Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Lucy Hall is the Co-Founder of LOANHOOD, an online fashion rental platform and community that allows users to loan inclusive, diverse, and creative styles for an affordable price. Chad talks with Lucy about being a peer-to-peer fashion rental app, building a community, and reducing the impacts of the fashion industry on the planet and people by helping to create a sustainable future. LOANHOOD Follow LOANHOOD on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Follow Lucy on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Lucy Hall, the Co-Founder of LOANHOOD, who are changing the face of fashion. Lucy, thank you so much for joining me. LUCY: Thank you so much for having me, Chad. CHAD: How are some of the ways that LOANHOOD is changing the face of fashion? LUCY: So we're starting off with a peer-to-peer fashion rental app, which we just launched ten days ago now. CHAD: Congratulations on the launch. LUCY: It's been a long time in the making. And, like I said, we're starting with a fashion rental app. But there are so many different ways that we want to change the face of fashion. It definitely needs a facelift. CHAD: What caused you to start with the rental platform? LUCY: It was something that we were really passionate about. So my co-founders and I actually worked in the fashion industry for the majority of our careers. So we could see first-hand how it was changing, how it's developing. And sustainability started coming into our lives, and we could see that things had to change. And we know that the fashion industry is quite archaic. Big fashion businesses are like these huge ships. It's so hard for them to change their course and to actually implement sustainability into their supply chains or their values. And we knew that we could do it quicker and better and faster than them. So we started testing the idea of circular fashion by doing clothes swaps which is a kind of an entry-level way to circulate fashion for free or relatively cheaply. And we started getting this amazing feedback from people like, "Oh, we would love to do this again. And have you thought about monetizing it?" And, of course, that was our...to get to scale, we knew that we had to monetize this sharing of clothes. And that's how our peer-to-peer fashion rental app grew and was born. CHAD: That's great. So you have two co-founders. LUCY: I do. CHAD: Jade and Jen. Were the three of you working together at the time? LUCY: Funny story, Jade and I are actually best friends. And Jade was my model back in the day. So Jade has been a fashion model for 12-plus years. And she was on Britain's Next Top Model. And I was a model agent. She came into my agency as one of the runner-uppers, and we forged a lifelong friendship from there. And we've both been passionate about fashion. And then, as I said, our career paths, we could see the detrimental effect of the planet. And Jade decided to go back to university and start studying. She did her master's in fashion futures at London College of Fashion. And that's where she started seeing sustainability. And the idea of a peer-to-peer rental came from that course. She was studying the future of fashion, and she knew that this was the only way we can move forward. And Jen was a friend of Jade and is a graphic designer by trade and is an amazing brand builder and amazing designer. So we were asking her for some advice. And she came on as a co-founder at the beginning because she just knew this was the right path for her. CHAD: You started with these swaps. Were you doing the swaps as friends because you felt it was the right thing to do? Or did you have an eye towards this could be something more? LUCY: Well, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to do something big. We knew we'd got to a certain point in our careers where we were like, right, let's use our skills to really make a change. But we were also working, and we all had jobs, so we were kind of doing it as a side hustle, just testing the idea and going, "Oh yeah, we'll do this." And then it started picking up, and we got a contract with a local council. And we were like, wow, people are really interested in this. Let's keep going, and then the pandemic hit. CHAD: How did the pandemic affect you? LUCY: [chuckles] Well, as you can imagine, people weren't really doing clothes swaps or renting or even thinking about those things at the beginning of the pandemic anyhow. So we kind of just put it on hold and did what everyone did in the pandemic, hunkered down. And we started learning as much as we could about the circular economy, about sharing economy, trust economy, marketing, product, really teaching ourselves from the bottom up what it takes to make a global brand. So we were quite lucky in the respect that we had that time away to really hone our skills and focus on what we wanted in the long term. So post-pandemic, when we came out of the lockdowns, although there were multiple back and forth, as you know, it was definitely a stop-start for us, but we knew that it actually...it just allowed us that time to really focus our minds on what we wanted and a long-term plan, not just like, oh, let's try this out. We know what we want for the next 5 to 10 years, basically. CHAD: At what point did you decide, okay, we have to make an app? LUCY: It was a difficult one because we thought Shopify, Sharetribe there are all these amazing platforms. You can just get a business at the click of your fingers. However, for peer-to-peer fashion rental, it's a much more complex model. Even Sharetribe, which is supposed to be for those kinds of models it's not as detailed as we needed it to be. So we tried to build a website from scratch. And, again, we just knew that we're very much focused on Gen Z. And when we were talking to our audience, we knew that they wanted an app. So we just scrapped it and said let's just go for it. But having no technical background was a real difficult decision for us because we had no funding. We'd all just left our jobs. The pandemic had happened, so we didn't have any savings really. So we had some money from the clothes swaps. And we did a rewards-based Crowdfunder, and we raised £14,000 from friends and family in our community that were buying free rentals for the future and just believed in the mission that we were on. And we were able to get that £14,000 and put it into the start of building an app. And as you're aware, apps cost a lot of money. CHAD: [laughs] LUCY: We didn't get that far. And we learned a lot of lessons with the build because we tried to project manage it ourselves. Having no technical background, that was tricky. And we offshored it to a team in India who were lovely and amazing but not as skilled as we needed them to be. Because we had no technical background, we really needed somebody to lead that for us. So we had a starting point, but we knew that we had to actually get a technical lead on board pretty soon. And we were lucky enough to find a partner in a company called ON, who are based in the UK. And with them on board, they led the tech from there on. CHAD: Continuing to work with that team in India, or did they actually provide the entire team at that point? LUCY: We switched to another offshore team because it costs so much money here in the UK. CHAD: So when was this all happening? LUCY: Last year, mainly. 2021. CHAD: To give folks an idea, you make the decision to start building an app. You start doing that in 2021. You just launched. But your business is more than just the app. Were you right up to the wire with the app being ready? LUCY: Like you said, we're building a community. And what we learned from the pandemic is that you can't rely on one part of your business to help you succeed. You need multiple things. And what we're passionate about more than anything is community. And what we found with the fashion industry is that it can be quite elitist. And if you want to work in the fashion industry, you have to move to London or New York or Paris, and you have to probably know somebody in the fashion industry, and we wanted to change that. We wanted you to be able to start your own fashion journey wherever you are based. And what we also saw was that all this money that people were spending on fashion was going to big fashion businesses and to probably one guy at the top of that chain, whereas, with peer-to-peer rental, you can actually circulate that money within communities. You're lifting communities up so they can create their own sustainable fashion future. So what was really important to us was to have community as one of our main pillars going forward. CHAD: And how have you gone about building that community? LUCY: Organically so far, which has been really nice. And again, the events that we do have been part of that. But to scale, we really need to start building out ambassador programs, referral systems that can help us hit those kinds of network effects. CHAD: So I know you're only in the UK. LUCY: Correct. CHAD: What are the limiting factors to expansion beyond the UK? LUCY: Money, obviously. CHAD: [laughs] Okay. LUCY: We’re on a funding journey at the moment, and that's a ride for sure. So we kind of use the Depop playbook. Do you know Depop? You're probably over 25, so that's probably why you don't know it. CHAD: [laughs] Yes. LUCY: A third of 16 to 25-year-olds are on Depop in the UK. It's the 10th most-searched-for resale platform in the U.S. And they started off in the UK, and they organically grew into the U.S., which is nuts. We probably won't do that, of course, but we plan to go to the U.S. potentially next. But it depends on investment, on what our audience is saying, where they're based. What we find with our audiences, the universities that we partner with we have a lot of international students. So they're taking that idea back to their hometowns, which is really interesting. But on a tech front, going into the U.S. is easier because it's an English-speaking country. Going into Europe is a bit more complex because you have lots of different languages, although you have one single currency, which is helpful. CHAD: Since your model is peer-to-peer, individuals are sending the rented item directly to the person who's renting it, right? LUCY: That's correct, yeah. CHAD: And so I suppose one potential barrier is you don't need to be able to receive centrally or to handle things in the United States. But you need enough people in the U.S. to make it worthwhile for individuals to be sending each other things to have enough rentals and activity. LUCY: Always, the problem with the marketplace is the cold start problem. There is a great book by Andrew Chen called The Cold Start Problem. And we really need to build both the supply side, which we call the loaner, and the demand side, which we call the borrower. So we have been working really hard in the UK to get as many of the supply side on board because we know the people that we want to be on the platform, so emerging designers, young makers, and creators. And because we have our fashion backgrounds, we can identify those people quite quickly. And we've done things that are totally not scalable, like messaging them on Instagram and scouting people in the streets. But as a small startup, you kind of have to do those scrappy things as well just to kind of build the supply side. CHAD: Right. And I think that's why so many marketplaces end up focusing on particular geographies even if they could expand because that focus helps you do those unscalable things that you need to do in the early days to bootstrap that community that you need for the marketplace. It hadn't occurred to me until you just said it that I've been thinking that this would totally be individuals, but for an emerging fashion designer to be on your community offering up their clothing for rental, that hadn't even occurred to me as a possibility. LUCY: Something that we're passionate about, especially post-pandemic, a lot of young people that are either at university and didn't get the real university experience had to make some extra money started these side hustles of teaching themselves to crochet or teaching themselves to knit. And now they have these amazing pieces, and they're open to renting them out as well as doing their retail side of it. And what we found from the resale people, so the Depopers or people on Vinted, was that they'd get this kind of seller's remorse. So they'd upload the item, take amazing pictures, and they'd sell it once. But with rental, you upload it, and you can rent it out over and over and over again. And you still get to keep it and wear it yourself, so a bit of a no-brainer. CHAD: Yeah. So you went on the journey of creating the app, creating the community. You've just launched. So are you actively fundraising? LUCY: We are actively fundraising. We're just closing our pre-seed round. And we were very lucky to have an incredible lead investor come on board. He just got the idea instantly. What we found difficult is being female founders who don't have tech backgrounds; it's definitely a couple of negatives against us. [laughs] But we're going to use it to our advantage, and the people that are on the journey with us now 100% are behind us and believe in what we're doing. Because we're an impact business as well as we want to have profit alongside people and planet, that's what's important to us to make impact socially, environmentally, and through the industry. So the next step of our fundraising journey will be a crowdfund, an equity-based crowdfund. So we did the rewards-based crowdfunder last year. This year, it's going to be equity-based because we really believe that we're building this platform for our community, our audience. So they should be able to invest in us and come on that journey with us. And hopefully, the business grows to huge proportions, and that they can get some money back out of that later in their lives. CHAD: Are you going to be using a platform to do that? LUCY: We are undecided, although I'm leaning over to between one and another. There are only two platforms really in the UK, so Seedrs and Crowdcube. And I've spoken to some other founders that have done both platforms. And I've spoken to both the companies. I've looked at articles trying to find which one's the best fit for us. One interesting thing that we had with the Crowdfunder was we were deciding between Kickstarter and Crowdfunder UK. And Kickstarter is very much more focused on men, more sports, definitely a male demographic, so that's why we went with Crowdfunder. With Seedrs and Crowdcube, they don't have that; it's a very equal split. So it's just on the feedback that we've had from other people that have used those platforms. So I'm leaning towards one, but I won't say yet because I haven't fully decided. CHAD: So you're only allowed to do that with people in the UK? LUCY: I think it can be global, actually. CHAD: Are you planning on having it be global? LUCY: We have friends and family all across the world. I spoke to somebody today in Lithuania. I spoke to somebody the other day in Australia. I speak to people in the U.S. all the time that are like, "When are you coming to us?" [chuckles] CHAD: Yeah, that'll be interesting; the fact that you're able to do the equity crowdfund anywhere, but people won't be able to actually use the product right away. You know, it's sort of a catch-22; you've got to have one before you can have the other. And so, hopefully, people go along on the journey. LUCY: Chicken and the egg. We need the money to build the tech, to build the audience. But we need the audience and the tech to show the investors that we've got engagement and traction. And yeah, there's always something. I think we're doing pretty good. MID-ROLL AD: As life moves online, brick-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. CHAD: You mentioned that your three female founders have faced some bias, it sounds like, especially in talking with potential investors and seeking to grow your community. How has that been for you? LUCY: You know, I don't want to put it down to being a female founder. I actually think the statistics tell us that, unfortunately. But I think what's the problem is that most of the people that I speak to in investment, either VCs or angels are guys, middle-aged guys between, say, late 30s to the 60s, and they are investing in businesses that they get. They don't generally get a peer-to-peer fashion rental app for Gen Z. They're like, "Oh, they're going to want to ship things to each other, and like, what about the packaging?" And they've never heard of Depop. It just got bought by Etsy for $1.62 billion. It's a huge industry, and rental is just an evolution of resale. And they're like, "Oh, okay, kind of get it," but they don't really. We have to hand-hold them a lot through the pitch deck and get them excited. But that's, the problem is that we don't have enough women in the investment space or ex-founders. I know in the U.S., it's a lot different. They have a lot more ex-founders investing, especially angel investors, which is great because they get the journey. Whereas if you have somebody with a financial services background, all they care about is the math of it. And it's like, you know what? Startups don't always just succeed on the math; it's the vision, it's the idea, it's the network effects, it's the audience. There are so many different things at play here. And if you've never started a business yourself, you just don't get that. CHAD: There's a lot that goes into creating a company. And it may not be the fact that your female founders directly contribute to it but in an environment where they're looking for a reason not to invest. LUCY: Exactly. CHAD: That bias can creep into all of the excuses or differences that someone might point to and say, "Oh, this isn't going to work," or "I don't get this." LUCY: 100%. If you've got a good business idea and you've got a strong pitch deck and a strong financial model, then that business will do well, for sure. However, there are so many other factors at play. And when there are so many great businesses competing against one another, they unbiasedly go with one over the other. CHAD: So you also mentioned you have another excuse that people might use is you just don't have a technical founder on the founding team. LUCY: That's definitely a struggle. We will be bringing in a CTO later in the year, which will be really exciting because it's definitely the missing piece to the puzzle. We have domain expertise in fashion. We have that side of it down. But yeah, the technical side of things, I think all the founders that I have spoken to that do have a CTO in the founding team or even have brought their technical team in-house just say it's a game changer. When somebody is invested in your company, and they're using the platform every single day, they can see the bugs. I mean, Chaz from Fat Llama, which is a great rental app, said that his developers would pull out a laptop in the pub and be like, "Oh, I just saw a bug. Let me quickly fix it." I mean, wow, that would be insane. Our developers finish at a certain time, and that's it; they're gone. So if we have a problem on an evening or even because they are in India they have a different time, we can't get hold of them. It's so frustrating. CHAD: So when you start to build a team, will you be doing it based in the UK? LUCY: Or based in Europe, at least. I think another thing to come out of the pandemic is this remote work, and I think that's great. I think there's so much talent across Europe, across the world. But for the timezone issue, I think Europe is definitely a better fit for us because we don't want to be having the same issues that we're having now with the time differences with India. But yeah, there's so much talent across the whole of Europe. CHAD: Yeah, that's what we do at thoughtbot. We are all throughout the Americas, all throughout Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We've built our team. But we're grouped in by timezone. So people work with clients and with each other. And there, it's based on the timezone that they're in. And so that does make a big difference around how communication can work and how a part of the team you're able to feel because you're online at the same time as each other. LUCY: Yeah. Definitely, that's a great show. CHAD: But I definitely recommend casting as wide as possible. It definitely allows you to hire the best person for the job. LUCY: Yeah, I think we need to find somebody that's passionate about the mission and who understands working with three co-founders that don't have a tech background that we probably do need a little bit more hand-holding than another founder would. We're learning so much as we go. Hopefully, we'll be coders one day. [laughter] CHAD: I actually don't think that. Some people might say, "Oh, you really should learn to code yourself." And I think that that does a disservice to what you are bringing to the table with your domain expertise and with your ability to really understand the industry and know what needs to happen from a business perspective. LUCY: Yeah, I would totally agree. You can't be an expert in every part of the field. You can't be an accountant; you can't be a CTO. You need to be good at exactly what you do. And I'm the CEO, so I have an overview of everything. And that's what I love is kind of have a little finger on each little project that's going on and really get an understanding of across the board. But you need those people that are drilling into, like, we have my co-founder, Jen, who's a graphic designer by trade, but she's our Chief Creative Officer. And she really drills down into the creative side of things. And she knows what she's talking about. And she is the expert in that, and that's so valuable. CHAD: And I think that that's the important thing to founders to do early on is to really understand what their product and business are. You don't necessarily need to learn how to code. But I do think it's a mistake when early founders start stepping away from the product too early. LUCY: Yeah, you need to be super close to the product. And you need good communication across all different divisions. So marketing and product have to talk to each other all the time, so we can tell our audience what's happening in the product, and then we can build the features that we need to grow from the marketing side of things. It's all about communication. And it's so hard as a startup because there are so many different things going on and so many people pulling you from left to right. There are metrics to hit; there are bills to pay, there's audience, the community to keep happy. And it's like, oh, you can't drop the ball on anything. You really have to just do as much as you can. But if you communicate to each of those stakeholders, we're doing our best. I mean, we had a mail-out the other day that said this is a business built by hands. It's built by people. I know we're a tech company, but there are real developers there hammering on their laptops. We're all here writing the copy and doing everything that we can to make this the most successful business so we can make real impact on the climate change and communities. CHAD: I want to talk about that impact, but before we do, I'm curious, so you're all in the same general London area? LUCY: No, we're not, actually. So Jade and Jen are based in London. And I actually moved out of London a couple of years ago, and I live in New York in the north of England. CHAD: Oh, okay. LUCY: See, definitely a different dynamic. And another reason why I'm passionate about bringing the fashion industry outside of London is because I travel up and down all the time, and I'm lucky it's like an hour 50 on the train. But that becomes expensive, and it's difficult to travel all the time. CHAD: So, are you meeting in person with each other? LUCY: We try. I just saw the girls last week. I'm seeing them again at the weekend. We speak every single day on Slack, WhatsApp. We have weekly calls, and we jump on pretty much video calls to each other every day. And that's, again, another thing from the pandemic that's been a game changer. Because when I actually left, it was just before the pandemic. We were like, oh my God, how is this going to work? But I knew that it was the right decision for me. And then the pandemic hit, and everyone was on video calls. And we were like, oh, this is so easy. This is great. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah, it really opened that up to everyone's expectations. LUCY: Yeah, and I think it's great. I think it's much more flexible. And we will get an office for sure. But I would love to have an office here and an office in London so we can have teams across the nation. Because I think we don't all have to go and live in a capital city to get the same out of the fashion industry. CHAD: Yeah. So let's talk about sustainability, the environment, and climate change. I am somewhat aware that an enormous amount of resources goes into creating new items of clothing. LUCY: It's crazy. So the fashion industry accounts for 10% of the global greenhouse gas emissions at the moment. And if nothing changes by 2050, it will use a quarter of the world's carbon budget. It is insane, and it affects not only the planet but people. The garment workers are paid nothing. They're treated badly. And this is all part of the supply chains of fashion businesses. And like I said, when I started in the fashion industry, e-commerce really was only just starting, and Jade, who is the model, was working for Asos, which is a big fashion brand and big fast fashion brand. So when she started working for them, she was shooting like 10-15 items, 20 items a day, and when she left, so five years later, they were shooting like 70 items per day. They were just churning out more and more fashion, more options. And you can imagine most of the clothes are made...well, we have this whole disconnect about clothes. So I actually had a restaurant for three years in between my fashion career. And that's where I found sustainability because you have that connection with food. And you know that eating organic or eating locally and seasonally is better for you and better for the planet. But nobody thinks that your clothes come from the ground. They're made from plants. Or if they're not made from plants, they're made from oil. It's nuts that people don't have as much education around it. And that's partly because the fashion industry doesn't want people to know, and it's a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's a very opaque industry. We went to one university, and they said that they thought all clothes were made from machines. They had no idea that there was cotton and linen. And so, like, wow, this is crazy. CHAD: So given that it's the magnitude of the size of the problem but also the industry, there are two ways of looking at that, I'm sure, one is the potential for your impact is huge. The other is how do you get started? How can we have an impact there? So how are you tackling that? LUCY: I get asked a lot by people, like, how can I start my sustainability journey? I feel so much pressure to do things. I should be vegan, or I'm not recycling enough. I got a plastic bag, oh, I feel terrible. And it's like we are all on a journey. And you just have to start one day at a time and just be more conscious. So whether that's instead of buying one dress for a wedding that you are probably just going to stick in your wardrobe, why don't you rent it? Try one of the platforms that are out there, and you can rent a really cool dress, and that's probably someone else is going to rent it, and someone else is going to rent it. And by prolonging the life of an item, you can save so much energy and water. And those small things that we can each do will make a huge impact globally. There's a lot of mindset shifting and behavioral change that needs to come with rental. As we saw with Airbnb when they started, people were like, "Oh God, I don't want someone sleeping in my bed," and now I Airbnb in my house all the time. And it's a great source of secondary income, especially for a startup founder [chuckles] but also giving people the opportunity to have these experiences in small communities, which I love. And that's what we want to see with fashion is that people will start being more conscious. And how LOANHOOD is different to other more traditional rental systems is it's much more affordable. And it's much more accessible because you can meet in person. So how we see it growing is these hyperlocal communities where you can meet people in person, a bit like Facebook Marketplace. They've done super well in more of the suburban areas. You can drop off your dress to somebody around the corner. So you're reducing the cost of delivery and reducing the emissions by meeting in person. So those hyperlocal communities will be really important in helping people adopt this behavior. CHAD: Are you worried from a business perspective that if it's just renting to someone around the corner that they might not want to do it through LOANHOOD? LUCY: I think people will still do it through the platform because of the added value that we give, you know, rental protection. I could go and borrow people's clothes like my friends in the area. I wouldn't do that. I might do it once or twice. I think if it's not somebody that you're really friendly with, then you would definitely do it through the platform. CHAD: Yeah. And by rental protection, you mean if something gets damaged or that kind of thing, it's protected. LUCY: We don't have full insurance yet because, again, the sharing economy is a new economy. And, of course, insurers are very old school. And it's hard for them to grasp the fact that there's a new industry here, but that is changing. And as soon as we have more data, we'll be able to get full insurance for these items. But right now, we do it in-house and protect items, minor damage, or repairs. And if it isn't returned or damaged beyond repair by the person that's renting it, then they have to cover the retail price of it. CHAD: Yeah, makes sense. What's beyond rental platform in terms of this is where you decided to start, but your goal is to change the face of fashion? What's beyond? LUCY: There are lots of different verticals that we can do within rental or in fashion. So we're really passionate about digital fashion. Jade, my business partner, is actually doing her Ph.D. in digital transformation in the metaverse. So how can we bring sustainability and ethical practices into the metaverse with fashion is something that we're really passionate about and something that we're exploring, renting different things so femtech, or skiwear, activewear, all those kind of things and then just creating a space for our community to grow creatively. So entrepreneurship is really important to us as well, and giving people the opportunity to be...especially Gen Z they have this way that's called pay to create. So they're passionate about making money out of things that they can do themselves, whether that's creating content, renting out the things they own, upcycling. We want to expand on that and give them the tools to actually create their own career paths. You don't have to go down the traditional university routes. We see a world where there's a LOANHOOD campus where you can come and learn how to be content creators or all sorts of different things. It's a really exciting time. And our 10-year plan keeps getting more bigger and bigger. And we're like, oh God, it's just exciting. CHAD: Yet do you worry about spreading yourself too thin and compromising on the early steps? LUCY: We always come back to the point of why we're doing this and who we're doing this for because what's the point? Otherwise, we're doing this to reduce impacts of the fashion industry on the planet and people. And we are doing this for our community and to give them the options and give them the power back. As we've seen with governments around the world, people in leadership roles are not doing enough, and we can't rely on them. So if we want to create our own sustainable future, we have to do it ourselves. And we want to give people the tools to do that. CHAD: Well, I wish you the best of luck in that. I'm very confident that you're going to have the impact you're looking for along the way, and I wish you the best in that. Thank you for stopping by and sharing with us. I really appreciate it. LUCY: Thank you so much for having me. It was great to chat too. CHAD: If folks want to find out more or get in touch with you or follow along, where are all the different places that they can do that? LUCY: Check out our website, loanhood.com. If you are a founder and you want to talk about funding or building a product, marketing, you can email me lucy (L-U-C-Y) at lucy@loanhood.com. And we are on Instagram and TikTok @loanhood. CHAD: Wonderful. You can subscribe to the show and find notes which include a link to everything that Lucy just mentioned along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. 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Lenore Champagne Beirne is Founder and Managing Partner at Bright Ventures, a groundbreaking space for transformation in people, companies, and industries with coaching, capital, and community. Chad talks with Lenore about being at the intersection of all three of those services, providing support for diverse entrepreneurs, and staying intentional about the kind of company and culture they're creating. Bright Ventures Follow Bright Ventures on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, or LinkedIn. Follow Lenore on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Lenore Champagne Beirne, Founder and Managing Partner at Bright Ventures, a groundbreaking space for transformation in people, companies, and industries with coaching, capital, and community. Lenore, thank you so much for joining me. LENORE: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Chad. CHAD: Bright Ventures, I love the three things: coaching, capital, and community. Would you say at the core you are a venture capital firm? Or is it really the intersection of all three of those services? LENORE: It is truly the intersection of all three of those services. In fact, I started Bright Ventures because of a gap that I saw in the capital markets. But the first thing that we came to market with was coaching. And we learned so much from coaching diverse entrepreneurs and investors, and operators that we saw ways to add value to those groups and ultimately built the accelerator and venture capital fund and a number of other programs. CHAD: Like most companies, I think what you have is relatively unique. Most companies are a coaching company or a venture capital fund. Do you get pushback, or are there concerns about doing too much? LENORE: We've heard that question, although I don't know that the same question would be posed, at least in the same way, to a man, especially if it were a White man. But that aside, the reason we get the question is because I personally have led the launch of each new phase of the company. And what has really given our investors and also our partners comfort is that as we've expanded, we've also massively expanded the leadership and the skill set of the Bright Ventures team. So I would say at our heart, we are a transformation company. We make inclusive innovation possible. We define that as building a future that works for all of us together. We make that possible. And we know that because that's a huge, gnarly, complex, nuanced issue, you have to have a multipronged solution. And so, for us, the combination of individual and systems transformation through coaching, community where we can practice and learn, and capital that actually shifts how businesses can operate is the right set of interventions. CHAD: So one of the things venture capitalists often give feedback to their clients about is either doing too much or mixing business models. So like, oh, you shouldn't do consulting because what you have is a product company. They are different revenue streams, and different ways of working, and different ways of generating money. How do you balance those different business models that are within your organization? LENORE: Well, I think, as I mentioned, the business models that we have inside of Bright Ventures are intended to solve the same really big problem in different ways through different angles. So what we have found is that there are a lot of early-stage ventures that would benefit from the kind of coaching that we offer. But coaching is typically a really high-dollar item, only available to kind of an exclusive few. And so, it became clear to us that building a community with more scalable programs could meet the need of the stakeholder that we're interested in. And that has driven, time and time again, the business models that drive and organize our work at Bright Ventures. CHAD: Yeah, I realize part of what's on my mind is say you're working with a founder and you invest in that founder or a founding team and a founding company, do they no longer become a coaching client that's actually paying you money for coaching? Or do they get it for free? LENORE: Mm-hmm. So founders in our venture portfolio have access to the full suite of our services. And obviously, it's in the Bright Ventures entities' best interest to see those companies win and to give them all the resources and support that they need. You're asking these questions about business models. One thing I should clarify is that we don't have just a single business operating entity at Bright Ventures. The venture fund entity is a traditional GP LP structure that exists to invest in, yes, maybe some of the companies that we serve through our services business, but also a broad swath of companies across the U.S. at early stage. There's then a pretty straightforward consulting firm that we have that also goes by the name Bright Ventures but is a different legal and operational entity. So there's no proprietary information shared across those lines that are different management teams. What unites the Bright Ventures entities is a commitment to inclusive innovation and a set of frameworks that we have seen now proven to drive inclusive outcomes as a competitive advantage in venture. CHAD: Oh, that's awesome clarification. One of the things that we've struggled with a little bit at thoughtbot is we do a lot at thoughtbot. It's probably one of the reasons why I'm asking these questions about balancing. And sometimes, I do think, oh, it could benefit us if they were separate entities. LENORE: How have you all thought about that so far? CHAD: For the most part, what we do is we run separate P&Ls for the different business lines or the different offerings, but it's all actually one entity as long as it doesn't cross country boundaries. We have a different entity for Europe. LENORE: Got it. I asked because I'm curious because, at some point in the next couple of years, we'll probably do one more entity. And we're talking internally now about the moment that that will be the right thing to do, not yet. But good to hear that you're thinking about that as well. CHAD: Yeah. What was the part of your journey where...you mentioned you started to see this need. How did that need or seeing that need jump from that to I'm starting out; this is a real thing? LENORE: It's blurry. The lines are blurry for me, particularly as the founder of Bright, because I have been working on effectively pulling the same threads as long as I can remember, even before Bright Ventures had a name and was an entity. And so, for as long as I can remember, I've been confounded, frustrated [laughs] by and working on the inequity of access to capital and to opportunity in entrepreneurship and in many other expressions of wealth creation. I've also, for as long as I can remember, thought a lot about how people think, and how they relate to themselves, and how they relate to other people. And truly, I can remember experimenting with these ideas when I was really young, maybe even less than ten years old. I then remember experimenting with them in college and trying to create a major for myself because I was trying to understand the intersections of these questions. Officially, it was in 2014 that I launched Bright Ventures as the strategic advisory firm that I mentioned we came to market with. And that was because I had just come off of a really important career experience. I was living and working in Haiti on a program funded by the U.S. government to invest in and then provide support for entrepreneur organizations so like small businesses, social enterprises in Haiti. And I loved that work. It was super challenging, really rewarding, really interesting. But it also opened up in me this question about what entrepreneurs actually needed for support and how to support other investors and seeing potential where I saw it but that the markets might be missing it. And so, in 2014, I had enough of an idea about some of what was missing to get started. And to the point of the line or, like, okay, I'm going do this now, that's when that happened. CHAD: I've had a whole bunch of guests on who talk about issues of inclusion, and particularly access or being excluded from funding and opportunity. And I'm curious, from your perspective, what kind of support do founders who are typically excluded or underrepresented most need, especially on day one? LENORE: Well, one thing that I have found really fascinating about support for diverse entrepreneurs is that we often, as a whole, I'm speaking like we in a very big sense, tend to assume that there is a homogenous set of supports that are required. And this gets to that question about business models and how we make sure that we actually have at Bright Ventures a diversity of ways to help people. What we've learned is that diverse entrepreneurs are not a particularly homogenous bunch. And there are a couple of things that seem to be consistent for certain groups that we have worked hard to build frameworks and models for. One of those things is mindset shift and personal leadership development. That was executive coaching for us. We developed a specialty in helping people who are systematically in out-of-power positions move into in-power positions, and that was through a series of coaching frameworks and leadership frameworks that we would deliver. We also learned that in order to do that durably and sustainably, you also had to go and coach and train the people who might be excluding those entrepreneurs. So we started to develop expertise in working directly with investors and helping them see the brilliance and maybe overlooked opportunity in diverse entrepreneurs. Those were two. We also have some skill-based programming where we help people inside large organizations and also brand new ones think about how to tactically build inclusion into the way that they run their day-to-day. And we finally, of course, have some capital programs where we invest directly in diverse entrepreneurs, which we know are vastly underrepresented in the capital markets. CHAD: You use the word tactical, which I think is a really interesting one because a lot of times, especially on the show, we might talk about strategic things, which is different than tactical. So what does tactical inclusion mean to you? LENORE: So it does start with the strategy. There has to be a business model that makes inclusion possible. Otherwise, we're kind of putting a Band-Aid on a really big open wound. But if there's a business model that makes it possible to take reasonable care of your employees and leave your customers better off than they were before they met you, then tactical inclusion is things like understanding how to delegate, how to give feedback, how to hold meetings in ways that actually bring out the best in your team, and how to collect product feedback that's truly representative of the full swath of people who not only use your product today but maybe are impacted by it throughout your value chain, or might use it tomorrow if you made some innovative choices in product design and development. And so we say tactical, and we highlight that because what we have found is that much of the conversation about inclusion and certainly about diversity lives at this very theoretical level. It ends up being like an ideology, an aspiration, and we don't think that's sufficient. We think you have to actually make it how you behave. And so that tends to be where we focus both in our training and in our evaluation of inclusion in other companies. CHAD: One of the problems that we sometimes see, and we see it in our clients, too, is not everybody responds to training in the same way, particularly if it's like, watch this video. Sometimes there will be not very much participation in that at all. Or even if you're just watching it, maybe you're not giving it your full attention. What does the training that you give actually look like? LENORE: What you just said is exactly why we looked for other things to name what we do because training gets such a bad rap. CHAD: [laughs] Yeah. LENORE: But what we learned about training is, I mean, this seems so obvious, Chad, but it has to actually be a skill that the person will obviously benefit from implementing immediately. So the first thing is like, do you need to and want to and recognize the need to learn this? We only go in with training when we can see that there's general consensus that it'll provide real value, business value, personal value, cultural value in the company. The second thing is that we recognize that people's attention spans are shorter on average. And so what we do with training is make it highly experiential. We'll introduce a concept and then show you a way to practice it right away, as in, within the same 20-minute span. We also then give folks an opportunity to practice live and get feedback. And we only apply training to real-life decisions that managers or leaders are thinking about right in that moment. So for us, again, you asked about this word tactical. It really comes down to how deeply we can tie the training to the person's motivation and their ability to apply it. Mid-Roll Ad: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? 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LENORE: We do an assessment in the beginning, at Bright Ventures, we called it culture audit, to determine the readiness of a culture for the depth of work that we can bring. And we have different ways of engaging depending on where the company is today. We also ask companies to self-identify. Like, how deep are you really interested in going? What kind of outcomes are important to you? And so there's a bit of we've built our frameworks in a modular way so that we can mix and match them to the environment, the strategy, the leadership, the goals of each of our clients. CHAD: I'm curious, from an investor standpoint then, what makes pre-seed, seed companies potential when you have your investor hat on the right kind of companies for Bright Ventures? LENORE: Yeah, we're really excited about companies that have an early signal of building inclusion into the fabric of the business model. And you can usually see that based on the way that the founder is building a team. It's not always...sometimes it's so few people that it's just not enough people to really assess diversity, as is sometimes the case. But you can tell how a founder thinks about divergent opinions, about different perspectives, and about the pipeline of people that they're seeking out to build a company with. The other way that we look for inclusion in the pre-seed and seed stage is really in the business model. And again, the word tactical, like, is this product or service...who is it designed to serve? And how is it designed to leave them? Are the questions that we tend to ask. And what we have found is that if you invest for inclusion, 85% of the time, that is overlapped with investing in diverse founders, but it's not 100% of the time. And again, our lens on that is that inclusion is a behavior, not an identity. And so we're looking for any founder who's building inside of the paradigms I mentioned earlier, irrespective of demographics. And we particularly get excited; in the next ten years, we think there's a lot to be built in digital health and in FinTech, in the broadest sense, Web3 and Web2 FinTech for I think a lot of inclusive business models to emerge there. Also really excited about future of work as a place where I think inclusion will be a massive competitive advantage. CHAD: So many companies are starting remote or are fully remote. Is the training that you give or the advice you're providing in terms of tactical inclusion does it differ for in-person versus remote companies? LENORE: There's a consistent framework or set of questions that you can answer those questions in lots of ways. So if I ask the question like, how does your team get to know one another? The answer to that could be very different if your company sits together every day and actually you unwind on Fridays together. Versus if you're a fully remote company in multiple time zones, sometimes even multiple languages, the answer can be different, but we still know that the team feeling cohesive is a key ingredient for inclusion. And so we're looking for how your company does it and that your company does it, not that it does it in a certain way. So we try to help our clients see their companies as systems in the way that we do so that they can see how is the fact that your team feels cohesive related to the way your team generates new ideas or brings new products to market? And then, we trust management and leadership to design the right specific ways to have that expressed in that company. CHAD: What advice...someone who is just getting started and is just getting started out maybe has an idea, maybe it's a founding team, a team of co-founders. They're very early stage. Are there some things that you would recommend that they either do or avoid doing in order to lay a good groundwork for an inclusive team and company? LENORE: Yeah, absolutely. The building block, like the fundamental input for inclusion, is listening, and so we have done a ton of resources on how to practice listening, how to know if you are listening. But you can't build a system that dynamically includes other groups without really understanding those groups. Listening is really important. Another thing is I find that it helps people build more inclusively when they go through the exercise of seeking out opinions that really differ from their own. And beyond, I think what people typically mean when they say playing devil's advocate, really trying to understand like, why does that work? So one of the things that founders who have built inclusively have really interrogated is who their target market is. And I have found that it's really useful to go through the exercise of making it incredibly narrow, like very exclusive, so you understand your assumptions around who your target market is. And then asking yourself, what does that group, that very narrowly defined group, have in common with other groups that I've crossed off the list? Looking through the lens of what unites diverse cohorts of people tends to net new insights about how to build an inclusive company. CHAD: That's really interesting. Can you give an example? LENORE: Let's say there's a haircare company, and the founder of a haircare company really wants to build and sell shampoo for people with blue hair. Exciting, great. This founder has quit their job to build this blue haircare shampoo company. When we meet that founder, we ask them to, again, narrowly define a target market, people with blue hair, and then go through the inclusion assumption exercise of saying, well, what is it about those people with blue hair that's going to make them come and buy your product time and time and time and time again? And what is so motivating about this problem that you are willing to quit your job to build this company? What we have often found is that the founder gets to the place of saying, "Oh, it's actually not that it's blue hair. It's that the person is really proud of the color of their hair. It's a pride in hair color that has me buy this particular shampoo. And it is the sense of community and affinity with other people who have made non-traditional hair choices." Cool. That's a way bigger target market than just people with blue hair. How do we build that company? And so that's the pivot from we want a narrowly defined target market because it shows you what you already know. And then challenge your assumptions by digging even deeper and seeing how actually people with blue hair and people with orange hair might have something really interesting in common that we may have overlooked historically and might have left a lot of value on the table. CHAD: I think that's a great example. It's also an example for me of the kind of benefit that having someone external can bring to you, whether it be a coach or a mentor and even someone like yourself who will be brought in to explicitly do it. Sometimes, especially founders, have a hard time really thinking critically about what it is they're trying to build. And having an outside perspective, in my experience, can be really helpful. LENORE: Yeah, I if I could give one gift to every founder, it would be to have a coach. I think so many founders are brilliant at their business. And it is so helpful to have an external perspective because we all have blind spots. And having a person looking for your blind spots, supporting you in seeing them, and then practicing living in them, so they're no longer blind spots is, I think, a really transformative experience personally and professionally. CHAD: You've been growing Bright for several years now. As you look ahead into the future for yourself and for the company, what are some of the things that you're excited about? LENORE: I am so incredibly proud of the team that has been building Bright with me. And we have some additions to that team coming that I'm over the moon about, so I'm really excited about that. And by extension, we're growing the Bright Ventures community. So we used to do almost exclusively in-person work in New York City, where I live. But like many groups, through the pandemic, we started to experiment with digital formats for delivering some of our frameworks, and programs, and insights. And we found some things that really resonate. So we're now expanding the Bright Ventures community to allow many, many, many more people, even globally, to build an inclusive economy with us. The community has well-being events, which is a critical part of building inclusively. If we're not well, it's hard to include others. It also will have skill-based trainings like some of the ones we described. And we think a huge opportunity is to help people build connections across networks that they wouldn't necessarily have access to otherwise, so that I'm really proud of, really looking forward to. And then finally, always excited to see the portfolio founders that we back grow and fully express their ideas and bring their, in some cases, finally first bring their companies to market publicly. CHAD: Is that community something that people listening might be able to sign up for now? LENORE: Absolutely. I would say if you're even inclusion curious, like, you just want to understand what inclusion actually means and why it's not a boring thing that you have to sit through a mandated training on, or why even if you're already in the streets marching you should get involved in understanding how inclusion shows up in tech, we would love to have you. And it's a low or even no commitment experience. Drop in, see what resonates, provide us some feedback. We'd love to have folks participate. CHAD: Yeah, we'll link it in the show notes. But can you tell people where folks go to sign up? LENORE: Yeah, we'll link a waitlist. We're inviting people in in segments to make sure that everyone has a really good experience. So we will provide that waitlist link. I actually don't know the URL. CHAD: [laughs] That's fair enough. Fair enough. Well, on that note, if folks want to get in touch with you, or follow along, or find out more about Bright, where are all the different places that they can do that? LENORE: The best place is LinkedIn. My name Lenore Champagne Beirne is really easy to find. I'm the only one. And I'd love to have you all connect there. You can also submit...if you have a startup idea or an existing company that you're interested in bringing into Bright Venture's view, please feel free to submit that on our website, which is www.brightventures.io. And you could technically find me on Twitter, but I won't really be there. [laughs] So I hesitate to suggest it as a place to communicate with me. CHAD: We're going to link all of that in the show notes as well, along with a complete transcript for this episode. You can find all of that at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can technically find me on Twitter as well at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening. Lenore, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. LENORE: So great to be here. Thanks again, Chad, for the questions. CHAD: And see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Lenore Champagne Beirne.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. 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Sarabeth Jaffe is CTO and Co-Founder at HelloPrenup, the digital prenup platform designed to get couples on the same page. Chad talks with Sarabeth about dogfooding her own product, completely starting over from a technical perspective using Bubble, a low-code/no-code platform, and appearing on the ABC hit series Shark Tank. Hello Prenup Follow Hello Prenup on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. Follow Sarabeth on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Sarabeth Jaffe, CTO, and Co-Founder at HelloPrenup, the digital prenup platform designed to get couples on the same page. Sarabeth, thank you so much for joining me. SARABETH: Thank you so much for having me. CHAD: I can't say that I was aware of your...or that I wanted to think about prenups and seeking out a product around prenups. But it's super interesting to me. And I'm sure that that's part of both the challenge and opportunity with HelloPrenup. So, tell us a little bit about the product. SARABETH: So, as you mentioned, HelloPrenup is really the first of its kind. It's a digital platform that allows couples to create a prenuptial agreement that they're both happy with completely online and for a fraction of the cost of going to an attorney. So why is that interesting for folks these days? Really it's because couples are talking about their finances a lot more before they go into marriage. People are getting married later in life, so they have more assets to protect, or in many couples' cases, they have a lot of existing student loans or other liabilities that they can actually protect their partner from. So I think a lot of couples are becoming more open to prenuptial agreements as a way to kind of start off their marriage with a clean slate. And I can actually speak to our customers because I actually built HelloPrenup after I got engaged. And I was looking into getting a prenup. My fiancé and I we've been together for over seven years; we've known each other for over ten years. And we've always been really transparent about everything and especially our finances. And I love being financially savvy, looking at my investment portfolio, and being really frugal and everything. So to me, getting a prenup was always just the smart move. Being kind of a realistic person whose parents are actually divorced now, I view marriage as a partnership that, if it's working, when it's working, that's amazing. But if things don't work out, I think there should be a different path that you're able to take seamlessly. So when we did get engaged, I started looking into how to get a prenup, and it was a really confusing process. If you want to get a prenup without using HelloPrenup, you have to contact a divorce attorney before you're even married, which kind of starts the precedent of your marital journey off kind of a little weird. And also, hiring a divorce attorney for your prenup can cost a lot of money. The average cost is like $300 an hour. So it kind of depends on how complex your prenup is. But if you're planning your wedding, buying an engagement ring, maybe trying to buy a house soon, you're going to put a prenup on the back burner because of the costs, even though it's a really important financial planning tool. So that's why I came up with the idea. I'm a software engineer. This is something that I think I could build is a platform for couples who want to get a prenup done really conveniently and for a fraction of the cost. So I started working on HelloPrenup on my own in February of 2021, so a little bit over a year ago. And of course, I quickly found out that I don't know all the laws required, [chuckles] and I don't know how to write a good prenup contract. So I need either a legal advisor or an attorney to really help me figure these things out, especially because the law per state actually is different. CHAD: Just so I understand the timeline, did you start it before you got married? Or did you end up doing a prenup through an attorney for yourself? SARABETH: Ah, yes. So actually, we're getting married this Saturday. CHAD: Wow. Okay. Congratulations. SARABETH: Thank you so much. And we are HelloPrenup users. CHAD: Okay, wow. SARABETH: So we did our prenup with our platform. CHAD: So you managed to get the product done before you got married so that you could use it? SARABETH: Yes, yes. I wasn't going to get married without the prenup and going through an attorney. [laughs] I gotta...what is the expression? Like, reap what you sow or something like that. CHAD: Yeah, or eat your own dog food is another one. SARABETH: Yes. Dogfooding our own product has been amazingly beneficial for our team. So that's kind of where I left off in our story so far. I needed to find an attorney. CHAD: I'm curious, you know, I'm a software developer too. I think we all have ideas. How did it become just from an idea to a thing you were really going to do? Where was that sort of switch? When did that switch get flipped? SARABETH: When I came up with the idea for a digital prenup platform, I was actually unemployed. So this was kind of in the middle of the pandemic. I was previously working at a really awesome startup based in Seattle, Washington. But unfortunately, I was actually going through a lot of depression, and I felt really disconnected from my work. So I ended up quitting that job in November. So I took about three months off to recenter myself and figure out what I wanted to do next. So when I thought of the idea for a prenup platform, I had the mental capacity to dig into the problem. And when I figured that it would probably be a profitable business, that's when I started to work on it full time. And I didn't have another job, so I was able to jump into it. CHAD: Okay, so you then needed to find an attorney. You realized that was something you lacked. SARABETH: Yeah, so I started doing some Googling while I was deciding whether this was something I definitely wanted to commit to, to see if there were competitor platforms. And I actually found HelloPrenup at that time. Of course, I wasn't involved with it. And so my co-founder now her name is Julia Rodgers Esquire. So she is a divorce attorney based out of Massachusetts. She actually had been building this product, which was completely aligned with my envisioning of what I was going to build. But of course, she had the legal background of it. So I found her platform, and I noticed when I tried to sign up for the platform that the system was under maintenance. So I was like, huh, maybe they need technical help. So I actually ended up cold emailing her to see whether she needed any software help with the hopes that we could team up. And the next day, we just hopped on a Zoom. It's interesting talking to someone who you've never met before about possibly teaming up on something or potentially being a competitor to them. I made it very clear that I would much rather team up with her rather than try to figure this out on my own. CHAD: That sort of sounds like a threat. [laughter] SARABETH: Oh my God. CHAD: I'd much rather team up with you than have to do this on my own. [laughs] SARABETH: Well, I really respected what she had built at that point. So she had put a lot of time into actually writing a lot of content and blogs around prenuptial agreements. So she had a really good base for the business. But it was really the software that she was running into issues with. So she had been struggling and working with overseas developers. So as an attorney, she didn't have a lot of experience project managing a software project like that. And especially with contract developers, you can't say, "I want this to be built in a sustainable, scalable fashion." So there were a lot of bugs with the platform. The way I saw it was like, hey, she kind of has this MVP. And she's an attorney, so I think we would make an amazing team. I was also really excited at the prospect of being able to work with another woman entrepreneur. And we hit it off really quickly on our Zoom call. And yeah, so we've been working together since about March of 2021. CHAD: Did you end up keeping what she already had from a technical perspective, or did you start over? SARABETH: We completely started over. I tried to salvage the codebase that they had used. It was like Angular, which I actually despise Angular framework in general. I tried my best to clean it up, but they had no tests. They had a bunch of copy and pasted code. It was just kind of a mess. So that's when I really decided that Bubble would be a great option for us. CHAD: Well, for those who don't know, Bubble is like a low-code/no-code platform. SARABETH: Yes. So it's called Bubble.io. It is, as Chad just said, you know, it's a low-code platform which allows you to actually build full-stack web applications. So unlike other website builders like Squarespace or Wix, you actually have a database or a back-end component to your application. And of course, for the majority of applications, that's really a requirement to build something actually useful for people. So I'd been playing around with Bubble.io before we scrapped the codebase. And it was a good starting point because I'm still currently the only full-time developer on our team. And because we are using a low-code platform, we're able to move a lot faster with a lot of our feature development because there are a lot of things that had been done for us. So there are a lot of drag and drop features that we can leverage via different plugins. CHAD: It's an interesting choice to me, not because I don't think it makes sense, but I think a lot of developers...you are a developer; you know how to code. SARABETH: [chuckles] CHAD: And I think a lot of developers, when faced with that choice, can't resist writing custom software. SARABETH: Yeah. [chuckles] You know, I've always been torn between the development and the product world. And for a while, that was really a struggle for me deciding whether I wanted to be a product manager or a software engineer. So I settled on being a product-driven software engineer. So to me, the use case of like, I could write the traditional code, but it'll be a lot slower, or I could build the product a lot faster by using this tooling. That's where I land most of the time, like, the more time-efficient way to do things. CHAD: From deciding to work together and starting to work together to okay, I'm going to rewrite this in Bubble; what point were you back online with the new version? How long did that take? SARABETH: Yeah, so that took us about three months to get it relaunched, and so I was pretty happy with that. I mean, of course, there's still a ton of work that we're doing to build out the product, but to really get it back up and running and also in a more scalable way so that we actually can provide prenups across multiple different states now. So it's a lot more flexible in the way that it was built. So it took about three months to get it relaunched. CHAD: So at what point then did you go on Shark Tank? [laughs] SARABETH: So [chuckles] there were a lot of variables in play. And so, I was really thankful that we chose to use Bubble because the speed at which I needed to develop this was even more reduced. So we started talking to producers pretty quickly after we decided to team up together. It's a really unusual entrepreneur journey, I would say. I knew that it would make a good story because prenups are kind of taboo, as you mentioned. Television loves something a little spicy, a little bit dramatic. So we started talking to producers, I want to say, in June or July, maybe even in May. And at that point, we hadn't relaunched the product. So we were really just pitching the idea. And we were pitching ourselves as founders to the producers and the exciting concept of how will the American public perceive a product that is a little bit taboo talking about prenuptial agreements before you get married? If you're familiar with Shark Tank, you probably see that they have a lot of wedding-related companies that go on. But we were kind of flipping the script on that. So while I was rewriting the entire software, we were also going through the auditioning process of Shark Tank. CHAD: I can imagine that's pretty intense. SARABETH: Yes. CHAD: I think the closest thing I can think of is when you enter into an accelerator or something like that. You might be in it for three months. You're going to have demo day at the end. But with that, you're presenting to a group of people. It's not broadcast on national television. SARABETH: Yes. [laughs] CHAD: It's probably a little bit of a different thing, and there are no producers involved, that kind of thing. SARABETH: Yeah, yeah, exactly. By the time we had gotten on the set of Shark Tank to pitch our products, we'd only really been relaunched for about a month and a half. [laughs] So we were flying...I'm so bad at expressions. CHAD: [laughs] SARABETH: We were pitching... CHAD: By the seat of your pants. SARABETH: Yes, that one. Thank you so much. [laughter] So we were really pitching the potential of our product. And we were just so ecstatic to be there. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint CHAD: When you went on Shark Tank, how much of what you said and those kinds of things was all you, or how much is it put together for the show? SARABETH: Really, the only thing that is heavily vetted by producers is your pitch. So when you walk into the tank, and you give your 30-second to 2-minute spiel that's a bit more theatrical, you practice that over and over and over again. And it was really a fascinating experience. Because as a fellow software engineer, you know we're kind of more chill people, [laughs] more realistic. But they kept saying, "Bring more energy to it. Do big movements, maybe even do a dance or something." [laughter] I'm kind of living this double life where I'm writing software, and then I'm -- CHAD: In between rehearsals, you're opening your laptop and making another thing happen on the app, I'm sure. SARABETH: Exactly. It's like, oh, okay, we have pitch practice tonight, and now I'm going to work on this core feature. Without it, we literally don't have a product. So the producers are very involved in your initial pitch. But then when you jump into the Q&A, when the Sharks start asking you questions, that's all you. CHAD: That's really cool. So are you happy that you went on Shark Tank? SARABETH: Yes, I'm so happy that we went on. I've always been a Shark Tank fan. I think it's been on for over ten years. Shark Tank has been something that's kind of kept me interested in being an entrepreneur. When I started learning how to code, I knew that I always wanted to start a business. And just seeing the number of ideas and the variety of businesses that people are able to build and putting that on a show is just a fascinating concept. So I was really happy to go on the show. And, of course, the impact on our business has been tremendous. Really, it changed the trajectory of our business. We gain most of our customers through organic search. So most of our customers come in through Google saying like, how do I get an online prenup? By getting on national television, we are really thankful that news stations were now interested in talking to us. So by linking to our website, that helped boost our search engine optimization rankings. And so now we're actually a profitable business due to Shark Tank. CHAD: That's awesome. So is the tech team still just you? SARABETH: The tech team is me. And I have started working with another Bubble developer on a contract basis. But calling out to any software engineers or low-code developers, if you're interested in joining a legal tech company that's growing a lot, feel free to reach out to me. So I really do need to be hiring another developer. At this point, I am really the main developer working on things for a variety of reasons. The first reason is that Bubble, while it is very quick to develop a product on your own from a technical perspective, it is lacking in features when it comes to collaboration with other developers. So with traditional code, you'll do code reviews on GitHub, and you'll just do like a diff. But the branching and the version control is definitely a little bit lacking. So I'm trying to wait out the Bubble team. They have some stuff coming down the pipeline that will make it easier to do collaboration. But for that reason, it is a little bit easier as an entrepreneur using a low-code platform to be the sole developer because you kind of know exactly how everything works. And then also, developers are really expensive. So we are actually a completely self-funded company at this point. So we're bootstrapped. We haven't actually accepted any investment at this point. We're a really conservative team. If we hire a developer, we want to make sure that we're able to provide them with a competitive salary and competitive package. And we're able to do that now. It's just a matter of finding the right person, which is actually a really interesting space because low-code developers are still on the up and up right now. CHAD: I know you can't see the future. But do you foresee a point where either Bubble doesn't take you where you want to go, or you need to start augmenting it in some way? SARABETH: I would like to push Bubble as far as I can. I think now that Bubble is getting a lot more recognition...and they just got another round of funding that was pretty substantial. I think that they're going to be improving a lot of things, especially when it comes to, like I mentioned, collaborating with other developers on the platform and performance. A lot of pushback that people give with low-code platforms is like, oh, the page won't load as quickly as if I wrote it with pure React or something like that. So I want to try and stay on the platform as long as possible. If we really continue to grow, I would be willing to move back to traditional code. And we'd actually be set up for success in that way because we would have a fully functioning product, and half of development is figuring out what feature to build next. So we'd kind of say, all right, here's how it works. And then, while we're kind of maintaining our Bubble application, we can have a development team build it within our own platform. Does that make sense? CHAD: It does. And I think with Bubble, it doesn't need to be all or nothing, right? SARABETH: Mm-hmm. CHAD: You can use APIs. Or you can basically extend it with custom code if you really needed to using webhooks and that kind of thing, right? SARABETH: Exactly. And that's the way that we've done it. So actually, the contract generation is written in Node.js JavaScript. And the reason I did that is because it's easier to process data in a sequential order with traditional code versus Bubble. And you can also hook into other APIs, like for us, we do a conversion of the HTML of the contract into a Word doc. So we're able to call into a conversion API and then save it on AWS with traditional code, and you can do all that with Bubble. But it's a little bit more straightforward when you know what you're doing with just like JavaScript; you know a few lines here and there. Does that make sense? CHAD: It does, yeah. I'll be super interested to see how far you're able to push it and what those things you need to do outside of Bubble are. SARABETH: Yeah, I'm really excited to try to push Bubble as an option for entrepreneurs. We were actually the first low-code platform to be shown on Shark Tank. So every Bubble developer on Twitter was really excited about it. CHAD: [laughs] SARABETH: So I think it's a really interesting spot to be in right now. CHAD: Yeah, from a technology perspective, I think that that's one thing we've talked about. And you addressed the other thing that sometimes people say is a promise. Like, it is a commercial platform. It's not an open-source platform, and you're building entirely on top of it. And so that presents a certain amount of risk that like, they might go out of business. You know, they're a VC-backed company, and maybe they'll go out of business. And then where would you be? The fact that they've just raised a significant additional round of funding mitigates that somewhat, but it's still a concern, right? SARABETH: Yeah, it's definitely a concern. And it's something that, as a software engineer, it's terrifying to know that you're relying on someone else for your livelihood and now the livelihood of multiple people on our team. So it is really scary. You cannot export your code from Bubble. But I believe they have said that if for some reason they go out of business, they will allow you to do that. I'm sure whatever code you export from it is not going to be very pretty to look at. So it probably makes sense to write it from scratch. But I think at this point, I'm really happy with where we're at. I like remaining a really lean team. And using different tools in simple ways and trying to keep our product as simple as possible has really helped us grow. CHAD: What's next for HelloPrenup? Where are you setting your sights on? What's keeping you up at night now? SARABETH: Ooh, so many things. We do have an exciting investor coming on. I can't say exactly who, but they were really involved in building one of the largest legal tech platforms out there today. So we're really excited to be partnering with them and be building out our network across all 50 states. Right now, we're actually in, I believe, 32 states. You can use our platform to create your prenuptial agreement. And so, we're excited to be starting to onboard attorneys to the platform. So that's one of the things. Another thing that's on our radar is keeping up with, you know, it's hard to say the trends of what's going on with Web3. But we do have some things that are related to Web3 that we'll be tackling in the next probably a year or a couple of years when it comes to financial data. Yeah, so those things are kind of on our radar of our product. And then, on the near term, we are doing a lot of work to try and normalize the entire conversation around prenuptial agreements. We partnered with The Knot, which is one of the largest online wedding registry websites. And we've been writing a lot of blogs on their website that talk about the educational side of prenups. And we're actually going to be launching gift cards. CHAD: [chuckles] SARABETH: So you can list a prenuptial agreement on your wedding registry, and people can help support it. So there are a lot of initiatives that we're going to be doing on the product development side and then also kind of on the marketing education side of the business. As we start to grow, I'm trying to pull my attention away from those things. But sometimes, it's really hard because some parts of the business that aren't technical are fun to get involved in. And I'm sure you run into that or when you were scaling thoughtbot getting distracted by other parts of the business because they were just interesting. But there's a lot going on right now. CHAD: That's exciting. You mentioned earlier that you hadn't taken investors yet. And so is it about that scale that's causing you to take one on now, or what's going on there? SARABETH: So we're profitable. We don't need an investor, which is we're so thankful for that. So it's really a strategic partnership for us. CHAD: Well, that's really cool. I'm excited to hear everything you have going on. And I really wish you luck in everything that you're doing. SARABETH: Thank you so much. CHAD: So if folks want to find out more about HelloPrenup, follow along with you, get in touch with you; where are all the best places for them to do that? SARABETH: You can check us out on helloprenup.com. And we're on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Just tweet at us @HelloPrenup, and one of us will respond. It'll probably be myself or Julia. So you're able to get into contact with us if you have any questions. And of course, if you are a developer who is looking to join a really fun, women-led legal tech company, hit me up. CHAD: Awesome. You can subscribe to the show and find notes with links for everything that Sarabeth just mentioned, along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments for me, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you so much for joining me, Sarabeth. I really appreciate it. SARABETH: Thank you so much. CHAD: And thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Sarabeth Jaffe.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprintSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Victoria Guido is the new Associate Director of Business Development and DevOps Strategy at thoughtbot, and is joining Chad as co-host of the show! Chad talks with Victoria about getting involved in DevOps work, transitioning to agile, moving away from her old community which was based on geography, and tips for people onboarding into a new role. Follow Victoria on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Victoria Guido, the new Associate Director of Business Development and DevOps Strategy at thoughtbot, and wait for it, the new co-host of this very podcast with me. Victoria, thank you for joining me on the show for this episode, for joining me at thoughtbot, and now for joining me as the co-host of the show. VICTORIA: You're welcome. Thank you for having me. CHAD: You do all of those things, right? [laughs] VICTORIA: Yes, yes. CHAD: So I'm hoping that we can introduce folks to you. I'm excited to have you on the show and for the audience to get to know you. Let's start with your role at thoughtbot. I think maybe you have the esteem of having the longest title at thoughtbot right now. [chuckles] VICTORIA: Yes, I love it, Associate Director of Business Development and DevOps Strategy. So I'm not only doing business development but also planning our DevOps services and how we do that at thoughtbot. CHAD: And you're on the Mission Control team, which for folks who follow along or want to go back and listen, we had Joe, who is the CTO of thoughtbot and the interim Managing Director of the Mission Control team, which is our new DevOps team and Site Reliability Engineering team, that's Episode 403. So I will link that in the show notes, but it's at giantrobots.fm/403 as well. So, how did you get involved in DevOps work? VICTORIA: Right. So I first went to my first DevOps meetup in 2017 when I was living in Washington, D.C. I had been working in IT and operations for about 5 or 10 years at that point. And I went to a DevOps meetup and met some really nice guys, and they were very...what I liked about it was that it was both the technology side and about culture. And it was about how do we break down silos between different groups, and then bring in the automation and start to do next level type of operations? So that's how I started to get involved. And I started attending the meetups regularly and then became an organizer for the meetup and for the conference series. And that's when I became like the biggest DevOps person in D.C. probably. [laughs] CHAD: Did you end up moving from the general IT work that you were doing into more DevOps focus work along that way? VICTORIA: Yeah, at that time, that was when as a federal contractor, you know, agile had been around for quite a while. And I had been through several agile transformations with large program teams. And now DevOps was becoming more of a thing. And the project that I was on at the time was managing a large set of federal websites and was managing the build pipeline and process for how they got their code into the public's view and how they managed the servers and all the other back-end services that supported those applications. So DevOps was both top of mind for the government. [laughs] They were trying to now be able to deploy as frequently as they were able to build new features. And it was part of the work that I was performing as well. CHAD: You mentioned you were doing government work at the time. What was that like? What kind of work was it? VICTORIA: Yeah, actually, my first job after college, my first full-time job, was at Citizenship and Immigration Services. And it was about a 200-person program. Some of the applications were actually written in Siebel. And so we had just a variety of different applications from Siebel to Java. And they had just transitioned to agile. And so that was taking a team that was managing Oracle releases and bringing them into a kanban style workflow and figuring out how do we be agile when we're in maintenance mode, and bring the team along with me? And I worked my way up from a process engineer to project management and did a little bit of testing and a little bit of development in between. So it was interesting because it was a major transformational shift for that agency and still getting steeped in ITIL processes and how to do unit testing, acceptance testing, and all of those other kinds of critical processes for building applications. It was good. CHAD: What does transitioning to agile mean when you talk about groups that size? You're talking about unit tests and that kind of thing, which can be part of agile, but I assume isn't the only aspect of it. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think for that group, it was about changing the way we planned and managed work and figuring out what processes could we automate. So is there testing that we could automate or test data creation we could automate? And I think there are some concepts from agile that helped our planning, for example, making a physical board to manage which environments has which versions of Oracle in it. Those types of concepts of just kind of stepping away from your computer and getting together with the group every day to talk about what issues they're running into that's kind of what it was. But there was still, of course, documentation requirements, big documentation requirements, and everything like that. So it was an interesting sort of half transition or tailored approach to doing agile with that type of team. CHAD: And then from there, you moved into ongoing sort of consulting companies that worked with government. VICTORIA: Yes, I worked for two pseudo-government financial organizations, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and Fannie Mae, so my next two roles as a project manager and system engineer. So at Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, I got exposed to more system engineering and security engineering, working with their mobile device management policy, and actually designing the mobile device management to match DISA STIG. Sorry, I'm doing a lot of acronyms out here. [laughter] You can stop me if I use too many. But that was really interesting and also upgrading their system, they were using to manage change for the organization so their ITIL services management tool. Going through the process of upgrading that project and coordinating across all the teams who delivered software at the agency was fascinating. I went on to Fannie Mae, where I started to really build knowledge bases and start to build out actually using SharePoint at the time. [laughs] But figuring out ways to share knowledge across large teams and other large production support services teams, and how to get them collaborating so they could improve themselves and do continuous improvement, and learn what other groups are doing. CHAD: That's one area where I honestly don't have a ton of experience. Most of my professional experience has been at thoughtbot or other smaller organizations. How do you manage that, or what are the big differences between large organizations like that and something at the thoughtbot size or smaller? VICTORIA: The biggest difference between a large organization like that and a small one like thoughtbot would be I think of how change gets generated and started. In a small organization with a culture like thoughtbot, change can come from anywhere and very quickly have permeated the entire organization. With a larger organization, you can have leaders try to force change from the top down. And you'll see individuals some will be 100% on board. Others will figure out how to qualify what they're already doing to fit that change. And some others will just be full-on resistance and just kind of be waiting for the next leader to come in so they can switch into whatever they were doing before. And there is also that organic change that comes from individuals and then pushes up to the rest of the organization. But I think it's much harder, and you have to have a lot of will and a lot of support from leadership that they're accepting of those types of ideas. CHAD: I think it's the nature of groups and companies to want to grow. Do you think that there's any way to preserve that smaller culture as an organization grows? VICTORIA: I think so. I think it's possible if you integrate it into part of your core values, and that becomes a part of how you interview, and how you do performance reviews, and how you build your culture as a company. I think you can build it on those tenets. I think in some organizations, there's usually some form of acquisition where you acquired a team from a contracting company, or you acquired a team of federal employees from another agency when you restructured. So it makes it a little bit more challenging to really integrate that part of your culture into every step, but it is possible. And you also have to accept that not everyone might be on board all the time. CHAD: Well, I think that that is probably the biggest challenge is even in a larger organization, if you foster a culture where change can happen from anywhere, it's not necessarily top down. Transferring that knowledge or that practice throughout the whole organization is really difficult. Like if it's thousands or tens of thousands of people, adopting a change seems really difficult to me. So even if things are really organic coming from all levels of the company, you could end up in a scenario where everything is being done differently, everywhere. VICTORIA: Yeah, and I think, too, when you're in a larger organization, there's more context for every unit. And so you can think this is a change we're going to do. This is going to be great. But then, once you actually see the way that people work, that change might not actually help them that much. And so I think that if people have autonomy to be able to make changes that make sense for them, that's more likely to be effective than if we tried to push change from the top down necessarily. And being in my position as a contractor, I really don't have authority to make a lot of changes. CHAD: [chuckles] Right. VICTORIA: So either I have someone backing me up, or I really get to know the individuals that I'm working with. And I can demonstrate and show them that there's a better way of doing it and do it in a way that gives it to them as an option so they can choose to adopt it. And that's usually the only option I have to give anyway, [laughs] so that's been effective because people do want to be better at their jobs or be more efficient. But a lot of times, I think the changes aren't really addressing their problem, and so it can be easy to push it aside. Mid-Roll Ad: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs CHAD: So you mentioned you got involved in DevOps DC and then as an organizer. I know you also started to work with Women Who Code. Why did you get involved in the organization of DevOps DC and that kind of thing? Was there a business or a personal reason to do it? VICTORIA: It was both. It made sense from a networking perspective, both in potential customers or clients and in recruiting. But also, I think it made sense. For me personally, the people who were showing up regularly were my kind of people, you know, [laughs] people who cared about blameless post mortems or feeling open or making me feel welcome when I came to the meetup. That was a big reason why I got involved. And it just made sense for me, too, because I was coming from an operations background. I'm like, oh, DevOps, this is the way that we're supposed to be doing things. [laughs] CHAD: So you were really involved in the D.C. community and had been there for a while. But you recently moved to California. VICTORIA: Yes, yeah. I've been in San Diego for almost two years, about a year and a half at this point. Yeah, big moves. CHAD: What was it like to move away from your old community, which was so based on geography? VICTORIA: Yeah, it was sad, but it was interesting how it worked out with the pandemic because when we found out we were going to move, was when everything shut down, and we went slowly remote anyways. And so I continued running DevOps DC remotely and some Women Who Code events for about a year afterwards. And then, when I decided it was time to really shift away and actually be more present in the San Diego community, especially when the other meetups started going back to in-person meetups, that was actually really hard to say goodbye and to say that I wasn't going to be organizing anymore. And I really miss all my past organizers and people who would come to the events. CHAD: Has it been difficult to form a new community locally given the pandemic? VICTORIA: Yeah, I've looked at quite a few meetups. There are a number of good meetups here in San Diego, and LA has a great scene as well. But yeah, it's been hard for myself to just get out of the house and to find similar groups that have those same interests. That's been a challenge, but I think it's coming along, and we'll get there. CHAD: And along the way, you joined thoughtbot. I'm curious, what were the things, in particular, that attracted you to the role or to thoughtbot? What were you looking for personally? VICTORIA: Personally, I knew that business development was an area that fit my skill sets really well, and the things I like to do like going out, and networking, and talking to people. And this role, in particular with the DevOps strategy in there, really excited me because I could use all of these hours and hours I've spent in meetups and conferences to good use to help develop services within thoughtbot that are really tailored to our specific user groups and needs. And to work with highly skilled, highly regarded engineers and developers on developing these products I thought was really exciting. And then thoughtbot as a company, in particular, I found the interview process to be really well thought out with, for example, I knew that it was going to be a long interview process. So there is a compensation that you can receive just for interviewing. And I thought that was something that was really nice [laughs] and also just showed that approach of being aware of the candidate's experience and wanting to have that be a good experience and a worthwhile endeavor. So that was part of why I liked thoughtbot. Open source was a big consideration for me. I wanted to work somewhere where they were passionate about giving back to the open-source community, and all that together brought me here and made the most sense. CHAD: Cool. Do you have any tips for people onboarding into a new role? Or maybe even if it's not tips, was there something that you did intentionally when day one or day minus one you're thinking about, okay, tomorrow I'm getting started? How did you approach that? VICTORIA: One of the biggest advice I give to people who are starting a new role is to schedule one on ones with members of your team and get to know them as individuals, especially in remote environment since you don't necessarily have a chance to go out for coffee, [chuckles] just to have a quick one on one and get to know them a little bit more in your role and figure out where you can start to add value. I think that's a great way to start. And then to just develop your list of ideas for where you think you can add value, some outstanding questions for where you need to understand more. And I think the other advice would be to engage in the social channels. I think my first day, I posted a picture of my dog on the dogs' channel. [laughter] And just like, let your personality show a little bit. And don't be afraid to post in a large channel, especially if you know the culture of the company is open to that kind of collaboration. And then people start to see your face and get to know you a little bit more, and you feel more connected to your company. CHAD: Were you nervous when you joined on your first day? VICTORIA: Yeah, a little nervous. And I'm also aware of just having been a federal contractor that some people might hear that and have an impression of my style or the way I like to work. And so I'm a little aware of like, oh, I definitely don't want to wear a blazer. I don't want to look too corporate. [laughter] CHAD: That's funny. Yeah, one time, we were meeting in sales meetings with clients, and we wanted to establish that we were not a typical consulting company. And so intentionally going to a sales meeting wearing a t-shirt or something like that was a statement, like an intentional choice we were making to subtly communicate what kind of company we are. So that resonates with me. VICTORIA: Right. [laughs] CHAD: So now that you've been here for...oh, geez, how long has it been? [chuckles] VICTORIA: It's almost a month. CHAD: Almost a month. Was there anything that surprised you? VICTORIA: There have been a few small things that I'm probably way too happy about. One is just the actual page count in contracts is just way lower than what I've had to work with in the past, [laughter] which is very exciting for me. I was really happy to see...I went to go add a custom Slack emoji, and there were already like 2,000-plus Slack emojis. So that was really exciting for me. [laughs] Surprising...the part that's interesting is, in some cases, as a consulting company, it is the same problems that we're trying to solve for. So, in that case, it's almost expected, but it's interesting. So to see some things like what thoughtbot has, a playbook in GitHub, and anyone can edit it. And that was something I was really trying to work on at my last position. And you're 5 or 10 years down the road where you've solved some of the issues where you have a nice editor so that people can go in and edit pages without using Markdown or pull requests. But it's still difficult. So it's interesting to see that some challenges have progressed a little and have still some different issues. CHAD: Yeah, it's always interesting to get a new person's perspective with fresh eyes. I've been doing this for a long time, and joining a new company remotely is different. Back when you were joining a Boston team or a San Francisco team, you could go into the office. And your first day, you'd be sitting right next to somebody and going to lunch with them. And that kind of thing is clearly very different now than it was then. VICTORIA: Right. And I did get to see everyone at Summit for one night. So that's exciting. CHAD: Yeah, that was exciting. So we happened to...I think the week before you started, or maybe two weeks before you started, we were having our company-wide in-person get-together in the United Kingdom. And you happened to be going to Germany for a wedding, right? VICTORIA: Mm-hmm. CHAD: So we tacked on to that trip and stole you for a day, and we were able to see each other in person. That was exciting. VICTORIA: It was really cool. Although I had a lot of FOMO once, I saw the next day was like D&D and a bunch of games and hanging out. I was like, wow, I'd really like to stay longer. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll do it again next year. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, that's true. CHAD: Mission control is the one team at thoughtbot that works on clients that is cross time zone, so most of the teams overlap with clients 100% with time zone. So it'll be people in the Americas work with clients in the Americas. But the Mission Control so that we could provide a wide swath of time zone coverage for that infrastructure work, for that support that we do, crosses the teams. So one person on your team is in Nigeria, and you're all the way in San Diego. What's that like? How do you manage that? VICTORIA: Yes, well, everyone on the team makes sure to update their availability in their calendars so that we aren't accidentally scheduling meetings really late in the day for folks who are on that UK time zone. It's been all right, though. I'm used to asynchronous communication, and so is the team. So I think that we're really good at being able to use Jira and Confluence and Slack to communicate. And we are open with each other on where we're flexible if we need to make meetings a little bit later. And everyone's been really supportive of not trying to have meetings too early with me, which I appreciate, [laughter] 8:00 o'clock is totally fine, though. It's actually been good. I'm used to the asynchronous communication. I actually would even be open to more meetings that are done just over Slack and just when people wake up. CHAD: I think there are different philosophies here. But I'm very much in the camp of assuming we want to work a sustainable pace, which we do, then you can't build a culture around synchronous meetings where everyone needs to be on the meeting together because it's basically impossible. Those two things are at odds. Someone will be outside of their regular work hours, and that's really hard to continue on sustainably. So I'm very much in the camp of having a culture of asynchronous communication. And that doesn't mean that you never talk. [laughs] It doesn't mean that you don't work with each other. But maybe those times should be focused on what can't be replicated asynchronously, which is sometimes the social connections, the cultural connections of the team. VICTORIA: Yeah, and I think we get a kick out of saying like, "Good morning, Victoria, and good evening, Olamide." [laughs] CHAD: Cool. Well, I'm sure folks will get to know you more over the course of the next episodes. I really appreciate you joining the show. If folks want to follow along with you or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to do that? VICTORIA: I'm more active on Twitter, and so you can follow me there. And I tend to like and retweet a bunch of DevOps-related events and Women Who Code events. And I'm also on LinkedIn. CHAD: So what's that Twitter handle? VICTORIA: It's @victori_ousg. CHAD: Okay. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with an entire transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And I'm so excited it's not just going to be me on that email list anymore. So definitely send an email. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening. Victoria, thank you again. VICTORIA: Thank you CHAD: And see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneursSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Adam Kenney is Chief Product Officer at Numerated, which helps banks and credit unions transform how they lend to businesses. Chad talks with Adam about what institutional banks and credit unions are like as a market and customers and what sales cycles look like, going from 17 to more than 130 customers quickly, and the scaling challenges they faced, and how the pandemic affected them as a company. Numerated Follow Numerated on Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Follow Adam on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me, today is Adam Kenney, Chief Product Officer at Numerated, which helps banks and credit unions transform how they lend to businesses. Adam, thanks so much for joining me. ADAM: Thank you, Chad. Thanks for having me. CHAD: Let's dive into Numerated a little bit more. How do you help banks and credit unions lend to businesses? ADAM: I think we're in the middle of what is a pretty meaningful transformation in terms of how businesses are expecting to get access to credit. Really what they want is something that is fast, easy, convenient, largely driven off of the change that has happened in the retail space over the last 10 to 15 years. And in many ways, business lending is still catching up to that, and so our focus is doing that. It's helping the banks and credit unions really change how they interact with their business customers. We use a combination of data and great experiences to make that process as seamless as possible. We've been noted to, using the combination of data and technology, help banks increase the number of loans that they can do with their existing staff by as much as fourfold. We are also noted for inventing what we like to refer to as the three-minute business loan. It's one of the things we were written up on in the Wall Street Journal back in our days in Eastern Labs, where we've been able to get businesses from the point of application all the way to a funded loan in less than three minutes. And that's a process that historically has taken as long as three weeks. And so really excited by the ways that we're able to really help change how banks themselves can look at their operations. But more than anything, it's how banks are able to rethink and change how they interact with businesses and help the businesses in your communities grow and get access to the credit that they need. CHAD: So from a digital product perspective, there's a piece of a product there that banks are actually taking on and white-labeling that provides a lending experience for their clients, right? ADAM: That's correct. I mean, we're a cloud-based SaaS system. But you're right; they branded as their own. And so if you're going to Eastern Bank's website and clicking through and ultimately going through the application process with us, it's going to look and feel like it's just Eastern's website. And all of the interactions that you have with Eastern or any of our customers are going to feel that way as well. So yes, it is a white-label solution that we sell to the banks, and they provide to their customers. CHAD: The actual banking industry is not one that I've had a lot of experience in. And so I'm curious what institutional banks, credit unions, that kind of thing what they're like as a market or as customers and what the sales cycle looks like and those kinds of things. ADAM: It's about as varied as an industry can get, I'll tell you that. [laughs] You have to remember that banks and credit unions can be as small as having a few hundred million dollars in assets, maybe as small as 100 million. And in some of our customers' cases, they're de novo banks, and they're just getting started. And they range up to multiple billions of dollars in assets. And so, these are organizations that scale dramatically. Each of them have their own problems. They're also going to be made up of very different tech-minded individuals. You're going to have some smaller institutions that are basically managing a book of business that's been a book of business for close to a century and are interested in how technology can make them more efficient. But they are not the technologists that you and I would be used to working with on a day-to-day basis. And then, of course, you have people like ourselves who are really trying to, from inside the bank, change what banking is to their customers. And so, it's a very diverse industry in terms of what they're looking to accomplish. We've even come up with recently this framework around how we think about and really talk to our customers about how they transform and the levels of transformation that they can go through. And for us, it's essentially a four-level transformation starting with very small and pointed technology innovations that allow them to drive innovation in very fragmented bits and pieces, for lack of a better term, up to and including they're going to transform everything or become a digital bank. And you can imagine there are lots of stops along the way in terms of where a bank is and where they want to end up as part of their strategy. CHAD: From a product perspective and managing change, do you get a lot of custom features from individual, either clients or potential clients? And how do you manage that if you do? ADAM: The way I think about it is that we certainly get a lot of requests from our customers, and every customer likes to think that they are different and unique. In reality, there's a strong theme to almost all of the requests that we get. And personally, I think that's part of what our job is as a product leader is to really understand how to create themes out of the individual requests and provide a platform back to the market that addresses as many of those in a more holistic way and drives value across not just the individual asks but across all of the customers. And so yeah, there's some uniqueness. And certainly, we need to provide a platform that allows for that. So as an example, every bank has a slightly different view into how they want their credit policy to work and be implemented, but the framework around how you make credit decisions, how I get data into the platform. How do I create a credit matrix? And how do I then decide the exact offer terms to drive out of that? Like, that's a standard capability. And so we're innovating on that based on the individual features, but it's really not with an eye towards providing a specific custom feature to individual customers. It's more providing a flexible platform that allows them to configure the nuance but in a general theme that's going to help them be a better business. CHAD: So in the U.S., we had a specific program launched, PPP loans, in the pandemic to help support businesses. And I know thoughtbot we participated in that and went through that process. I don't think our bank was using Numerated. But I know that the bank really maybe...because they weren't using Numerated, [laughs] they needed to bring together an entirely new application interface very, very quickly in order to be able to take our application to that. And I think that Numerated was right there at the start of that. ADAM: Yes. CHAD: Talk about something custom maybe quickly. ADAM: [laughs] CHAD: What did pulling that together look like? ADAM: So maybe to take a step back if I could first and just paint a picture for you because you're right, it was kind of a unique and incredible period of time. We were fortunate in our line of work because we are all about helping banks transform how they lend to businesses. We had the base platform already built and established that allowed businesses to apply for loans on our platform. Even before the pandemic, we were one of the leading technology platforms for processing SBA loans. So we were uniquely positioned for the opportunity as it results to PPP. At the start of the pandemic, we had approximately 17 customers using our platform. Fast forward six months later, we had 135. And so, to your point around there were a large number of institutions looking for a new application solution overnight, I think that shows you how aggressively banks needed a solution. And there was an opportunity for us to offer our platform to be that. I think the other thing to recognize as part of the backdrop anyway is this was a crazy time if you think back to where we were in the pandemic. No one knew what life was going to look like in a week. And most businesses, especially smaller ones, didn't know if they were going to have a business. And so for us, that also provided the opportunity and maybe a little bit of the confidence in saying, "You know, we have nothing to lose. We're well-positioned. And what else are we going to do? Because it's not like people are making other loans for the next couple of months. Let's just go own this". And so I think it was the combination of us making that recognition, having a really good base platform that had familiarity with the SBA, had familiarity with business lending, and with a team that then could really acutely focus on solving this one problem for as many customers as possible. And by the way, have the emotional impact of not only helping banks but knowing that we're basically helping hundreds of thousands of businesses stay afloat through probably the craziest time in our country's history. And so that's really what got us going. And then there was a ton of work to your point around customization around building out the platform. But the one thing we've tried to do from the beginning is hold true to some of the foundational vision that I mentioned earlier. Like, we don't want to be in the business of custom software. That's not a winning proposition for us or our customers. And so, as much as it was maybe hard at times, throughout PPP, we were always thinking about okay, so we have to make these changes to support this crazy never-before-seen lending program. But how can we do it in a way that's going to set us up to serve the businesses in a year or two when this whole pandemic thing is over? Because PPP is not going to last forever, but our customers are. The businesses are still going to need credit. So whatever we're doing as much as possible, let's be building a foundation that gets us well beyond PPP. And so we were using it as really a catalyst to build a bigger business even while we were helping customers through the pandemic. CHAD: One of the things that I really appreciated, and I have an outside perspective on it, but I really...and people can always do better. ADAM: Yes. [laughs] CHAD: But I thought it was one of the rare circumstances where everyone realized the urgency of the situation: government, banks, everybody. And there was a real willingness to realize, well, we've got to do something. If we try to figure it out all right now, it's going to take too long. So let's just do something, and we'll work out the details later. And so I think there was a willingness, and from a product perspective, my guess would be that allowed you to work iteratively too. ADAM: It did. It was [laughs], I think in some ways a blessing and a curse. CHAD: [laughs] ADAM: Because I can tell you that the number of times my team would get a set of new capabilities, which listen, were great for the customers. It made everything better for the businesses that needed help, so I would never want it any other way. But the number of times that those new capabilities were announced by the SBA on a Friday night and were expected to be live on Monday morning, let's just say it was more frequent than I would ever like to relive. [laughs] And I can remember, especially going into the second round of PPP, it just so happened that all that was happening between Thanksgiving and Christmas in a year where all families wanted to do was spend time with each other after a crazy year had gone by. But we didn't get that luxury, unfortunately. We had a job to do, and that was to make sure that we were ready for the next round. And so it did come with a lot of cost in terms of we had to work really hard to make it happen. But to your point, it allowed us to iterate. And I give the government credit, too, particularly the SBA. They could have, for example, just launched the program and then launched more money into it and stood still, but they didn't do that. To your comment, they had to get live as quick as possible. And so that first round of PPP, there were more technology hiccups. The SBA had some volume constraints. They couldn't really handle the performance. We ended up having to govern our application submissions because otherwise, the SBA couldn't handle it. There were other challenges in terms of how we were validating data. But that got better month by month. And certainly, by the time we got to the forgiveness part of the process and then the next round of PPP the following winter, they actually invested in completely ripping out their legacy API and providing us in the tech community a modern RESTful interface that was much easier, much more performant. And so, even though the volume got even crazier as we went through the program, it actually became easier for us to deliver. The first round, we were literally working around the clock because the SBA was having issues. We couldn't get enough documents through DocuSign and whatever else. We did, I want to say, close to 3 times the volume in the next round a year later but at about 15% of the energy because we had just improved that much in less than a year. And it wasn't just Numerated; it was Numerated working with our partners in government and elsewhere to just get the process that much smoother for our customers. CHAD: Were there things that you needed to do at Numerated? I mean, to go from 17 customers to more than 130 that quickly, I assume that there were some scaling challenges for you along the way. ADAM: There was. And I will say this: we were blessed to have a really good technical infrastructure in place that allowed us to scale on the infrastructure side without a ton of problems. We were able to essentially stand up new environments in our infrastructure relatively quickly and easily and even handle the peak volume of PPP, which was exponentially higher than anything we had ever done on the platform. That was not a problem for us. Where we had to scale is in two areas, one from a technical standpoint was how we were interacting with our technical partners. I mentioned already the need to govern how we were submitting applications to the SBA. We worked very closely with DocuSign to essentially put rate caps on how many documents we were generating at any given time and essentially spread the volume because none of us had dealt with that or dealt with that kind of volume before. And that's where we had technical challenges were in the interfaces and working with partners to make sure everything lined up well. So that was one area, got through it pretty well. And ultimately, like I said, for the second round, we were smooth sailing. The other area to your point around standing up all the banks was how we implemented the customers. Our typical implementation cycles going into the pandemic were multiple months. We had to stand up all over the PPP banks in less than two weeks. And so that took a combination of...I'll call it technical delivery. So we essentially created a cookie-cutter deployment and then used a deployment strategy to push that to all of the new customers all at once that we didn't have before. And we were able to create that relatively quickly. The other was we had to take a much harder stance with our customers than we had ever done around look; everyone's getting the same thing. It's government-mandated anyway, but it's going to be exactly the same. And other than the white-labeling that we, of course, gave everybody, you might want slightly different process around the workflow, around the approval. You're going to have to take the same thing that everybody else is because we just don't have time to configure the nuance across 100 banks. And so luckily, to your earlier comment around, everybody just realized we were in this unique time, we do what we have to do, and we got through it. Our banks were very willing to do that. But that was the other change we had to do to really see this scale through. Mid-Roll Ad: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff CHAD: If you're comfortable talking about architecture a little bit, do you have a shared sort of platform that everyone is on? Or, for each of the customers you have, do they have their own instance? ADAM: So we've made the decision, mostly because of our regulated industry; we felt like it was safer, so each customer gets their own database. We do keep everyone's data completely isolated to protect their information and give them the utmost confidence that it is protected. But we have a shared application layer. And so, our web servers are shared multi-tenant instances. And so it's essentially a combined environment where we're both sharing some resources but then also deploying individual databases and then the configuration because outside of PPP, it is unique bank by bank. And so, the configuration gets deployed within each bank's individual environment. CHAD: Cool. I've worked on systems like that before, and they can certainly present...especially when you need to scale them quickly, and you've got a lot of new customers being added. You better hope that it's been automated. [laughs] ADAM: Yes. And luckily, we had a good amount of automation in place during PPP or even going into it, I should say, but of course, PPP stretched that. And so we've just continued to get better and better as a couple of years have gone by. CHAD: So the second PPP came through. It's in the forgiveness period now, so that's winding down. So Numerated were at that point you alluded to earlier, which is when you were doing PPP, you realized it's not going to be around forever. Let's lay the groundwork now to help customers in the future. We're sort of at that point now, right? ADAM: Yes. CHAD: So what does that look like for you? ADAM: So it's essentially expanding the portfolio of loans that our customers can leverage our platform to execute. And maybe to say that better, if you look back prior to PPP, we got our start with small small business lending. And what I mean by that is loans under $250,000 that can be highly automated. That's where Numerated got its start working with Eastern first 15 customers, saw the value in getting extreme efficiency and delivering essentially capital to their businesses in a number of days instead of weeks. That's what we were great at, very similar to what PPP was, by the way, which was getting money to people in a number of hours in some cases. But we knew that that was never the vision for what we wanted to be or what our banks needed in the business banking segment. Ultimately, they want that same level of use efficiency experience for all of their business loans. But in order to support that, there are a number of capabilities that we needed to build into our platform to handle that. Underwriting gets increasingly complicated when you are underwriting loans at 500,000, a million, or $5 million. The businesses get more complicated. The collateral gets more complicated. The entire process just becomes more sophisticated. But that's what banks want, and by the way, that's what businesses want. They don't want to have a great experience when they're a little bit smaller, and they've taken out a $100,000 loan and then have the experience be crap two years later when they come back, and they've taken out a million-dollar loan. And so, that has always been our vision. We've had the fortune of being able to do really well on PPP and essentially just accelerate that vision. And so that's what we're working on right now is really building a loan origination system that allows our customers to transform how they lend to businesses in entirety. We have been building out all of the sophistication I mentioned around underwriting. We have recently acquired a company called Fincura based out of the Boston area. They automate spreading. If you're not familiar with what spreading is, it basically takes either paper or PDF versions of a bank's financial statements, and it turns them into really critical financial ratios that help banks understand the creditworthiness and the risk associated with the business. So you can imagine what that is. It's taking OCR, technology, AI, and basically taking what were PDFs and converting them into scores that can then be used to automate and drive efficiency in the credit decision, again, all part of being able to then really transform how banks are doing all of their business lending. But that's what we're working on now, converting all of the PPP customers to use the non-PPP, for lack of a better phrase, parts of the platform and really helping them change how their businesses look at them in terms of the opportunity to access credit. CHAD: So I think it's probably worth noting you made the decision to join Numerated right before the pandemic hit. ADAM: That's correct. CHAD: And so you joined when? ADAM: My last day at my previous company happened to be the day we closed the office due to the pandemic. I had obviously made the decision prior to that. But then, my first day on the job at Numerated was the second day of PPP. So essentially, you know, call it a week after everybody had gone home for what became the better part of the next year to two years. CHAD: So I assume making a decision to join a new company, you're going to be the chief product officer. You've had a lot of conversations about what the vision is and what you're going to do. And you're going into a business where hey, there are 17 customers, and we're going to scale. But you probably didn't guess what was going to happen ended up happening. ADAM: No. [laughs] CHAD: So I imagine like part of your vision for what you were going to do both as a company and as an individual must have gotten put on hold. ADAM: It's funny, yes and no. So I will say no to your lead in there. There were certainly times before I started where I was calling Dan our founder and CEO. And I was probing him and pushing him like, is this still a thing? [laughs] Are we really going to go do this? Not realizing what PPP was and really what it was going to mean for our business. So there was that period of time where I wasn't sure. I knew it was going to be different, but I didn't know what that meant yet. Once I understood what was happening and what we were doing, I actually never felt like it was putting anything on hold. And I can come back to the fact that it put some elements of our business on hold. But for me and why I joined and the vision I had, I was coming to help the team really expand what the platform could do for banks and their business customers and to accelerate the number of ways we could help. I have prior experience working at Capital One and Pegasystems with a lot of the systems and the processes that we were helping to reinvent at Numerated. And so, my vision was always to come and build off of those past experiences and accelerate what we were doing in this specific small business segment. PPP, in a lot of ways, just accelerated that. It took what would have probably been three to five years’ worth of market adoption in terms of understanding what digital transformation was going to look like, getting customers fully comfortable with a more digital experience, getting comfortable with a more data-driven approach to decision-making. And the pandemic forced all of that to happen in weeks. CHAD: Well, people couldn't even go into the bank to turn in their paperwork. It had to be done remotely. The staff wasn't there either. ADAM: And the staff no longer could look at paper financial statements because they couldn't get paper financial statements. And so everything changed overnight. One of our customers has told us at multiple customer events since he's like, "You guys, you let the rabbit out of the hat, and it's not going back." It just changed overnight what was happening in the industry. And then, for us, it gave us all of this extra opportunity to invest and invest more in what we wanted to go do. Our team, when I joined, was about 40 to 45 people. Our team now is 145 people. And our engineering team went from a little over 20 to just under 60. So we have exponentially changed the rate in which we're innovating and going after things. And so, for me, it's just accelerated and made things more exciting. The one other comment I'll make in terms of putting things on hold it did put some elements of the business on hold because every one of our customers stopped thinking about what I'll call traditional business lending and focused 100% for the better part of 18 months on getting through the pandemic. And even once PPP was done, there was another six to nine months where banks were trying to figure out, are we really out of the pandemic? Are we ready to start lending the way we used to? Do we need to rethink risk? Because these businesses are all different now than they were two years ago. The things that made a business risky two years ago are different now. And so there was also a little bit of a hangover as our customers internalized within their own walls what it meant to get back into lending. And so, it did put some elements of that on hold. We were fortunate, though, that we grew so much through PPP. And we actually kept adding what I'll call core customers, not just PPP customers, during that period that our growth actually accelerated. And it's been really good for us. CHAD: That's great. You mentioned the team growth that you've had. Different companies are organized in different ways. As Chief Product Officer, where do you sit within the organization and relative to the engineering team? ADAM: So at Numerated, my responsibility includes all of the product management as well as the engineering organization. So I'm responsible with my teams for everything from initial product strategy, the product design. I have all of the UX and design team as well as then all of the execution, the delivery of the platform as well. CHAD: So does that mean that there's VP of engineering in your organization or some sort of person like that that's working closely with you? ADAM: Sort of. So I have...basically, it divides more at the director level. So I have a couple of VPs that work for me that have a combination of product and engineering, both experience, expertise, and responsibility. But then their teams have product managers, and then we have directors of engineering that then manage their individuals from teams. I also have a group of former bankers. They're product managers but act as consultants to those organizations. And that's where we get all of our industry expertise. They've worked with the SBA. They've worked in credit offices, and they really help to influence the product roadmap across those teams as well. CHAD: So the entire engineering structure also being under the chief Product Officer, I would say that and correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's probably not how the majority of companies organize it. Do you agree with that? ADAM: I have seen both, but I would agree that it is not the majority. CHAD: I would say if there is a majority, and I agree, I've seen both too, but you might have a CTO and then VP of engineering. And so, the engineering organization goes all the way up to the C-level. And then there's a Chief Product Officer. And here's the product management and product underneath them. Was this an intentional choice from the beginning as you scaled out the team for you to have it all live under you? ADAM: It was intentional. I will give my personal view on it. I think that as we continue to evolve as technology companies, one of the hardest things for us to achieve is alignment around vision and purpose. And that drives a level of focus that I think maximizes the ability to move the business forward. And based on that premise, the places where I've seen things work the best is when there is a focal point across product and engineering within specialization underneath. Because it drives, I think, the best alignment across the organization. I will acknowledge, however, that finding leaders that can actually operate effectively in that combined role is extremely difficult because you need people that have a high degree of engineering experience so that they actually know how to build for quality, build for scale, even for things that don't immediately impact the bottom line while having enough business acumen to understand the demands of the business and how to balance those priorities against what we need to grow the business at the same time. And so, it does create a little bit of a snowflake challenge. I cannot find or replace those roles as we grow and scale nearly as quickly as I can in a divided organization. But I have found that it does help me drive clarity of priorities and purpose and ultimately focus in the organization versus the places I've worked where that hasn't been the case. CHAD: So I guess given that, then I assume you're hiring. [laughs] ADAM: We are always hiring. [laughs] We are definitely in growth mode. And we are looking for great people that can help us to build a platform and really transform how our customers are thinking about how they lend to their businesses. CHAD: Well, I agree. I think there are different structures then that can achieve it. And also, a lot of it comes down to the people but that alignment and that understanding of design, and product, and development or engineering. And ideally, people and all of those skill sets and all those teams who get it and can balance those different priorities with the business is really important, and that alignment of vision. And so there are probably different structures to get it, but that's what you're aiming for. And I think that the structure that you've set up is one which is very helpful to getting that alignment. ADAM: Agreed. Agreed. I think that while we're on the topic of the team and the culture we're trying to build out, I'll maybe use that as a way to share a few more things that we're really driving towards. You can imagine a company that has scaled the way we have and continues to grow. That presents some other organizational challenges as well. One of my firm beliefs is the fastest way to scale is to create really strong, empowered, decentralized teams. That, again, gets back to the whole vision and focus thing. They have to be rowing in the same direction. But they have to be really independent in the day-to-day. And so we've really spent a lot of time over the last, I would say, year and a half shifting to that kind of a model to where each of the teams is really embracing what their individual accountabilities are. They are really focused on how they're delivering success for the business and are able to make a lot of the day-to-day decisions. But then it falls to management, leadership, myself to make sure that when they make those decisions, they understand the context in which we're trying to drive the business so that we can do as much as we can as fast as we can but in a way that's high quality and delivers value. CHAD: Awesome. Well, I sincerely wish you all the best in that. I really appreciate you stopping by and sharing. Thank you. ADAM: Yeah, my pleasure. I appreciate the time, and good to get to know you a little bit, Chad. CHAD: If folks want to find out more, maybe apply, follow along with you; where are all the places that they can do that? ADAM: Yeah, sure. So numerated.com is where they can go and learn more about the business, and they can learn more about where we're hiring. People should check me out on LinkedIn. That's probably where I'm the most active these days. And feel free to message me as well. I'll also give you my email address if anybody wants to reach out. It's pretty simple. It's adam@numerated.com. Whether it's opinions, thoughts, or reactions to anything that I've shared today, or you just want to build a relationship, I'd love to hear from people and get to know you a little bit better. CHAD: Wonderful. You can find links to all those things, probably not Adam’s email address, in the show notes. ADAM: [laughs] CHAD: We want to protect him from those spam crawlers. But you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for the episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Adam Kenney.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoffSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Susanna Twarog is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of SOS, which is transforming wellness on the go through a network of smart vending machines that deliver just-in-time necessities where and when you need the most. Chad talks with Susanna about wellness on the go, the unique business that they're building and what SOS can offer brands, and the biggest hurdles to overcome to get 10,000 machines up and running. SOS Follow SOS on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn. Follow Susanna on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Susanna Twarog, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of SOS, which is transforming wellness on the go through a network of smart vending machines that deliver just-in-time necessities where and when you need the most. Susanna, thank you for joining me. SUSANNA: Thank you, Chad. It's great to be here. CHAD: So, what makes the vending machines from SOS smart? SUSANNA: So what makes our vending machines smart? Well, I think smart and vending are typically not words that go together. And I think when we founded the company, the machines that we were looking at were outdated and old and out of stock. And to be honest, first and foremost, payment methods that are accepted by most vending machines are completely not in line with the modern consumer. So we were looking at vending machines that take quarters and cash. And as two working women on the trading floor, nobody has quarters or coins or even cash anymore. So first and foremost, we are a cashless, modern vending machine that accepts contactless and modern forms of payment. CHAD: Let's level-set a little bit about wellness on the go, what that means. What I hear when I look at...which I took a look at the product on the website, which I encourage people to do, and it's worldofsos.com. I think it gives a much better sense of this. But correct me if I'm wrong that what we're talking about here is the vending machines that might typically be in a men's or women's restroom. Is that right? SUSANNA: Absolutely. So the problem that we are in a mission to solve is to transform outdated, completely broken, ugly hardware that's existed to distribute wellness essentials like menstrual care and other wellness products in public spaces. So those old machines that look like steel box drops [chuckles] that is the business or the distribution channel that we're looking to disrupt. And so, by introducing beautiful design-first tech-enabled hardware into this space, we're completely transforming a distribution channel that has not worked or served anyone for decades at this point. CHAD: I don't even use those vending machines. But it seems to me like they're often broken, dirty, not even stocked. Is there market reasons why that's the case? SUSANNA: So, to be quite honest, I think Robina and I, when we founded the company, started to explore why hasn't this problem been solved? And the fact of the matter is the built world, and a lot of commercial real estate is designed and developed by a group of people who don't necessarily menstruate or need these products that are everyday health and wellness essentials for actually what is over half of the world's population. But the folks who design and plan these spaces are not necessarily coming at the design with a perspective of these needs. And so, honestly, Robina and I set out on a mission to say when we think about inclusive space and the world that we want to live in, we want to live in a world where not just among certain people but all people have access to health and wellness products that they need when they're not at home. So you may have everything that you need and want from the brands that you love and the ingredients that you trust in your own cabinet. But when you're on the go, and you're at work or you're traveling or entertaining, or spending time in other physical spaces that aren't your home, typically, those products aren't available, and they're very hard to access. So it's a major area for us to innovate and introduce a world that we want to live in where you can access the products you need from brands you already know and love or want to discover and try. CHAD: So building really any hardware, and I have a lot of guests who have done hardware in the past, can be a challenge, especially starting out. What you talk about in the startup industry is often like starting out small, figuring out the minimum viable product, bringing that to market to early customers, and then learning and refining. And that can be difficult to do when you're shipping something physical. So how did you approach that? SUSANNA: Robina and I approached this with a lot of intention and a lot of thought. We came from finance, business development, and sales backgrounds. Neither of us are engineers. So when we decided that we were going to found SOS and started to literally sketch out renderings for the type of hardware and design that we wanted to see in the world, initially, we were faced by a lot of people telling us to white-label products that already existed. You know, maybe don't invest in proprietary hardware or designing it yourselves. Try something that already exists. See if there's a product-market fit. And ultimately, we actually invested in and began to work with an industrial design firm from the beginning. We have seven global design patents on the hardware because we knew that without an elevated design-first piece of hardware, the network would not be well-received, would not be able to grow and exist in the places we knew it needed to be, so to be in grade A commercial real estate where hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on designing and innovating into the built world to make these spaces cutting edge and tech-enabled. And yet, if we didn't do the same with our hardware, this would just be another vending machine that got relegated to the basement or the back room, and that is not the company that we set out to build. We want to be a piece of integrated, exciting, engaging hardware and tech-enabled experience in these spaces. And so, to do that, we had to forge the path of bringing in and working with and basically investing our own money into designing a proprietary piece of hardware that could deliver the experience we knew was so integral to driving value for the company. CHAD: I assume that wasn't easy or cheap. Did you fundraise at that point to do it? Or when you say your own money, were you literally the two of you investing yourselves? SUSANNA: Absolutely. A big point of pride for me and Robina is that from the moment we founded the company through, to be quite honest, I would say the first 18 months of work, we invested our own personal savings. And this wasn't trust fund money that we'd inherited. This was truly just personal savings as young women in finance that we'd put aside, and it was the most money that either of us had ever spent on anything, was investing in ourselves and our own company. So we started...our first investments were in legal work and doing the patent search, and generating ultimately what has now been granted as seven patents for the company. So patent work was the first money we spent, and then also engaging with an industrial design firm to get our concept into CAD rendering and identify the first contract manufacturer that we worked with on the prototype. So we were able to get pretty far prior to fundraising with our own investment. And trust me, it was a big commitment from both of us. And I think the fact that as co-founders being totally in lockstep with taking some of the biggest financial risks that either of us had ever taken and doing it together, and really having equal passion and commitment and belief in what we were going to build was an exceptional part of our founding story. CHAD: I imagine you were probably a little nervous, the two of you. [chuckles] SUSANNA: You know, it felt just like we had to do it. And I think it's kind of like lightning struck in the sense that we had this moment. And from literally the moment that we stepped aside and started to map out the business, there hasn't really been a pause or self-doubt in the sense that we've really known we're going to take this as far as we possibly can. So scary, yes, but it felt like we had the conviction from the very beginning, which I know is rare and not everyone's founding story. But for us, it really was 100% the right thing to do at the time, which was we're going to make this happen. CHAD: So where did you and Robina meet? SUSANNA: So we met as colleagues first and foremost. So we were two, I would say at the time, young women working in finance, and she was my counterpart. So she had a role in London, and I was in Boston. And we worked on our basically sales and business development pipelines together as colleagues first. And ultimately, Robina relocated back to the U.S, and we became friends on the same trading floor. So really, it was a friendship that grew out of a business relationship. CHAD: Do you remember when and where this idea first came from? SUSANNA: Sure do. [chuckles] It's very close to my heart. I was in the middle of a workday faced with a frustration and inconvenient situation where I couldn't find products that I needed when I needed them at work. And it was interrupting my day for the millionth time. And you know those moments when you have a friend, and you choose the person that you run to when you are, I guess, pissed off for lack of a better word? [laughs] And we just took that moment of me saying, "This is insane. How am I dealing with this? I can't get a tampon when I need one." And our eyes lit up. And we said, "Ah, well, this is a common problem for a very important segment of the world. And we need to do something about it." CHAD: Now, it's a big leap to go from that frustration to founding a company together and actually working on it. So, how did that happen? SUSANNA: So we had that moment, and we stepped aside and said, "This is completely insane. I'm too valuable to be wasting my time worrying about this on a daily basis." And the other fun part of our relationship is that we're also two young women with disposable income. We love products; we love travel, we love entertainment. We like to have fun. We work hard; we play hard. I'm taking those two perspectives, which is like this frustration and universal need combined with consumerism. And this desire to make money, spend money is like combining the two and saying we have an opportunity to capitalize on this need and this consumer at the same time to deliver on a mission and drive value and consumer value for brands at the same time. And that really, I would say, sparked a tremendous amount of excitement and interest from Robina and myself. How incredible to have an opportunity to build a company that is really driving good, and changing the world, and elevating access to these essential products while also tapping into this consumer interest of ours in products, and brands, and emerging indie brands, and digital content, and tech. And combining them all into one company and doing so with a lot of, I would say, excitement, and optimism, and win-win-win. Making the world a better place fulfilling a passion and interest of ours at the same time and driving value, and building a company. CHAD: How far along were you in the idea stages, the legwork stages, before you both quit and started working on it full time? SUSANNA: Took the leap. Yeah, that was a really critical decision and part of our journey. We were very intentional about taking the business as far as we could while protecting our personal financial interests in the sense that, you know, retaining benefits, positioning ourselves so that the company would have the most ability to succeed. And so we actually got through to basically 2020 when we were launching our first machines before we quit and ultimately joined our Techstars Boston 2020 program. So we were, I would say, nights and weekends absolutely killing ourselves with work. We were able to raise our seed round, our pre-seed round technically, while still employed at the bank. And I would encourage others who are thinking about starting companies to maybe...in some cases; I'd say do what we did. And in other cases, I'd say it might kill you. CHAD: [laughs] SUSANNA: But I feel like whether we liked it or not, it put us in a position where we had achieved a tremendous amount of traction. We had our prototypes built and ready to be installed. And they were literally going into some of the most prestigious physical, commercial real estate locations in Boston as we were quitting. So I would say we were taking quite a bit of risk still. But we'd done everything we could to protect the company and make sure that we could get SOS where it needed to be before joining and coming on full-time. CHAD: How did you find those first places where the machines were going to be installed? SUSANNA: From the beginning, it was one of the areas of the company that we invested the most of our time in, which was that we had extensive contacts and relationships in financial services; that was our background. We had to start from scratch networking, and telling our story, and telling our vision with commercial real estate partners. So pre-product, first slide decks, first cold calls, and warm introductions all really focused on commercial real estate. So we gave ourselves a crash course in real estate owner-managers, who the national players were, and started to network a ton, which was just LinkedIn, asking for introductions, having some meetings that were successes, having others that weren't. But really, I think Robina and I had a and have a very, I guess, strong sense of salesmanship, I would say. That's a strength of ours. And so we were able to really get people excited and to believe in us and not to say sell smoke and mirrors, but we were waiting on a physical product prototype to arrive. And we were able to get believers and commitments before we actually had the product ready to demo in the market. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. CHAD: So you already said at the beginning of the show your product is targeted or primarily for people who menstruate, and not a lot of property, commercial real estate developers, that kind of thing, are those people. So was that a struggle early on to get people excited or to find the right people? SUSANNA: It will always be a struggle, or maybe not always, but it continues to be a struggle. I do also want to make sure I share what we have built. And we have a mission to elevate access to menstrual care products, but our product is for everyone. So our actual physical network and machines we actually carry wellness essentials for everyone. So by solving this mission-based problem of access to menstrual care, we're actually building a product that serves everyone. We have products that everybody uses and needs every day. And what we see in the marketplace is that SOS really is for everyone. But to your point, I think a lot of conversations, particularly early days and even now, still is a lot of educating and educating decision-makers about the need for this amenity in inclusive space and diversity and inclusion goals. And how can you expect or corporations expect to deliver on these important metrics that their leadership teams are being asked when these essential everyday products aren't even available in their space? So there is a huge education. There are some uncomfortable conversations. Robina and I have gotten very, very good at having these direct conversations with a lot of people who maybe aren't comfortable talking about the products, but it's an important conversation that needs to happen. And if we don't have the conversation, then we're never going to get anywhere, and we're not going to be making progress. So our goal is to try to make the conversation exciting and engaging and show these leaders or decision-makers that there is a lot of brand equity that can go alongside thinking about the people in their space, what they need, and what can make their experience in physical spaces better. So that's kind of like leading leadership to a place where being part of what we're building is exciting. And it's an exciting opportunity to deliver an experience that's been long overlooked and is in need of a refresh. And so I think when we find folks who get that and are comfortable and excited to be part of the story, then that's usually where we find our best fit. CHAD: So you're now a little ways on from that period of time. So what stage would you say you're at from a company and a product perspective and a market perspective? SUSANNA: We closed our seed round fall of 2021. And that put us in a position, and that capital has taken us to a place where we're a team of 12, and that's across sort of all categories, which is sales, product, marketing, operations. And we're operating in three markets so New York, Boston, and South Florida. We are going to be doubling our network from just over 40 machines to over 100 by the end of summer. And then we'll be looking to get to closer to between 300 and 400 by the end of 2023. So we are in a phase where our prototypes went from three machines in Boston to, like I mentioned, over 40 machines on walls now across corporate locations, transit, retail, sports, and entertainment. And we are and have been investing in and developing and evolving our tech stack and our product. So we've made some changes to our hardware since our prototypes, of course, and then invested quite a bit in our tech stack on the product side. So we will continue to bring in new best-in-class software partners where appropriate and then also invest in-house in continuing to evolve our product and features that we release to the network. CHAD: Do you have a sense of, you know, currently the biggest number you mentioned is the 300 to 400 machine target. I imagine that the total possible number of machines that you could have, even just with moderate growth, is actually huge. SUSANNA: Absolutely huge. So when we talk about our five year-projection, the number that we use is like 10,000 machines. So really, we want SOS to be ubiquitous. We want SOS to be everywhere you go, and so it's a brand that you associate and you trust to deliver just-in-time necessities from brands you love when you're not at home. So that would be across, you know, as people return to offices being an enterprise amenity and being in all leading real estate locations across the categories that I mentioned and really having a connected network. So I would say, in general, vending is usually associated with white-label machines or mom-and-pop operations with snack machines, and that is really not the goal. We want to deliver an elevated experience as a brand and as a company across all of these locations so that you recognize the SOS machine. You know the experience that you're going to get. You know the perks of interacting and engaging with us as a brand and that there's a real trust and brand awareness that comes with the network as it grows. CHAD: I totally get that you're trying to do something different in this space. But what are the numbers of those traditional vending machine suppliers like? Is there a big player in this space, or is it a lot of local companies white-labeling? SUSANNA: It's a lot of local companies. And I think probably a good opportunity for me to highlight probably the biggest component of our business has to do with the media network that we're driving. So our machines are 32-inch touch screens serving interactive digital media when not being used as a point of sale. So, in addition to obviously having contact with cashless payment for the actual transactions and retail at the machines, we are serving direct campaigns and programmatic advertising across the network. And in terms of the value and the drivers behind what we're building, experiential marketing which can be a combination of digital media and physical retail distribution and sampling. And we have abilities to deliver value to brands looking for both. And in some cases, brands are looking to execute both at the same time. Others will be just looking at SOS as a unique way to drive impressions and brand awareness in spaces, and locations, and audiences that they haven't had access to in the past in this way. CHAD: What might that look like? That might be a company like an exercise equipment company or something wanting to spread awareness but not necessarily having a product to offer in the vending machine. SUSANNA: Exactly. It could be fitness, financial services, direct-to-consumer brands where the consumer matches the audience that we're reaching, but the product doesn't belong in the machine at the distribution point. So the digital media and impressions that we can drive in addition to the product type, which is we have touch screens. So we have first-party data collection opportunities, interactive campaigns, and surveys that run on our screens that are different than, for instance, a billboard that you drive by because this is a physical, interactive network. And with Instagram and Facebook advertising and first-party data being a very hot topic right now, having opt-in first-party data collection mechanisms for brands to offer sampling in a new channel is very valuable right now to a lot of the executives and CPG brands that we're talking to. CHAD: I assume that from a business perspective, that is pretty attractive to you because the business of physical goods looks like one thing, but the business of advertising is a completely different model. And the combination of those two could be pretty attractive. SUSANNA: Exactly. It's really unique about the business that we're building and what SOS can offer brands. So in order to, for instance, stand up a sampling campaign with SOS versus potentially having a street marketing team sampling, the cost and the data that we're able to collect by sampling through our network is much more valuable than potentially hiring folks to stand around and pass out product. CHAD: Yeah, there might even be some brands that aren't necessarily comfortable doing it depending on what it is, a street campaign, or consumers that might not be comfortable taking something from somebody on the street that in the privacy of a restaurant might go over a little better. SUSANNA: Absolutely. I think there's discretion in this automated retail experience for actual interaction with the physical product. And our machines and the network are, in some cases, in restrooms. In other cases, we're actually public access, and we're in amenity spaces. So these machines and the distribution channel is available in a whole host of appropriate locations and spaces. CHAD: Cool. So what's your biggest hurdle to getting to 10,000 machines? SUSANNA: Well, right now, we have a ton of demand, and the hardware is capital intensive. I'm sure there'll be people listening to this who are scared of hardware. And I would say, in general, that is certainly an obstacle to growing a hardware business. CHAD: Putting a machine in a new location is not immediately profitable. There's an expense to creating that machine and then a timeline for it to pay itself back. SUSANNA: I would say certainly. At a high level, SOS is a B2B2C business. So it’s a B2B sales lifecycle for you're building relationships selling into institutions in commercial real estate and corporations. That is the first I would say challenge, and funding the hardware and lead times with supply chain and hardware right now. It's a very hot topic, certainly hasn't been easy. So the lead times on the hardware and then funding the hardware, so exactly if it's going to be a three or four-month potential lead time on hardware and orders. Funding that order before machines are on walls and revenue can be generated on media, and our product sales or amenity fees kick in. The timing of all of that makes, I would say, our business but hardware businesses in general potentially either less attractive to investors who are looking at SaaS companies all day long and have a very different profile in terms of the company. But we're excited to be in a position where we have a very, very hot pipeline, a lot of inbound interest. I would say we're getting inbounds from best-in-class partners that we could only dream of doing business with. And they're reaching out to us to bring in the amenity. So it's an exciting position as a founder to be in to be opening your inbox and having multiple grade A inbounds a day. That's fantastic. And moving towards a place where we're happy to report that we have signed and committed machine financing in place for this next period of growth. So that opens up a lot of doors. And in terms of our journey, initially investing our own cash into getting the prototypes ready for installation in 2020 to being in a position now where we have our first machine financing vehicle in place to actually protect our equity as we grow the network, which is what we're looking to do for the remainder of this year and next. I don't know if I answered that accurately. [chuckles] But the challenges of running and operating and funding a hardware capex–intensive business is probably the biggest. CHAD: Is there a point in time where it really is that or something close to that that's holding you back, and you end up just doing this huge financing round or something in order to completely blow out the scale? SUSANNA: I think we have, and we're very keenly aware of first-mover advantage in the sense that we have, and COVID and other global macro-economic barriers have basically made it hard for a lot of companies to grow really fast right now in certain industries. So we do have a first-mover advantage right now. And I think we want to look at the next; I would say year to year and a half to get the company to a network size where we're operating profitably and then go to our Series A and really crank on the growth and get the network humming and growing really rapidly after our Series A. CHAD: So your goal would be to be operating profitably before getting to that next phase of growth. SUSANNA: We expect to right now based on what we're seeing. So the business and our performance indicates that with this equity, this next...we're basically entering a bridge round, but with this machine financing and a bridge round, we should be in good shape to do so. CHAD: Yeah, I think there are lots of different ways of doing things. But that seems to be what investors are wanting to see today. But also, I think not only is it from the market, but I think they're a little bit more...not to dwell on specific examples that I don't know too much about, but like, for example, scaling Blue Apron and a lot of the other meal box companies they were doing that when they weren't profitable. So they had never really shown that they could actually be profitable, but there were real costs to scale as well like you have. SUSANNA: I think for many reasons, it makes sense for us, I think, to get the business to profitability. And a lot of it is selfish, you know, thinking about the company and our current equity stakeholders. But we don't want to be in a position where we dilute ourselves out of the business effectively with growth capital when we haven't proven or made the company profitable. So, anyway, that's our goal. And I think we're feeling pretty optimistic about it right now despite the fact that I know the market and the world feels like it's falling apart [chuckles] for a million different reasons. But we actually, surprisingly and shockingly, feel pretty optimistic right now. CHAD: Well, I really wish you the best with that, and I look forward to following along and seeing all the good news along the way. If folks want to find out more about SOS or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to do that? SUSANNA: So definitely, I think you mentioned our website, that's worldofsos.com. And you can feel free to email us at hello@worldofsos.com. CHAD: Awesome. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your story and your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it. SUSANNA: Great. Thank you so much for having me. CHAD: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Susanna Twarog.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Anna Spearman is the Founder of Techie Staffing, which connects high-quality technology talent with high-caliber clients. Chad talks with Anna about founding and growing the company, immediately after graduating college, during a pandemic, reputation building, and facing skepticism around her lack of track record in recruiting, and finding and providing talent for clients as a white-glove service. Techie Staffing Follow Techie Staffing on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. Follow Anna on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Anna Spearman, the Founder of Techie Staffing, which connects high-quality technology talent with high-caliber clients. Anna, thanks so much for joining me. ANNA: Thank you so much for inviting me, Chad. CHAD: In theory, at the surface level, Techie Staffing is probably fairly straightforward in terms of what you do. But I'm curious how you got started. ANNA: Yes, of course. So I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's been two years. Two years ago, I was, during that time, attending the University of Virginia, where I was majoring in computer science with a minor in entrepreneurship. And in the spring of 2020, I was planning on coming back home to...I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I was planning to come back home for spring break. And I was finishing out my second semester of senior year. So I was planning my [chuckles] victory lap of going back home, taking a little bit of a rest time, and then coming back to UVA to finish my degree, graduate, and move on to a new job in Los Angeles. But unfortunately, as my plane was landing in Los Angeles, we kept hearing about COVID. And so the pandemic hit in the middle of my spring break. And during that time, I had to finish my second semester of senior year remote. It was very stressful, but when I finished the degree, I was so fulfilled. But unfortunately, there was a rapid dwindling of entry-level tech and product roles. I initially either wanted to be a software engineer or a product manager or be a software engineer that transitioned into a technical product manager. But unfortunately, once the pandemic hit, companies weren't willing to ramp up entry-level talent. Companies didn't really know what was going to happen in the future, and everybody was remote. So it was just a really confusing time. But while I was searching through different job boards trying to find new opportunities, especially entry-level opportunities, I found just a wealth of senior tech jobs, specifically with companies that were thriving due to the pandemic. During that time, companies like Peloton, Discord, Zoom, they were all soaring due to the pandemic. So I had heard about contingent recruiting in the past. My biggest dream for a new opportunity for myself graduating out of college was just to learn something new every day because I've always had a very much an interdisciplinary background. I've never been able to stay in one area. I've always loved to try different things. So with a little bit of a background recruiting at a past summer internship as well as wanting to utilize my entrepreneurship minor...I'm actually a fourth-generation woman entrepreneur. So definitely, growing up, creating my own business was my dream. So really, that was my main goal. I thought I was going to transition from a current role into entrepreneurship, but I had my back against the wall. So I just thought, why not start now? So I created Techie Staffing, a technology staffing agency specializing in direct hire placements nationwide. I basically had my virtual graduation; then I took a week. And then, I got started creating the website, establishing the business paperwork, as well as developing strategic partnerships with senior technical recruiters that had full candidate pipelines to fill incoming job requisitions. And I basically started off with nothing. I had no contacts, no network, just nothing at all. And I was really starting just fresh. So I really had to really spend a lot of time networking and developing relationships as well as just learning and mastering full lifecycle recruiting, especially with engineering since there's such a supply and demand issue for software engineers. So you're just consistently following up and contacting people that could potentially be interested in your companies. But it really blew up. As I was establishing everything in 2020 from summer to the end of 2020, it was 2021 when it really blew up where I contacted this founder during the time they had raised a Series B 50 million, which was amazing, and they were going through a hiring sprint. So we got connected fairly quickly. And with just great team synergy, we were actually able to place five people in one month, and it was frontend, backend, and full-stack developers. So that really jump-started Techie Staffing. And then after that, we worked with...we're now working with Fortune 500 companies as well as high-growth startups and really building a diversified portfolio, and we’re also a certified woman-owned business which I'm so proud of because there aren't really a lot of women or even just women of color that are founders. So I was really happy to get that certification, really proud of that as well. I always say all the time to everybody it's super stressful, but it's so rewarding at the same time. And I do believe that it's honestly, you know, I know the pandemic has been super hard on people. And it's been such a change and such a shift. But there is still a part of me that is so grateful for making that pivot because I really found something that I feel like I really enjoy doing every day. CHAD: That's great. I really commend you on everything you've done so far. And I'm excited about what you're going to do in the future. You now have grown where you're multiple people on your team. ANNA: Yeah, so we actually hired two new people fairly recently. I did have one direct hire recruiter working with me. So now it's officially a team of four. I did develop the strategic part. I do still have some strategic partnerships as well because on that part, at first, I was partnering with recruiters that were independent, so who were a little bit more entrepreneurial so that we could split the placement fee. But it's still better to just have full-time employees. I'm so excited to have two new additional hires, and it's still new for me. So I'm really looking forward to growing together in terms of growing Techie Staffing and growing into being a full life cycle recruiter because it wasn't that long ago when I was in that same exact spot. And it's so amazing. It still blows my mind to this day how two years ago, thinking about interviewing candidates or selling to clients, and now what I've evolved in. It's been absolutely amazing. So I'm so happy to see their journey and seeing them transition into being technical recruiters and also making a pivot in their career as well, which that's still blowing my mind a little bit. I'm sure you know founding thoughtbot and really building that from the ground up. So it's just amazing seeing that infrastructure. It just really brings a brighter future as well. CHAD: So what kind of people do you look for when you're looking to add to your team? Are you bringing on people who have experience with recruiting? Or are you bringing on people who are transitioning into it? ANNA: I would say for Q1 and Q2 of 2022 and even a little bit beforehand, since there was a surge in demand for everything and tech companies were just scaling like crazy, there was very much a competitive market for recruiters, specifically technical recruiters. Because that's what companies were really looking for to scale their engineering and product teams. So it was very, very competitive to recruit for a technical recruiter. So now you see agencies now who are hiring people who can have the DNA for a technical recruiter but not necessarily have direct experience, which I think can be really, really cool. Because like I said, like two years ago, I knew absolutely nothing, and now I feel very much confident in the full life cycle. So I think that's really cool to have people be able to pivot into a really cool industry where you're really learning something new every day, and you're speaking to really interesting people. We specialize in senior up until C-suite, so yeah, learning from people who are senior all the way up to Director, VP. So it's really interesting. So when I was approaching hiring, I really wanted to find someone who had that DNA that can potentially transition to being a technical recruiter. And that DNA would be, you know, it doesn't have to be personality but just really interacting with engineers, just maybe being a self-starter. I would say great communication, and lastly, I would say just really hungry. Yes, I would say hungry. Because if you're really hungry and you're really willing to learn and be open, so openness as well, then you can really understand the rules or just the lifecycle and the process of being a recruiter, and then you can change people's lives. I actually had one...It was about a year ago, I was working with a Fortune 500 company, and I recruited this guy, and I led him through the process. And it was about maybe a month later when he told me I had basically changed his life. Him and his family were now moving to Atlanta, and it was a new role, and it was just a fresh start. And he was just telling me how appreciative he was of me, and so that really hit home. So I think for those two new hires, I'm so excited to have them get super engaged and be able to change other people's lives as well under the Techie Staffing name, of course. CHAD: You mentioned early on that you're contingent recruiting. So correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that you get paid when you place somebody, when someone gets hired from the company that hires them. ANNA: Yes. CHAD: But then you also mentioned that these people who you're bringing onto your team are full-time. So how does the compensation structure typically work for them? ANNA: Oh, compensation, we have them on salary, but they do have commission. So we wanted to really give; like I said, I want us to grow together. So I do provide commission for each placement they'll place just to really provide incentive. Like I said, it's so early. I want us to think of each other just as teammates and a team because we're all building towards the same goal. So just really wanted to provide incentives where they're really feeling like they're almost owning it full life cycle as well. Because like I said, it's early on, and these can be really strong pillars in the future. So there is salary, but there's also that commission as well to just really provide that incentive. And I know for me personally, incentive can be awesome, so definitely trying to provide that motivation and having them really feel like they're an integral part. CHAD: What's the harder part of your business? Or are they equally hard, finding new clients versus finding people who want to work with you on the candidate side? ANNA: On the business development side, I would say it was harder perhaps in the beginning because I just so was starting with nothing, really. I had just graduated from college. And a lot of agency owners they previously have maybe worked at a really cool tech startup, or maybe they've been working on their agencies for the past 5 or 10 years. They have previous years of experience, but I didn't have that. So I had to convey another method of just really networking, really meeting people, and just really knowing my stuff and having a handle on it. I know maybe a lot of people say, like, just fake it until you make it because then once you make it, and then you get that experience, then you can transfer that experience to new experiences as well. So at first, it was really just building myself up and building the Techie Staffing brand so that we could acquire those clients. In terms of the candidate side, I would say Techie Staffing, and one of the things and part of our brand that we love to portray is that we are the agency that has the companies with the best employer branding. Because like I said, with the supply and demand issue for the software engineers, it is so competitive to attract them to new opportunities. There are just so many companies that are contacting them multiple times a day. So there has to be at least a little bit of a shine or a little bit of a differentiator for companies that you're recruiting for. So we actually specialize in companies that are Series B and above that do have that established employer branding where engineers are really interested in joining that company, so that's just the thing. It's like really having companies that have strong employer branding and being able to follow up. Follow-ups are really, really important when it comes to engaging engineers because, like I said, it's just a super competitive market and just trying to provide them a great white-glove experience. There are some agencies that fall a little bit too close to the client-side where the client is always right. And there are some that fall too much to the candidate side where the candidate is right, but we really want to be a balanced middleman where we're just trying to find the compromise and find the best solution for everybody. So that's the real important part of it of just really providing them with a great experience and showing them that we care and that we're rooting for them. Because it sometimes does surprise me when candidates can be a little...maybe this is a part of me being new. But that's kind of an advantage, too, because I'm still paying attention to detail. That's where my computer science major comes in. It's like constantly trying to stay in tune with candidates and what they need, so just trying to provide a great experience in general. And I'm sure you feel that way with your clients. You're a consultancy as well where you're trying to be B2B and contact these different companies. So how do you conduct business development and really differentiate yourself? CHAD: We focused a lot on reputation building, so blogging, creating open source so that we don't need, fortunately, to cold contact people. And when we do, we're fortunate enough that they might already know about us. And so it's an easier conversation to have because they may already be reading our blog, or they may already be using some of our open source in their product. And so it becomes an easier conversation to have. But the majority of our clients actually come to us when they have a need because we're fortunate enough to have worked to be at the top of the list. ANNA: Definitely, yeah. And I'm still doing that, just reputation building. With one of our Fortune 500, we're doing incredibly well with them to the point where we're filling their pipelines, and we have majority of our candidates in their pipeline. So that's what we're really working on right now is just consistently...and I know like with any business, you have to just constantly build that reputation. So I especially just try to provide a great experience for candidates because they can also be hiring managers as well, so just really providing that white-glove experience. And also, a cool differentiator we always like to showcase is like, I'm a computer science major. And actually, the two people that I just hired have a tech background. So it's not like tech is entirely foreign to us. We've engaged with programming languages. We've coded projects. So we do have some form of understanding when it comes to certain technologies or certain projects that certain engineers are working on. And that's what really gets me excited to speak with engineers because it's so cool and interesting hearing about them working on their projects and working on projects that directly affect me and the products that I'm interacting with. So it's so cool to hear about their...I can understand a bit. And so that's another thing we have with Techie Staffing is really finding people who have a bit of a tech background so at least they have a little bit of knowledge or an understanding of what projects and can be able to really share and convey that to clients that are looking for this talent. CHAD: You mentioned it's a really competitive market now. And as a company who probably has multiple clients, how do you minimize or how do you deal with the potential competition for the limited supply among your own clients? ANNA: Among my own clients, I will say that right now we don't have...for the roles that we're working on for each client, they're not very similar or too, too similar, which is a good thing. We would like it in the future where we could have the same role, but we can understand how that can be a little tricky as well. CHAD: And how do they differ then? Are they differing by the technology experience that they're looking for or the sort of level of the role? How are they different? ANNA: It could be technology, difference of the role. So, for example, for a Fortune 500 company that we're working with, we'll work more with UX, data science, data science roles, as well as...so UX, data science. And then for high-growth startups, mostly with them, they're really looking for back-end engineers, but overall just engineering so frontend, backend, DevOps. We are working potentially to do engineering or more engineering-heavy for our Fortune 500 companies. We have recently been working on a VP of engineering. So for Fortune 500 for now, we've been working more with leadership roles especially, and for high-growth, it's been more engineering IC. But we would like to transition that in the future to have it kind of...or have roles that maybe some candidates could go to this company, and some candidates can go to that startup. And then another differentiator could be or what makes our clientele different from each other is for high-growth startups, especially for engineering ICs, they're really looking for candidates that come from high-growth startups who just understand the current company where they are, and how they're scaling during that period of time around that series B and series C. That's the time to really scale. And Fortune 500 companies they can be open to startups, but for the most part, especially sometimes for leaders who need to have a certain amount of direct reports, they're more looking for people from larger companies. So that would be one way to kind of separate it and so we're not having candidates almost be where they have to compete with candidates within our own company. Because with the difference in the leveling of companies, there's just a difference in what kind of candidates that they're looking for. Mid-Roll Ad: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: url tbot.io/devops CHAD: When I was first starting thoughtbot, I really felt like I needed to take every client that we could get because we were just starting out. We needed to make money. We needed to build a reputation. And so, I felt like we needed to say yes to every client. Over the years, I learned that that was actually watering us down, and it made us less successful. And the more we were clear about who we were, and what we did, and what clients we were best for, the more successful we were. Have you gotten to the point where you needed to turn down clients? ANNA: Because I do such targeted biz dev, we will contact companies that we personally want to work with. But I will say in the beginning, there were some companies that were a lot smaller that, just like you said, you just felt the need to want to rack up a client list. And you just are ready to go and wanting to work with someone. It really motivated me to really take a look and really go deep into the type of clients that we want. So, for example, really, really early-stage companies can have a really, really hard time hiring because, like I said, employer branding is so, so important. And so usually what they'll have is maybe like mission, but they won't really have salary. Or they won't really have the employer branding of the company of candidates either knowing about the company or being able to search the company really quickly and seeing the platform that the company is building and seeing how strong it is. So it's really, really hard to recruit for those stages. I mean, it is possible, but it's just really hard. And then at the same time for these early-stage companies, they really want to, which I totally understand, you know, when you're having your probably 8th, 9th, or 10th engineer and being on the founding team, you really want a strong engineer because that's your platform, that's your baby. You don't want anybody that, you know, it could potentially maybe cause problems, or they really want somebody there they can trust. And so it's hard, you know like I said -- CHAD: But they might not be able to afford that. [laughs] ANNA: Yes, they might either not be able to afford it, or they also cannot interview fast enough in order to just get the offer in their hands. Because I understand they really want to have them speak to the entire team and have them have an in-depth process because it's very much an important role. But these candidates and startups are moving so fast right now where I will speak to a candidate one day, and he or she or they'll probably say, "Oh, you know, I'm passively looking. I'm not really actively looking." And maybe a week and a half to two weeks later, they're like, "Oh, I actually have two offers in hand." So it goes really, really fast versus earlier stage; it can just go a little bit slower because they're just really taking the time to go more in-depth and see if this prospective candidate is the right fit, which is totally understandable. But it was just really hard for us as contingent trying to find that candidate, that perfect candidate for them as well as trying to keep candidates warm and keep them interested when some companies just have like mission. So now, in the future, I've just really, like I said, Techie Staffing, we specialize from Series B and above. And I really just make sure during business development exploratory chats that I'm really going in-depth and making sure I understand the roles that they're prioritizing their time to hire. So if they have a long, long interview process and a really, really low salary in terms of the competitive market, then I may not be as interested in that startup as opposed to another startup whose interview process timeline could be about a week and a half to two weeks. And it doesn't have to be absolutely amazingly competitive base salary but just a fairly competitive salary with a great timeline for time to hire. So that's been my way of just condensing or just being a little bit more pickier in terms of clients in the future. Were there any certain clients for you where you started working with them, and you were like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't have," that's now caused you to be a little bit more pickier for clients in the future? CHAD: Part of it was the kind of work. So we really wanted to be writing software. But just starting out, I also had a background in sort of IT support. And so, when I was reaching out, particularly to past clients, they might say, "You built our website. Now can you help us with purchasing a computer or setting up a computer network in our office?" I felt compelled to say, "Yes," because I felt like we needed all the work we could get. But by doing that work that wasn't really what we wanted to be doing, we were not only less happy in our work, but it was taking time and attention away from the work that we really wanted to be doing. The other was values and practices, which took a little bit longer to form a real understanding of what our values were and the practices that we believe in. But now there's a pretty clear list of the kinds of companies that...what we say at thoughtbot is that we want to work on things that deserve to exist in the world. And so there's a whole bunch of industries that they might not even be actively doing harm in the world, but they are the ones that we wouldn't work in. But even if it's just not a positive contribution to the world, it's probably not going to be something that we're excited to work on. ANNA: That's been an exciting trend, actually, to speak with engineers about. I've started seeing that trend where engineers are saying, "I don't want to create anything evil," or "I just want to do good." And that's been a really awesome selling point for some teams. It definitely is a cherry on top where engineers are really looking for social impact. And the cool part is they have so many opportunities that are coming towards them that they can really pick and choose which one. So to find people who are really looking for social good and just really mission-driven products is amazing to see. And I'm really happy with the work...I'm actually working with a data science team for AI ethics. And that's been really interesting hearing some people talk about their projects and hearing about how data can really not only just strengthen bias but also can just really produce results that can harm certain groups of people, which is so interesting. And it can be something so, so small that I haven't even noticed at all, but that can lead to a big difference. CHAD: Yeah, we've had several episodes about that. ANNA: And it's amazing. And it really is just a huge difference with something so small. And as a woman of color, I'm always aware of what's going on in terms of just ethical practices or just fairness and seeing bias. But in terms of data, seeing something so so small can affect just a whole group of underrepresented people is just amazing to see. But it's also amazing that people or data scientists are now aware of it, and now they're changing it so that it no longer...at least they'll be able to alleviate that bias. CHAD: I want to ask a little bit more about that, and then I want to talk about some market trends. But if you're comfortable, I'm curious; you already mentioned you were just out of college when you were getting started. So there was skepticism around your lack of track record in recruiting. And you've mentioned that you are a woman of color. And so I think as engineers, as people in the market, we probably have this image in our head of what a typical recruiter looks like in terms of attitude, and values, and demographics. And you don't fit that mold in almost any way, basically. Is this actually a positive for you now, or is it actually still hard? Are there companies that are actively seeking out to work with you because they want that different approach? Or are you still facing that skepticism? ANNA: I'm still facing that skepticism. I actually created Techie Staffing around the time of summer 2020, where Black Lives Matter, where George Floyd happened. And it was really interesting because I was entering the corporate workplace. I went to a really wealthy private school in Los Angeles. And I went to the University of Virginia. So I survived two PWIs which means predominantly White institutions. So I thought I had not seen it all, but I thought I had maybe experienced those experiences of bias and understood it a little bit more. But when I went to the corporate workplace and the diversity inclusion campaigns were happening, it was just really confusing because it's hard specifically for engineering and product specifically because it's so new that there is a really, really hard time to find diverse talent. That's why I honestly believe that it's just really trying to educate underrepresented communities to understanding all of the different diverse types of roles and opportunities that you can encounter in the tech industry so, for example, like UX, UX design, UX research, data science, machine learning, all of that. So I think I was more contacted or maybe was engaged in business development companies who were looking for me to do diversity which I think it kind of...and I am such a huge proponent for diversity. But it also kind of had my heart drop a little bit because I just felt like people were contacting me because of who I am instead of just thinking like if it was just any other agency, would I be contacted specifically for that? It was more just for exclusive searches, which can be very, very hard for products and engineering. I think in diversity and inclusion, we really need to focus on different departments and the different problems that underrepresented communities encounter with different departments. So it was just really hard, but in terms of companies contacting me because I am a woman of color owning an agency, no, that didn't really...and it's never really helped. I do wear it as a badge of honor because, like I said, I started out with nothing. So to start out with nothing and have to fight through everything to sit at the table and create something is amazing. My background didn't really help me. It was really just me, just constantly contacting people. And I was prepared for this because, in my entrepreneurship minor, they said, "You're going to encounter a lot of nos," and so I did. I encountered so many nos, but eventually, I was able to turn those nos into yeses. So now that I turned some of those nos into yeses...and I'm still encountering nos, but I still keep going and still building and building. And now I do feel a sense of pride now two years later where it is like, wow, I really did have to fight through to make it, and that's where I hold just a huge sense of pride. But no, it was not my background that really...the only thing that my background was maybe appealing was thinking like, oh, okay, I think you can do diversity and inclusion, which I don't want to be profiled in that way. I just want to be a founder who happens to be a Black woman instead of a Black woman founder. And so, I don't want to be contacted to feel like my race is a part of it. And that was interesting in the corporate workplace, especially when I was trying to navigate different, you know, how to speak, how to build rapport, or how to navigate corporate workplace conversations. And that's very hard to do with diversity and inclusion because you're fighting with, like, that's racism and misogyny. That's something really deep-rooted, and that has been here for years and years. So it's a really heavy, heavy topic. And that's not some really, really heavy topic that you really want to bring or a lot of people don't really want to bring into the workplace. So that was just hard to encounter. But overall, I so, so support diversity and inclusion. And the cool part is because I have this awareness and I know that diverse teams are better teams, whenever I'm sourcing, or one of my recruiters is sourcing, I'm just making sure that they have that in the front of their mind, and they're just trying to diversify their candidate pipeline as much as possible. CHAD: Well, taking it from the candidate side of things, I, unfortunately, I'm of the belief that the hiring process is really ripe for extreme, subtle unconscious biases or conscious ones even to have an impact on the hiring process. So, how have you navigated that on the candidate side? I'm sure you don't want to say anything negative about any of your clients. It's not about, oh, this company is racist. But I think do you agree with the premise that the hiring process at a lot of companies is ripe for some bias to creep in? ANNA: Of course. I mean, all of the time. And the part that's so, I would say, scary about it is that bias is something that you feel. It's not really tangible. You can't really grab it. I mean, it can be in writing, and [laughs] there has been stuff in writing. But it's very much kind of yeah; it's non-tangible. So it's hard to really call it out specifically of like, hmm, this candidate I don't know why all of a sudden nice to haves become must-haves. Why is there a shift? Like I said, there are different problems with different departments, but there are also different problems in terms of leveling systems, so leadership roles versus individual contributor roles. There can be a little bit more, you know, maybe there's a little bit more openness on the IC side, but with leadership, it can get a little interesting sometimes. But the hard part is it's not really tangible. So I really have to give it to diversity like DEI specialists because to have to navigate those conversations and really articulate a non-tangible thing is so, so complicated. So there are tangible things you can do, like having a diverse panel. But what happens if the company doesn't even have the numbers for diversity to have that diverse panel in the first place? So it can get really complicated in terms of trying to navigate the bias within the interview process, and we do try to do our best there, just trying to provide on our side because that's all we can do. It's really up to the companies in terms of their interview processes and how they are going to change it or maintain some stages. But for us, we're just trying to just submit diverse talent and really just try to provide that white-glove service for them and hope that that bias doesn't seep in. But like I said, it's such a heavy topic. And like I said, with corporate workplace politics, it can be so fragile and really interesting. So it's just hard to really take that and understand where it comes from or being able to even verbalize it. So that's where it gets really interesting. And so, I do hope that in the future, interview processes are changed where there is able to be a diverse panel, or there is a way to really be able to understand that bias. Because like I said, it's very complicated. And we don't want to claim that any company is specifically racist, but it's just understanding bias and maybe why there's a difference for one candidate versus another candidate, which can be really interesting. CHAD: I think the first part is recognizing that everybody has biases, and it could be anything. It could be, well, what happens when you come across a resume of someone that went to the same school that you did? What happens to that resume, then? And does that subtly influence how you review that resume? It has nothing to do with their race or the color of their skin or anything. So those biases can creep in, and you need to decide as a company is this something that actually matters to success at the company? Is this something that we want to be using when we make hiring decisions about who gets that first interview or who continues on in the interview process? For us, we've decided it's not, so we have a completely anonymous screening process where we don't even show the names of schools. We don't show the names of the companies that you worked at previously. We only show the positions that you held at those companies because we've decided that whether you have a degree or not doesn't matter, and the companies that you worked at previously don't matter. It's what you were actually able to do with that experience. ANNA: Oh yeah. I think that's actually amazing. That's a really great way of doing it. I always just try to tell hiring managers also to just open that candidate pipeline as much as possible because the number one way to really understand someone isn't really through just a piece of paper. Yes, we want to make sure that the resume is at least a bit aligned. And they have, if it's an engineering role, for example, the right tech stack or maybe the right technologies or the right kind of projects that they've worked on. But other than that, you'll be so amazed what can happen when people just hop on a call with each other. You can really find just that hidden genius in people. So usually, when it comes to just diversity, it's like just hopping on a quick call with someone, anybody. Like you said, there are so many biases, but just being able to talk to them and see them as a human being can really just surprise you and surprise everybody. So really just, I always say just find that hidden genius through engaging with someone. CHAD: Yeah. So you've mentioned time to hire is a really important thing moving quickly in today's market when candidates have a lot of opportunity. What are some other ways, either trends or things that are happening in the market or things that you see changing? ANNA: Well, honey, I'm sure, as you know, there's been a huge amount of layoffs that have happened. Like, recently, about 17,000 workers were laid off from more than 70 tech startups globally in May, and that's been about a 350% jump from April. So I will say it's just due to inflation as well as just the slowing of demand. Startups right now are just really trying to just cut corners and just really trying to just hone in on their runway and their burn rate. CHAD: Are the candidates that are being laid off finding new work quickly? ANNA: I'm not sure because it depends on the departments. We're working with engineering mostly in product. So it's really funny because as we are tracking the layoffs, we will contact candidates to see if they're interested in another opportunity. Because fortunately, for our client list, we haven't had anyone have a massive amount of layoffs which has been...we're so happy about that, fortunately. But we've actually contacted engineers. And it's amazing how strong the engineering department is. It does not seem like they really are...that's not a department where there's like significant layoffs because they just have to uphold that platform. So yeah, so it still is in terms of engineering surprising with all these layoffs. It still is just very much competitive because even the people who have or the companies that have encountered a large amount of layoffs those engineers are still wanting to stay or don't...there are some that may feel the need to depart at a certain point. But for the most part, they are staying. But in terms of how quickly, I'm not entirely sure in terms of for people that are laid off how quickly they are being hired because this is also within early-stage startups or not early-stage; they also have Fortune 500s too. But yeah, I'm not sure about that part. But in terms of engineering specifically, the jobs are still just growing. The projected growth rate for software engineers is like 22%, and data scientists is 22%, as well as web developers is 13%. So fortunately for us, as an agency who primarily specializes in engineering, there hasn't been a huge difference. But like I said, specifically with engineering, that time to hire is still super important because these candidates are still encountering offers quickly. And it's just a way to be competitive because if you're just the first offer, you're the first offer in their face instead of, let's say, they have two offers from another company and you're like at the last offer. It's such a big difference there. CHAD: Are you seeing a lot of remote positions versus in-person positions? ANNA: Yes, remote is still going strong. I have seen that now there is a little bit of a trend of some startups or companies where you know because I research companies every day...I'll go on Crunchbase, Morning Brew, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Built-In. I'll go on all of the websites, and I'm seeing who got a fresh new round of funding or who's highly growing, or any new products that companies are offering. CHAD: You're seeing some companies say that they're hiring hybrid or in person. ANNA: I am seeing that on startups and companies' career pages, once they've acquired a new round of funding or they're scaling, that on the job boards, you'll start seeing only the headquarters, so just San Francisco or just maybe Boston instead of remote. So it's been a little bit more of a quiet transition because I remember when bigger companies were announcing it like, oh, we're going to transition in the office in February of 2022 or December of 2021, then there would all of a sudden be a mass exodus of people who were seeking remote opportunities. But I do still feel that remote is still going strong, especially for high-growth startups, you know, yeah, still going strong. There is the option of hybrid. With these engineers that do have these choices, 100% remote is really becoming a great selling point. I mean, I don't even know if it's really a selling point but just standard now. CHAD: So that's what you're hearing from candidates. Candidates want that. ANNA: Definitely, candidates want. There's been plenty of candidates that we've interviewed where they've said in terms of their...because we'll ask them what would be their motivation for considering other opportunities and potentially leaving, and then they'll say, "X company is anticipating us to transition into the office, and I just don't want to do that." Their commute may be an hour, and that can be two even maybe three hours out of your day where you're spending your morning driving and then spending your evening driving. So people just prefer to be remote. Or people are located now in the Midwest. They're going back to their hometowns where they're able to instead of like these big metropolitan cities where now it's really hard to afford a house, so they're going back home and being able to enjoy their family there. So definitely it is a standard and people are really interested in it. And for companies that are having employees transition back into the office, we've consistently heard that there's just a mass exodus of people leaving. CHAD: What have you seen compensation do over the last year-plus? ANNA: I would say for compensation, I mean, in my personal opinion, when it was super competitive, it was definitely increasing. Now I feel like we're working with a Fortune 500 company, so compensation hasn't really been too, too much of a problem. So yeah, it hasn't been as competitive. But I do remember when it was maybe around Q1 and Q2 2021 where there was almost this great rehire. And everybody was scaling, and demand was soaring where the salaries were just like, it just increased or were just consistently increasing. We were just so shocked at what some software engineers were making. But now, it seems to have potentially tamed a little bit. It's not as high as it probably used to be because we were working with that series B Company and their salaries were pretty good, pretty competitive. But all of a sudden, with the demand soaring and these engineers, it started getting even more competitive. Then that's when all of a sudden, you know, the first few placements were fine. And then, all of a sudden, each candidate, like I said, they would say they were passively looking and then the next week... And this startup their time to hire was actually really great. But even with this competitive market, it was still hard because, like I said, a week later, they would already have an offer. And their salary would probably increase like 20,000-30,000 from their initial target base that they were seeking to now what they were being hired from other companies. So it would definitely increase. But I haven't seen that recently as much. CHAD: Yeah. I think also the trend to remote changed compensation, too, because it leveled it out. There were people who if you were trying to find a job in Kansas and you were going in an office, that market is very different than the U.S.-wide hiring market. But now, candidates are on the U.S.-wide hiring market. And I think that that brought up the lower end of salaries. ANNA: Oh yes. Because at first, it was like okay, we can look for...it was 100% remote, which was great, and so they were like, we can look for people in the Midwest. But during that time, companies were paying San Francisco and New York salaries, and they were offering those salaries to people who were located in Kansas and Iowa. So you would have engineers who were deep, deep in the Midwest who were asking for in terms of target for those metropolitan city salary budgets. And they would get it, which I think is great as well, just they are doing the same work as someone who is located in San Francisco or in New York but maybe with less overhead, of course. But it definitely was a little bit more of a challenge. And you can no longer assume that somebody located in the Midwest that may have lower salary bands aren't at those metropolitan city salary budgets now. CHAD: Anna, thanks much for stopping by and sharing with us. I really I'm impressed by what you've accomplished so far. And I'm excited about what you're going to be able to do in the future. ANNA: Thank you. Thank you so much, again, for inviting me. I had a great time speaking with you, and it was so interesting hearing about your time being a consultancy. Because I know being an external vendor, it's really interesting interacting with clients when you're not internal. So that was really interesting hearing about the difference of clients that you're encountering at first versus now. CHAD: Yeah. If folks want to get in touch with Techie Staffing or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to do that? ANNA: So in terms of contacting me, I'll say the best way would be either our website so www.techiestaffing.com. Or you can contact me on LinkedIn; my name is Anna Spearman, A-N-N-A S-P-E-A-R-M-A-N. I'm always active on LinkedIn. So if you're seeking a new opportunity either on the candidate side or either meeting, help and engaging Techie Staffing as a scaling company to fill your engineering, design, UX, and product roles, you can contact me on LinkedIn as well as filling out the forms on the Techie Staffing website. And we also are on Twitter @StaffingTechie. So definitely contact us, and we'd be happy to hear from you. CHAD: Wonderful. You can subscribe to the show and find notes and a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Anna Spearman.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. 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Chelinde Edouard is Co-Founder and CEO of MustWatch, which connects people through television. Chad talks with Che about creating a social and user engagement platform that allows people to come back and constantly use an app without interrupting TV-watching experiences, how they use data to improve user experience, and fundraising and giving investors opportunities to help build out the app, increase marketing, and potentially build an Android version. MustWatch Follow MustWatch on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow Che on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Che Edouard, Co-Founder and CEO of MustWatch, which connects people through television. Che, thank you for joining me. CHELINDE: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. CHAD: So astute listeners of the show will note maybe that name sounds familiar. And that's because you and MustWatch were mentioned on Episode 419, which was about the GK Fund with Michael Benezra. And I asked him for examples of the kinds of companies that he was excited about that they had given their grants to. And you're the one he called out, and so that jumped out at me. And thanks for joining the show. CHELINDE: Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. And I definitely want to shout out the GK Fund. They've definitely been a huge support to us since giving us the grant. And they're definitely leading the charge in this new avenue of racial inequality and helping startups in that fashion in Boston. CHAD: So I'm curious; before we get too far down the road of where you're at today and how you got there, let's take a step back and just remind people what MustWatch is. CHELINDE: Absolutely. MustWatch is an app that's on the App Store now. So even if you have an iPhone, you can download it. And it's an app that's revolving around TV. So it allows you to see what shows your friends watch, chat with them about them, and send recommendations all in one place. So we think of it as like a social hub for all of your TV needs. CHAD: I think people who hear this might be like, oh, does this exist already? That kind of thing. And there are a couple of things a little bit like this, but it doesn't seem like there's really anything that's quite like this, right? CHELINDE: Exactly. So a lot of the social TV apps and other services today focus on one feature, for example, chat or recommendations, or giving reviews about shows, or having a list of them. But our app, we do all of it in one place. So on our app, it can show which shows you like. You can also share with your friends directly; hey, you should go watch this show because I think you should like it. We also have this feature called watchlist, which is our natural social recommendations of here are all the shows that your friends are watching that you don't watch. And so it's a way to give people a way to find new shows without getting the same recommendations from Netflix and Hulu that are not really accurate today. CHAD: How did you hit upon this idea? CHELINDE: Actually, one of my high school friends, we were all brainstorming and coming up with ideas for companies. And then one day, he was at work, and he was trying to talk about Game of Thrones, but his boss wouldn't let him because he wasn't caught up on the season. He wasn't there. CHAD: [laughs] CHELINDE: So he was like, how do I find someone or talk to someone who's caught up to where I'm at so I can actually have a conversation? And so we brainstormed, and we tried to solve the problem of let's just create a spoiler-free chat kind of solution that would allow people to talk about shows that they're caught up on. And then that we've iterated and evolved, and that's kind of led to where we're at today. CHAD: And when was that? CHELINDE: That was, I want to say, 2014. That was when I graduated from BU. So in the summer of 2014, that's when we first had the idea. And then from there, we just brainstormed, had a bunch of meetings, and then just took a year in stealth mode trying to figure out how we wanted to create a business plan. And then, from there, we hit the ground running. CHAD: You and your friend, what were your sort of core competencies, the two of you? CHELINDE: I'm the tech background, so to speak, because, as I mentioned, I went to BU. My degree is in management information systems, which is basically business IT. So I was trying to leverage all my technology skills there and also my business skills to say how do we, one, build the app and two, create a business that can actually support it for the long term? And he had more of the idea on the customer side of how can we create an experience or a user engagement platform that allows people to constantly come back and constantly want to find more reason to use our app? Because as we know, people watch the show on TV, but the app is a conduit to that. And so, we want to figure out a way to get people to constantly use our app but also not interrupt their TV-watching experience. CHAD: So you said you're trying to figure out a business plan. You're refining the concept. At what point do you start making the leap to actually writing an app? CHELINDE: With all apps, you start with this concept called wireframes, and so we built out a bunch of wireframes. Two of my friends from high school we all built the app together. And then one of them went to Miami, and his friend from Miami he's the one that actually helped us develop the app and code. And so we worked with him to actually say, "Hey, these are our wireframes. We're trying to make this into an app. Can you build it out?" And so, we worked with him over a year to make that a reality. CHAD: And it took about a year to get to launch. CHELINDE: We actually started on Android, and we were trying to create an MVP or prototype. And so we took that idea like I said, we were working for a year, to this company called Netcapital, which is a crowdfunding platform for startups and companies. And we launched on Netcapital in May of 2020. With that idea, we raised 50k in almost three months. And with that money, we actually built the app from there. And so the app you see in the App Store now is from the money that we've raised on Netcapital. CHAD: Did you throw away that original version and start over? CHELINDE: I wouldn't say throw away. We kind of used it as a launching point. But we don't have any Android version right now. We're strictly in iOS. CHAD: Yeah, that was notable to me. Tell me more about that. CHELINDE: So going from Android to iOS it was really a business decision there because our developer had knowledge in Android but didn't have the iOS background. And so when we went on Netcapital, we used that money to actually hire a real development team. That's who's building our app now. So we work with them to build our app. And going to iOS has allowed us to, at least in the meantime, expand in the U.S. market a lot quicker. CHAD: Now, are they building it in first-party frameworks only for iOS, or are they using something that is going to allow you to go expand to Android in the future? CHELINDE: So right now, we're strictly iOS only. We would like to move to a React Native or a tool that allows us to promote to both. When we first started, we wanted to just focus on iOS, given our costs. CHAD: These are common problems that a lot of startups or common decisions that a lot of startups have to make. And it's not always straightforward. Were you worried about this? CHELINDE: Yes. Because that's one of the things now it's we would love to have an Android version. But for me, being more of a purist, I didn't want the code to work in one system and not another. And given that we only had...in my mind, it's like you have one shot to make an impression. And when you go out and launch it on the App Store, I didn't want it to be half-baked in one and half-baked in the other. I'd rather have one be exactly how we want it to look, and then we can adapt as we grow. CHAD: How has it been working for you, then? CHELINDE: So far, so good. We're actually in the process of releasing some new features later this month, and so like I said, the watchlist feature, which allows you to add shows that you're going to watch in the future. We also have the ability to create chats through the chat functionality because previously, you had to create a new chat every single time. So we've made it easier for people to start chats, and also you can do group chats as well. So it's not just individuals. You can have a whole group of people in one conversation. CHAD: So some of these features there must be a backend server powering all of this, right? CHELINDE: Yes. So we use the Google Cloud Firestore for our backend. And another cool part about our app is we have a lot of analytics about what people are watching. And that's where we take their data from our cloud, the Google Cloud Firestore, and we send it to the BigQuery, also a Google platform. And then we use the Google Analytics that we have on the app to then do our reports around who's watching what, top 10 shows for the past month, the top 10 shows based on if you're male or female, based on what age group. So we have all the analytics on the viewing habits from the data that we've collected. CHAD: Can you tell me how many users you have now? CHELINDE: As of right now, we are at 820. We are looking to obviously get a little bit over to that 1,000 users mark, and then we can have a better sense of what kind of insights we can glean from there. CHAD: Well, hopefully, coming on this show will help you do that. So if you're listening and this sounds interesting to you, where are the best places...so people can search for MustWatch on the App Store, the iOS App Store? CHELINDE: Yep. And we also have a website mustwatch.com if people want to check that out as well. CHAD: Yeah, so let's do it. Let's push them over the top and get those numbers up. I'm curious about usage patterns. Are you able to see any patterns in terms of what causes people to either keep using the app or not? CHELINDE: Yeah. So the main thing that keeps people using the app is having chat groups with people and then also getting recommendations. Like I mentioned before, we have the social recommendations of people just showing you what shows people watch. But there's also direct one-to-one. If you're on the app, I could send you a recommendation. And that's what drives a lot of people to go on the app and find new shows. Another thing that we see is a lot of people just searching, just looking up the shows that are on the app because our database of shows is actually pretty robust. I was talking to someone yesterday; he's Korean. And he was using his phone to type in a show. And he was using a Korean keyboard, and the show came up. And he was like, "Oh wow, I didn't even know you guys support multiple languages." And I was like, "Yes, we support." Our database of shows is very expansive. So if you're in Korea, if you're in Japan, if you like anime, if you like telenovelas, we have all types of shows on our app as well. CHAD: Do you get that database from somewhere? CHELINDE: Yeah, so there's actually a TV show API called TMDB, which pretty much is an open-source, free database that you can pull from. So we use that as our source for shows. CHAD: That's cool. Speaking of shows, I noticed on the MustWatch website, on the team page, you all list your favorite shows and what you're currently watching. I think you and I have different tastes in shows. [laughter] I have heard of the shows that are your favorite, but I have not watched any of them. CHELINDE: Oh wow. [laughs] What are your favorite shows? CHAD: I think actually my shows match the shows listed by Rob, your CFO. CHELINDE: Oh wow. [laughs] CHAD: And my all-time favorite show is, I think, The Leftovers. CHELINDE: Okay. So yeah, and that's the cool thing about this app is like, if you're on the app, you would see Rob's shows on the app too. Because if you download the app, you become friends with all of us immediately, so you have friends on there to start. CHAD: Oh, that's a cool idea. CHELINDE: So it gives you a way to just see what the app can look like before...because if you're on there by yourself as one person, it's a social app. It's meant to be with people. It doesn't really give you that clarity. So I bring that up because that's the one cool thing about the app is you always are surprised by what shows people watch, even if they're your friend. It's like, oh, I didn't know you would like that show. Or oh, I liked that show, and you don't like that show. And it's a very cool icebreaker or just a social connection that you can make because everyone's putting shows on the app. And one way, actually...I was talking to someone the other day thinking about how like Spotify, you put all your playlists and all your shows. This app is kind of like a Spotify but for TV shows and also for movies. So it's not just shows, movies as well. CHAD: And the cool things that Spotify does in terms of the reports that they release annually to each individual person and everything. Like, that's all stuff you can do too. CHELINDE: Yep. CHAD: Yeah, it's cool. So your background actually is in sort of business intelligence, data analysis, and analyst, right? CHELINDE: Yes, that's correct. For my day job...I just want to back up. I also have a day job while also doing this. And I've primarily been the past couple of years a BI analyst. So previously, I was at HarbourVest, which is a private equity firm here in Boston. And then, I recently joined Liberty Mutual Investments also as BI data analyst. So I've been very involved in the financial services side of data analytics, which has allowed me to just get other insights on how technology works and just also getting exposure to the whole industry as well. CHAD: So you basically have two reasons why you want to get the number of users up. One is from a co-founder perspective and founder perspective; you want to get the number of users up. But from a data perspective, you want to get the users up so that you have more data to play with. CHELINDE: Exactly, exactly. The more users we have, the more data we can collect. And then data we can glean insights, and then provide value to our customers as well. Because our app users, if we can know which shows they are liking, we can also then tell them about shows that they also might like. Because once you find commonalities in shows that people are liking, you can then give them better recommendations. And we think that the social aspect of our app, the fact that we have all of your friends on there and they're giving you recommendations, it's better than just, oh, you've watched this show in the past three years, and it's on Netflix's algorithm of watched shows. That, to us, doesn't really seem as insightful and helpful to people. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: url tbot.io/sprint CHAD: So you mentioned you have another job in addition to all this work you've been doing on MustWatch. How has that been? You know, starting a company, working on it while also having a full-time job elsewhere? CHELINDE: Yeah, it's definitely been, I guess, one of the challenging things I would say. It's definitely been rewarding. It takes a lot of time management, I would say, because you have to balance your day job and manage something on the side. I think the biggest hurdle I had was when we were first launching the app on the App Store, meeting with developers, and trying to fundraise all at the same time because I was just pressed for time. Because of the COVID, COVID happened right when we were launching. So working from home all day everyday kind of helped because I didn't have an hour commute anymore. So I got two hours back in my day. So I could, instead of going to work and just commuting, I had an hour in the morning and an hour after. I could use that time for MustWatch. But I had to definitely sacrifice some of my social life to make that happen. [laughter] CHAD: I assume that you have the plans that you would hope that things with MustWatch get to the point where you could do it full time. CHELINDE: Yes. The goal is to get MustWatch to a point where we can pay our employees and have salaries, and everyone can just be working from the company. But as everyone knows, if you're in a startup, you got to just not pay yourself and make sure everything goes into the company. How I see it is you can't pay yourself until everything else is working. CHAD: Yeah, I mean, people hear the startup stories of raising a whole bunch of money, working exclusively on it, having more than enough. I think that that's actually not necessarily the norm; that's the outlier. I think it's more common, more widespread to do what you're doing, to have an idea, and to be working on it and growing it while also holding down another job. CHELINDE: Because as we all know, the bills need to be paid, [laughs] and those don't go away. But I didn't want to give up on the dream. So if you want to make it happen, you can make it happen because while I was at HarbourVest, I also was at Babson getting my master's degree in business analytics. So at one point in time, I was working full-time at grad school and doing MustWatch. To me, that was probably the most busiest period of my life, but I did get through it. [laughs] But definitely took a lot, but now we're here. And we've gotten support from the GK Fund, and I couldn't be happier with where the future lies ahead. CHAD: One of the things about the GK Fund is that it's a grant. It's not an investment where you're giving up part of your company in order to do it, which I think is really important, especially for very early-stage companies, not to have to give away a significant portion of their company just to get some angel investment or that startup fund. I assume that's one of the reasons why it's been a big impact for you. CHELINDE: Absolutely. I mean, one, having it not be an investment was a lifesaver for us. At the time, we were still trying to figure out how to just get cash to get to the next stage. And so, for us, a grant was literally the blessing or a miracle at the perfect timing because it allowed us to...it gave us a little kickstart. Because I mean, as everyone knows, if you're a startup, you're always low on cash. And you're always trying to decide what's the best way to move the company forward? And that just gave us that breathing room without having to worry about paying it back, or a timetable to now let us actually grow and do what we can do best. CHAD: Do you hope to take a more traditional investment in the future? CHELINDE: Yes. So we're actually planning to do another fundraising on Netcapital. This time we're planning to raise $450,000. And that's going to help us build out the app, increase our marketing, and then potentially also build an Android version. CHAD: So I'm not sure that everyone who's listening will know what Netcapital actually is. CHELINDE: Yep. So Netcapital is a crowdfunding equity platform which allows retail investors to directly invest in startups. So if you're looking for another way to get into early-stage companies, Netcapital is a great place to do that. It's similar to if you've heard of StartEngine. It's a similar concept to that. And it's mainly you pretty much buy shares in a company, and then that company will then take that money to then use it for the funds that they have set in their offering. And you actually get an equity stake in the company. And so, for us, it's great because typically, those types of fundraising opportunities don't come for us. You need to have VC-backed or some kind of angel investor to get to that level. But having it be open to everybody, there's a larger pool of retail investors that allow you to get to where you need to go. Because if you can get a couple of your family, friends around to give you like a hundred or a couple thousand, it's definitely a better avenue than just going the VC route or just getting a loan from a grant or a startup, an SBA loan, something like that. CHAD: Traditionally, something like Netcapital was not really possible. But my understanding is that in 2016, the laws changed to allow smaller investments and get actual equity and for companies to offer it in such a way that wasn't possible before. CHELINDE: Yes, I believe it's called a Reg CF, Regulation Crowdfunding, and that was the law that was passed in 2016. And that is crucial to us being able to have an offering on Netcapital. CHAD: So it's not like Kickstarter where, you know, in Kickstarter, you're offering a new product or something, and people aren't becoming investors in your actual company. Netcapital is they are actual investors. And so, as an entrepreneur, as a company, what do your obligations to those investors look like? CHELINDE: So because they're investors, we have to give them quarterly updates. We have to file our annual report. We have to disclose any conflict of interest. There's a whole SEC team that has to approve and review any offering that goes on the platform to make sure that we are following all SEC guidelines. And then also, we are liable because they're investors. So they can email us. They can reach out to us, and we will respond because they are our shareholders. [chuckles] And so we need to make sure they're happy as well. CHAD: Yeah, with one of the things that Netcapital does is it sort of works like Kickstarter in that if you don't meet the goals that you've set, it doesn't actually happen. CHELINDE: Yep, there's a minimum investment threshold, so it depends on how much money you're raising. So last time, when we raised 50k, the minimum was 10k. So if we didn't get over $10,000, all the investors would get their money back. But if we got over that threshold, then that's the money that we would be able to use for our company. CHAD: 450,000 is significantly more than 50,000. What do you feel like you need to do in order to make sure that you hit the goal? CHELINDE: So one thing is going on podcasts like this to make sure that people know about it. [laughter] Secondly, we're actually going to be partnering with the GK Fund to do some more media exposure there. And then we're also partnering with Silicon Valley Bank because they're actually our partners on the banking side. And so, I'm going to be partnering with their network to leverage their connections as well. And then we're also going to be just doing the classic social media, posting on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, friends, or family. All avenues of media we will be pushing out MustWatch. CHAD: When do you expect to open up that listing? CHELINDE: We're targeting mid-July right now. So that's when we're planning on going live on Netcapital pending the compliance review and all the other legal stuff, but that's when we plan to go live. CHAD: Okay, well, if you're listening to this episode, it's going to be going live in a couple of weeks. And so definitely follow along and check it out. Cool. Well, what are your goals for that next funding round? What do you expect to use it for? CHELINDE: We expect to use our funding round on improving the iOS experience, so adding more features because we've gotten some customer feedback. And we have a laundry list or a backlog of items we want to add but obviously limited by cash constraints. So once we have the money, we can do what we want to do. And then we also would like to improve our marketing. So we want to have a real marketing team and improve our SEO. And then we also have a connection with Hollywood. So the writer for Ford and Ferrari, his name is Jason Keller is on our team. And we want to see how we can get our foot in the door with Hollywood as well. CHAD: That's really cool. What would that look like in your ideal scenario? CHELINDE: Ideally, we'd have some celebrities or Hollywood A-listers on the app using MustWatch and then promoting their shows or promoting our app in one of their media engagements as well. CHAD: Or chatting with people about the episode that just came out and that kind of thing. That'd be really cool. CHELINDE: Yeah, exactly. We want to get people to just engage on the app with celebrities as well. That's definitely one of the avenues we were thinking as well. CHAD: One of the big trends right now is TV companies making companion podcasts to the shows that they make. I can totally see them doing this kind of thing as well. CHELINDE: As we all know, user engagement and fan engagement is crucial for these companies, and MustWatch would be a crucial way for a lot of companies to connect easily. CHAD: This is a little bit of an aside, but I was sort of surprised that you were able to get mustwatch.com. CHELINDE: It was not cheap. [laughter] I think for some people who were following us for a while, when we first launched, our name was WatchParty. And that's how we originally started our company. But as we evolved, Facebook released a watch party feature; Hulu, Amazon all have these watch party features, and they weren't exactly like our company. And we didn't want to get any confusion in branding. And so we had a long discussion around what name do we change to, and how do we still convey the right feel for the app, and what we want to do? Because on our app, you're not watching the show on our app, I want to make that very clear. It's all about finding a new show, chatting, and connecting with people, but you're not watching on the app. And so it's tough to...not tough, but we wanted to make sure that people knew that the app was for finding new shows. But also, it has to be like a must-watch. Like, I need to go watch this right now because it's something really good. And so that's how we came across this name. CHAD: You mentioned earlier on that expenses are tight when you're working on something new. How worried were you about spending money on a domain name? CHELINDE: So this is also where our partnership with Netcapital came into play because they helped us in terms of getting us off the ground. And we work with them on the business side as well. And this is one of the avenues where they helped support us. CHAD: Oh, wow. Wow. It's great that you're able to pull together these different resources and get that support. CHELINDE: Yeah, to us, it's been crucial because, without the support, it's very tough to get your name out there. It's very tough to promote the idea. And so, with Netcapital and the GK Fund, it definitely puts us in a better light than usual. CHAD: Well, Che, I really wish you the best and MustWatch the best and your whole team. And good luck over the next few weeks as you open up this round on Netcapital. I ask everybody, again, go check out the app. Sometimes we talk to companies of all different stages on the show. And I especially think it's important when we have someone that's just getting started really trying to hit these user numbers that if people could go check it out, that'd be great. CHELINDE: Really appreciate it. CHAD: If folks want to follow along with you, get in touch with you, that kind of thing, where are all the different places where they can do that? CHELINDE: Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, Che Edouard. You can reach out to us on mustwatch.com. We have a contact us email there. You can also email me at che@mustwatch.com if you want to reach out. I am available on all platforms. CHAD: Wonderful. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes and a complete transcript for the episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprintSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Geronda Wollack-Spiller is the DEI Program Manager at thoughtbot. Chad talks with Geronda about implementing a successful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program at the company by providing a culture of belonging, the challenges, in particular, the tech industry faces, and acknowledging that many of us work in spaces where when we're bringing someone onto a team who has underrepresented identities, they might be the only one. How do we create a space that's as inclusive as possible? Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at thoughtbot Follow Geronda on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Geronda Wollack-Spiller, the DEI Program Manager at thoughtbot. Geronda, thank you so much for joining me. GERONDA: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. CHAD: In honor of Pride Month, we're doing something extra special for this episode in addition to just having you as an extra special guest. We're recording live in front of thoughtbot remotely. We've got a whole bunch of people watching. I can hear them cheering off in the distance for you as you make your debut on the podcast. GERONDA: [laughs] CHAD: Thanks for joining me. GERONDA: Thank you. Nice. [laughs] CHAD: So you joined thoughtbot as our first ever DEI program manager back...when was it? GERONDA: Oh, April, yeah, April fourth. CHAD: It's been a whirlwind few months. Thank you already for all of the contributions that you've made to the company already. GERONDA: Oh, thank you. No problem. CHAD: Tell us a little bit about your role. And then I can provide some fill-in terms of what we were thinking when we added this. But let's start with sharing a little bit about your role. GERONDA: A lot of my role is about...so it's a lot of understanding the processes that we have, people operations processes, and really thinking about how do we provide more of a...or improve our ability to provide a culture of belonging. And so a lot of what I do is I will partner across with people operations, and I'll look at things like promotions, and who are we promoting? Who are we hiring? Improvements to performance management processes. How are we giving feedback? Who are our managers? And a lot of what I'll do, too, is execute against the goals that were set by our DEI Council before I had joined, which the council is great. And I'll look to see are there different ways that we should be looking at goals? So one of the things that I'm doing right now is I'm building out a multi-year roadmap for DEI. And I'm incorporating a lot of the goals that the council has already put together, which has been super great. And I want to create a space that feels like a safer or brave space for anyone to come to me with concerns, questions, suggestions. And I partner a lot with different groups to be able to understand their needs and make sure that we are voicing and amplifying historically marginalized groups but also providing a lot of the education around what DEI means and how we can do that in our everyday jobs. So I am co-chair of the DEI Council. I support that council to take on different projects, build out task force, work with everyone across the company to contribute, and infuse diversity, equity, and inclusion within the company. So that's a lot of what I do. [laughs] Other things involved, but that gives you kind of a high level of my role. CHAD: Yeah, that's great. I've talked before on the show about the DEI Council in a few different episodes, mostly in passing. And overall, when we started on...the concept of a council came from some consultants that we had worked with previously to do an audit. They provided us with a few different suggestions about how we could continue on from that audit and take action. And one of the things, especially with our geographic studios, the way that we used to be organized the idea of one person from each of those studios coming together on a council to work together and then bring the work back to their studios for action really resonated with us as a structure that could work pretty well for us given the structure. We've obviously since gone completely remote. And the council is no longer specifically tied to those individual teams or those offices that we no longer have. But the council is still that, a group of people from a wide array across the company who come together and focus on and organize our work around diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we saw the opportunity in your role to have someone provide continuity and organization and experience to the council to help make it even more effective at thoughtbot. And I think we're just getting started with that. But I think it's been very positive overall, your addition, and like I said at the top of the show, thank you again for your contribution so far. GERONDA: [laughs] No problem. Thank you for hiring me. Thanks. CHAD: [laughs] Well, speaking of hiring, you've done a few different things over the years. And I'm curious; you started in more general human resources roles. Was it a goal from the beginning of your career to move into a DEI role, or did that evolve along the way? GERONDA: Ooh, interesting question. Yeah, it actually evolved along the way. I thought I would be an HR project manager and I would be leading projects across global companies. And when I started in my career, I was an HR operations analyst, and I was doing a lot of the HR product management. But what I discovered is every single time that I would be in a role, I kept looking at things from a DEI lens without realizing that I was. And then, as I started continuing to do that, I fell in love with it. And I was like, okay, this is my place of where I want to be. So even though I was doing projects related to HR, if I would do recruiting operations, I would look at okay, well, who are we actually targeting, and who are we hiring? And what are the opportunities and gaps? Then I worked in the education space, and I would look at, well, how are we actually...like, what types of demographics are we bringing to the schools? So I would do things in my role that were very diversity, equity, inclusion-focused even though I was an HR product manager or in operations. And I started realizing I really loved more of the diversity, equity, and inclusion side of things. So instead of continuing to get roles in HR, I was like, I have to get a role in DEI because that's where my passion lended itself more so. I made that decision from my last company that the next role I have, I will not take it unless it's DEI-focused. So it developed and evolved over time. CHAD: Some people might have the thought...I have to confess sometimes I've also had this thought as like, why can't just DEI be weaved through everything HR does or through everything everybody thinks about all of the time? Why do you need a specific DEI person at a company? And I've come to understand that it's hard to do that. [laughter] But I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. GERONDA: It is challenging because you also have to think of it as everybody is in a different place with diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But there are some people who are incredibly passionate about it. And then there are others that are aware of it, but they may want to just kind of focus on their job. Or they might think, well, we just need to treat everybody the same. Like, why is that so hard? So because everyone's in different places in their level of understanding and the importance of it, it does get tricky to think of things in that lens, especially in your day-to-day job. Your priorities change consistently. So you might be working on a project here. But then you're now shifting to a new team, and you're shifting to all these different places. And it does become challenging to keep it top of mind for a lot of people in the company. And so I think that the overall almost resolution to that is the more that you start to continue to talk about it, the more that you have accountability. And you're training people like leadership and managers and everyone to be aware of what it means, and what the language is, and how you can think of these things. It takes time, but then it slowly starts to get easier. Sometimes there is an understandable fear of I don't know where to begin, and I don't know what I don't know. I don't want to make a mistake. I don't know how to look at this. And should I be looking at this? But I think that when there is a lot of the understanding from the leadership level, and it goes down to managers, and you start to infuse it across different spaces, it does come a little bit easier. So I'll say what I like a lot of what thoughtbot does is there's a lot of open communication and transparency around things like goals, around hiring, and trainings that we maybe want to offer. So I do think it can be hard. I don't think that you can also get every single person involved in an expertise level. And you shouldn't expect anyone to be an expert, but starting to think about their job and how this could impact themselves or others, it does take some time. CHAD: And I already alluded to this earlier, but I think we have an additional challenge which is because the majority of us are all on client work all the time and consultants, that through-line, that continuity of when we identify something, really having someone who can be that continuous force, an organization as people rotate through the council or as people's workload with client work or attention ebbs and flows. I think that that is one of the additional challenges that we have that you help with. GERONDA: Yeah. And the rotations on the council are super helpful as well and then creating a space for anyone to come to you with questions. I like that we have this anonymous forum where you can submit a question if you're not comfortable asking it publicly, whether it's you want to learn more or something's going on that you want to talk through. I think that's also very, very helpful. And just continuously educating and giving the space for the practical implementation of what you're trying and what you're doing will also give you a little bit more of that comfortability rather than learning about something and then hoping that you're doing it well. So it's challenging, but we'll get there, and it's worth it. [laughs] And every company has these types of challenges, so it's not unique. CHAD: So you didn't originally start off working in the tech space. And so I'm curious what you've learned or seen that either is good or bad about the tech space in particular, what challenges this industry has. And it is Pride Month, so I guess there's a lens, particularly of LGBTQ+ challenges. Is tech particularly challenging? GERONDA: Yeah, I think as an industry, it's particularly challenging. So I worked in education, as I mentioned. I worked in the optometry industry, which I will say has very significant challenges just for the industry itself. But tech is challenging. I think there are moves that are being made in tech. But what I'm starting to notice in terms of challenges for the LGBTQ+ community is a lot of things where there is this sometimes perception, depending on how visible you may be, that you are qualified and not qualified. And what I mean by that is for the trans community or the transgender community, in particular, it can be very challenging because you may not what they call pass as the gender that you are looking to reassign yourself to. So if you are male, and I hear this a lot from other people, is if I'm male and I want to transition to female, I may still be going through the process. So when somebody looks at me, I might still present masculine features. And there is this misconception or this uncomfortability that I may not be qualified to do a job. So in the tech space as well, it's really hard during the hiring process sometimes to be taken seriously because of how you might look or how you might present yourself. I will say that in a lot of spaces, the culture in a company in tech what I've noticed is it has this generally casual feeling to it and a sense of you can come in, and you'll be taken seriously. And you can meet with different groups. But I think what I've noticed is when you're trying to get into tech, there are not a lot of people that are similar to you. And it's really hard to find those types of people because not everyone's going to be out. There are assumptions that are made that if a woman's hair is short, she must be lesbian. So we misgender people. And when going into the tech space, I think that there's a hesitation because you don't necessarily see a customer base similar to you or other team members similar to you. There could be those things like mental health challenges because you don't know if you can come out in a space, or you don't know if you're going to come out, and that could affect your role. So a lot of times, you'll hear and what I've been hearing in the tech space, is those who are transgender are usually the only ones on a team that are transgender. If you look at also for the LGBTQ+ community, you have to also consider the varying identities that come with a person. So an experience for a Black woman who is queer could be very different than a white male who is gay. So there are those different identities. So the vulnerability piece, and in the hiring process, and going into tech, you already hear what's going on and the challenges that are happening for the community. So you may be hesitant or might be a little bit fearful of what that would look like. I think in the tech space as well, a lot of executive leaders or managers are predominantly cis-gendered white males. So when you see that, and there's not as much representation at the top, you kind of have that sense, and you wonder, is this a place that I feel like I can belong and have a generally safe experience? And then the skill set, too, I think what I've been hearing, and what I've been reading and just researching, and what I've been noticing just speaking to other people is the promotion opportunity for those in the community feels like you have to work much harder to get known and be visible because a lot of times, you may want to promote people that are similar to you. So if you have teams that are more cisgendered White males, you may find that those teams are not as diverse. And the industry itself, I do feel like it is becoming more diverse. I think Lesbians Who Tech, for example, was a conference that I'm so glad that you let me attend because -- [laughter] CHAD: I didn't let you. That's not permission, or rather I encouraged you to attend. [laughter] GERONDA: Better wording. Thank you, Chad. You encouraged me to attend, and you're encouraging me to attend the one in October. But just seeing in my experience and looking at the tech space, I wasn't sure what the demographic would look like. But going to that conference and then going to the one...I'm in Seattle, Washington, and there was a local one in Seattle, Washington. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gay men, lesbians, transgender, and I didn't even realize that there were so many of us in the community in that space. And it was fantastic and amazing to see. But I think visibility is another piece that we're struggling with because you want to be able to amplify those voices and give those opportunities. So that's what I'm seeing a lot in the tech space. I do think that we're improving in those areas. But those are the challenges that I see in that space. CHAD: To go back to one thing that you said, this idea of being the only one puts people in a difficult position. And I think because tech as an industry is not that diverse, to begin with, you end up with that in a lot of different identities, not just LGBTQ+. If you are historically underrepresented or have historically underrepresented identities, it's really likely that you're going to be the only one and especially the intersection of your identities. If you have multiple underrepresented identities, then it's very likely that you might be the only one. Mid-Roll Ad: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs CHAD: As leaders, as companies, as a community that wants to do better, let's solve it all right now, Geronda. GERONDA: [laughs] CHAD: No, we're not going to solve it all now. But what are some ways...like acknowledging that many of us work in spaces where we might not have...or when we're bringing someone onto the team who has underrepresented identities, they might be the only one. How do we make a space that's as inclusive as possible for that person? GERONDA: The big thing that I always like to say is try not to put all of the work on that person to solve it for themselves. And when they come in, I think what's really great and what I've seen work well is having that initial conversation with that person who's joining, get to know them first, and give them an opportunity to say, "If there's anything that you would love to have here or anything that you find challenging, I want you to feel that you can come to me. You can go to HR or DEI program manager, whoever." So it's providing that space to say if you need support in feeling comfortable, whether it's in your job or just you as an individual, I want to offer that. And so please be as open as you can with me. And it's providing those different spaces to amplify the voice of that person. So, in meetings, if you're noticing maybe that they are more reserved or hesitant to speak, ask for their opinion if they're okay with that. Recognizing the great work that they've done, giving a lot of that recognition, and then also offering different ways that they can get the community that they want. So what I love is that we have Slack, and we've started ERGs. And so that gives you a lot of opportunity. We have a Slack channel for the LGBTQ+ ERG. But we also have a private channel for LGBTQ so that we can talk about things that are working, not working, working well. And definitely getting their experience and looking for ways that you can involve them and recognize them and continuing to check in with them. So regular one-on-one checking could just be how are things going? How are you feeling being a part of this team? What are some things that we can do differently to make you feel welcome? And that's a question that you can ask everybody so that it's not feeling like you're just targeting that one person. So asking those questions and checking in with that person is really helpful. And then, considering the people that are coming in, how are things like benefits being provided? So things like if somebody who's transgender comes in or an employee decides they want to transition, are we providing gender-affirming care as part of benefits? So those are different ways that we can have them be included and offering up the things that we provide that could potentially be a community like Slack, like the DEI Council, like having those different conversations. And when you start to do things like this, like us doing this pride event, that is pretty significant. We didn't just slap a logo on LinkedIn and just say, "Oh, okay, Happy Pride." We had lightning talks. We get education. We learned about the community. You're having me on here to talk more about it. We're doing a big celebration. And so that in itself is a pretty critical step. But it is checking in and learning about the person and asking pretty frequently their experience, how they're feeling, their needs, and then looking to increase that diversity over time on that team so that you're not feeling tokenized as that person and always being the only. So those are things that I would suggest. CHAD: One maybe misconception or feeling that people might have...and I think it starts in the hiring process because you're not supposed to talk about these things in the hiring process. You're not allowed, at least in the United States, to ask someone their sexual orientation during the hiring process. Or if someone was transgender and you're interviewing them, it certainly should be a topic that you as a hiring manager don't bring up during the interview. So my sense is, and speaking personally but also broadly, it can then feel like you're not supposed to talk about those things once the person joins either. Why is that wrong? [laughter] GERONDA: So a couple of things I'll say about that is so if somebody brings it up, that can open up the conversation. I'm very open at the fact that I have a wife and that I'm lesbian. And I purposely do that, personally, to see what the reaction is going to be and what the company is going to offer. So I can determine if I feel like this is going to be a good space for me. I think that when you're having an interview, it's just like for anyone who may not be in the community. You don't really necessarily ask someone if they're married or "Are you having children?" You don't necessarily ask like, "Do you fall in this community?" or "Talk about transgender." Because a lot of times, there is this feeling of I have no idea what this space is going to feel like for me. I'm not going to out myself, and you may even out somebody who may not be out in their professional or their personal life yet. And you want to provide that comfortable space. But you don't want to do that either because then that person and across other interviewing spectrums bias can amplify a lot. And you can mislabel someone's gender. You might use the wrong pronouns, and pronouns are always optional. So I always say look at the person for their experience and what you want to learn more about relating to the job. Of course, you want to learn about them a little bit more personally as well. But it is more harm to try to identify their identity because that could lead to bias and could ultimately lead to discrimination because you don't know what that person's view is in the interview process either. CHAD: But once someone joins your team and assuming that they're open about their identities, and this applies to all identities, I think, then quote, unquote "treating everybody the same or ignoring people's identities actually does the reverse of what people intend." It makes an environment where people feel like they don't belong, that the identities that they have or what are important to them aren't recognized. And so you're not recognizing the person's full self, and you're not accommodating it and trying to build an inclusive environment. It could actually backfire if you intentionally ignore people's identities, right? GERONDA: Yes. So it can backfire if you ignore the identities, especially the identities that have been shared openly. So if I'm going to fill out a survey, let's say where identify myself as part of our hiring process, as a manager, I may not say, "Hey, I noticed that you checked off that you're transgender. How can I support you?" But it is going through the onboarding process and other areas to say here's what we offer from ERGs to benefits, to how we work, how we work as a team. And if that person does disclose that they're transgender, or they're in the LGBTQ+ community, or they mention their culture or what have you, you can then direct them in the right places to say, "Oh, we actually do have this LGBTQ+ ERG if you're interested. I know you may be talked about it in the onboarding process. If you're open to it, you can definitely join us, and here's how." And then, over time, it is really thinking about you may not know the identities of your team but taking time to do things in practice that would touch upon all identities. So when you're thinking about having team conversations, there may be somebody on your team who is neurodiverse. They might have autism, or they might have ADHD. And how you're communicating...then you start to think about meetings. Do you just do Google Meet meetings? Do you just do Typeform meetings? You have to think about different learning styles and for different identities. Like it's Pride Month right now, just saying Happy Pride Month to everybody. And they may then be open to sharing more about their identity and sharing the activities that are happening in Pride Month, and encouraging them to do things on the council. So you want to make decisions that could think about different identities, even if you may not know what those identities are. And I also think it's being proactive and being ready that you might have those identities. So things like I had mentioned where you might be providing gender-affirming care, or you might look at your parental leave policies and other things that you have available for that. So I would say without knowing the identity, I think over time, as you build trust that [inaudible 28:24] start to develop and come out. But it's also if somebody's coming to you in confidence with something, really taking that very, very seriously. If I, God forbid, came to you, Chad, and was like, "Chad, I'm coming out to you. I am lesbian, but I'm not comfortable with sharing with everybody else." I would trust that you wouldn't share that amongst other people. So that's another piece to that as well. CHAD: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think as people in that position, in management positions, we need proper training around those kinds of situations to ensure that we handle them well. I think training is an important part of being a manager but also just DEI in general training and equipping everybody. GERONDA: Yes. Having a common language across the board and a common understanding across the board is very important. Because when you think of diversity, equity, and inclusion, everybody may have varying understandings of what those mean. Some people may not know what those mean, and so having that common language across the board and understanding. And then yes, training, of course, and opportunities for you to then practice that training in spaces and getting feedback along the way. CHAD: So I imagine that there are a lot of people listening who this is really important to them. It's an important topic or a place where they want to make improvement for themselves or their company. They might not have a lot of support or resources at their company. There might not be a DEI Council already. And I know every company is different. Every team is different. But are there some things that individuals or leaders might start thinking about or doing specifically if they're just getting started with this? GERONDA: So if you're just getting started, I always say there are a lot of great resources out there for you to consider. So whether that's a book...LinkedIn has really great training on just understanding DEI and how to be an inclusive leader or work in an inclusive environment. But I would say a really great place to start is if you don't have this already, think about what your demographic looks like. And what are some things that other companies may be doing? So joining different channels and saying, "We're at the beginning stages. What are some things that we can do?" But I think what's most helpful to start is you have to gauge where you are as a company and understand your people and the demographic and do something that allows for an open discussion and open forum to get perspectives from other people. So I know things like listening tours where you might talk to different departments or different teams. Or if a company is small enough like our company, you can meet with each person and then think about what are some common themes that you're seeing? That can also create a great space for that. I'd also say you can put out a survey to see what the experience is. So if you are doing things like engagement surveys, you can absolutely include things in there about what do you think we're missing? What would you hope to see? But I think a lot of it is you have to understand your people and what you have available to you at the company and provide an opportunity for everyone to share their ideas and perspectives to that. So what I've seen work really well is one, when you start to understand there has to also be this communication and this accountability at the leadership level to say, "This is why we're focusing on this. This is why we think it's important. We want to hear from you." And something that I thought was really unique and helpful is if your company is small enough or even if it's big enough, a lot of companies what they'll do is they'll have the CEO, or they'll have managers host these kinds of forums where you can meet with them, and you can share. You can ask them a ton of questions. You can share your ideas. You can share what you hope to achieve from this and just starting to get perspectives first. And that may, over time, start to evolve into a council or people wanting to do an ERG. But really get as much as you can from people and then learn a lot from that as well. CHAD: That's great. I asked that question, and then it turns out it was one of the ones that someone submitted in the chat from a thoughtbot person. GERONDA: [laughs] CHAD: So I wanted to acknowledge that even though we overlapped the question, that question technically comes from Amy Wall, a developer at thoughtbot. Another question from Fernando is how can other employees support DEI people like you from a daily perspective? GERONDA: Just take over my job. [laughter] No, I'm just kidding. So it's always helpful for me to have transparent conversations of where you are. If you want to help me, it's helpful to learn about your experience and come to me with things that you're seeing or ask me questions. Also, don't be afraid either to say, "I really don't know what this means or what this is. Can you help me?" And it's also bringing learning as well because I'm not a developer, and I'm not a designer. [chuckles] I think that the work that our team does is fantastic. And they're super smart. And when I look at a lot of the things that are happening, like coding and conversations, although I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, it's really amazing to see. But from your perspective, there may be things that I am suggesting, like, oh, maybe we need to increase accessibility, and we do need to do these things. But be okay to challenge me and say, "I actually don't know that that's going to work well or not." But I think to support me in my role, the more that I know of the challenges, and the more that I know about you individually, and the more that you continue to bring these things up from a DEI perspective is super helpful. So what I've noticed and what I've really loved about working here is we have those opportunities to have those very open, transparent conversations. And we can post about issues, and we can post about things that we want to change in our handbook. And sometimes people come to me with questions. And I love that people come to me and say, "This is what I want to work on more. Do you have any suggestions?" That really helps me in my role because as much as I would love to know everything that's happening with every single person, it can be challenging. So be honest with me and just share what's going on and be willing to learn and share resources with me too. Yes, I'm a DEI practitioner, but that doesn't mean I know everything. I know it's very surprising to a lot of people right now that I don't know everything. CHAD: [laughs] GERONDA: But share things you're reading. Share things that you've noticed. That helps me a ton. So that's how I say you can help me. And thank you for that question, Fernando. I appreciate that. CHAD: A thing I would add is recognizing that there are, especially at thoughtbot, multiple levels of ways that you can support and contribute to our efforts. So we try to identify on the council okay, this is the thing we want to work on. The council isn't intended to do everything. But so what we'll often do is we'll say, okay, we're going to gather a group of people in a task force, and we're going to work on this. I think that's another level of contribution. So showing up for those participating in them when they arrive, and frankly, not signing on to too much because you spread yourself too thin and then can't do a good job doing everything that you want to do. So yeah, those are some tips that I would add. Geronda, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I really appreciate it. GERONDA: Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. CHAD: Happy Pride. [laughs] GERONDA: Yes. Happy Pride. I'm so excited. I feel like I'm a little biased, but this is like my favorite month of the year. [laughter] Lots of fun celebrations. And of course, I recognize other holidays, and I think they are very important. But this one is generally very close to my heart. So thank you. CHAD: Well, if folks want to follow along with you, get in touch with you, find out more, where are all the places that they can do that? GERONDA: Yes. Follow me on LinkedIn, Geronda Wollack-Spiller. I'm on Twitter at @gerondaws. And I think those are the two best places to follow me. I'm most active on LinkedIn. And I usually respond there pretty heavily. CHAD: We'll include those links in the show notes, which you can find attached to this episode. And you can subscribe to the show, find all those notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. And thanks to all the thoughtbot people who were in the chat, and with the questions, and paid attention and listened to this episode. And see you next time. GERONDA: Yes. [laughs] ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Geronda Wollack-Spiller.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. 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Panos Siozos is Co-Founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, an online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting online courses. Chad talks with Panos about building e-learning platforms dating back to 1999, providing rich feature sets and catering to customers located in lots of different places, and deciding to stop bootstrapping and take investor money. LearnWorlds Follow LearnWorlds on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Follow Panos on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giants Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is Panos Siozos, Co-Founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, an online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting online courses. Panos, thank you so much for joining me. PANOS: Hi, Chad, and thanks for hosting me. CHAD: You have been working on LearnWorlds for a while now. Where did the idea come from? PANOS: I guess this has been brewing in our minds, mine and my co-founder's, for many years. We built our very first e-learning platform back in 1999, right after completing our studies in computer science. And we started postgraduate studies in educational technology. So in an academic setting, though, we had built many, many e-learning products, platforms, and authoring tools. And we were always exploring the state of the art. And we always had it in the back of our minds the possibility and our obligation, I guess, to create a commercial product at some point and try to get the state of the art of e-learning that we were exploring in the academia and put it at the hands of actual trainers, and teachers, and give them the tools to create the best possible online courses that they could. That was always at the back of our minds. And after completing our Ph.D. studies, after working in different jobs and different roles, we got back together at some point in 2012. And at that point, the conditions for e-learning were very, very mature. It was like bandwidth was in abundance. It was easy to create videos. It was easy to distribute videos. Cloud computing made it even easier to create software as a service platforms. And we understood that it was the perfect moment to come together, take our expertise, and try to put it in an amazing product that would be commercial and help all those people out there that wanted to create online courses. CHAD: So I think you launched in 2014. PANOS: Yes, we spent a couple of years. We started building the platform in 2012 in stealth mode. We were, I guess, traditional engineers. We had this build it, and they will come mentality. CHAD: [chuckles] PANOS: We had done almost like in the first year almost zero research on customer development and business development. We just had in mind to create the best possible platform that we could, and then obviously, people would just buy it because it's the best. Obviously, things don't always work that way. So we created the platform then we started talking with potential customers. We launched commercially in 2014. And this is when we had our very first customers, people who had the online courses. They had the online content. They had audiences, but they didn't have a platform. It seemed a huge burden and a huge task to create an actual platform to deliver and sell their courses. And this is where we came in and started providing our tool as a software as a service solution. CHAD: So in 2014, I'm sure that there were other competing products on the market. Today, there are probably even more. What makes LearnWorlds different from all of those or better from those? PANOS: In 2014, it was very early, I guess, in online courses. Most people were going to marketplaces like Udemy or Coursera. It was very difficult back then to create your own online school, to own the website. We had people who were either using traditional clunky Jurassic; I would say, learning management systems. CHAD: [chuckles] PANOS: And they were trying to adapt them for e-commerce and all the stuff, and it was always very difficult to do. Others were trying to duct tape together WordPress sites and plugins and custom codes. And that was something that wasn't scaling very gracefully. I would say after a couple of 100 users, it was almost impossible to maintain sites like that. Others were trying to create their own platforms, write code internally or hire a couple of developers. And then a few months or a couple of years and after having spent a couple hundred thousand dollars, they were realizing that this is very difficult to develop a tool like that unless you've done that in the past and you know what you're doing. So it was very timely to bring to the market a product like that. What differentiated us from the others and what still differentiates us is that we have an obsessive focus on the learner experience. We're probably the only, I don't want to sound presumptuous, but we're probably the only course platform creators or, let's say, founders or co-founders of a course platform who have actually studied that. And we have PhDs in edtech. So we are bringing lots of our academic background into the platform. And we know that initially, this was even detrimental to growing the platform because, in some ways, the platform was even too complex for what people were expecting and could absorb back then in terms of features. But as the years passed by, we managed to find an excellent balance between how powerful the platform can be in terms of amazing design, offering great, interactive, engaging learning experiences, and also offering the ease of use and all the commercial features that users would expect. So we have a deep product with lots of offering affordances. For example, people can create amazing interactive videos very easily, just like editing a PowerPoint, I would say. You can just upload a normal video that you shot yourself, perhaps using a mobile phone, and you can convert it into an amazing interactive experience. And this is something very important for the students, the customers that will actually, at the end, consume the content. So to this day, the platform is very innovative. We're still participating in research projects, and we're seeing what is the state of the art of e-learning? And we're trying to implement that into the platform, obviously, now with amazing feedback from thousands of customers and millions of end-users. So it's an amazing opportunity to give to the people the things that they actually need and use to create the best possible online courses and sell as many of them as possible. CHAD: One of the things, and it speaks right to the value proposition of the product that you use, is that there are so many features that you can have. And so, if you embark on the journey of creating your own platform, it's really easy to look at the surface level of what that looks like and say, "Oh, that's easy." PANOS: Yes. CHAD: But then, when it comes to other features, you have the ability to make mobile applications on LearnWorlds and those kinds of things. Like, that's a rich feature set that is really difficult to deliver on your own, right? PANOS: It's very difficult to deliver on your own, and some things look deceptively simple. And when you actually see what is under the hood, it is very, very complicated to deliver a super user-friendly and easy tool or platform or authoring environment. So the platform is very powerful because people have all these different needs. We're talking here this is a platform that can support both the, I don't know, the nice, old lady that wants to sell some knitting courses, and she has a community of a couple of dozen people who follow her and consume her courses, all the way to online schools that run with more than 300,000 users. It's extremely difficult to be able to scale a school to a size like that. And in many cases, people might start simple. They might even create a nice, simple user interface with a couple of videos. This is something that everybody believes that they can do. And they can do it initially, but once they have a couple of hundred users, or a couple of thousand users, their success becomes problematic. They cannot keep up with all the demands for something like that. And then they need more features. They need more features for doing their marketing. They need analytics. They need the scale and the reliability that a platform that serves a few thousand users requires. There are all sorts of things that people miss. So we believe that you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel, especially when there are amazing ready-made wheels out there, white-labeled wheels where you can just go to a platform like ours. And in a couple of days, you can have an amazing online school customized and optimized for your own case study, for your own audience, for your own language, for your own design. The settings that you need to power your own business model, whether it's selling courses on their own, selling memberships, selling subscriptions, bundles of courses, all those different things that look simple on the outside but they require lots of precision to work great and delivering in scale. CHAD: So, given the rich feature set, I'm sure that you have a lot of customers located in lots of different places. I'm sure they have different needs, too, different profiles. How do you as a company go about deciding what to work on? And how does the workflow through your organization? PANOS: This is always a very interesting task, something that we are doing almost every month. We update our roadmap on a quarterly basis. But every month, we go out and check again the feature requests, and the trends in the market and the industry, and all the things that are happening. We receive hundreds of feature requests from our existing customers every week, and these are being organized and prioritized. And we always try, obviously, to help our own existing customer base. But we work with many partners and other platforms as well to create integrations and to deliver features, and uncover needs that people have today. And in the past couple of years, as you can imagine, with COVID, we had to adapt many changes to the new business models and the new ways that people started creating, delivering, and consuming online courses. For example, when COVID started, almost overnight, there was a huge demand for creating and delivering live courses with no pre-recorded videos. That's something that used to be quite frequent feature requests, let's say. Before COVID, we had it in our roadmap. Once we understood what COVID would mean for the industry, almost overnight, we stopped other things that we were doing and started working hard on delivering, let's say, our Zoom integration. So in just a matter of a few short weeks, it was super easy for anybody who wanted to teach. You imagine how the situation was amidst the lockdowns. People their businesses were shutting down. They couldn't reach their audiences, their customers. Their revenue streams had ran out. So we brought to the market this integration, and it was super easy for a photography teacher, a yoga teacher, a coach from anywhere to just create an online course, plug in their Zoom account, and be able to deliver courses, either one-on-one, to a small group or even to hundreds of students. So we had to adapt as the market was adapting, and the same comes when it comes about business models, ways of getting paid, different payment methods. For example, some European countries...as a European company, we're also very attuned to what our European customers need. In several European countries, credit cards, traditional credit cards like Visa and MasterCard are not the most frequently used methods of digital payments. So we have to work with local payment gateways to provide these kinds of solutions. Also, for taxes, taxes in Europe are way more when you're selling from one country to the other. They’re much more difficult and complex than in the U.S., So we have to adapt to the demands from customers and offer solutions like that. So it's always anticipating, seeing what the actual users need but also keeping a large chunk, I would say, space for innovating, bringing to the product things that people don't actually ask for because they don't even know that they could exist and that they could be helpful. And this is where our expertise, I would say, comes into play. Our team is constantly researching trends and other platforms and how people interact with platforms and other tools. And we try to stay ahead of the curve, not just follow what others are doing but be the leaders in this kind of chase. And rightly, you mentioned there are dozens of platforms out there. It's great to see so much innovation in so many different platforms. Especially after COVID, I can say that it seems like there is a viral spread of new platforms. We almost see one new platform every week. And it's nice because it seems that the industry is very hot. And there is lots of demand for these kinds of solutions. We do have a head start, and we will continue to improve the product and bring an amazing solution to people who want to use something like that. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff CHAD: One of the features that you have is localization, being able to have your content in lots of different languages. How early on did you add that feature? PANOS: This is something that we had to do very early on. The first iteration of the platform, before even founding the company when we were just a side project, was built for the Greek market and the Greek language. So that was in a very difficult situation back in 2013, 2014. There was a huge financial crisis in Greece back then. So once we had the product ready, we realized that nobody wanted to invest in e-learning. It was a very tough situation to be in. So that's probably one of the best things that happened to us. Because almost overnight, like in day two, we had to go to an existing mature market, which was the U.S. market, where people were willing to test a new platform. They really liked what the platform could do. They were ready to risk a product, a new product that was brought into market by a small ragtag team from the other side of the world. And so we had to adapt to a new language. So that was something that came in very early on and was very helpful in dealing with different markets and different localizations, working with different payment gateways, and becoming an international product from very early on. So right now, we have customers in more than 110 countries; even though U.S. is by far our biggest market, almost half of our market is based in the U.S. But we are very willing and able to work with new markets and help them and help people bring their own localizations and their own translations into the platform. CHAD: Yeah, that jumped out at me because I've seen other products that don't have that feature. And I think it's in part because a new company started in the United States knows that they have a fairly big addressable market just within the U.S., and they don't necessarily need to support multiple languages. And I thought that, and that's what I heard, was that the fact that you were not in the U.S. compelled you to have localization really early on. You've also mentioned a few other ways in which that has influenced you. How do you think being in Greece and being a European startup has influenced you as a company overall? PANOS: This is the DNA and the blueprint of how the company eventually grew. For example, we started in Greece amidst a dire financial crisis. We were, from day one, a remote company because of the conditions of the co-founders. So we happened to be in three different cities, two different countries. And we just wanted to work together. We didn't have any long-term plans of how a company would evolve. So from day one, we became a remote company. So as you can imagine, in the next few years, that gave us...and even when COVID came, that gave us an immense advantage because that's the way we had been working. We knew that full remote was an option from day one. The second thing that really also influenced us is that because we were growing in a situation...amidst this financial crisis, we were a bootstrapped company. We didn't have access to any external funding, which obviously made things much more difficult at the beginning. We couldn't get access to funds and invest in marketing very early on and push the platform heavily. On the other end, as a bootstrapped company, we developed a mentality of being very resource-efficient, cash-efficient, paying great attention to all of our KPIs and our unit economics, doing lots of unscalable things, as Paul Graham would say, you know, wearing lots of hats, investing a lot in people who didn't have the credentials, let's say, or the experience that one would expect from to hire in a U.S-founded startup. So we had to invest in the local people, in the local skills, amazing youth. We're talking here back in 2013, 2014. Youth unemployment in Greece was about 70%. So it was a terrible situation. It's like this meme where people were asked to have experience, but nobody was giving them a chance to develop this work experience. So we invested in people like that. And that's the best thing we did. So we're talking about a remote bootstrapped startup with a can-do mentality with access to amazing people, not specialized or skilled, let's say, or experienced in this particular software as a service role but very smart and willing to work and excel and do better for themselves and for the company. So I think that was the recipe that helped the business grow. And also, coming from a small market, we had to adapt to a fragmented European market. Europe is a huge market of about 500 million people, a few less now, a few million less now, barring UK. But this is a fragmented market. You don't have a unified market of one language. One currency may be, yes, in most countries, but we're talking different languages, and different tax regimes, and all the staff and different mentality even. So we had to adapt. This is difficult. But also, it gives you the resilience and the flexibility to adapt to all these different cases. And then going international was very natural to us. It's not that we started in a small market, and then we're trying to create a foothold in a second market or the third market. From day one, we had to look outward to find the people who would use and dare to use a platform like ours and try to be our best selves and try to give them an amazing product. CHAD: Yeah, that's great. You mentioned that you initially bootstrapped. Have you taken investment since then? PANOS: Yes, we have. We did a small seed round of about $1.1 million in 2019 with a small local VC. And then last year, about a year ago, we closed a Series A funding round of $32 million with Insight Partners. CHAD: That's great. Congratulations. What caused you to make the decision to stop bootstrapping and take an investment in that seed round? PANOS: That was the point when we realized that we needed the extra fuel in order to push the pedal. We were seeing that we already had a great product. We were on to something. It would have been too slow to continue working in a bootstrapped mode with a few resources that we had. We wanted to accelerate. We wanted to accelerate hiring, product development, and all this stuff. So we didn't actually need the money back then for the viability of the company, which is actually, I guess, the best reason to raise money and the best time when we don't actually need it. So that's how we started. That gave us the extra confidence. It allowed us to bring in a few extra people. We started investing more in hiring professionals that had already done that, who had already experience in SaaS businesses and international businesses. And that gave us a lot more certainty and trust in ourselves to keep growing the product and going further. And this last round with Insight Partners...Insight Partners is one of the top VCs in the private equity funds. They also bring in an amazing team of operators who can always jump in and help in case we need something. So it helps us expand our horizons, be more aggressive in our hiring, much more confident about what we can do. And that also has given a great boost to the business and the team. CHAD: This idea of acceleration and going faster is an interesting one. I've seen it in our clients as well where, especially if you're in a competitive market, you could have a good growing reasonable business, but if everyone else around you is raising money, raising capital, and accelerating, that can put you back especially if you don't realize it. Do you feel like that was part of what was causing you to want to accelerate? PANOS: Yes, yes, definitely. So e-learning is a complex industry, let's say. What we're doing is very competitive because the market is always changing. People demand more. New business models require new features, and everybody wants an all-in-one platform that will keep doing more and more. So you cannot just stand still. It's not like a micro SaaS where you can have a feature the same working for five years, and you can still have people signing up and using that. You have to be ahead. You have to adapt. This is a very fast pacing industry. And now there are so many different players from all different industries who look at online courses and content delivery in general in new ways and start approaching from different angles, whether they are marketing tools, or video hosting providers, or email marketing providers, or traditional learning management systems. So there are many people around this online course industry. So you need to have a war chest. You need to bring in experts. You need to keep investing in R&D and improving the product and also customer success, making sure that your amazing customers can perform even better, and they can take advantage of all the features in the platform. So you cannot just stand still; that's not an option. You can perhaps get away with it for two to three years. But eventually, the product will fizzle out. We will not be able to compete with what is happening. You mentioned all these different platforms coming into the market. You have to stay ahead. And luckily, now, with the recent funding and obviously with the help of our customers, we have all the resources that we needed to implement the vision that we have for the product. All the things that we couldn't do in the past because we were constrained in terms of resources, and time and money, now we are able to innovate much faster, bring many more new features to the platform and to the market, and help people create the best possible online courses. CHAD: You mentioned that when you raised that initial seed round, you did it with a local investment company. Was that intentional? I took a peek; the company is Marathon Venture Capital. And they specifically say on their website that they day one partner to Greek tech founders, so they're very focused. [laughs] PANOS: Yes, they're very focused. There is a huge network obviously of Greek founders almost everywhere in the world. So they have a deep pool of people to reach out to and a huge network. It was definitely; also there was a parameter of convenience, you know, them being close, being able to communicate easily, having the same kind of mentality and the same kind of experiences. This obviously makes things much more easier. I guess at that point; it would be much more difficult to go from a bootstrapped remote ragtag team to a fully funded company with a traditional, let's say, Silicon Valley-based VC. Even explaining back then in 2019 that you are a remote company wasn't easy. It's something that made some people wonder about how serious you are about that. What are your plans going forward? How are you going to hire? How are you going to compete? How are you going to hire people if you don't have these amazing startup offices with the pool tables and all the stuff? But we were saying that it's feasible. You can do it. I mean, you can find the people who want this kind of lifestyle who appreciate this flexibility, who want to be close to their families and work from their small cities somewhere in Greece or in other countries and be close, let's say, online with another team. We weren't crazy back then. So it was much easier to make these kinds of propositions to a local team. I guess it was convenient, and we had a good match. But already, this investment prepared us a lot in terms of organizing the business, due diligence, taking care of our finance and reporting, and all the stuff, and legal and made us ready to go for a bigger investment later when we needed it and when the time was right. CHAD: So from three co-founders in 2014, how large is your team now? PANOS: I think with the recent hires, we're about 120 people right now. We are still fully remote. In fact, in the next few weeks, we will just open a small co-working space in Athens where about half of our staff resides. But this is going to be more of a co-working space kind of experience. I think right now; we have people in our team from 16 different nationalities in 11 different countries. But still, the majority of the people are based in Greece, so here are the roots of the company. But we are internationalizing fast, getting people everywhere we can find them. People that fit the business, we're happy to bring them on board, and these kinds of remote-first flexible environment that we have is very fitting for some amazing people from all over the world. And they prefer that actually than returning back to an office. CHAD: For yourself as a leader, how have you needed to grow or change as your team has scaled so much? PANOS: We're still doing that. CHAD: [laughs] PANOS: It's not just me. It's my co-founders as well, my two co-founders, Fanis and Giorgos. I wouldn't have been able, obviously, to do anything alone, neither any one of us, without having the others. Still to this day, we're very hands-on. We're involved in all the projects. In some cases, we were a bit more reluctant to delegate. But still, the team really appreciates that we're still in the trenches with them, learning, solving problems every day, trying to not give solutions from both ad hoc but be with them, solve problems with them. That's something that they appreciate a lot. And obviously, we are still...every day we are transitioning. We started as a team of three people on a side project that was just taking a few hours of our time per week. And this business came to be the biggest part of our lives, spending 12-plus hours every day and more, and weekends, and everything else with a growing team amidst some very difficult conditions like COVID where things were, you know, in our families and our cities, things were blowing up. And we had to stay close to our teams and keep delivering a product that was skyrocketing in terms of demand. So we are still learning; that's our motto here in LearnWorlds, getting better every single day, trying to enable our team be more enablers now and better project managers, inspire people in order to help them deliver the best that they can. We are lucky to be in a great industry with amazing customers, all of them creative people who create great content. They love their products. They love their own customers. So this is something that helps us have a great mission that our employees also share. So they see that it's not just about the numbers or about getting the MRR or getting the sale or whatever. But they really enjoy helping our customers and helping them create amazing little, online businesses and get their products online. Every day we get amazing feedback from our customers, and that really makes people around here very happy. At the end of the day, they go home, and they know that they helped launch another business or two and help people, in some cases, realize their dream of becoming independent, you know, escaping nine-to-five, or helping a coach or a trainer get some amazing reward for the fruit of their labor and the content that they have created with so much work. So this is a great thing to watch. And it's great being around people who enjoy this kind of business and this kind of environment. CHAD: Is there anything that when you were starting the company based on your prior experiences, both good or bad, at the other companies that you had worked at along the way in your career or your co-founders’ careers when you said okay, we're starting LearnWorlds. We're starting our own company. We specifically want to not make this mistake or instill this value in our culture that you were very intentional about? PANOS: There are probably a lot of things. I'm not sure if I can name one in particular, but we always wanted to create a business that we would love being employees of. So we wanted to be in an environment that we would enjoy being ourselves. That's probably kind of egocentric, like, it was about us. But I think there were some unspoken values in some cases or cases where we would see that no, this is bad; we shouldn't go down that path. We didn't want to replicate ourselves and create a company of people who'd look like us and react to the same things that we would. But we always wanted to have an environment that we would feel happy, and we would love to be part of. So far, at that scale of 120, we have managed, I guess, to do that. In many cases, this is also our number one priority. Features come and go. People come and go. Customers come and go. But we know that the biggest strength of this company is the minds of the people who work for us. We want them to be happy. We want them to come to work happy every day and bring their best. That is our major priority. And especially in times like that, their mental and physical well-being as well it's a major priority for us. And we believe that if we create these conditions of safety and trust, the empowerment and learning as well of constant improvement, we will achieve our goal, and we will have a team that will be working for a product that is going to be better every day and every week. And this shows, at the end of the day, this is something that customers can appreciate, either by seeing a new feature in the platform that they love or by receiving some amazing help from one of our customer support reps or an amazing demo from one of our salespeople. This is something that we are lucky still to show everywhere in the company. This is the mentality of the entire company. Hopefully, we'll be able to preserve these kinds of values and attitude as we scale. CHAD: That's great. I really wish that for you. Good luck and congratulations on all the success. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story and your wisdom about scaling the company. If folks want to learn more about LearnWorlds or get in touch with you or follow along, where are all the places that they can do that? PANOS: You can always come to our website www.learnworlds.com. Our platform offers a 30-day free trial, no credit cards, no strings attached. If you have any questions around online courses or any ideas about what you could build yourself for your business, come to our website. Join us, and we will be happy to help you out and show you what is possible today. CHAD: Great. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes and a full transcript of this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. 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