Harvard i-lab | Building your Startup Team: Novel Approaches for an Agile World

Welcome everybody so as abby said i've kind of spent my career on both the operating side as a founder and a ceo i was a venture investor for about seven years done some angel investing i've spent some time in big companies as well so i was acquired twice and so three times actually first part of my career work for ibm i worked for startup in cambridge it was Required later by ibm i said i wasn't going to do that a second time and then i built a startup that was acquired another startup was required by

ib by a documentum that was required by emc so i've done kind of both sides i've also lived on kind of the early startup era if you want to call that the 80s and 90s and then kind of the current Kind of startup era and then and i think what i realized is the world has changed a lot and i want to and and so when abby asked me to do this presentation there have been a lot of thoughts kind of in the back of my mind of how the world is different and how you

would build a startup team in today's environment differently than it had been done in the previous decade or the decade before that And so it gave me an excuse to put some thoughts down on paper i also use it as an opportunity to reach out to about a dozen entrepreneurs in the community here in new england in boston didn't go out west this time because i wanted to just gather their thoughts on kind of what they thought was different about building their teams what they thought worked and didn't work and i tried to capture some

of that in this presentation as well So the thesis behind this is building your startup team is different than building a team in a large organization and it's different today building a team than it perhaps it was a decade ago i think i think the world has changed and i'm going to go through that a little bit um as i wrote the presentation i realized though there's no one answer and so this has to be something that you take Kind of a framework and a set of concepts and apply it to your unique situation this

is not going to be a recipe book i need to do a b and c it doesn't feel like that it should be a set of questions that you ask yourself about your unique particular situation but abby and i talked last minute about a day and a half ago to try and make this a little interactive so we have three teams that are here that Have volunteered to kind of join us to see if we can apply the framework on the spot and see whether it's helpful not helpful whether it uncovers some new thinking or

not within those particular organizations at that point in time i think we'll open it up to a set of questions too if people want to ask of the team or of me this is the first time we've done this pitch so there may be a few rough edges so bear with us there okay So how many people have startup teams that look like this i did once fancy walls raised five ten million dollars of venture investment people with fancy titles i don't think i ever wore tie to work though well maybe i did early on

um maybe a short hands how about more like this right okay and this is more fun isn't it i mean this is what one of my topics Will be building a cohesive team this helps as you can see um i wanna though take a step back in time when i was putting together this pitch i'm a pack rat and i keep things from different eras and i found this video that i candidly have not looked at i won't tell you the date until we play it but i found this video and i realized that Building

startup teams and building a startup culture and hiring great people and kind of building a team that can go take the hill has been in my blood from the beginning so with that let me roll this video this is new england cable news now from new england's own 24-hour news channel this is new england cable news from our business page what corporate America will do to attract and keep good workers the high-tech industry is suffering from a shortage of talent at least that's the word from top executives in the industry but things are different at

one massachusetts software maker new england cable news business reporter mont finnell explains so we go for fire power glenn mcdonald is blowing off a little steam when the pressure of work builds or when He just wants to have a little fun he just fires away obviously you wouldn't be doing this in a company like ibm or would you well i would but probably not for very long mcdonald's part of a growing number of companies that are making their workplace environment a little bit more like home we believe if people are enjoying what they're working on

decisions happen more quickly you make Better decisions people work harder people feel more empowered so at instinctive technology employees open the door to a fully stocked fridge new hires are given fifty dollars to get stuff for the office like these lights a toaster oven or a coffee grinder workers are provided with more desk space than at most companies they even have the choice of whether they'd rather have a more powerful computer Or a bigger screen i thought that's a nice little touch i mean here a lot of times just you show up and here's a

machine he had no saying what it is employees get three weeks vacation extra holidays and stock options partly to avoid conflicts workers don't have titles they're encouraged to work at home and they don't have to attend meetings unless they want to It allows for individuals to say i could be spending my time in a more valuable way by doing something else and they can get up and do that and that's where we make sure that meetings don't run on endlessly that meetings have agendas and are our decision and action focused and aren't a waste of

time when jeffrey beer and peter salas co-founded instinctive technology seven Months ago they quickly learned that in order to find qualified workers their corporate environment had to be different that's the bottom line just merely a competitive salary and benefits package isn't enough to attract the great employees that you need to hire in fact in massachusetts over the past two years the supply of available software engineers and programmers has Nearly dried up with a rebounding economy the number of people working in the software industry has grown from 95 thousand to one hundred and thirty thousand lately

there haven't been enough qualified people to fill the positions when the company started out if i received word of a candidate i had to get back to them within a matter of a day or two otherwise candidates were already Speaking with other companies or taken off the market within a matter of three to four days now the developer of internet business solutions says it has a bevy of qualified people coming to it faxing in resumes and applying for jobs on the company's web page actually i came here so much based on the culture that i

didn't even know what the product was before i made my decision to come here No kidding but instinctive hasn't fulfilled all its goals it had wanted to give everybody their own private offices in the end several are ending up in cubicles again the problem is that the area's high-tech economy is so hot now that spacious affordable real estate is hard to find between cost location size and arrangement you have only so much choice in the Coming year instinctive technology expects to double its number of employees and one more perk if you're already an employee here

the company will pay you one thousand dollars for each person you refer to them who ends up getting a job here in cambridge massachusetts mont fennell new england cable news i actually hadn't watched it beginning to end until now i started and i said I'll save it for later but back then a thousand dollars was a lot of money but we were pushing the edge back then there's some ideas that are new and creative and worked and some that clearly would never work today so i think things have shifted a little bit i'll say one

last little tidbit this aired prime time you know dinner hour uh several times as necn does all night Long and i got a few phone calls from my investors after this ran now this is before we'd announced our products we were still kind of heads down building the product we didn't have a whole lot to talk about but we were we needed to hire so we put we were able to convince ndcm we were cool and different they came into this piece and i got a voicemail from one of my investors that said jeffrey What

are you doing there are you building a country club so investors will tell you they invest in teams and they believe about culture and they believe about cohesive environment and they really don't because this was really intended to attract employees which is really all it was about um but we did a bunch of cool things right some of them i'd never do today so that was just for Fun and you caught the date on it i didn't realize the date was in it so it was 1997 that's a while ago here's what we're going to

talk about today first i'm not going to spend a lot of time on this but startups are different there's a lot we need to figure out you need to be nimble we're going to talk about that a little bit and the world is different today and i think there are ways to build Teams that are very innovative and very novel and we're going to touch on a few of those and i hope to learn some from folks here today as well um we're going to talk a little bit about kind of how do you get

into the unique requirements of your business and how do you build your startup team and then as i said we're going to do some case studies okay so um this is an unlikely startup org chart Clearly right um candidly i'm not sure how anything get done gets done in the state department given an org chart like this because i don't understand how to operate in that environment but i will say i have seen startup org charts that look like this so this is not as humorous right um as as i said in the kind of

the preview this is really not about the org chart But i think this represents kind of a core problem of some startups that i see which is there's a little bit of a sense on role and responsibility and less around accountability and what needs to get done and that's what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about today okay so talking a little bit about kind of startups and and later stage companies there's a a couple people that i've Worked with catherine catlin and bouja cookman that have this framework for the stages of

growth of companies and what they call the spin cycle that happens at different stages of growth and there's a natural thing that happens in companies where the organization and the structure you put in place in the early days around the startup where you're developing the product and getting initial market feedback needs to change as you scale it as you Go to market as you get revenue as you start to hire distributed people in the field and it'll change again when you start to broaden out and go worldwide and you start to build multiple levels into

the management structure perhaps as you're getting to be profitable and you're opening new divisions and it'll change again when you get to multiple products and multiple markets As a large company we're going to focus kind of in the first two sections primarily the first but then a little bit into the second as well and catherine and bruja's thesis here is the structure of the team and the structure of leadership and how the team interacts with each other changes at each of these scales at each of these levels have Anybody seen this before or anything like

this they actually have a wonderful book out it's a little dated but there's a lot that kind of is relevant still today in the early days um you know everybody's a doer everybody wears multiple hats the core team works as an integrated whole it's kind of amorphous it's not structured like an org chart As you start to grow a little bit you might start to bring on some functional hires but there's still very much a kind of tight cohesive organization even if you begin to get distributed the leader the ceo is still very intimate in

lots of decisions it's not a delegation and a step away and frankly you're having functional leaders that take on kind of broad leadership responsibilities themselves And taking on ownership outside their functional lines i won't go beyond that up the chart because it's not as relevant to us right now so we'll focus on the bottom two stages here okay so early stage is different than later stage from a world perspective a lot's changed since 1997 and just going back and looking at kind of how i would have done things Differently back in my first startup a

lot of changes in people i mean maybe every generation says this but when i think about the gen y generation the 20-somethings and kind of their motivations i have a son that's 21 so i get that firsthand but then i have a teenage daughter also when i get oops i get how she thinks very different expectations of of work of acknowledgement of kind of what keeps them engaged and job Frequency changes i see this in a lot of startups where there's not that long-term commitment that there was in my parents generation clearly but it's even

heading more in the direction of i'm here for a while to work on a project have some fun deliver something and then i'm out of here doing something else very different mindset around people and how you Create loyalty and how you create job fulfillment for those people um the world from a geographic standpoint is very different i mean cd we have people in europe in south america in the middle east working with us and it works great but we have to work at it um and we get a lot of value out of doing that

so we'll talk about that today the concept of virtual work and collaboration across Time zones and boundaries is an important important part of what we're trying to do is we build companies today the economics also are very different in different geographies you need to be sensitive to that obviously the cultural differences are very different different geographies you need to figure out kind of what works for you know a 20 something in cambridge is going to be very different than perhaps somebody in argentina Business models and how we generate revenue is very different today many more

ways that we can do so um in the you know when i did e-room we could have somebody on the phone calling to sell or we could have somebody in the field calling on a customer that was about it we started some freemium stuff but that was very early and we started letting people go online and self-subscribe but it didn't exist Today think about all the different ways that you can generate revenue and you can generate sales and a lot of this we all know you can't do all of that you've got to narrow it

down and figure out what are your core business models what are your core distribution mechanisms that you're going to get to work and that's going to drive the kind of company the kind of startup team that you need to build as well Pace of change is crazy so that you heard in the video that was seven months in to the founding of e-room and we still hadn't shipped a product yet right it took us we did it in nine months we shipped our first product in nine months and that was considered fast at the time

today nine months is an eternity right and and we needed to raise three and a half million in our series a to Get the first product of beta you know that'd be nuts today you'd never be able to do that so it's a different world in terms of pace in terms of how you experiment and iterate in the marketplace and work with clients and customers about products becoming instantly available when you want to deliver them it's not about a deployment an install and a configure and an integration it's in the cloud and i Subscribe and

i'm going and i can figure it myself and i'm going to touch on a little bit more some of the whole agile methodologies around pace as well which translates into benefit and a lot of added complexity to how you build your startup you're doing it with the customer in hand you're iterating you're getting feedback along the way you're not kind of putting a plan in place and putting your heads Down a building for nine months technology i don't need to spend a lot of time on the technology because we all know it a lot of

the technology has changed and it enables many different opportunities in terms of products and and solutions that we can create um we would have never considered back then going internationally in the beginning today there are lots of businesses that Start internationally and come back to the us or they find the right market where they know there's a better opportunity to start there or they start in multiple markets at once that adds complexity to your team and then one of my passion areas i think the whole financing world has changed and is continuing to change dramatically

how we get funded where capital comes from what investors are looking for we'll touch on this a Little bit more later but we need to be much more creative about capital efficiency you know kind of smaller amounts of capital to get to proof points before we go further along okay so um back in the 90s there was a wonderful book called built to last that was about kind of what went into great companies that were built to last a long time And i kind of just skimmed through the book again just to remind myself of

what was there i would be hard-pressed to have a startup look at what's in there and say that you should focus on much of it and it did a lot of traditional waterfall company building i mean in the in those days we approached it the way we approached software development with kind of a focus on the market and the Mission and core values and 10-year objectives and three-year goals and strategic initiatives and culture and alignment and all this kind of stuff and then plans and you executed that that's not going to work right i like

to say in this world of kind of capital constraints and time to market pressures and competition coming from all over the world A constrained hiring environment you need to think very differently about this phase of building your company and what i like to say to people is what are you going to do that allows you what are you going to do that proves that you can live another day so it's a short-term mindset not to say the long-term isn't important but it's much more focused on what do i need to get done to convince an

investor put in more Money to get a customer to buy to get kind of a win out in the marketplace that's the mindset we're going to take today in terms of how we're building our culture okay and our team so i mentioned in the beginning abby and i did a pitch earlier in the year on kind of taking the agile software development mindset and bringing that to how you build your Company and the principles of agile really form the foundation for how you build your company i think i'm trying to in this presentation extend it

to how you build your team so agile is about iterating doing things incrementally a little bit of time iteratively learning as you go getting something out there putting it in front of people getting feedback making appropriate changes Deferring decisions that don't need to be made today that can be made tomorrow we can't get it all done we have to decide this is important now i'm going to wait on that when that's not important not deferring all decisions deferring those decisions that you can defer delivering fast executing quickly we need to know are we going in

the right direction and iterate and get that Feedback quickly we can't get the feedback after nine months and realize that we're going in the wrong direction and doing the stuff that matters not the stuff that doesn't matter so trying not to focus on things that don't matter like the color of the sofas in the lobby okay so abby and i took this from kind of traditional agile methodology and we translate it into How do you build your company and i'm not going to go through this whole pitch but i said abby we need to do

this pitch again because there's a lot of good stuff here the six elements that we built for how you build your company is first starting with a vision so this is not only about short term it's about what do you aspire to be and we're going to do that when we do the exercise Today we're going to start with what do you aspire to be because that's important for a number of reasons and it's not just about pivoting your way into something that's not what we're talking about but taking that vision and focusing it down

focusing it onto something that you can execute in a short period of time and get feedback on it it's about being very Clear about the risks that you face and building your plans are out reducing that risk and it's about as we talked about kind of making decisions to incrementally increase the value of your company every step of the way whether it's proof point with a customer momentum in the marketplace maybe it's revenue maybe it's a set of metrics that you need to have to prove to an investor That you're a worthy investment okay figuring

out in what order do you do things right in this capital constrained world we can't do everything all at once actually the hardest startup i ever had was in 1999 when capital was effectively free money was easy to raise we had more money than we needed to do there were no constraints on the problem it was too hard to execute in that Environment i'd much rather execute an environment where you're constrained and you're forced to make decisions of what can what i have to do today and what can wait till tomorrow but building that ordering

the sequencing of a b and c is takes a lot of art and then finally building in flexibility that we're not going to get it all right in the beginning you need to kind of learn make changes Course correct we call it pivot occasionally pivot's a big word flexibility can be kind of minor course corrections along the way okay so that was the framework that abby and i did in a couple hour presentation i just did it in 30 seconds so but i want to translate that into how to use this to build your team

because i think there's a lot of relevant Kind of basis here for to do so so with this agile mindset let me talk about the imperatives for building your team and we're going to spend the bulk of this time now on on kind of these imperatives so the first um in terms of the agile mindset was vision and the first kind of imperatives is attracting awesome talent to your team awesome talent that brings you know Complementary skills who share that excitement and the vision so a big part of why we do vision is to attract

people that share that vision i'm going to get into each of these in a little bit more detail but as i said the vision is not you can't execute the vision you've got to focus it down there's a real key challenge around your team building which is Focusing down on what we need to do for the next milestone getting everybody aligned on what we need to do and what we don't need to do so that we don't have people running renegade and going off and working on things in our core to the next milestone creating

a learning organization so creating an organization that knows how to work in the marketplace and take feedback And embrace it not fight it that's a challenge when you think about how you build your team and we all know some people that like to i committed i'm doing that i'm not moving from that okay how do you create an organization that's a learning organization and is willing to take in that input building a cohesive team these startups are tough right they can get very charged we'll Hear some today from some of the teams there are difficult

moments um there's not a lot of room for individual ego in startup teams right there's there's a real goal here is to kind of everybody be pulling in the direction of the company collective win not the individual win we'll talk about that a little bit more um and we make mistakes we won't get it right from the beginning So how do we create an organization and a culture where we embrace those difficult decisions and we make them crisply and we move on to the next level whether those be oops we did something wrong or the

opportunity has changed and grown and we need to change the organization to take advantage of that opportunity okay As i said in the agile methodology embracing flexibility is not easy creating a culture that does that is a difficult thing to do it's about how you hire it's about the mindset it's about the rewards it's about a number of things you do with your company and thriving in good times is easy one of the first startups i worked with was lotus development and we were kind of a little like the google of our day we Had

this huge revenue stream over here called 123 that generated massive revenue so that everything else in the company good or bad or ugly was a success at least in our minds but it really wasn't so you know you've got a culture that embraces flexibility when things go bad and the team comes together okay and then um lastly i'd be remiss if i didn't talk about how Do we embrace the younger generation gen y and now i've learned there's a gen z i don't know what we're going to do next gen z is our teenagers that

don't care about privacy live in the social world different mindset i don't want to appear old but that's a head scratch a little bit for me so that's our framework and i'm going to dive in a little bit more detail on that Okay all right so how do you attract awesome talent with complementary skills who share an excitement for the company vision okay first and foremost i think you have to build a company that people want to work for or better yet even want to brag to their friends about okay this is about attracting great

talent i think I have a thesis that great talent attracts more great talent weak talent attracts very weak talent so i think focusing on kind of who you bring into the company that share that vision that um that can help bring others onto the company is pretty key um i also believe and i'm going to share some some other quotes from some of my Buddies here my friends hiring for aptitude over experience in this stage that's not to say experience is invaluable but in this early stage when we're trying to build for flexibility and we're

trying to be a learning organization having people that can wear many hats and are willing to kind of clean the dishes today and take out the garbage tomorrow is pretty key uh Don bulens who's the ceo of unidesk multi-time successful entrepreneur known don for about 30 years one of my least favorite vc buzz phrases is domain expertise the other he says is pivot but that's not relevant he says while some amount of relevant experience can be extremely valuable i think many entrepreneurs and investors backing them often overvalue domain expertise when building their teams Many times

such people bring a set playbook or i've been there done that attitude and i know what to do mindset to the company which prevents them from being open to learning what's unique what's different about the company and what it will take to succeed don greatly prefers people who are smart hungry intellectually curious and highly self-aware i i concur At this phase look for passion you're you as a startup person as a startup ceo founder are doing this for more than just there's a market opportunity a financial gain potentially in the future you're doing this because

this has something meaningful to you in here i think you want people that hire people that share that in the early days because this is hard and it will get hard And having people that are doing it for willing to keep driving because this is their mission this is their passion is is something that will provide you a lot of strength going forward i'll pick on don here again don says no passion no job entrepreneurship is a quest founders are passionate therefore the team must embrace and share that passion often entrepreneurs and investors look for

the professional executives who can Guide the entrepreneurs or scale the business if these professionals don't become passionate about the product they're bringing to market run away don't be tempted by solely by experience or the expertise they can bring don actually tells a great story his prior company um what was it called a little kandy great success but don don had no domain experience for this Company he had passion for it he convinced the team that he could learn it and he could get passion about it he became ceo of ecologic was the name of the

company um sold that to dell for a multi-billion dollar cash exit a few years ago and that was about passion oops i like to call this building the whole brain when you build your early stage company you don't want to build You want to build a team of people that look like you and have the same skills and preferences and experience and and kind of decision making mindset as you you want to bring people on the team that are very skills very perspective very backgrounds different strengths and weaknesses diversity does create better decisions in that

conflict which sometimes isn't fun often what comes out of that is better decisions And as long as we'll touch on this in a bit but as long as you keep the respect and you understand where people are coming from i think understanding people's backgrounds and why they are the way they are helps breed that good dialogue that needs to happen and you need to think about the team as a cohesive whole not as one brain but as a whole brain where you have realists and optimists You know nobody wants to be the negative naysayer in

the room but that person plays a role that keeps the people that heads are in the clouds from kind of dreaming that this is going to happen let's get real about what can get done the creative folks that see lots of solutions but can't get pinned down on which one it is they need people to get their feet on the ground so as you build your team you're thinking about How will that dynamic organism come together and help you be a stronger brain okay all this comes down to polishing your hiring process hiring shouldn't be

something that you take kind of you know just as something that takes your time i need to do it i'll do an interview this needs to be core not only the ceo's job but everybody in the company's job What are you looking to hire what skills you need to bring on what what types of people are you looking to bring on i hate you know culture fit i struggled with another way to put it this is not about someone who looks like us and matches us right it's about someone that will help build the collective

organization bring something unique to the team okay uh brian halligan ceo of hubspot avoid the press release higher if you hire a Long pedi if you're someone who has a long pedigree and you're proud of that and you issue the press release you've probably hired the wrong person i like that one always be recruiting i think if we're hiring for aptitude over experience when that person comes along that brings those relevant skills and background and passion We want to be in a position to hire that person not if the job doesn't if the job opening

isn't there yet clearly there are financial implications of doing so but if you're always recruiting and the team is always recruiting when that talent comes along you want to be able to get that person diane hessen was a pro at this she was always in recruiting mode and her whole team was always in Recruiting mode and lastly it's everybody's job it's not just the ceo's job it's just not it's not just the hiring manager's job it's every employee's job to kind of help bring people into the company help bring the right dna into the company

uh paul english why is hiring so important think back to the teams you've run in the past think about the best person you've ever Managed and the worst person you've ever managed let's do more of the former and less of the latter that pretty much simplifies the whole thing okay so i was a long this is taking longer than i thought i'd be i realized but that's okay attracting talent is something that's kind of first and foremost how you build your team okay as we talk so that's the vision piece of It that's kind of

we're on this mission we've got this kind of higher level objective we're trying to achieve how do we bring it down to reality and get people focused it needs to be taken down to a set of key initiatives and get everybody on the team aligned around that so a lot of what i do today is coach early stage teams and going from their big grand vision down to what do We need to get done today and how do we execute that and how do we get the team now aligned around doing that and a lot

of this is around what are the proof points in the business that we need to get done whether it's a financing or customer metric or some proof that tells us we're heading in the right direction and i talked about dividing the defining The mvp for your company your minimal viable product or what we call your minimal minimal viable company how do you get down to kind of the core set of things that you need to do this is not something the ceo does it's something the team needs to do what are we doing what aren't

we doing that gets us to that next milestone okay communication and ensuring clarity among the team is critical Um it's very easy to veer off um you're tempted by lots of feature creep from a company perspective you got to be very crisp this is what we need to get done to achieve this milestone so we put ourselves in a better position to raise money or generate revenue or get customers and these are the set of things that can wait till tomorrow we don't need to do this Let's not spend time on that let's eliminate waste

i add this here because it doesn't fit anywhere else but i believe in the power of a distributed team and embracing people from different cultures different parts of the world getting it to work in a virtual environment first it brings great economic benefits it brings talent that you know you might not be able to find here especially as Markets get tighter and i think it helps create a better culture inside the company where you're documenting things things are kept clear and in front of people it's not that things are happening in closed meetings and then

nobody hears about it it has to be documented if you have people to distribute it to know what's going on embrace that distributed team i think it Helps you be better as a local team as well uh brian even says the bay people work and live is radically changed we have people that don't want to come into the office they want to work in an environment that they can be productive in well there's a trust and a working uh quid pro code that needs to be there but if you measure people and what they get

done Versus facetime you can make that work brian says the office is an idea not a place something to keep in mind um i translated to reward getting stuff done over face time okay and i think in this world of cloud-based solutions and distributed teams you know kind of rewarding the people that actually move the ball forward Versus the people that talk a lot meetings and show up is i think what we want to kind of encourage okay on to a learning organization how do we create a learning organization that crisply makes adjustments to the

plan learns in the marketplace gets feedback and adjusts to reduce risk and increase value okay this is a cultural thing that's not Easy to do because there are people we know people we've worked with that tend to i committed to that i'm going to get that done it's a different mindset so i like the idea of committing saying i'm going to get it done but verifying let's make sure what we're doing is the right thing to do and it hasn't changed right that was yesterday yes we committed to that but look what we learned competitor

Announced something here we have to make a change here we heard from a customer yesterday and it now underscores other customers been telling us we need to make this particular change let's make that change metrics can be very helpful here if you're looking at objective data and you're measuring the right things in the marketplace then it's not an intuitive gut feel Who's ever got the loudest voice let's make a change but it's about the metrics telling us it's not working we need to make a change let's try something else that's going to help help get

those metrics to improve and communicate them broadly we'll get into this a little bit more later about trust and confidentiality but i'm a big believer in getting the metrics out there cash position revenue customer wins and Getting trust in return that that's kept confidential don't automate and scale until it's proven i see this a lot in startups part of it is a lot of startup founders are technical folks and they want to build their product and they want to automate taking credit cards to purchase the product and getting online that's not important let's see if

people want it in the first place right let's Build something see if it works get it out there then let's figure out maybe we can put somebody on the phone and take a credit card and we'll get through it for a little while until we have enough scale that it's painful then let's put somebody on it and get it to work uh melissa leffler who worked for me at at e room as vp engineering At another startup in town this is i think our sixth startup build just enough up front be smart about scaling look

for triggers so you know when to build out so you can define this as part of your metrics when we hit this particular metric that's time to hire that's time to automate it's time to change the way we do something don't do it before then okay this also allows for flexibility in learning if you already built it And you're taking you know you have a big mechanism for taking online purchases and you're not using it what a waste what a hard thing to change versus having somebody that can kind of be nimble and kind of

try different things and figure out what works and then automate that it's a little bit of a funny one but i think maintaining humility even in the face of when things work It's not because we're brilliant it's not because we're more talented than the next guy right it's like okay that worked because we thought about it we planned and we got there if it didn't work let's take the time to all get together and do an effective postmortem and let's understand why it didn't work learn from that learning is about taking risk learning is about

Trying things that you don't know whether it will work or won't work if you have a culture where people get punished for failure nobody's going to take a risk nobody's going to put their neck out there so if you can make postmortems a healthy thing something that makes people feel good like okay we did this it didn't work what can we learn from it we all can learn from it i think that's a success If you repeat the same mistake again that's not a success though okay a small change today is better than a big

change tomorrow i think this is a little redundant but you know tweaking and making little changes trying different things a lot easier to do that before we've built too much right make sure that works before we build on it melissa says adjust your process to fit Your team deployment market stage customer activity so i think being smart about where you are realistic again this is about uh kind of building over time and and sequencing what do i have to do today and what can i defer until tomorrow okay building a cohesive team that celebrates the

collective win over the individual game and learns from failure Um so celebrating the collective win over the individual game is something that takes leadership it takes um acknowledgement of i mean watch the last year's celtics play last year's red sox play or two years ago celtics i should say there's something powerful that comes with the collective win of the team and the humility that comes from the individual that recognizes it Wasn't their sole responsibility for that win let's create activities that celebrate that collective win uh diane liked to have rituals and some of these were

silly and some of these really reinforced the collective win she found ways to kind of celebrate anything that could be celebrated that was collective in some way I think that sends the message to everybody is that it's my skype i guess i should have shut that off a cohesive team needs to have trust and i think the basis for trust is about understanding more about individuals in the company than just they show up for work and they do their job and they go home i think trust is about what motivates people where they come from

what their background is A deeper understanding and i've seen a lot of great ceos spend time trying to build that understanding of people within the organization and there are lots of old school techniques here retreats and things like that some of those work a lot of it just comes down to really understanding what makes people what makes people tick what motivates people to build that trust the trust needs to be There i'll talk about that a little bit more later too um todd lufford who's the founder of people fluent great entrepreneur great ceo trusts the

foundation of any high performance team and without that trust no collection of great individuals can become a truly great team it's born out of knowing the members of your team and them knowing each other And in setting the tone that you're going to expect high trust and you can expect confidentiality learning from failure i said this a little bit in the last slide but how we learn is by making mistakes we need to reward failure we need to kind of make sure that there was some positive that came out of a failure yes something didn't

go right and maybe we burned capital we shouldn't and we went into a particular We built a feature or went into a market that we shouldn't have done so but let's learn from that how do we keep that from happening again sure the bad news as well as the good news i am a huge believer and bad information should be distributed quickly people trust you as a leader so much more if they know you're not sugar coating things and if you're bringing to them You know we're tight on cash here's what we need to do

to be able to raise the next round we all need to pull together to get that done they know there's nothing else lurking there they don't know about nobody wants to come in tomorrow and find out that the company's been shut down right they don't want to be surprised by that so they want to know they're in it with you um you know there was a i went quick aside Here i don't know if this is the best time to do it but in the early days of one of my startups um i think it

was evil i mean i was even we you know we were we just finished raising the round we hired about 10 people into the company we were heads down building the product we had built a very early prototype and i was out in the market kind of getting feedback on it and I was getting very polite feedback on this product customers prospective customers are saying this is nice this is kind of cool yeah i could kind of see using that and i'm coming back all charged up isn't this great positive feedback everything's wonderful and then

i went to a customer who i knew would not sugarcoat anything and he looked at me straight in the eyes he said you're going to get killed What you're doing is wrong um the specific thing for the techies in the room this was back in the early in the mid 90s we were building a web app with a custom client he said you need to be in the browser can't be a custom client everybody's working in the browser this is 1996. the browsers were brain dead there was no way to get an application to work

in the browser back then But i came back and i was petrified because i knew it was wrong he was this customer was right we were building the wrong thing i'd raise money on the on the concept i'd hired a team on the concept i got the team aligned around it and i'm sitting here with this thing in my head that's telling me it's wrong what do i do about it and i imagined all the worst things that could possibly happen Stop the presses we're not building this we're going to build that and the team

says jeffrey you're crazy we're out of here we're going to go do something else right investors saying what we gave you money to go do this now you're changing to go to that we're out of here we want our money back i'm imagining all this stuff i'm not sleeping at night when this is going on i had a conversation with actually this was one of the more powerful Conversations i had with an investor where he said we didn't write the check for you to go build that we want the check for you to go chase

that market opportunity with a talented team go do what you know is right to do so what did we do we came back i came into the company peto my co-founder at the time he thought i was nuts but he said if you think that's right we're going to make The change and we've got the whole team together and we say we need to make a change we need to be in the browser i don't know how to be in the browser there's no way lots of naysayers in the room but we came together as

a team we went and approached it looking at three or four different ways to solve the problem we came back we presented to each other in a couple days Here's a couple alternatives we found a brilliant answer we were the first to ever get an app working in the browser in the mid 90s and the team came together stronger than it had ever been and we didn't lose a second in the marketplace because we were stronger we were moving faster sorry for that aside but that's pretty powerful diane says here complete openness i Think i've

done that let's move on embrace the difficult decisions so we will all make mistakes and as the company grows they're going to there's going to be a need to make changes or if things change in the marketplace they're going to need to be reason to make changes sometimes you've hired somebody who was great in the early days and they're not keeping up market Opportunities gotten bigger the job's gotten bigger they're not the right person they're not a bad person the world has changed usually you're not the only one that knows this usually others in the

company know it and it's pretty clear to everybody that maybe this individual is not the right job or the job's outgrown them or maybe they don't fit in the company anymore And it's a difficult thing to do especially as a young entrepreneur young ceo young founder hardest thing you can do especially if it's someone that you brought under your team that shares the passion shares the vision sacrificed to join the team it's very hard but we all know it's better for the common good and i actually tell my lawyers to go Away when it comes

to this even though they like to tell you there's ways to do this i believe there's a way to be respectful the individual and help them move on to the next thing and recognize what they brought to the company at this stage and that looking forward for the health and value of the company we need to bring somebody else in to do that job so you'll hear this from lots of ceos This is not new but fire fast we all make hiring mistakes people that don't scale well try and compensate for their deficiencies i mean

god forbid if it's poor performers or poor attitudes that's a different thing that's poison but good people trying their best not the right fit more difficult decision diane says holding on to non-performers for too long lowers the standards for Everybody in the company so this is still about keeping that high-performing cohesive team yes yeah so you're saying that um maintain some respect for the person and people don't like the lowering of the boom like oh you're gone so in terms of having to let someone go do you give them a runway or is it pretty

abrupt you know i think there's It's it's case-by-case specific i think other lawyers in the room the lawyers are going to tell you one way to approach the problem all i will say is put your human being hat on as well and balance the lawyer view and make a decision because you're going to take a risk you take a risk every day how much risk are you willing to take around this individual if you believe this person is going to be litigious Or is going to go nuts listen to your lawyer if you believe this

is someone who is part of the team and it's going to be very difficult but they will see the common good and the wisdom of doing it put your human being hat on okay and then in terms of longevity and paying somebody that has to be case specific you might not have the capital to do so what do you do about their equity There's lots of specific things that you need to do there but just recognize the lawyers have a particular job and the only only counter balance to the lawyer is your sense of human

decency and the lawyers don't like me saying that i know that okay but i've not been burned ever by doing it that way and i've actually done it the wrong way a couple times which is why i'm so Powerful on the other way you have to get it and hopefully it doesn't backfire yes when i've had employees as long as the work i've done yeah yeah and still i see large companies require i've turned out i mean i'm not that i'm looking for anybody because you know but i've been offered jobs and they always say

you have to be In-house and that's the deal-breaker they have a perfect environment where they're like i said look i understand have to be a certain window when the meetings get done certain things you know you have to have some face time but i autonomy to me is like the mastercard commercial it's priceless it's productivity it's everything I don't know if it's i don't know if it's a company size issue i think it's a company culture issue but i've worked in companies small and large i mean i've worked for well i can't say i was

senior enough in ibm to say that i work for ibm but ibm is a very distributed culture and they support people working wherever and they measure you based on deliverables but i worked for documentum that was Three thousand people and lotus it was six thousand people and today we're 12 people and we make it work so i don't know if it's a company size thing i think it is a mindset and how they want to approach building their team and their company i think doesn't become a yes if you've got x and y to work

together or one of them they see the other performance yeah once you move a little further let's say no one ever sees your sales guy Who's working really hard and there's a lead for their sales cycle well that seems like so you kind of end up as you're kind of handling this sort of issue where you are aware that around the coffee there's a little rumbling about people in the other department who you never ever see but you i think it's a tricky problem i don't want to oversimplify any of this right Um everybody heard

the question and i hope that got on video too it's a good question i mean i think communication helps a lot here i think face time is important sometimes like you said there are times to check in and a virtual relationship only works if there's a a real relationship underlying it we all know that also so spending that time to build that trust that that sales guy that's remote is awesome Doing his job i don't need to see him to have confidence in that individual how do you get to that point even if things go

tough let me try and get through this and then we're going to have plenty of time for a question at the end if that's okay all right i'm going to skip ahead here force foster culture that embraces flexibility and thrives in good times and bad as i said earlier So there is no straight line we know that um abby and i had two great slides remember the slides there was this where was that road that wrote in camps that went like this those are not startups lombard street is startups right so you need to build

you need to build a team that can take those left and right turns with you right and not Go off the road okay um so we talked about this in in in the agile mindset deferring decisions that can be deferred so flexibility is about i'm not going to lock in on that one right now i don't need to make that decision what's the level of freemium support or freemium offering that i'm going to create i know there's a freemium and i know there's a premium we're going to defer that one for a Little bit until

we learn more architecting for uncertainty not just technically architecting but architecting the company for uncertainty getting very crisp about what you don't know and what you do know and then saying we're just going to make sure that we don't build too much around where that uncertainty is um i talked about this a little bit earlier also um reward people to take the ball and move It forward we need to learn more about this before we can make the decision who can take that and go make it happen those are the kind of people you want

on your team to kind of get some data build something make something happen that helps move the ball forward not to the finish line but closer to the finish line this there's a fair amount of debate around focus on what you must do well and outsource the rest Outsource not necessarily meaning send it to india or something like that but the things that we don't need to do i don't really need to have a bookkeeper on my payroll in the early days i have to have a bookkeeper but that's not core to my success or

failure i would like a cfo to keep a look at my books and make sure we're not doing anything to run awry of the law or of the irs but i don't need to own that Execute fast how do you execute fast i mean you can run faster in place that's one way to do it another is to just make sure you take smaller bytes so trying to figure out ways that i don't need to solve the whole problem i'm going to solve a little piece of that problem and move that forward and get that

execution and test that and know that that's working But what i found to make that work you have to create the parking lot you have to have a place to put the things you're not doing today what often happens this happens in product features but it happens in companies broadly if we have no way to put stuff on the side and find them later everything gets crammed into this release and gets granted this month and therefore it gets too late and You're late and you miss it you build too much so executing fast requires taking

smaller bytes and having a place to say i'm not doing that now i'm going to put that in the future okay these are just some of the things and we're going to learn some more from the teams we come up what are you doing to embrace flexibility in your organization so that you can do lombard street Melissa says make every higher count in the beginning and feel pain before adding so another important point here too is by outsourcing sometimes you might realize i don't really want to do that and if you have the employee on

board and and you said your job is to go to x and you realize that job doesn't need to be done anymore well that's painful versus let's go Experiment let's hire a contractor let's go see if it works we don't know if it's going to work for the business or not we're going to try it you know what kind of marketing person is the right kind of marketing person to hire it depends on what our business model is so you might hire someone who's a good utility player and have them do a bunch of things

or maybe you just outsource it and find Someone to come try different things with you and then figure it out and then hire the right person um diane says this in the beginning you need utility players people who will see a customer customer problem and fix a problem make coffee help with internal training and get the mail later on you need specialists if we can hire more people like this They're just willing to get things done that's makes it a lot easier to remain flexible outsource with care also critical mass first and flexibility and agility

is key really underscoring everything here okay allow for gen y and gen z um how do you create an environment that attracts the younger generation to get that energy and fresh thinking in your company okay um and i'm not an expert in this by Any means so there was a great article in the ink that i saw a couple months ago and so i just kind of summarized that here um you know creating a relaxed work environment we tried to do that in e-room in the video it was a little cheeky but the reality is

places for chilling out places for recreation beer on tap I kind of like it watch out for the laws you know we said three week vacation policy a lot of companies have no vacation policy today they say get your work done take the time off you need to that really does reinforce we were talking about earlier of holding people accountable for the stuff they do not facetime um make the executive team accessible to employees Um in this early stage kind of executive team in the board room in that first slide that's so counter to what

we're trying to build here right a flat org chart candidly kind of mentoring and teaming younger folks up with people that are a little bit more senior from that of them um career pathing helping people think through what they might want to do next giving them lots of different Choices that i think really keeps the younger generation engaged if they feel like they're still learning they're still growing um you know finding younger people that are willing to take direction too is not easy but this will make sure that you do that if i could do

that with my kids i'd be great they don't listen to me anymore um set up processes but be flexible Processes are important it's not a dirty word um but you need to kind of say this is the way we do things sometimes you need to just try things as we've said and if it doesn't work be flexible go in and make the change i think the younger generation you know i think processes are good to keep people kind of in check a little bit but let's be flexible if it doesn't work For them and it

doesn't work for the company as a whole maybe we need to make a change um i won't talk a lot about gen z because we're not hiring many of them yet or some of us maybe we are anybody hiring teens not yet it's going to be different um when this social generation this lack of sensitivity to privacy grows up i'm going to be curious to see what that Happens in the workforce maybe they'll change and they'll realize they are their ways or maybe they'll teach us that they were right i'm not sure yet but there's

also energy there the the broadcasting mentality of that generation um they've been called the age of the selfie you know i how does that help or hurt your culture i don't know maybe it can be really helpful depending on what you're trying To do okay hopefully they realize it's not all about them it is about the company you need to get them thinking it's about the collective win and it's about the company as a whole okay okay oh brian says embrace gen y don't fight them if you make gen y's work in a gen x

culture they won't be happy but if you build a genuine culture which I think hubspot is they'll be hyper productive we need to get over ourselves and conform to them that may be a little strong not the other way around maybe we can he he is embracing his youth and he wants to remain young perhaps but uh it will keep us all young that's why i like to do what i do here in the eye lab actually is because it keeps me young it keeps Me learning i get stuff as much coming back as i

do in mentoring so um that's kind of the that feels a little bit formulaic to me that feels a little bit like here's a set of things you should do what you need to do is take that interpret that for your own particular situation particular company and there's a set of other questions That i would have you ask of yourself and we're going to ask some of the folks here that come on on the stage to join me a little bit how do you bring the unique requirements of your business into how do you build

your startup team because there is no one answer and every company depending on biz model and technology and location and markets and all that is going to have a slightly different Nuanced approach to my imperatives that i just shared with you okay how important is domain experience and skills and what you're doing and age how important is it that you be distributed which markets are you going after are you building a physical product are you delivering something that gets outsourced are you doing a software product you're doing something that's not technology at all How are

you distributing that how it has that probably has the biggest impact in terms of the type of team that you want to build you know am i am i building something that's distributed in the cloud way over the wire or over the app store or do i have field based sales people that need to call on enterprise customers it's very different and likely we're all in the kind of a capital efficient Scarcity of capital world today i don't anybody raising their hands doing 10 15 million rounds right now no there are some there are some

oh good we got one in the back yes hopefully we'll see depending on how much capital you're trying to raise and who you're raising it from you might build your team and your company differently because if you're Trying to prove something smaller i need to prove i can get a prototype in the market that's valuable to customers and that they'll tell other customers about it if i can prove that then i can go raise money and i can go raise a million bucks on that or it's a different kind of thing i need to do

two years worth of development before i can even put it in the marketplace and i need to have a whole big organization behind it to make sure That we're testing it properly go raise 10 or 15 million dollars if you're doing that different businesses different needs different team needs there okay so i'm not going to go through this in great detail because this has to really be applied to your unique specific situation okay i also realized late last night that this pitch is probably targeted a little bit more to teams that are a few people

Looking to kind of ramp up a little bit it may not be as appropriate to kind of the founder the sole founder who's kind of sweating away themselves trying to kind of beg bar and steal anyway they can and i said oh did i miss the mark here and i went back and thought what would i do differently if i were a sole founder or a sole individual in a team trying to build my team at this point and the Reality is i think that the framework still works you still need to get someone let's

imagine you're looking for a co-founder you wanna find someone who has the same shared enthusiasm for the vision and passion for what you're trying to achieve same thing that first hire has to be somebody that shares that passion with you not somebody that's just coming on board to Kind of build something or execute something they need to be complimentary to you um caution you know caution hiring the roommate hiring a friend hiring the spouse that looks like you act like you spends all their time with you find somebody that complements you that challenges you that

from skills and preferences strengths and weakness perspective Helps complete that whole helps add to that idea of a whole brain okay have the conversation about what it what are you trying to do with this how do we want to grow it is growth and success a billion dollar company where we've raised 100 million in venture capital or is growth and success a million dollars from angels we get profitable we grow a great business profitable throws off cash have that Conversation very you will find getting into building the company very different things you're trying to achieve

depending on your growth objectives let me do this let me get through the pitch i'm almost done i'm going to come back to that because i knew it's going to come up how do i find that person that's my compliment what do i do in the interim is the question We'll come back to that i promise you need to partner with somebody that you can trust with your children this is hard you need to not worry about are they doing something that's counter to you and where you're going okay so trust as we said earlier

in building your team trust with a co-founder is all the more important somebody who can disagree respectfully not someone who's just says yes Or that someone that goes ballistic on you um is in it committed good times and bad right really wants to join and say i'm gonna go through the hard times because there will be hard times and i think even of yourself you'd ask this willing to step aside if needed you get to a point where the growth has exceeded the individual or the company needs something else for Some reason we're doing this

for the collective win and for the for the success of the company not the success of the individual okay so i think when you're looking to co-founders this is an interesting checklist probably not complete but an interesting set of questions to ask yourself is this the right person because it's a long-term commitment not as long as a marriage but it feels a lot Like a marriage it's a couple years at least and maybe it could be ten years okay i will be candid with you i haven't been this thoughtful about co-founders you know you maybe

do it intuitively but i would i'm gonna ask these questions a lot more of myself as i look to kind of join have people join me okay um this also brings up a question i'm not going to spend any time on this on Founder pie issues ownership equity whole set of questions around that we're not going to spend any time on that today that was a pitch that i did a while ago called defining the fount dividing the founder pi i do it occasionally here in the ilab we'll probably do it again some other time

and it talks about how to have that conversation with a co-founder around ownership okay okay take a breath that was a little Longer than i thought i apologize but we we're scheduled to go to four is i hope that's not too long for folks but now we want to get to the interactive part and we have three teams that have volunteered to kind of join me for discussion about taking this kind of this um set of imperatives and a framework we put forth and let's have a conversation about it okay so let's start with sarah

is that okay Come up here set up some chairs that you took no it's good okay well while you're doing that abby let me just say sarah to give 30 seconds on what the company's about in your vision for the company here is this on is that on ib i don't know where the switch is all right cool um so my company is hupik we're basically creating a movement We changed everything as of a week ago so we're creating a movement for people who have food allergies to be able to eat outside of their home

it started as a device it's now being um sort of transformed into a sort of auto check-in app when you walk into restaurants starting as that then going into training with a restaurant chef and maybe getting to a device eventually but essentially What we are doing is making it so that if you have the food allergy you can eat outside of your home whether that be in your town or in paris or in india or wherever you're going and not be afraid of having that meal so this is um the restaurant would be running some

of your software then yeah and i would check in in some way so they're now aware of what my Allergies are correct okay i got it so have you raised money yet uh we have not raised money yet we got some money from winning the harvard innovation challenge um harvard college innovation challenge in the commercial category we got 10 000 from that they're giving us another 5 000 at the end they're holding out on us but that's how much we've made so far so on that 10 or 15 000 the hope is you Prove something

so you can go raise more capital right theoretically yes theoretically so what would you like to prove on this first round of capital what are you trying to get done we're trying to prove that we can actually offer something valuable uh and that will ideally actually allay the fear for the consumer or for the restaurant for both but In particular the consumer my father and my sister both have seafood allergies and it's awful and they've had so many reactions at this point that i can't even count how many times they've had one um and get

to the point where they have a safe encounter in a restaurant and my father doesn't have a panic attack when he walks by legal seafoods the door swings open and he smells lobster so i Found the passion for you yeah okay that that's now out there yeah um so describe the current team uh it's me right now right now yeah um any independent people working with you or just you so uh it's it's a complicated story um so i had a very difficult conversation this past week with um who was my co-founder uh we're still

struggling to sort of figure out what Position he holds but we know he's not a co-founder because he's not out of school yet he just can't prioritize this company he literally marks off every single box that you mentioned in this presentation i would trust him with my kids he gets along great with my boyfriend like it is great you know we like throw around is that on the chart i missed That one yeah no i mean you know well i do i have a long distance boyfriend so that's important to have that dress and you

know he's a great individual he's just thinks about things in completely different ways than i do um and it's caused us to go great for a while okay so let's talk about you set a milestone of what you want to Achieve yeah i imagine this is get some software out there then that can do this or is this just test in the marketplace the concept test the marketplace right now so test and get validation of what the software might need to do right okay so um i do this on a number of restaurants yes probably

different different sorts of restaurants so we want to go to Places like clover that are really into experimenting we want to go to some place as boring as burger king we want to go to the legal seafoods to see what the luxury looks like we want to know what it looks like at a luxury resort maybe maybe what it looks like at disney they're also super into allergies um so just just kind of being able to find where our niche might be okay so with That you need a set of people or skills around you

to help you execute that do you think or is that all on your shoulders at this point it is all on my shoulders um well let's let's talk through first kind of what talent do you ideally if you put maybe capital aside a second if you could attract someone around the team that could help you yeah what kind of talent would you try To attract uh i found that someone who thinks linearly works really well for me i tend to be one of those creatives that has a kajillion ideas yup um and you know stutters

i'm thinking so fast and have so many things to think about so someone who thinks in a more linear way um is this someone also so the in-market Testing is that something this person would do you would do both of you together both together i think it's something that it it would be key to sort of how i'd want to run a company to have them experience it with me in terms of the requirements for the deaf for the app and product requirements and the like that's written down in your head exists somewhere or that

person needs to Bring it on also you're looking for someone with product or technical skills yeah i mean ideally i i would look to someone who has some experience doing some mobile development at this point to understand what what consumers look for or what it should look like or what it should feel like or what people respond to is gamification something that we should use is it not is how do you how do you work With inside this this new sort of mobile app environment okay any other things you think you need in terms of

skills to bring into the company at this stage at this stage i would love to have someone who's a veteran in the restaurant field to understand what sort of systems they're using now electronically maybe we could we would be able to incorporate into that maybe there's something that is just this huge barrier and we would Never be able to overcome and so there's we need to find another way around that um that would be awesome maybe even let me challenge you there a little bit because finding that person that also is comfortable in startups and

technology and creating a new market very difficult person to hire um and i'm not telling you you can't but maybe think about that person as an Advisor an independent or someone part-time that helps because they would bring them the restaurant experience but not slow you down from the other things that you might need to do and maybe you get lucky and you find that person that can do both right this is a time period i'm going to jump over focus a little bit right now just also given time you need to learn a lot in

this phase Right what are some of the key questions you think you need to answer in this phase one of the biggest questions is what creates peace of mind what how how do you quantify that how do you express that you can deliver that yeah and how you even define that to begin with in order to make a product that allows for that to happen so this is a phase where flexibility is Pretty key it's a little easier because it's just you and clearly the objective is about learning and getting back from the marketplace this

is right that isn't right so it's a little bit easier to handle kind of creating that learning organization at this at this point um what else is needed do you think in terms of Learnings in the marketplace what else do you need to learn there's so many things i mean i think a lot of this goes back to what do we defer for now and what is the most important thing right now i'm going to read this as a question of what is what are one of those more important things at the front of my

mind that i want to answer now um i would definitely say who is going to pay for it and in that Sense where who are we creating the most value for and who are we killing the most pain for is it actually the restaurants in the end because they might want to be able to know that they're not going to have a reaction in the restaurant or this can act as some sort of liability buffer yeah and that's a huge painkiller for them or maybe it Increases their liability or there's so many different things and

maybe we're just a way to access you know food allergic people and we do advertisements in our uh in our app for i don't know uh uh like clinical trials or something so um one of the things i know as an investor selling to restaurants is really tough there's only one success we can point to recently and it took them a long time um Open table um so a lot of investors are going to be averse to something that requires people calling on restaurants to get something right so i suspect answering that question of distribution

and how are you going to get consumers and how you're going to get restaurants in this early phase is going to be pretty important also you need to figure that out once you Figure out what the solution is so i would add maybe not to kind of put words in them out there but learning kind of how are you going to distribute it and how are you going to get customers and restaurants to to kind of embrace it is something you probably want to try and embrace in this phase as well question back there it

goes back to who pays then also because if there was a way that a Partner could distribute for you if it were free that's a lot easier they could get aware and generate awareness for you and you figure out some way of freemium or pay or someone else pays for it potentially who benefits most but it yes also be like a remember like a member's type of you know like information sharing i have a friend who's just found out his baby daughter is Allergic has a nut allergy and he doesn't know how to leave the

house with her guidance he won't go anywhere until he's been assured that nothing has nuts and i just think like maybe if you start like having a community of people that share information and maybe it's a membership so that brings up then an another skill that you need to attract to the company As someone has community building experience if that's not you sir all right how do you get that into the company early and see if you could build i love business models that start with something that's off on the side and a little bit

easier build that then helps facilitate what you're trying to achieve longer term hubspot did a brilliant job of that in the early days um can we go back to your co-founder a Little bit and poke on that because i think there's go ahead team learning there and maybe audience learning as well um kind of embracing difficult decisions you took that head on what brought it to a head if i can ask um i sat down with one of my mentors and he said no excuses and i said well but and he just kept saying no

excuses And i ended up sitting with him for like two and a half hours talking about what my value prop was and and what it means to be the leader of an idea and how you're the only person to advocate it and at the end he just said no excuses um and i mean this is this is a guy that's worked with not only has domain expertise but has also had a very successful company and it It just it just rang so true for me that i just didn't have excuses and although it was personally

difficult he wasn't committed enough was that the only issue or were there other issues there i mean there's also the thing that we're a young team and there's not necessarily domain expertise but as you said and as has been proven over the year that that was not A factor that really affected us super negatively we actually were able to do quite well for ourselves considering we didn't have a whole lot of experience um but in the end it just we we weren't his priority i understood that as a human being i understood that um and

you know we're still friends we still talk we're still you know everything and there's a possibility that you know when when we could be a priority for him That that that would be a nice person to hire but right now i just the idea can't do that it's just not compatible with growth good for you for doing that it was really hard any other questions for sarah in the audience anything else you want to touch on in the framework we put forth that was helpful To you that really kind of helped you think a little

bit oh like everything pretty much everything but the only thing i would say is no excuses i like no excuse i'm going to add that to the pitch if i can great sarah thank you so much appreciate you taking the time to come up phil you ready come join us thanks I know a little bit less about life guides so why don't you again start from the beginning tell us a little bit more about kind of your business and and your vision for the business sure so the the vision for life guides is to create

a curated repository of knowledge around life events so if you think about buying your first home maybe dealing with a health event like Diabetes another chronic illness or something like going to graduate school if you had a couple of friends who had kind of gone before you and done it you could sit them down for coffee learn about their story save yourself some time money and stress um but chances are you don't have those friends and so what we do is we take a life event we find three to five people have been There done

that we have them spend 40 minutes in front of webcam record basically their story in very specific parts of their story and we put it into free guides for anybody to access on the internet so you do an editing job of that and really try and tell a story of how you might deal with childhood illness or something like that Yeah so the curation comes in choosing the right people as well as choosing the right questions um and this is a web experience then for people and building building a community around these life events do

you think also or is it more a per just a solo thing i go i watch a video when i i'm done i move on yeah so we we'd love to create a community as well we don't have the critical mass at this point but Basically most users that we've talked to have asked for you know could i be in a group of five or ten people private bulletin board that are going through the same life event share stories uh sure questions things like that um i'll ask the same question you've raised capital yet we've

got five thousand dollars from the hbs rock accelerator awesome Have you spent it uh we've spent seven hundred dollars of it thus far so what do you want to achieve with that five thousand dollars um what do you want to prove yeah so we have a site up we've got about 15 guides our traffic keeps growing i think what we really need to prove is that we can scalably acquire high quality content from interesting people across a broad Array of uh knowledge spaces and translate that into users and so basically now we have an online

guide creation platform where somebody can go on and create a guide in 90 minutes we basically need to find people that actually are going to go on and do that get value out of it so that would be for a single kind of person giving a video kind of overview or They would pull together multiple videos and put together a guide so basically it's 25 minutes to define the guide what what do you want to cover what are the chapters where the subtopics and then about 40 minutes per contributor to go on and add content

so if you wanted so it's 25 plus n times the number of or 40 times the number of people contributing and my assumption is after This five thousand dollars you're going to be out looking to raise money to to kind of fund the company at that point or you think there are other sources of capital that you need to get a little bit further before you do that uh it's a good question so uh we've had a couple of people that i've worked with in the past and friends of mine who have offered to invest

in the company and i think it's really How do i feel about this going forward and would i put my own money into this uh and that's kind of how we're going to judge whether or not to raise capital being skeptical yourself yeah exactly great exactly great i like i i like that as well i think keeping that healthy skepticism about your own startup and making sure this is worthy of your time because you could be doing Other things right is really important um so tell me about the team today uh yeah so the team

i'm the founder uh i used to work in venture capital i'm self-taught programmer went to hbs and then we've got four lovely interns two of them are right here i don't see the other two uh so two are developers uh one's doing a cs underground once doing a masters in cs The other so these guys have been teaching themself a lot of code actually alyssa redesigned our whole home page which looks nice you should check it out cool um and uh yeah that's kind of the team so um let's go back to kind of what

do you think is missing on the team in terms of skills based on what we need to get proven which is get the product out and get some proof that kind of you can attract Content and you can attract people to view that content what's missing on the team do you think yeah so i think we need well first of all uh four of the five of us are going back to college in august um and so that's a lot of manpower generally yeah i think that we it would be great to have a product

person so i can code i don't have great sense of design um i probably shouldn't be spending my time Coding i probably have a comparative advantage in other things um so that's a skill that we're missing that would be a great co-founder um marketing so we're building a brand we're building a community we're trying to get out there and get interesting people excited about using our platform somebody who's just like an evangelist that would be huge um these are these are co-founder types Do you think or do you think these are employees that you hire

after you've raised some capital so the plan is basically you know i have the skills to execute so let's execute and raise capital because i know i can do that um and then in the meantime you know i'm i'm going to hackathons i'm when i'm working i'm trying to network as well and so it would be wonderful to run into to find somebody who would be a great Co-founder but i also realized that it's almost impossible to find somebody that fits the mold and so uh i'm not banking on that i guess i'm hedging my

bets let me go back to i didn't quite get out of you what's the passion for this space why are you doing this uh yeah so that it it goes back to when i was in college i interned at a wall street investment bank i didn't Have a great time i wrote myself a note in the middle of the summer i was like hey phil here's why you wouldn't want to do this for your life in september it was 2007 i had a lovely job offer from said investment bank and was feeling the pressure i

actually remember meeting with the ceo and was feeling the pressure and i almost signed that offer but i literally found this note On my desk and i'd completely forgotten everything that i'd written in that note um and so last year i was at hbs and the pressure is even higher when you have debt and you have kids and you're going to get flown to hawaii for a weekend or whatever and get an extra signing bonus if you sign and so i basically just made this little structured reflection tool got a lot of good feedback and

a Lot of people are like hey this actually changed my career trajectory this 10-minute exercise and so i said gee whiz there's all these hacks that people have figured out about life events here's one but there's thousands and if you had that information you'd save yourself an incredible amount of time money and stress uh and so that was how lifeguards was Born so finding somebody that shares that vision with you that passion that it's not just a product co-founder i often hear that i'm looking for a cto or product co-founder there are a million out

there and they're not going to join you right right they're going to you the one that's going to join you is someone who cares about that maybe had a life event Like that yeah so how do you find that person not easy i'm not saying it's easy but networking with a more focused view towards what you're looking for like let me meet people that have been through this before that have made changes in their career or had some other life experience that required a change death of a parent health issue whatever it might be just

In the interest of time here a little bit um what do you hope to learn in kind of this first phase in the five thousand dollars that helps you decide whether you're going to do this going forward or not i think we need to figure out what the value prop is to the mentors creating guides um i'd love it if there were just pockets of people that wanted to pay it Forward and give back and i think there are a lot of people out there like that it's hard to find them in a scalable way

um and so do we become more of like a self-promotion platform i really hope not but basically we need to figure out how do we scalably acquire high quality content we've actually also experimented with some more like user-generated type of things with like sharing Reflections and things like that um getting it to be high quality and trusted seems to me to be a high bar yeah and you're gonna have to hit that bar for me as a consumer to come in and say i'm gonna take your advice so these are people that either have reputational

authority or experience in it or do it as a living or something it's not just you made a decision about joining Investment banking or not and i did a video yeah um i might not trust your input as much as somebody that's done it for a career or something like that right so i think that's a key thing to push on is learning about about what does it take to track high quality content yeah right right yeah that's definitely part of it and i guess something that we've Struggled with a little bit i think we've

found the solution is like is it the top you know percentage point somebody that wrote a book about this or is it top five percent somebody who worked at goldman sachs and then worked at bain capital and they're gonna do a guide on going to private equity and it happens that they're in the top five percent and we've kind of figured out that like That's that's pretty good especially if you find somebody with charisma who wants to give back for the right reasons okay yeah i think getting answers those questions will be interesting to see

what does it take to motivate people i think that's right yeah um sounds like a lot of there's still a lot to figure out here though so flexibility is pretty key Yeah in terms of we talked about that i'm curious how you found the interns to join you where did they come from and what's that what do they look like in terms of skills that they bring to the to the company yeah sure uh so i found them all through college job boards uh mostly bu and then northeastern uh the skills that they bring so

two of them are very technical um and they've just Basically spent the entire summer coding yeah um two of them are more generalists and they've been doing a lot of you know marketing blog post writing things like that as well as dipping their toes into things that honestly they're they have a comparative advantage in which is design making things look right talking to users things like that very cool i suspect the organization Feels a little bit like phil these are things that need to get done go get this stuff done or is it more collaborative

is it more kind of people pulling trying different things and learning as an organization yet or is the learning come to you and that translates back to we're doing x y and z how would you describe it i think it especially started off as the former yeah and then it's evolved a little bit so every day We have a morning check-in where people great you know i'm asking them hey what are you working on today i'm not saying hey this is what you're doing um we have a weekly strategy meeting where we review metrics um

and transparency we also learn about something last we learned about venture capital um and that's a space where anybody can say like hey i don't understand why we're focusing on this Or why why am i working on that we also have weekly one-on-ones where i'll sit down with somebody and it's my explicit goal not to talk in that meeting and it's just for them to say like here's what i think we should be doing at lifeguides here's what my experience has been like here's my feedback for you as a manager so last question so come

august everybody goes back to school Yeah you probably won't have spent all the money by then i don't think so our burn is like 100 bucks a month yeah so um so question is kind of what happens through the next year yeah does the ball how do you keep the ball moving forward when people are taking classes and they've got other commitments um are they do they remain engaged with the company do they go away do you hire Other people what are you thinking about for the fall uh it's unclear yeah so my guess is

that one or two of them will want to continue working on life guides in the school year um we'll probably end up trying to hire some other help uh we're on a trajectory right now where it's not inconceivable that we'd be able to raise that i would feel good enough to raise money in the fall And so you know if we raise 300 or 500 000 or whatever it is then um we could hire somebody yeah to fill some of these roles so it's a little bit unclear but i think their trajectory is such that

i feel confident that we'll be able to attract other talented people if we need to and it sounds like the two big areas for me are around product as you talked about And being able to get the high quality content somebody can go out and really kind of find that content and get it produced and get it on the platform and there's a third piece which is you know getting users to engage with it but i think that's probably something you could handle on your own well good luck to you hopefully today was helpful to

you any questions for phil here yes sir answer those questions Yeah we've looked a lot at quora and also stack overflow which is like this developer q a site and i think the way both of those started was stack overflow was run by this guy joel spolsky who just kind of like knew a lot of really high quality developers and they kind of use this as their personal message board got a lot of good content and i think the core guys you know their ex facebook And if you remember the beginning of that website it

was all tech stuff like that's all there was and i think they just asked like their closest 300 friends to write a bunch of stuff and that's kind of what we're doing too so we have a lot of career and financial services related content in the pipeline and on the site because of my network and hopefully that's an interesting base to go and bridge to Other stuff but yeah two more questions i now have um interesting if this can be a marketing platform for some of these experts fine line of crossing the line over from

kind of giving guidance and then selling somebody something but that's an interesting way to kind of promote i mean these radio tv shows that are on sunday morning the Financial guidance shows that are content helpful but they're recruiting hard for you that's pretty clear yeah um and then just last before the recruiting the interns um younger than you right are about the same no they're also they're all like 20 20 something so any learnings from managing somebody in their 20 well you're 30 28 28 yeah yeah so you're close enough to It you know but

any learnings in terms of motivating a young team and interns and have their own ideas of what they want to accomplish this summer so i think you know two big things was just like being very genuine about trying to make this an awesome summer for them so one of the reasons i want to have summer interns is that uh i had a summer internship at a Startup when i was a sophomore in college and it truly changed the trajectory of how i thought about my career and i just wanted to be a great mentor and

i think that that is payment and i also think skills development um so the people that wanted to learn programming this summer are learning programming um you know i always whenever i Am prioritizing work and maybe this is to the detriment of the progress that we're making i always think is this going to be like mindless terrible soul-crushing work and if so how can i break it up and how can i make it interesting um and hopefully we don't have too much of that i see how's still done great good but yeah i think just

being genuine about wanting to make it an awesome Summer because that's what it's about it's about getting experience kudos for you for doing it i think doing that early and doing that often is awesome it's giving back and it's probably making you better and it's challenging what you're thinking about your business it is challenging um i think uh having i don't really have a technical background i taught myself how to Program um but being able to relate to people with a technical background was really important and showing that in an interview and i also think

just like articulating like what are you gonna get out of this summer um one of our guys really really really wants to work at a big tech company um and i've got a bunch of friends who work at big tech companies and like i'm More than happy to help them get there um but yeah i think you kind of have to sell people on a dream and experience because you can't sell them on compensation unless you've raised more than five thousand dollars um so yeah just like sharing your knowledge like every week we have this

lunch and learn thing like uh every week we share the metrics like everybody's part of the team You know it's not like me doling out tasks like i think it's all these little things that make it fun to work and you have to communicate that in the interview and just be genuine about it yeah great phil thank you that was yeah that was a lot of fun okay the six foods team so i think i'm gonna you're gonna call them out on certain things okay instead of having six of us up here and You're taylor

i'm rose you're rose yes who's taylor taylor's right there he's actually an intern so i did tell oh you replied to my email to it i didn't even change oh okay that's all right so maybe just let me know if you want something in those three we might just have to kind of translate it later but that's okay just capturing bullets like you're doing is great so we can at least kind of there are some good learnings that have Come from this so far all right rose so i know what you do but tell everybody

here um kind of what you're what the company's about today and what your vision is for the company so we are six foods and at six foods we believe that six legs are better than four and we are introducing insects to the western world as a sustainable food and currently today we are launching our Uh first product our chirp chips they are tortilla chips made with cricket flour and they're three times the protein half the fat of your leading potato chips they're non-gmo and gluten-free so we're really excited about that and i'm here with my

co-founder we have a co-founder in new york and then our three interns for the summer so before we go any further how many folks Are interested in trying the product well that's a good data set that's if that's representative of the market you'll do okay we'll see we'll see um so have you raised money we have so we did a kickstarter campaign yeah and we raised about 70 000 from there um and we also have some money from business competitions um but we haven't gone the Vc or angel around not yet and what do you

so what needs to get accomplished on that capital that allows you to kind of both commit to the next phase and know that you're going to and what are you going to do raise more money in the next phase i imagine right right right um what we're looking at now is it's about being skeptical like you said everything We've done up to this point has been testing our assumptions i mean we literally started out cooking up insects like whole because we're like you know what we're going to test this assumption that people aren't going to

eat this we were right did you capture the insects i don't know yourself about this but okay we can talk more later um but yeah so every step of the way we've been Testing like what products should we bring out um how should we bring it out what is the messaging we're gonna tell for the first four months all we did was pitch we pitched at like all these different competitions until we got it right and started winning because we wanted to get tight on our messaging um this was messaging to investors not messaging to

consumers but it was both because some of them Were crowdsourced um competition so people would vote kickstarter you had to be messaging consumers exactly and we were very successful our goal was 30 thousand we raised that in three days so um we did pretty well so um great so there was something iterative in learning in there can you summarize what you think that was that kind of caused you to kind of figure out what worked and what didn't work how did You approach it i mean it's all about design thinking right that's the buzzword but

it's what we're doing this day is we have hypotheses or um you know we talk to people and then we go out and test and we we ask like every single person we come across this is what i do like this is all i talk about bugs and that's how you get that's how you really like start figuring out like what Products should we bring like we narrowed it down to like cookies and chips every person we encountered within like a month we literally asked them cookies or chips so that was like so many people

so many data sets um and realizing you know using that to guide cookies didn't win no no yeah chips won okay um it's still a tough one i mean it was really It was close okay so we we had to pick one at the end and run with it and crickets were always the choice or other bugs qrikets are the bugs of choice um there are more constraints there and like based on the supply chain and like what um health benefits of of the crickets compared to other insects um fda laws that you need to

be careful of here Yeah so actually the fda does not regulate this market and they're aware of it well so i wouldn't be i wouldn't look at like that there so the food market generally is not very like they don't have strict logs like they do in drugs right um and so what they do is they actually treat insects like they do any other Meat and so we actually get the microbial testing the same testing that you would for any other meat out there and so it's totally safe there's really high standards for mead and

so you know we're not really it's never caused any issues we're not the only company producing qriket products that are on the market so you know everyone's only getting better not not worse okay but yeah in terms of I think how to get to the next stage it's about testing our actual product in test stores having that data going to investor and saying look at our velocity you know look at the turn rate of our product this is why we're going to sell well and we've been getting a ton of media and that's been really

helping us too is seeing how other people are consuming our idea and how they're responding to it and Um it's been a really like thrilling experience today we were actually featured in business insider as one of the top 10 companies that are gonna you know change food in the future and it was like what so in terms of learning that you need to have it sounds at the core of this is consumer behavior right i think that's probably the biggest question any investor is going to have Is can you influence consume can you change consumer

behavior here right in the west um what other questions do you think you need to answer or is it just really that one if you could prove that if you could prove people that try it some percentage will repeat right maybe that's enough because i know you can create it i'm not worried that you can't manufacture it I'm assuming you can make it taste good right i'm assuming you can distribute it yes all these models are in place they're all in price you can make money doing it i thought the prices seemed a little high

on the website is that that's only for right now as we go i think they're going to decrease for sure okay so what else do you think you need to then test and learn In this phase well i think so we are treating ourselves like any other food product in the sense that any new product that comes to market you're going to have to test on store shelves that's competing against everything else on the market right that's the big challenge i don't actually think that the cricket aspect is because what we're making is a chip

It's a chip guys you eat chips um and so it's about making our packaging stand out you know when you walk by and there's like all these food should taste good or cape cod chips you recognize ours and you're like oh why is there something called trips you know sitting there like i'm kind of interested in this or i've seen it before so i think one it's about just standing out as like a food company first Regardless of you know crickets it's like another like honestly it's like a superfood it's like oh we put whey

in our chips or we put something else in our chips it just comes down to it's another ingredient but it's like how do we stand out as a food company period and i think that's the data that we need to collect is when we're on these store shelves and we're moving product At a certain velocity like like the cricut part that's what makes it exciting so two things that come up come to mind as an investor one is how big could this be and that's where getting some more data to tell me is this a

nice niche business that you distribute online or is this on store shelves and stop and shop right um Is one and then one of defensibility because if you go if you back your if you break your back proving that this market exists and yeah and getting there then who's to say that now you've changed consumer behavior the big guys can come in and play and roll right over you right how do you think about both of those and do you think you have to address Those two questions in the beginning um definitely i mean these

are things that we think about every day um people have asked us from the beginning like well what happens if friday comes in and it's like okay we're gonna develop you know the next cricket chip um and it is possible but generally what these big companies do is they buy a company like companies like ours it's actually a Great exit strategy for us um and then the second i'm sorry the first question was how big can it be how big can it be so we're looking at ourselves like another food company right you know it

could be so food should taste good for example was bought by general mills recently for 100 mil um you know this is a really scalable model these distribution channels and retail um once you get with A really good distributor you could be in a lot of stores as long as you're moving product so it could be really large and it's a very like tried and true method have product people buy it you know repeat as long as we can get people interested in what we're doing the food tastes good and people believe in our vision

i think it's all about this vision that we have We're not we're a chip but like what do we stand for you know we stand for sustainability we're standing for like this future um and the more you support us the more capable we are of you know having these really great supply chains in cities where we're raising crickets in urban settings versus like taking up agricultural and you know where a lot of the water and Arable land could be used for other things okay so let's turn to team a little bit introduce your team and

tell me how you how you decide who does what yes um so we have a really it was your presentation was really great and it because it really touches upon a lot of things that we talk about so um the way that we started is um laura here my co-founder she and i were College roommates um but we were put together by harvard we're ex the the most opposite individuals you could put together um we took myers-briggs and realized that we were like on the opposite side of the spectrum and um she was the one

who came up with this crazy idea in the first place you know she is often on vegetarian and discovered eating insects abroad and read about it sent it to me And i had just eaten a scorpion abroad and then we came together and were like oh my god let's do this um and and then we brought in our third co-founder who has a more creative background she's a designer and that was how it started she's a social entrepreneur my background is in corporate business and um my co-founder is more creative in that sense And so

we have three very different perspectives um which makes for you know a lot of arguments we actually like you said we make better decisions because we say like if all three of us can agree on something it's a good idea because we're coming from very different perspectives um and then we also brought on three interns with us this summer and this is our first time having interns I just want to talk about interns for a little bit in terms of when we first got into it a lot of people like interns are more work than

they're worth like you shouldn't do this um and i have i've worked in a lot of larger corporations and it really comes down to i think the hiring process so we actually had about 30 people apply for the position some of us also some of them found us through like blogs Um and we had a very like rigorous hiring process where i asked really hard questions like theoretically like if i were giving you five thousand dollars for the summer and you had like um your goal is to reach a certain demographic like what would you

do walk me through your thought process it's very open-ended but i'm really looking at like what are you thinking Like how are you thinking um and we do that down to three people who were are like absolute superstars so taylor here is from tufts um for hot is from you uh i'm sorry st olaf and then johanna is from umass amherst so three very different individuals very different interests but like so keen on like being very thoughtful um very like able to take things from Beginning to end and take responsibility and take initiative um and

these are all things that you know it's hard to tell in an interview but if someone has a good thought process and can break down problems from beginning to end to me that was like a really good sign good for you for doing that that's great it makes the team even stronger i'm just watching being sensitive to time here a little bit um What's missing on the team do you think can you point to kind of if you could bring someone else on what skill what capability you think you need yeah do you have a

thought on that it sounds like you i mean you have the you have the manufacturing experience you have access to manufacturing you have distribution some distribution experience Marketing experience yes it it comes down to do you have something i think it comes down to what you were talking to sarah about advisors versus team members i was going to say as well and it's finding the fine line between who does what and i think what's great about the advisors they can provide the connections but the team members are people who need to execute Um and for

us like what we really miss we're really good at the marketing we're really good at talking about the idea because that's what we love and we live that we have the passion um and and we work hard all the time but then when it comes to like having connections within the food network or the food industry like that's something that we're missing but we found though is that it's really Rare for somebody at our stage for some of experienced food entrepreneurs to come in and say like oh you know what i'm gonna lie come work

with you guys so right now what we've done is we've taken on a lot of great food entrepreneurs as or food individuals as advisors and mentors um but i think like as so for right now i think our team We're we feel really good we have three co-founders and so it's not you know one person shouldering the responsibility but i think eventually you know as we grow like it's about we're different from some other companies out there but it's about having a sales team who goes out and like we're selling to a lot of different

accounts um or we hire broker you know these are different options we can Look through something else is like eventually we really have to get tight on like marketing my experience is in marketing but like having somebody who can like focus on that all day every day so key for us in your email i don't know if you or taylor wrote the email but you talked about how you've divided up responsibilities today which is just you're tackling a piece of the problem each of you For now and then it's going to change which is i

think is a very refreshing way to think about it yeah somebody has to manage the sourcing of product and get the product built someone has to manage the distribution side of it and some have to manage the marketing side of it in the brand so um and that worked naturally for you how did you how did you figure that how did that discussion happen Or just naturally fall out do you think i think when we so being here um and like in this community there's a lot of pressure to think about what's your role like

are you the ceo are you the cmo and like there's a lot of pressure to think about like oh my god what does that mean but we're acting as if we're like a 10 million dollar company And really when it comes down to it is like we're just trying to get things done so that we can have product out and selling um and so when we looked at the summer it was like let's just break down our timeline and think about what are the big components that have to get done so that product can be

out in the fall and that's our goal and it really came down to here's supply Chain we have to make sure we have qriket flower we have to make sure that we have manufacturing and we have to make sure that we have distributors and so these are three big aspects there's three co-founders um three interns so that worked out really nicely where we started yes higher in threes is what you're telling me you just like threes three times two is six i don't Know i'm trying to figure that out um but just once we figured

out that there were like three components and we had very natural like tendencies towards each um it really just like worked itself out and even though when you have the i think the the trouble with having three separate components is like then how do you make sure that it all comes back together at the end and so having i think one person who can Kind of take the lead on like delegating and making sure that every piece is coming together and we have like brainstorms every day where we can talk about things we have similar

to life guides except at the end of the day we talk about oh what did we do today what needs to get done tomorrow um and just like keeping the energy up keeping really and we have friday check-ins with each Team member about how we're feeling and so like keeping these open lines of communication and then doing fun things we do thursday outings so important we did bouldering bowling um karaoke so yeah we've done a lot of team building stuff cool any difficult decisions you've had to embrace yeah a lot do you wanna Okay um

yeah there i think every step has been hard um one our co-founders in new york that's a really difficult relationship to manage is there a way like you know what is that what does that look like and how do we make sure that we're in constant communication and that she doesn't feel like she's out of the loop and we feel like we can trust her And so that's an ongoing conversation it gets really hard sometimes um other difficult decisions not working it is so it um it it goes up and down depending on when like

in the summer it's a lot better because she has more time but she has one more year of grad school left before she can join us full time in may and so are you still in school mm-hmm oh you're Both so we're full time that's gonna add some pressure to it then yeah yeah and another thing is um you know laura and i are giving up we have opportunity costs deciding to do this full-time um and that was a difficult decision i had to fly home a couple weeks ago to tell my parents i'm not

taking my microsoft offer that was hard and there's a lot also i think just like decisions like choosing chips or cookies Those were hard decisions and deciding laura and i have had i mean this is like fair honesty like we fight all the time because we're so different and like you know it's hard and it's about working through these problems and i think um the at the end of the day it comes down to like are you committed to this like do you have the right values and like do you Truly trust this person not

in terms of like your children but like do you believe that they have your best interests at heart and like i can truly honestly say like i don't think that my co-founders would ever ever like screw me over great yes a couple questions from the audience um so i want to ask about the importance of having a set location office space because uh you guys are part of the vip Here so there's a desk and an office space right here everybody gets together except for your uh partner in new york um but prior to that

before you guys were accepted as a vip where did you guys exactly meet currently uh my team we were unfortunately rejected by uh eyelash so we're actually resorting to like panera bread and starbucks is that what you guys resorted to prior To coming here we actually started out at the ilab um but you're totally right that i think having a meeting place is really important are you harvard students okay i i don't know how it works um but yeah so that might help you in terms of i think if you're harvard affiliated you have a

team member who's harvard affiliated That you could come here and meet um it's also it depends on where you are but like i think it's worth investing in maybe like a co-working space um because if you do have more than one team member like just having people on the same space like the the very like intangibles of like just like getting to know people and like having a touch-based point and just being around each other and feeling that sense of accountability is Pretty important i would agree i think if you don't have that it's not

game over but you got to put extra energy into ongoing you know kind of recurring meetings you know recurring themes we do this on thursdays this on tuesdays and there's a pulse and the kind of an expectation of kind of opportunities to connect if you don't have that things quickly Disintegrate exactly or maybe you want to leverage right and that's something that we've done from the very beginning is surveying um and actually going out and talking to people on the streets and so we've done a ton of testing um our initial like prototype we actually

took to the streets of cambridge in harvard square and just like yelled Hey try our cricket chips and we got it on film it's on it's for kickstarter and so you know like you could see people's reactions like oh this is like pretty good um so like having that product testing is really important and we and so like we're gonna keep going keep doing that and not only do we do like our own product but what we do is like here at the ilab for example we like Brought in a ton of different types of

chips and ask people around the ilab to tell us like of the these different chip flavors like you know which one was their favorite and why and so like keeping that you know surveying going so like there's product testing but then there's also just like the testing of like crickets right like is this a good idea and we've actually had some help with this but You know it's a really it's not a perfect survey when you ask people like what you think um it really ultimately comes down to are they gonna buy it um but

it's still good to have that data so like for example last weekend we went to a food show new york and we literally took our ipad around and just like stopped people and said like hi like we're college students like can you take this survey It was tough like some of our you know it's always hard interrupting people but like we got over 100 responses and we had to do it because we're like you know what like this is what we want to get out of this weekend and it's really important for us to know

like who are these people and like are they going to be interested in our product um and not only did we do that like yahoo actually did a survey for us they published an article on us and then They at the end like short article like a little bit of education they asked at the end like would you try um chips with bugs in it and over like 13 000 people responded very general population and over 52 percent of people said yes so like you know like we're like constantly trying to get feedback and we

have another really cool idea we came up with yesterday during our Brainstorm where we're actually going to like have chip rack like buy a chip rack and like very early prototype of like our packaging um and our product and have just like chips like literally printed on piece paper uh like i'm sorry like the packaging's gonna be printed on a piece of paper on like a plastic bag and like with chips inside and just like see who stops by and then ask them like Who are you like you know why are you interested right um

and so i think what we've learned is like constantly being in touch with your consumers is really important um i'm just sensitive to tying the rose but thank you so much i think we'll call it now but thanks everybody for coming hope this was helpful One last slide i just want to thank a bunch of folks that did help i think i have that slide here yes special thanks to the a number of folks that kind of help with some of the thoughts behind the presentation and in terms of follow-up if folks have some specific

questions they want to reach out to me contact infos there and i'm around the ilab probably once or twice a week also So track me down as well okay so thanks everybody for coming hope that was helpful you