Minnie Ingersoll of TenOneTen

Welcome to the Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape of the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Bier, managing partner of Bier and Troff and president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. One of the big things I encourage people to do is always to assume positive intent.

And I think that's a big thing that we sometimes lose is that it's easy for people to say the wrong thing at times and to have people not assume positive intent there, and that's, I think, where we get into a lot of trouble. Today, our conversation with Minnie Ingersoll, VC and partner at ten one ten Ventures takes us on a journey through the Google universe, the online car industry, and the real world challenges and opportunities awaiting today's female VCs and entrepreneurs. Well, good morning. Hi. Minnie Ingersoll is here with us today, and we're gonna talk about her background and kinda where she is today.

But, one thing I wanna ask is how is the traffic in here? It was not bad. I was coming from Pasadena. Right. So it's a crap shoot, but today it was lovely.

One thing I definitely want to encourage you as a very prominent, well known VC is very prominent, well known VC is to solve traffic in LA. I mean, from my perspective, that's your number one goal. You gotta fix our traffic. But you're helping out a little bit by having great podcast because the other thing is, if you're gonna thing is, if you're gonna sit in traffic, you might as well have great content that actually allows you to learn something while you're sitting in traffic. You heard that here today, folks.

I just want you to know. Turn it into the puck. Okay. So, Minnie, let's talk a little bit about where you started and, you know, how you got to where you are today because you're obviously a dynamic woman doing things in a time when we are interested in seeing the move women have made into the venture community and in a kind of corporate America and in politics. So let's start out.

I see you got your MBA at Harvard and you studied computer science at Stanford. Is Stanford where you started? Yeah. Stanford was undergrad for me. Grew up in Pasadena, across the street from Caltech.

My dad's a professor at Caltech and thought I wanted to study math at Stanford. And then I got going in the math department in the nineties, and it wasn't like things were just springing out of the math department, but the computer science department really felt very dynamic and exciting. And so, you know, I went over to the computer science department because it was so exciting, because I kinda wanna be part of the life of the party, if you will, as part of computer science. So that's why I ended up there. You know, we we hear all this stuff now about girls in math, for instance, and people holding women back and the double standard.

Did you experience that growing like, when you were you obviously were good at math. You were good in science, stuff like that. Did you feel discouraged from doing it because you were a woman? Was there was there a double standard? You know, it's interesting.

The percent of women graduating with degrees in computer science since I graduate has gone down, which is really unfortunate. I think it was about a third of my class were women in computer science when I graduated, and now it's maybe, like, less than 20, I believe, right now. So we are not going in the right direction, so I appreciate you asking. I think one thing about being good at math is I do think that there's a function of having great teachers and working hard that I really believe people can be taught math and can be taught to be good at math. And so I was good at it, but that was because I worked really hard.

It's kind of a nerdy high schooler, and I had great teachers. So it wasn't something that I thought about all that much early in my career. It was actually more more lately that I've thought about how much I've appreciated the people who've helped me in my career and how to sort of pay that forward. The other thing I'll say about being female with a degree in computer science is there's so much talk about what a male dominated industry tech is right now in businesses, but it's fantastic to be female with a degree in computer science right now. And so one thing I'm always really cognizant of is we talk a lot about how it's hard, but it also opens all sorts of doors.

I get asked to speak on panels, be a mentor, be involved in the community. And so I think it's important for women who are considering, should I get a degree in computer science? It's fantastic, and it's opened all sorts of doors for me. So you come out of college and why Google? How'd you get into Google?

Did you start bringing people coffee at Google? Did you enter in in a big level? Google is obviously this unbelievable success story, but you you were there fairly early. Right? So tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So I graduated from Stanford. One thing about Stanford was it was really hard for me. So even though I said I did computer science, it became really hard. So by my senior year, I was like, I'm not sure whether I could be a coder.

This is really tough. And in retrospect, my classmates are now just these people you've heard of, Marissa Mayer, John Lilly Greylock, Adam Nash who's been CEO of Wealthfront. I mean, just incredibly successful, talented people. So I went to McKinsey briefly because I wasn't sure I wanted to be a coder. But then I joined a startup.

I quickly realized that I loved the tech world. So I joined a startup and we IPO'd in March 2000, and then the market crashed. And so there was something called b two b, which was back to banking or back to business school. And so that is how I ended up going to business school because our startup had just IPO'd. It really looked like the bubble had burst.

People were saying the Internet's over. And 2000 was very different from 2008 in terms of just how the tech industry felt. And so it seemed like a good time to go to business school because I wasn't sure what next for the industry as a whole. So I ended up going to business school, and if anything, business school and I went to Harvard Business School. And if anything, it made me more sure I wanted to move back to Silicon Valley and back into the tech world.

Again, this is 2002. So I was looking for small, dynamic, exciting startups, and Google was the largest place I looked at, and it had 500 people at the time. And so this is o two. And, you know, we were still using Alta Vista to some degree, but the Google toolbar had just come out. And it just seemed like things were happening at Google, and they put something on their homepage.

Well, this is a little embarrassing. But they put something on their homepage that said, you're brilliant. We're hiring. And my mom sent it to me. And so I reached out to Google.

They weren't, like, recruiting from the Harvard Business School cohort. There were very few tech companies that were trying to recruit MBAs, but I reached out to them. None of my classmates went to work at Google. It wasn't the behemoth that it is now. So I reached out to them and and had some Stanford classmates, including Marissa, who were there already, and explored getting a product manager job there, which is how I ended up becoming an early product manager.

So did you have any idea Google would turn into what it was when you went there? No. No. I really didn't. It seemed like things were going well.

I had a bit of a product sense that it was going well, but I didn't know the financials. But at the same time, when I interviewed, I interviewed with Eric and Larry and Marissa and Sollar and Susan. And so, you know, I did get a good sense that there were incredible people working there. So you walk into a company like Google with 500 people. You're out of school.

Yes. You've been in a startup that IPO'd. But this is your first real time in this dynamic company that is obviously growing. Did you hit the ground running? Like, what were you doing your first few jobs there?

Yeah. So for the first number of years, I was a product manager on the billing system, which I thought was fantastically interesting, but, you know, it doesn't sound fantastically interesting. So Google at the time was a multibillion dollar company based in 20¢ increments, and the challenge was we need to close the books every month by collecting all the logs from the servers, turning those into invoices in Oracle, and closing the books in a few days. And, you know, you have one server that's down in Hong Kong and it's serving Japanese search queries for Chinese advertisers, and how do you turn that into an invoice? And this is before we were public, and sometimes we, you know, email each other spreadsheets.

And there was a little bit of, you know, if we just under bill people, no one's gonna complain because we're not quite sure. So if we just assume that, you know, we're not gonna bill people for the logs that we're not sure about or something. So that was not Sarbanes Oxley compliant. It was a huge interesting web to dive into and figure out how are we gonna actually build our billing system into a system that worked for advertisers, really. Did you know it was time to leave the Google?

How did you make that transition to cofounding Shift Technologies? Well, I stayed at Google for a long time. And so I stayed for eleven and a half years. When I left, it had been about a third of my life that I've been at Google. So I really believed in Google for I mean, I drank that Kool Aid on multiple occasions.

And, you know, there were things that were hard about Google. And I think from the outside, people often say, like, wasn't it the greatest place to work? Didn't you have chefs and masseuses and, you know, all of that? But there were times it was still really hard. Like, I didn't always know what I was doing.

My products were behind schedule. I had, you know, tech leads who didn't agree with me. Like, there were pieces of that were that were still hard, and I'm I'm really glad that I did stick with it for as long as I did because I think I learned a lot of lessons that then helped me when I was going to start my own company. So for me, I used to say that I was being entrepreneurial at Google. So I'd been there long enough that I was given a lot of freedom to start new projects.

So I started something called the Access Team. It was new at Google. It started by we tried to offer free Muni Wi Fi. So free Wi Fi to the entire city of San Francisco. And these were just new initiatives that were going at Google.

And then when I actually went to my own company and became a real entrepreneur, I realized how foolish it sounds to be saying you're an entrepreneur when you're actually within Google. Because when you're actually within Google, you know, many things are provided for you that are not provided for you when you go and actually start your own company and have to figure out office space and logistics and many things that are taken care of for you. So I think I learned a lot at Google that I was able to then bring to shift when I left, but I didn't leave lightly because I'd been there for so long and I'd really grown to appreciate Google. But for me, it was actually having my first child. So as these things happen, sometimes when you have children, it's a chance for reflection on what am I doing with my life?

Am I actually gonna continue to commute from San Francisco to Mountain View every day? And I really got hooked helping my friend George, who was my cofounder and friend, helping him start shift, and we really just started in his apartment. I'd show up every morning when I was on maternity leave. And helping him get it going really got me hooked on the entrepreneurial journey. So tell us a little bit about what Shift was about and what intrigued you and where it is today from that perspective.

Yeah. So Shift is an online marketplace for buying and selling cars, and it started in different ways. George had been talking to me about this idea, George, my cofounder, for many years. He was at Google with me. And he had been saying it's really broken.

There's a way to do this better. He talked a lot about car financing. And when I was about nine months pregnant, I then went to sell my car on Craigslist and thought, how hard can this be? I can sell a car on Craigslist. And for whatever reason, I had all men who wanted to buy the car.

And one, it was just incredibly hard to schedule, and I was busy. And I was still working at Google at the time, and they were canceling, and it was a mess. And two, they'd show up at the house, and I think I have to jump in the car in the passenger seat with this person. Or I just hand them the keys to my car and watch them drive off, and neither of those are really good solutions to me selling my car. So then I called up George.

I said, I think there's some merit to this idea that you've been telling me about for a while. And I said that I would help him get it going, but I really got hooked on the ability to really move fast, build things. One of the first things we did is we decided we needed a website, and I did some wireframes with a piece of paper and a pen. And it was just me and George, so we had an outsourced team in Thailand at the time. And we built a website and launched in six weeks.

And, you know, a functional website that allowed you to book a test drive, and that sort of thing doesn't happen at Google. Like, at that point at Google, you couldn't do wireframes on a piece of paper and have a functioning site live in six weeks. And that ability to really move fast and build things and just get them going became extremely addictive, and I found that I was not able to go to bed without my mind racing about, like, all the things I wanted to do to help get this going. So that was kind of our early days. And is Shift's out there today?

Is it still I'm gonna go into my used car salesman mode. But, yes, you can go to shift.com, put in some very quick information about your car, and we will come to your house or office, whichever you prefer, and give you a price for your car that is better than what you get from a dealer. So an online CarMax in a sense? It's kind of online CarMax, but we actually physically will come to you. So it's not online only.

Right. Someone will come, pick up the car from you, give you a good price, and that's all you need to do. And then how do you how to ship Tyrone and sell it? Right now, we get a lot of traffic to shift.com because we're a large used we're probably we're definitely the largest used car seller in the Bay Area. I don't know exactly where we are in the LA market, but we're large.

And so we get a lot of traffic. We actually have a lot of expertise in selling cars, and so we also will post the car on places like autotrader and cars.com. And there's a little bit of SEO ing, if you know that term, a little bit of optimization to actually get your car to show high on those sites. Then a lot of people, if they're trying to do it themselves, don't really know how to price the car well, how to take great photos, and how to make sure that they get top listing. So we do all of that for you.

But do you buy the car from the person or sell I mean, like, do you write them a check for $15,000 and then turn around and sell the car for $18,000 in pocket to spread, or do you have a contract with them where you're doing it almost like consignment? Now that we're larger, so Shift has been around now. We started in 2013. When we started, it was more like a consignment. Right.

But some of that was because we didn't have the debt facility to actually be able to give you the money upfront. Now we do a lot more of buying the car upfront because we can. Right. Makes sense. Yeah.

We make a lot of our margin actually on financing and warranty, so you're still getting a very good deal. But the person buying the car, if they were buying the car Right. On Craigslist, they can't get a loan. So if you were to go to Citibank to try to get a loan, you wouldn't be able to do it to buy a car. You could get a home loan.

You can get different sorts of loans. The way to get a loan, you have to go through the dealer because Citibank doesn't wanna deal with an asset that they don't understand. So you have to go through the dealer. So you could still get a loan from Citibank by going to the dealership. And so what we've done is made it possible for someone who's buying peer to peer to still get a car loan.

So you as the seller, you're still getting a great deal. Well, and then as you're saying, you can also theoretically sell it for a better price because you're making money on the financing and selling them a warranty as well. So there's other aspects of it. Interesting. One of my first clients when the Internet was all starting was probably 1990, could've been '95 to '97.

It was definitely before '98 when things really blew up. Was a company called one eight hundred car search. And it was started by these guys in LA that said, we're gonna change the way people buy and sell cars. Instead of doing it in the newspaper, we're going to have a thing called one eight hundred car search, and we're going to have these ads run-in. It's going to drive people to call us, the call center, and we'll have all your listings, and we'll you know, you can tell us what you're looking for.

It was what before the Internet, but it was kind of like, again, one eight hundred. And they spent like $7,000,000 trying to build brand awareness. But changing the way people do business takes time and you have to really have the staying power to do it. So we are gonna definitely check out Shift today. Great.

This is very cool. So in leaving Shift, I wanna talk about nonprofit stuff, but I'm curious. Again, what got you to say it was time to make a change again? Actually, I was having another baby. Okay.

The the true answer is having another baby. But also, I think that I love the early messy stuff. So I said that I was being entrepreneurial at Google, which was a little bit of a, you know, a stretch, I guess. But I love the trying to figure out product market fit and trying to figure out what is the real customer need that we're solving. And to some degree, Google and Shift both are kind of grown up at this point.

Google has really grown up, but Shift has grown up to some degree. At least it's like a teenager or something. And it's a few 100 people. It's at a stage where I actually was able to walk away and think about what next and still have it be a very viable business. So there was some just ability to do that.

I think when I had first talked to George about building this, I hadn't really thought about that once you build a company, it then could be the rest of your life that you then run a large online marketplace for buying and selling used cars. So there was part of that. And then, also, more recently, it has been this very strong desire to move to LA. So there are a variety of things at play there. So I can't resist asking you about that.

You said this strong desire to move to LA. So what was that strong desire to move to LA? LA is where I'm from, and my parents are here. And my parents are gonna turn 80 this year. I mean, they're still in great health and they're super vibrant, but that's some of it is I just really wanted to be able to be close to them.

And I've always loved LA just as a vibrant, very positive city. But when I was growing up, I felt like to be sort of in the heart of what's going on, if you're in LA, that means being in Hollywood. But so growing up, I didn't feel like there was enough of a tech scene, and I really felt very excited about the potential of tech. And so it's only been in the past maybe five years that at least from my vantage in San Francisco and and you don't know what's really going on when you're sitting in some other city, but it's only been the past few years that LA has really felt extremely viable and exciting as a place to be in tech. But I really still wasn't sure about that until I started spending a lot of time here and getting to know the community here that I realized just how great it is.

One of my obsessions is life work balance. And from a man's perspective, from a woman's perspective, being able to go to Harvard, being able to go to Stanford, being able to work at Google, being able to start companies and do all the things you've done, but it's not a coincidence that you've mentioned your kids twice and your parents. Do you struggle like the rest of us with this ambition but also trying to find time for those other things that are quote really important? No. In fact, it's just a perfect balance at all times.

Thank you. And so what's your secret? Where where we're gonna find this? Zen household at all moments. That's fantastic.

So I have a, hold at all moments. That's fantastic. So I have a, five and a half year old, three year old, and one year old. And They're here with us today, Michael. Well, that wouldn't be a shocker.

So at shift, people got used to me nursing at work, at the office. We had a board meeting. There's a picture of us having a board meeting where I'm nursing. There was no, you know, work life balance. It was all work and life was all one big friendly family mess together.

And so certainly striking that balance has always been a big part of what I'm doing, so thank you for asking because it's very core to my life. But I think the other thing is, you know, I've had Stanford and Google and all of these things and started my own company. And so sort of from the outside, it looks like, oh, great. And you've been able to have children at the same time. And it's been really hard and really messy.

And in any era, there have been things that have been extremely hard and I felt like maybe I won't make it in different forms. I dropped out of Stanford and thought, I'm not gonna finish Stanford. My whole goal was to go to college. I always assumed I would go to college. I dropped out and thought, I'm never gonna finish college.

And each time and then I went back a semester later and no one ever knew. But, you know, there've been each era there's been some story like that where it sort of it looks smooth from the outside. I think it's always important to remember that you compare your insides to other people's outsides. Well, I mean, what's that expression, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? I mean, the thing is, it's not that it's easy.

Right. But it's the struggle makes it worth it and it's worth struggling with it. And and by the way, I also wanna come back to you. I knew about the two kids because you mentioned the two kids, but the third one, which is was there any also big transition that took place when the third one? No.

So the third one and this is actually the second one that had no transition. The second one was the one who I was nursing at the board meeting. So the second one had zero transition, and I probably took like a three week maternity leave or something. Oh, that long. But it was all I was still online.

Like it was and so some of the reason there was a bigger transition with the third one is because with the second, we were probably about to hire 50 people that quarter when my daughter was born. And a majority of them are gonna be on my team, and I didn't feel like I wanted us to go through that growth spurt and to hire that many people onto my team while I was out. And I just didn't feel like I could have stepped away. I probably could have, but I didn't want to. I desperately was so excited to be part of the growth that I didn't want to take time away.

I and I felt like I worried about the example I was setting by not taking time off. But really, I just so much wanted to be part of Shift at that time that I didn't take much break at all. And then you made the move to starting a nonprofit. So I didn't actually start a nonprofit. I did join a nonprofit.

Okay. But I wanna just stay on what you said about, like, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. Right. A lot of these things just seemed so hard to do at the time. And the expression I like is you have to show up, tell the truth, and hope for the best.

And you go through these hard things. And I had hard employee relations. I had to fire people, and I felt sick to my stomach before doing it. And you just have to show up, and you have to tell the truth, and then you just have to hope it's gonna be okay. And you do that enough times that the things that you dread and you think are just going to kill you don't kill you, and you realize that they're not as big a deal as you think they are.

And so I think I've sort of learned some of that. And for me, having kids at home has been actually very important for me personally. Obviously, it's been important for me, but it's also been a good balance for my work. So I think that I would have been a 100 all about shift all of the time. And the roller coaster of the shift journey and just running my own company and hiring people, that roller coaster probably would have been too much emotionally for me if I hadn't come home to something that was more important.

The lows would have been too low if I didn't have something that just completely was non correlated. Because I had something that just didn't care about whether or not shift was going well. So one of my heroes is Stephen Covey. And he wrote a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and left the g word out of it. But he was a very spiritual guy.

He was a Mormon. And he believed that there were certain core principles, like Benjamin Franklin talked about. They kind of translated in the business that helped him build his career, but also was used in business schools. It's interesting. You use the thing about showing up and I'd love you to share that quote again and because I'd like to write it down.

But what's interesting is if you do it enough, it leads to a certain type of faith. Right? In all the things you're doing, when you're starting a company, when you're doing the things you're doing, it is starting like putting a seed in the ground. And it does take a lot of patience and faith to see it come up. So I'm curious how that plays in your life.

Well, you said he didn't that he doesn't use the g word? God. In other words, we live in such a polarized society right now. Right? You've got the people that are very ultra religious and then you got the ultra humanistic over here.

And they don't mix well. In the old days, you know, we had whatever it was, the church, and these institutions that told you a certain way. And now, what I see with entrepreneurs is they're all having to invent it for themselves. Like, what grounds them? What enables them to go in?

And you said something interesting, which is tell the truth. Right? Not everybody's telling the truth right now. And can you be successful and tell the truth? Because when you don't enforce laws and you make cheating okay, then everybody feels they have to do it.

And so, you said a lot in that period, but when you talk about faith and truth and being an entrepreneur, how did that all come about? Many different ways. I think that if I were to write my book of my life, I think it would be called Chop Wood, Carry Water. You know, it also can be just really practical stuff for people at work every day where you can easily feel like things are broken and kinda complain about it, and you still need to get through the hard times. And also, I think the grass is always greener being another famous quote that I think people can fail to see sometimes.

For me, my personal journey, I've been really depressed twice in my life and have felt like I didn't want to get up, get out of bed, go to work, call my mother, do the things, you know, just take I I have that every day, by the way, until I have my coffee. So I Right. But there's times where you just it's really hard to get out of bed. It's and I've gone through a couple of times where it's just been really hard to get out of bed. And, actually, I have made it through that not by anything other than time, sort of, and the ability to just sort of get out of bed repeatedly and just kinda go through the motions.

You don't always have to enjoy it, and you don't have to be good at it. But you have to do your best, and you have to tell the truth, and and then you have to have some, knock on wood, faith. You hope for the best. And I've had times where I haven't been able to hope for the best, and I've been like, I don't see any point in getting out of bed. But then out of that, I've had a lot of successes, and I'm in a very good place now.

I'm extremely happy. I I have three adorable children, and I'm so glad that I was able to just get through those times, not by doing anything, but just sort of by having some time pass and having things get better. And so for me, that's that, like, you need to keep getting out of bed every day and hoping for the best because at some point, good things do come. And my life has been really roller coaster y, and I feel like I'm in a really good place right now. Yeah.

I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, again, it's hard for a lot of us. Life is dark periods and light periods. But there is that place of will, will power, where we can act as if. Right?

Even if we don't want to. And for me, at least, it's interesting to start getting to the point where you do start to witness your thoughts and almost talk yourself. Say, That's not the real reality. I, the real me, is going to take control of that dark side and move it forward anyway. And so it sounds like you've developed that wisdom in terms of an ability.

And jumping into some of this other stuff you're doing, do you like mentoring and talking to entrepreneurs and helping them get through this? Because it's lonely. Right? I mean, when you're going through those dark days and it's hard to get out of bed, it's because we don't really have somebody always that we can point to that's been there, that can say, the sun is gonna come up tomorrow. So I'm curious for people starting their own companies that are coming to you for financing or for other stuff, do you enjoy helping them realize that they're gonna get through this?

Yeah. I mean, you could say that in some sense, we're off topic, but I don't think we are because I actually think the entrepreneurial journey is, if anything, an emotional journey. I mean, it's a business journey. It's all of that, but I actually think a lot of the people, my friends and other entrepreneurs I've worked with and certainly my journey, actually, the biggest skill that I think entrepreneurs need to come into it with is a bit of emotional maturity. And it might not be maturity, but it might be just an ability to ride through the ups and the downs.

And so figuring out how to build that up, I think, is probably more important than anything else going into a very roller coaster y you know, entrepreneurship is very existential for the business. Like, many businesses go out of business. And so if your whole life is at the business and lots of startups fail, you can't have that be then your whole life has failed. And so I actually think it's extremely important. And I think Jeff Bezos, he has said for many years, not just recently, that if you're not getting criticized, you're not doing something interesting.

And so some of this ability to be an entrepreneur is you're going to get criticized, you're going to fail, you're gonna go through a lot of that even if you are the world's most, you know, rich, successful, whatever we wanna call him. But you're still gonna have tons of people who are critical of you. If not failing, you're at least gonna get criticized, and that's hard. Being criticized and failing, you know, even if it's just failing on a product launch. Those things are really hard, and so figuring out how people get through that is certainly something that I love being able to find people who are willing to be open with me.

I'm an extremely open person. I've been told I'm open to a fall at times, but I'm extremely open. And so actually having entrepreneurs who feel comfortable being open with me is certainly something I hope to bring to the next era of my career. It's interesting because when I think of the entrepreneurs I've worked with in my career, and also just thinking about myself as an entrepreneur, because I do I'm pushing myself as I'm building both my restructuring business, doing my law firm stuff, and the POC. What's fascinating to me is there are pathological entrepreneurs that literally just see the world a certain way and they they will never take no for an answer.

They just have that gene where they just go. That's unusual. But what I've actually experienced is when you're growing a business and you're at the million dollar level, you're at the $5,000,000 level, you're at the $10,000,000 level, and you make a conscious decision that you're gonna go from that $10,000,000 level to the $15,000,000 level, you're now competing in a whole new world And you're going to get criticized. You're going to fail. You're going to lose business.

And my first reaction when that happens is to quit. This is too hard. I'm a failure. And you have to have the wisdom, I think, to really think it through and realize, No. I'm not failing.

I'm just going from high school basketball to college basketball to professional basketball. Each time I go up, I'm starting over again. You've obviously experienced that. But for me, it was not intuitive. I actually had to experience that to realize I just thought, oh, if you're growing a business, it's all wonderful because your friends ask you how you're doing and you say, oh, I'm doing great.

I think it's especially true in the venture backed business. So the venture business is a big bets business. And so they're probably stories of entrepreneurs who started small businesses that have been wonderfully successful small businesses, and they haven't had to go from the high school level to the college level to the pro basketball level. But venture business is a, I want to go to pro basketball, and I know that I'm gonna have to, you know, go up against bigger players or something. Like, I know the competition is gonna step up.

And that is the nature of venture business. And so you're constantly having to push yourself. It's meant to be a growth business. And so you're not meant to be, I wanna build a lovely store, and I'm going to sell tea at this store, and it's gonna be great. And I don't have aspirations for making it professional.

And that might be great for some people, and I don't think that's a bad course. Sure. It's just a different course. And once you're talking venture business, you are making a bet that you're gonna go for that. And some of that for me was the story of fundraising actually is where what you just reminded me of is the story of fundraising for Shift was getting a lot of no's and different rounds for us.

We did a large c that's at the time, it was large. It was a little over 3,000,000, and then we did an a, a b, a c, and a d. So we went through multiple rounds of fundraising, and some of our rounds were easier than others. You know, some are oversubscribed, some are undersubscribed. And the ones that were harder, what you have to do is you have to go and pitch, and you have to hear legends of the industry.

You know, Marc Andreessen's gonna tell you I don't believe in your business. And you have to say, thank you for that feedback. I don't necessarily agree. But you have to hear that from people who are legends, who who've done this many more years than you have. And you have to then have the internal fortitude to say, great.

I'm gonna go pitch someone else at 03:00. And to get a lot of no's before you get a yes. And that's actually a big lesson I learned from watching growing our sales team. I'd never managed a sales team before. At Google, I always worked on the product side.

Managing a sales team and having them, just the resilience that they build up and their ability to say, you know, when you say no, I ask why, and I ask why five times. And some of those skills, I think, are really valuable skills to build up, whether it's in fundraising or sales or anything else. But, yeah, I agree with you to some degree that some people have it innately that they have a vision and they're going for. But I think that lots of people have certain aspects and in certain environments, they have it. And you can have a introverted, non you know, I don't know, a little unsure of themselves sort of person, but they have a cause that strikes home.

You know, they have something very personal to them, and they are going to knock through walls to make that happen. And so I do think it's one of those which is to go back to the point of being, like, the only woman in the room a lot of times, I think it's important that we find ways of making sure that we aren't just finding the people who are good at banging the table and speaking with confidence about their five year projections when they have no idea what their five year projections are. And so, you know, making sure that we create that space and find those people who are extremely committed. They're just not loudly banging the table. So I definitely wanna come back to being the only woman in the room at times.

But let's start with the serendipitous way you've got got to ten one ten and you're starting this new career. And I wanna hear kinda how that also translates into or works with this notion of being the only woman in the room and how can you address that and make it easier for people when they are the only woman in the room, but also change it so that you're not the only woman in the room because there's a lot of good women out there that should be in the room. Right. Well, we can talk a little about only woman in the room, which is I mean, I've been in tech my whole career, and then I got into used cars. Right.

And so really what you're talking about is that Venn diagram, what the middle of the Venn diagram is of women in tech and used cars. Right. I'm in there. Right. So like it's no shocker that I was the only one there.

So moving to LA, I asked for introductions to a lot of people. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to like start something or join an early stage company or become an investor and move to the investing side of things. I I got a lot of introductions. One of the first people I met with was Brian Garrett at Crosscut. We went to a coffee.

I said, I'm new to LA. I don't know anyone. I'm like, I felt very nervous just about being here and not knowing people. And he said, you could come to one of our partner meetings and hear some entrepreneur's pitch. And I said to Brian, really?

I could do that? Are you sure? And he's like, no. I'm sure. It's totally we welcome having you.

And I said, well, I will not interrupt. I will not say a thing. And he said, no. The reason I'm inviting you is actually because I'd like you to sit at the table and participate and share some of your insights, share some of your perspective. And then I had the opposite thought, which is, oh, no.

Now I'm gonna have to sit at the table, hear a pitch, and then with a bunch of partners who've been doing this for a long time, then actually have some insight to share. And I've never been a venture capitalist and, like, now this sounds very intimidating, but great. I'm just gonna show up and I'm gonna do my best and I'm gonna hope for the best. And so I showed up at Tell the truth. Yes.

Yes. I'm gonna tell the truth and I'm gonna hope for the best. So I showed up at one of their meetings. And before the entrepreneur was done, I had so many opinions. I was like, oh, I can't wait.

Like, I had so many thoughts. And it turns out that, of course, you sit there and I've sat through a lot of things at this point in my career, and so I have a lot of, you know, I have I have my opinions. So it turns out that I did that a few times, not just at Crosscut, but I actually got to know a lot of the entrepreneurs, asked them about their journey working with the different funds here in LA, and also got to know a lot of funds, met a lot of the partners in LA as part of just getting to know the ecosystem. And so I got early, I I met ten 01:10. I met David Waxman at ten 01:10 and Gil, who I've known for a long time, but I hadn't met David.

I met him early. But I felt like it would be sort of irresponsible just to jump into the first thing that felt like a really good fit. So I did spend some time getting to know a lot of the funds and a lot of the founders who'd raised venture money in LA. So that was kind of how I got going is because the community was so open and and everyone offered to make more introductions. And so I felt like it was really easy to get to know the community because they're very cohesive.

They know each other, and they're eager to see the whole ecosystem succeed. It's one of those rising tide lifts all boats scenarios here in LA. So I went through a really whirlwind couple months. It was only a couple months of just getting to know everyone. So in doing the Puck, one of the things we're trying to do is not compete with up north or only talk about LA companies versus up north, But we are interested in exploring kind of the changes that are taking place and what's unique about LA.

So from somebody who's obviously spent a lot of time up north and who's now down in Southern California, getting to know the people in the ecosystem and so forth, What struck you as refreshing or different about LA? Well, refreshing it just on the very surface level of things. Right now, San Francisco is really grumpy. And it's kinda hard to pinpoint exactly where that's coming from. But I think a lot of things are not working in our society and San Francisco is a bit of a microcosm for that, where there's a lot of everyone's IPO ing this quarter.

Right? We're we're all talking about all the IPOs, and yet we really can't solve homelessness in San Francisco. We have a lot of people with food insecurity, and yet we've got gleaming Uber buildings and Twitter buildings. And so there's a lot of techlash, the tech backlash that's going on. And San Francisco is becoming a little monocultural with tech.

Maybe not becoming, but has, you know, a lot of that. My husband is not in tech, and there's just a real sort of struggle there with how do we take all of this success and make sure that it's a force for good. And so I think that people are just struggling with that, and people wanna feel like they've committed their life to, let's say, tech and that they are doing good in the world. You know, I think, do venture capitalists always feel like they are, you know, really helping solve the world's problems, or are they, you know, out to make a buck? And I don't at first wasn't sure I wanna be a venture capitalist because my motivation is not because I want to make money doing this.

And so I think there's just that internal struggle that's really strong in San Francisco. And you come to LA, but it's like everyone is high fiving. Everyone feels like we are building something here. We can do this together. We can be collaborative.

It feels sort of like you'd say early start ups, early in their time need to define their culture because culture gets set early, and it's set a lot by your first 20 employees. Once you've got 20 employees or 30 employees, like, you've kind of got a culture. And I think LA culture has been set, and whether it's the particular people or sort of the circumstances that it's growing up being able to learn from a lot of what's worked and what hasn't worked in San Francisco. For whatever reason, I think the culture here has been extremely collaborative and extremely positive and sort of creative in a way that I think comes from being part of LA, which has many different things going on. And it's by no means a place that's 90% tech, which I, you know, I think San Francisco feels that way.

You know, one of the things we try to bring up on most of the episodes where I ask the question at least is, again, kind of what you touched on, which is what is tech's responsibility kind of the the greater society? And whether or not you look at it selfishly, which is if you don't have good traffic and you don't have people educated and you don't have a stable society, you're not gonna get employees and people to sell your products to and stuff. And you talk about that grumpiness, and I almost think that's a healthy thing because I think, you know, when you've got such disparity right now between the people that have and and the have nots, it's not gonna end well if we don't all solve it. So I'd love to see LA not get grumpy, but by the same token, really try to tackle some of these problems that people are struggling with. So and speaking of solving those issues in terms of ten one ten and kind of women in technology and bringing more women in the system.

How do you see your role or how does that inform your motivation in technology in terms of the role of women? Yeah. So I mean, as far as just the role of technology, I'm not a believer in capitalism, I guess I would say, which is to say I'm not really a believer that the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value. That, I think, is outdated. And I'm not a scholar on this.

I think that at one point at Google, we were trying to launch something. This is during the Arab Spring. We're trying to bring access to people in The Middle East, access to information when their governments are trying to restrict access. And Patrick Pichette, who's the CFO at Google, said, I think we need to think about Google as half public company and half movement. And it's not like we have some responsibility to do some stuff on the side as part of our CSR corporate responsibility efforts.

Is, like, half we are a movement here, and we have responsibility to people. And I think that that's increasingly true. And I think maybe when, you know, business was just getting going, it made sense that Levi's could could make jeans and the purpose was to make money. But increasingly, technology, these tech companies are sitting at how do we have friendships, how are our opinions informed, how does our society function is being driven by people making decisions at technology companies and at businesses generally. And I don't think that the responsibility is just to maximize shareholder value because doing the right thing at some point has more ROI in the long term.

No. I think we actually need to rethink, like, what is the purpose of these businesses because they're playing such a large role in our society. I I agree. Absolutely. Now I'm not sure I've kept score, but are there three kids, a partnership at ten 01:10, and you're going to teach a class?

Yes. It's a class on product management at Caltech, and Caltech doesn't have a class on product management. They never have had a class on product management. And the reason I'm teaching the class is because someone asked me to. That's the best answer for why I'm doing it, which is when people say, hey.

There's something we really want that we think could be helpful. The woman who asked me is a senior at Caltech. It came up fairly organically. It was a really a bottoms up thing where she and a number of her friends are looking at jobs in product management, and they wanted this class to exist. And that is why I said yes to teaching it because you wanna feel helpful with your life.

And so when people ask you, hey. This is something that we think would be really helpful that you know something about, I said, sure. Now, do I know a lot about teaching a product management class? I don't. But I do know a fair amount about how product management actually works in the wild.

Interesting. We should get like a round table discussion going with smart, strong entrepreneurial women. Maybe we'll have a token man there as well. But I didn't even need my coffee today. You you were so interested.

So I I often say yes. I'm an enthusiast. I have a lot of energy. I would love to bring some people around to do this podcast. I think this podcast is fantastic.

It was a real resource to me. As I said, I'm commuting from Pasadena every day, and I was trying to get to know the LA landscape. So I'm really glad it exists. Well, thank you. Come back next time when we sit down with Dave Young with Cooley.

Dave walks us through the complicated path of representing emerging growth companies and how he helps his clients in the venture capital world realize the full potential of their business.