payments. I did scheduling via Google Calendar.

S1

Speaker 1

50:16

Communication with SMS and my database was Excel. So I could see how all of this was gonna come together. I got to work finding and vetting 3 University of Washington students. And I found 15 families in my local neighborhood on a posting board that was just posted about needing childcare.

S1

Speaker 1

50:33

I sent them an email and I just said, hey, I know you need childcare. I've got these 3 amazing people. If you need someone this week, just text this phone number. And I gave them my personal phone number.

S1

Speaker 1

50:46

That day, I got my first booking. And that week, I got my first 4. Every single week I just set the goal to see if I could just grow 10 or 20%. Well that next week instead of just 5, I hit 6.

S1

Speaker 1

51:01

Week after 7, the week after 10, I was blowing past these 10, 20% a week goals. And I can't tell you how different that felt versus my first startup and the whole time I was trying to push this boulder up the hill. And this 1, it was just, parents were telling other parents, and it wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it just felt different. The end of the 4 weeks, as luck would have it, YC was accepting applications for their Summer 15 batch.

S1

Speaker 1

51:29

And So I thought, what the hell, I'm going to apply. Because I knew I was early. I knew I didn't have a co-founder and a team, but I also knew that I was building something that people wanted. So I applied.

S1

Speaker 1

51:45

And truth be told, I didn't put a lot of hope into it. Because I'd applied for my first startup, I'd spent weeks writing the perfect application, I didn't even get an interview. I'd also heard that YC was the place for that 23-year-old white programmer. Which clearly, I'm not.

S1

Speaker 1

52:06

But still, I applied, because I believed in the truths that I had read in some of those essays. So imagine my shock when I got invited down for an interview. I excitedly got all ready, and went down for my 10-minute chance, and I sold my heart out to Kat, Kevin, and Aaron. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, I had this email waiting for me in my inbox.

S1

Speaker 1

52:32

And I'd be lying if I didn't say I was disappointed. But the next day I woke up and I decided to focus on that last paragraph, the 1 that said, we would love to see you reapply next batch. And I focused on 2 things. 1, they thought I was onto something, and that if I just showed more growth and brought a team on, that I could reapply.

S1

Speaker 1

52:54

And the second thing was, regardless of what YC thought or said, I had a growing company and I had customers to serve. So I got to work. I pretended as if I got into YC anyways. And I set myself the goal to just grow by 10 to 20% every single week for that whole summer.

S1

Speaker 1

53:15

Parents would text my phone number and ask me, you know, hey, is someone available tomorrow from noon to 4? I would consult my high-tech day planner, and I'd see who's available, and I'd text the sitter, and then I'd text the parent back. And if you want to know what my first product looked like, I'm almost embarrassed to show this, but if you can see in the left-hand margin, the numbers that are circled, that was my goal. So every single time I hit the goal, and in the boxes were all the bookings.

S1

Speaker 1

53:48

I don't remember what the color coding was now. This was crazy. But this was all I needed to get this up and off the ground. And then I started to outgrow the day planner.

S1

Speaker 1

54:00

Shocking, I know. And so I moved on to Excel. Again, it was super simple and it was just enough to get the job done. By now I knew that we were continuing to grow and I knew that I had to find that technical partner to help me build this.

S1

Speaker 1

54:19

But it's not as easy as it might sound, and I'm sure there's some of you out there that are struggling with the same thing about how to find that perfect co-founder. There's a reason that YC says not to start working with someone that you've just met. You're trying to find someone that is a good compliment for you and is a good fit with your personality. Somebody has the right experience and can have a passion for the mission.

S1

Speaker 1

54:40

And then finally can be a partner in the trenches through the ups and downs. It's a pretty tall order. So I talked to everyone. I asked for every single intro to any engineer.

S1

Speaker 1

54:50

I talked to tens, hundreds of people, and still nothing. By now it was about August, and I was exceeding my ability to just do all this on my own. And the crazy ironic thing was, I was about to grow my company to death. I couldn't handle anymore.

S1

Speaker 1

55:09

And so I doubled down, and I kept on asking people for more intros. Finally, through a friend of a friend of a friend, I finally met Richard. And when I met him, what struck me was that our backgrounds were really different. But the thing that connected us was that we had both spent our career in pursuing the things that made us curious.

S1

Speaker 1

55:33

He'd done really interesting but different things. He'd worked on a social media company, a dating app, and a Bitcoin gambling company, which I know what you're thinking is the perfect match for my wholesome family company. But when I started talking to him, there was just a fit. It was just easy.

S1

Speaker 1

55:51

We would just connect on what the vision was and how this could all be built. And it wasn't until later that I actually realized his experience was just perfect. What is Poppy if not building community? And there's the matching algorithm involved, and we're definitely taking payments.

S1

Speaker 1

56:06

But in those early days, it was really just a leap of faith, and all of this is just a leap of faith. So we decided to just work together for 6 weeks, just like a project, and see how it would go. He built the first version of our platform in a way that was just more nuanced and more sophisticated than I could have even imagined. And in that, I found a partner to be able to build Poppy.

S1

Speaker 1

56:34

In October, we decided to make it official. We even hired our first employee, Sarah. She actually comes from the child care industry. And so she was tasked with the most important part of our company, which is finding those really amazing caregivers, where they are, what kind of experience they have, what kind of vetting needs to be done.

S1

Speaker 1

56:56

So she came on and joined the team. I'd always thought of Hoppy as sort of a three-part thing. There's a parent side, there's a sitter side, and then there's the tech that connects it between it. We now had the team.

S1

Speaker 1

57:11

Finally, I felt like we were getting some momentum. We had the team, we had the ability to build the platform. Now, though, we didn't have any money. I couldn't believe I was in this position again.

S1

Speaker 1

57:25

This time we had payroll and we had just the regular expenses of a growing company and we needed cash. As luck would have it, YC's Winter 16 application was just open. And so we reapplied. And this time, the application basically wrote itself.

S1

Speaker 1

57:42

I mean, we had done everything that YC had asked us to do. And more than that, we just pretended as if we had done YC. And we just continued to grow. We had even more users that loved what we were doing.

S1

Speaker 1

57:53

And we had the team. So we were so excited when we, again, got the chance to interview. Richard and I practiced all the questions and we made our way down to Mountain View. I knew that the hardest part of our application was the fact that we had only worked together for 3 months.

S1

Speaker 1

58:11

So I was prepared for those questions. What I wasn't prepared for though, was that as we were walking in to register for the interviews, in behind us walked the founders of our key competition. I walked into the restroom to just gather myself, And I thought we had just come too far to just quit. And I thought if I was gonna go down, I was gonna go down swinging.

S1

Speaker 1

58:42

So. So we got in there and we just told the partners about Poppy, about what we were building, about what we saw, about our growth, about how our users just loved what we were building and needed it, and then about our team and how we were the perfect people to build this. We walked out, and I didn't know how it was going to go, but I knew that we had given it our all. I hopped on a plane because I had to get back, and I checked my email like a lunatic, just waiting for that inevitable rejection email.

S1

Speaker 1

59:21

By the time I got home, it was just gotten time for bedtime, and I figured, you know what, what will be will be, and I got ready to just get my kids ready with their pajamas, and I heard the phone ring. YC wanted to fund us. I didn't really hear the rest, but it was a stay of execution. I knew that we had bought the time to be able to figure out the next thing.

S1

Speaker 1

59:48

And as luck and hard work would have it, a seed VC firm in Seattle also decided to fund us. So the week before heading into YC, that was the bank balance in my business banking account.