Summary

Jules, the founder of The Grommet, shares her journey from growing up in Detroit to starting and selling her company. She discusses the challenges she faced, including a lack of capital and competition from Amazon. Jules also talks about the acquisition of The Grommet by Ace Hardware and the future of the company. She then shares her experience as a venture capitalist and her role at X Factor Ventures. The conversation covers topics such as dealing with rejection, the importance of saying yes, the challenges faced by women in the venture capital industry, and the traits that startup founders need to succeed.

Bio

Jules Pieri is an Investment Partner at XFactor Ventures, an Entrepreneur in Residence emeritus at Harvard Business School, and the co-founder and former CEO of The Grommet, which she sold to Ace Hardware Corporation. Jules was named one of the “Ten Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs” by Fortune magazine.

She is the author of the 2019 book “How We Make Stuff Now” that Inc. magazine called “One of the 11 Must-Read Books for Entrepreneurs.” The best-selling book is used as part of the core curriculum in many college entrepreneurship courses. 

Jules is a member of the Boston Design Vision Community Advisory Board, and an advisor to the American Economic Liberties Project. Jules served on the board of the University of Michigan Alumni Association, chairing the Endowment, Digital Transformation, and Nominating Committees and serving on the President’s Advisory Committee of this independent organization serving over 600,000 alums.

She studied industrial and graphic design at the University of Michigan, where she graduated summa cum laude.  She was the first designer to graduate from Harvard Business School, where she played on the school soccer team.

Jules grew up as the daughter of an autoworker, in the city of Detroit, and has lived and worked in France and Ireland. She has three sons and lives in Boston, and is an avid hiker, weaver, and activist for economic equality.

Links

Please leave us a review: https://www.podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

Jules’ XFactor Ventures: https://www.xfactor.ventures/

The Company Jules’ founded creating a new category: https://thegrommet.com/

The book Think Like a Startup Founder (early access, due out late June 2024): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s site for speaking, podcasting, and ruminating: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy’s non-profit foundation The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Takeaways

Jules grew up in Detroit and later founded The Grommet, a product launch platform.

The Grommet faced challenges such as a lack of capital and competition from Amazon.

The company was eventually acquired by Ace Hardware and continues to focus on finding and promoting emerging products.

Jules is now a venture capitalist at X Factor Ventures, investing in diverse founding teams with billion-dollar opportunities. Finding a way to be helpful to companies even when saying no can build stronger relationships.

Being able to say yes and trust the people you work with is a key trait of successful founders.

Discrimination against women and people of color is still prevalent in the venture capital industry.

Grit, resilience, and tenacity are important traits for startup founders.

Personal experiences and upbringing can shape a person's ability to overcome challenges and succeed.

Takeaways

Jules grew up in Detroit and later founded The Grommet, a product launch platform.

The Grommet faced challenges such as a lack of capital and competition from Amazon.

The company was eventually acquired by Ace Hardware and continues to focus on finding and promoting emerging products.

Jules is now a venture capitalist at X Factor Ventures, investing in diverse founding teams with billion-dollar opportunities. Finding a way to be helpful to companies even when saying no can build stronger relationships.

Being able to say yes and trust the people you work with is a key trait of successful founders.

Discrimination against women and people of color is still prevalent in the venture capital industry.

Grit, resilience, and tenacity are important traits for startup founders.

Personal experiences and upbringing can shape a person's ability to overcome challenges and succeed.

Sound Bites

"Yeah, so my career has been a lot around product development."

"I can take the rejection. I'm very good at it, but I don't like giving it."

"You've got to be able to trust the people who work with you, that they're bringing ideas, that they're going to put their all into it."

Chapters

00:00 From Detroit to The Grommet: Jules' Journey

14:01 The Acquisition by Ace Hardware

33:23 Challenges Faced by Women in Venture Capital

39:41 The Traits of Successful Startup Founders

And here's Jules. Hi, Jules. And great to see you. We don't see each other nearly enough. I wanna dive right in and start by asking you to tell the listeners where you're from originally and where you live.

Hey, Jackie, great to see you.

I know.

Well, I guess I'm from the wrong side of the tracks in Detroit, um, literally the city. And my dad was an auto worker and we lived literally next to some freight train railroad tracks in a Detroit diesel Allison plant. So I grew up in a very industrial setting and now I live in the oldest neighborhood in Boston. It's called Charlestown.

So we've talked about this, but strange coincidence that I'm also from Detroit, but not the city, the suburbs. And for people who come from Detroit, the first thing you do is you say, what mile road? Because that's how everything's measured in Detroit. Most people, unless you listen to Eminem, you don't think about that. But.

Right.

The city ends at 8 Mile Road and we live, I grew up on 13 Mile Road.

Right, and I would have been if, I mean, I lived essentially on 96, the freeway, but if it had a mile road name, it would have been Four Mile Road. And I worked on Eight Mile Road. I was a hostess at a big boy restaurant on Eight Mile Road in Detroit.

They know how to set up timed lights. Eight-mile road was amazing. If you went the speed limit, you could go for miles without ever stopping at a traffic light. I've never seen anywhere else get that right.

Okay.

Yes. You're right. And I grew to sort of a, you know, kind of expect that. And then you're right, you move somewhere else and it's not like that. And I remember for a while our family lived in Dublin, Ireland for four years and I brought the kids home. They were all sort of middle elementary school age and we were driving up Telegraph Road, which has the same timed lights. And they were joking because the scenery along the side of the road became like a road runner.

cartoon backdrop, like you know when the backdrop just keeps repeating like, oh, there's the Dunkin' Donuts and there's the McDonald's and yeah, that, because you could just sail for miles that those fast food restaurants would repeat without stop.

Yeah. And you mentioned Telegraph. So technically we were at Telegraph and 13 Mile Road.

Yeah, I know it well.

Yes, yes. So let's go right into startup land. And maybe you could talk about your founding of and sort of the idea behind and where it came from for what was originally called the daily

Yes.

Love to hear that story.

Yeah, so my career has been a lot around product development. I started out as an industrial designer. So that's keyed to what I'm about to tell you in terms of forming the grommet. At the time I started the company, I had just left a role as president of a social network, one that competed with LinkedIn called Zigz, a company you've probably never heard of. And I was networking for my next role.

and imagining working a startup. So I went to talk to a venture capital friend, capitalist friend, and I was sitting in the lobby of the, um, the investor's office and I was explaining to somebody else who was waiting to make a pitch that there was this really big problem with how, um, there was going to be an explosion of great new products in the market because of technology, because the internet.

3D printing, the ability to credibly create a prototype or to credibly do market research. The sources of new products would be unexpected young companies, yet in my career, it observed how retail was increasingly consolidating. So we were losing all the specialty stores and the mom and pop stores that take chances on new products, the luggage stores of the world, those toy stores of the world.

And I said, that's going to be a really uncomfortable collision, really great new products, more of them than ever, and they're going to be all dressed up with no place to go and they won't be sophisticated enough to manage marketing on the internet. Somebody's got to help these people. And, and the guy across from me, I've never seen him since said, you should do that. And I went home that night and thought that could be a business, like a product launch platform, somebody who creates, um, curates.

and creates trust and an exciting way to discover new products, which is what we built.

So when you, I don't know how far into it you were, but you probably had some of your staff that were out scouring for the world for new products. And you actually, this is how we met. You reached out to me and I guess they discovered that I had just published this book. Actually, it's right there.

And I don't think you, books weren't your thing, but you were made an exception or something. But, and then I think you had me, so I know you had me come in, but I think the reason you had me come in was that you were doing a short little video advertisement. And...

No.

Yeah. So what we would do is... Sorry, Jathi, did you want to finish that?

No, that was it.

Yeah, well, to answer your first sort of inquiry about the process, we launch products in all kinds of categories. So I've got a Swell water bottle here that we, it's a company we worked with at the very beginning. We launched Bamba's Socks. We launched Simply Safe home monitoring systems. We launched Fitbit. We launched Bananagrams. Yeah.

These are big. These are big. I mean, I only wear bomba socks.

Thanks.

They're great, right? I have them on right now too. And we were the only sort of wholesale partner, like non direct to consumer partner they worked with at the time. Because what we did, what you just noted is we would look at two to 300 products a week and we would select five for launch. So if you've gone through that extreme of a funnel, you know that the curation is real. We really tested the products or we read the book and

Nobody was doing video for products. The only company, there was one exception, Zappos had some very functional sort of turn the shoes, you know, on a turntable type videos, but nobody had put any effort into video. I think it was a very scary medium for people at the time. And we were doing that. We would launch each product, and in the case with you, we would have interviewed you. We usually did feature the creative, the product on the video. And so it became like a,

First of all, independent and kind of really heartwarming sort of look at the product, but accurate and truthful. And like a mini backbone for a mini campaign. And over the years, we assembled an audience, email was a primary delivery point for us. We assembled three and a half million people on email. So we were touching a huge swath of the US market with those emails within.

We launched at noon and within about 10 minutes, we knew what America thought of any new product as soon as we launched it, you know, where it was going, you know, who was ordering it. And we had a live, I'm sure you had the onerous burden of answering questions from our audience because we expected makers, we also created the idea of like a live interaction with the maker at the point of discovery. So for the first 24 hours after a product was launched on Gramut, the maker had a dialogue with our audience and it was...

For makers, really special because as an author, you can probably attest to this. You don't necessarily meet your readers in bulk very often. You have to do a lot to do that. You have to go out and do a book signing. And makers of manufactured products have an even more extreme distance from their customers. So they loved it when people would come in and be able to ask, well, why did you do it this way? And could you do it that way?

or people were just very encouraged by seeing people who look like them creating things. So the audience felt inspired by the makers of the authors themselves.

I probably had, if I remember correctly, I had a dozen, maybe a little bit more of those kind of inquiries. It was certainly nothing overwhelming. It was great. I mean, the feedback was great. Everybody was positive. Nobody said the slightest negative thing. It was just super nice. It was a great experience.

It was a funky corner, thank you. It was a funky corner of the internet because I remember we had a partnership with Yahoo and our same product videos we posted there and the comments had become a sewer really quickly. And on the grommet, no matter what, like no matter how positive or wonderful the product was, and on the grommet, from the very beginning, I think how you start a company is super important, how you treat your first community members, how you behave. We were...

human faces, we were in the videos ourselves, I'm in a ton of the product videos myself. And so when we answered a question or were part of that discussion board, people knew who we were, we were humans. And, and we just never let the conversation get out of hand if it started to veer, which sometimes it did in one particular direction, especially if a product was not made in the USA, there could be a bit of a ganging up on that maker. And we'd always managed to kind of

diffuse a conversation like that, because we launched a ton of products that were made in the USA, and we could point people to those. But more importantly, it was the sense of having a true human face, both the maker and our faces, on that discussion board. It never became a problem, and I thought, well, you know, we're small and cute. That's not surprising when we first started. You know, it's just our family members and friends, practically. But once, you know, we had 3 1⁄2 million people who could have commented.

and more because social and it was such an optimistic.

kind of reflection, I guess, on the world and on the internet.

I'm familiar with the phenomenon of the sort of troll problem. And I'm fortunate that my nonprofit foundation is also somehow escaping that negative stuff, which is good. You would hope that nobody's gonna say negative things about a 10-year-old girl being able to finally...

you know, run for the first time. So, you know, it's a little bit nice. So, was everything from day one to when you sold it smooth sailing or were there, so could you, well, I knew, well, I didn't know, but I guessed the answer would, who's had totally perfect smooth sailing? Yeah, could you highlight like big problems or challenges and how you...

Nobody.

one or two maybe and how you dealt with them.

Maybe I talk about two. One of them, I think every company's going to have some near fatal blows or really strong threats. And quite often, they could be competitive threats. It could be something internal, that the early employees, something goes wrong, and that can be fatal to a company. It could be misread of the market, and you've put a lot of effort into the wrong thing.

We had minor versions of all those things possibly, but definitely, but the major ones were two. One was the company was super undercapitalized and it was a company that needed capital. It wasn't a bootstrap from forever type of company because if you're really gonna help Jathi promote his book or a swell sell and gain awareness for their water bottles, you need to be.

a relatively large community that's trusted and known that takes capital. And it takes capital to do what I said, to find these products and tell beautiful stories about them. And we launched just as Lehman Brothers collapsed. And if that weren't enough, which it was a lot, the capital markets just closed. I remember I was on stage at an investor platform just after that event.

you know, not to be like bragging, but the company or we were like the bell of the ball at this investor event and the tenor from like the first day of the event to the second day of the event turned to such doom and gloom. People just came up to me and said, you know, this is going to be really hard. Like the news cycle that 24 hours had just sort of killed everybody's spirits. And so the capital doors capital really closed and

I think every company should have one or two years of extreme starvation and really proving you mean it. I don't think it's healthy for a company to be overfunded quickly. So I expected one or two years like that and knew how to operate in a lean environment. But we had four years that were really extreme starvation and near death three times. The type of near death you have to tell your employees, I don't know if I can pay you next Friday, you know, that kind of near death.

kind of near death the third time I remember. I thought I kind of shielded from my kids. They were middle to high school age at that point. And the third one I thought I've got to tell them, I just don't know if I can pull this one out this time. And I kind of was slumped on the kitchen counter and my youngest son, Carl, who was probably 15 at the time, asked me what was wrong. I said, you know, I...

just don't know if we're gonna make it. And he gave me this like, he doesn't know who Newt Rockne is, the Notre Dame football coach, but he gave me a Newt Rockne like, you can do it mom, speech. He had no idea what he was saying, but it was so motivating to me. More than if an investor or somebody else had said it, and I pulled it out that time. And then we managed to secure a strategic investment from a large Tokyo, improbably a large company in Tokyo.

Hehehe

And so the capital problem became a lot easier after that. I'd say the second problem was one that.

I, it was Amazon, I guess is the short, short description. Um, it was really hard ultimately, um, to compete in some ways with Amazon because they, um, they tried to buy us once to one year into the business. Um, because when I flew out to see them and I, I didn't have much knowledge of Amazon, I wasn't even much of a customer of Amazon at that time.

They had noticed how all the traffic from the grommet, somehow they could track what happened when the source of the traffic was grommet to Amazon and had the highest conversions in their history. We did a really good job making you understand and appreciate a product. But often, in the beginning of grommet, not many products were sold on Amazon. So that was kind of an edge case when something was sold on the grommet and then sold on Amazon. But over time, as you can...

obviously understand that changed. And we were awfully nice about not expecting any kind of non-Amazon arrangement or contract with the company. And I'm not sure I'd be so nice in the future if I could change that in the future, well, for my past self.

So then eventually you sold it to Ace Hardware. So I have an Ace Hardware, a local one here, and they do carry a lot of products that aren't paint and screws and light bulbs. And so...

It did, yeah.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me, but when I first heard that, it did surprise me. How did it come about?

Yeah.

Well, first of all, my lifelong best friend had told me she had an ACE hardware like yours. I didn't. She had one that was quite diverse and rich in its assortments near her house. And she said, I think a lot of grommets should be in ACE hardware. It was kind of like a mashup of a container store and a hardware store. So that was always in the back of my mind. And...

had no contact with the company. And then I was speaking at a women in retail event and this woman came running over to me after I spoke. She was from Ace Hardware. And she said, look, we're such aligned companies. We have 5,000 independently owned stores that care deeply about their local markets. They live in their local markets, these owners, these store owners, and we really want to have more local, small.

you know, non-home depot, same old, same old products in our assortment. But local store owners don't have the time or the energy or the expertise to do what you do to find these products. And, um, it'd be really cool if we could tap your maker base. And we had a wholesale business where we were selling to retailers already. So we'd launched on a consumer site and then the products that proved ready for scale, we had a separate wholesale site.

to sell to retailers like Nordstrom and independent retailers. And she basically initiated a partnership where we did a special display in 250 A stores, a beautiful wooden display where all the products, which are very disparate, because they're anything from a garden hose solution to a kitchen solution or a tech solution, all on the same wooden display with grommet branding.

And it was a wild success because we brought in a new kind of customer to ACE hardware who bought more than the typical ACE hardware customer. And then we expanded, we expanded that customer and other customers sense of what they could find at an ACE and the store owners loved having access to these products without doing all the legwork. And also it's really important to vet that a company is ready for retail display and representation because the scale is.

harder to serve at NACE Hardware than it is on e-commerce. And so they weren't taking risk of dealing with difficult young companies. We'd already vetted all that out. So they really liked it. And that led to the CEO making an offer to invest in the company, actually to buy out our prior investor, the Tokyo company, named Rakuten. I took the offer to Rakuten.

was too low and they weren't really interested. And then some months down the road, Rakitan was doing a strategic pivot and renaming all of their invested companies, Rakitan. That was not a viable option for us to rename Grom at Rakitan product launch. So it was a good time to spin the company out because like I said, they'd already bought most of it. And so I brokered the transaction for Ace Hardware to buy Rakitan steak.

And they did it at a better price than the initial offer.

So when Rakuten, or whatever their previous name was, had invested, did you continue to operate as the CEO?

Yeah, the Rakuten investment was totally hands off. And I it was an independent company, we just had the capital we hadn't had before. And we grew 50% every year, we got to profitability under Rakuten. So they were really happy with the investment. And they mostly used it as a kind of a laboratory or something to watch basically, because they had a

a business in Japan that was relevant. And then there was a lot of cross-pollination across their global executives. So I went to Tokyo a lot for that cross-pollination. It was a wonderful existence actually to have that kind of respectful investor.

long trip from Boston.

It is a long trip, but you know what? JAL Airlines started during that time, one JAL 7, it's number seven, once a day flies to Tokyo and JAL 8 once a day flies back and that changed my life when I could take a direct flight to Tokyo.

Yeah. So, but that was when Ace bought, then it was different. Did you have an earn out period? Did you stick around for a little while?

Oh, I did. Yeah, two and a half years and, is that right? Yeah, two and a half years. And there wasn't an earn out period, but there was a kind of an odd convention where we had to kind of revest our equity. It was very unusual. I've never seen that in any other deal. So the equity that was already vested for all the employees, but myself and my co-founder were...

bought out and then new equity was installed for them, which is what Rakuten had done as well. It was great for the employees, but my co-far and I, both of us did not participate in that deal. And so there was kind of an odd stipulation from ACE. They were worried that a flight risk basically, that if we could sell our shares and leave, that we'd leave. They didn't know us that well, you know? So they had us kind of have a...

of an earn out of our equity, if you will. It's a weird thing. I don't think it's a useful thing to share because I don't think anyone will ever see that deal. It was a very hot deal.

Mm-hmm.

So are you, as you observe it having been a few years, has it been well taken care of? Is it, do you feel good about, you know, what's happened to the grommet?

It's in a new home. So it was nearly shuttered by ACE after my departure. And then it was sold to a company that is doing a serious effort in creating their own version of the grommet. So if your audience goes and looks at it, it wouldn't look like the company I've described earlier in terms of the way it executes, but the core soul of what they're trying to do

definitely is retained in terms of looking for emerging products and makers and helping them find their audience.

So when you left once and for all, did you go straight into being a venture capitalist?

I started as a partner at X Factor Ventures during my time at Gromit. It's an unusual partnership. It's 23 women who are all founders and most are CEOs currently running their companies. So the model is this is a group of people are really in the flow of startups and potential deals and can invest basically alongside their day job.

And it's done that way because it's a very low admin, low overhead partnership. We, we can make individual investment decisions. So, you know, the classic VC firm with the Monday meeting and possibly a consensus on every investment, you know, where you have to convince your partners. We work together when we choose to, to vet a deal, but I can pull the trigger by myself, so that's efficient. And.

So I started that during gromit, but I started spending more time on it once I had more time.

Now I understand the name.

X Factor? Yeah, we only invest in diverse founding teams, early stage companies with billion dollar opportunities. And we're sector agnostic. That's one of the superpowers. The 23 partners have nothing in common in terms of their areas of expertise, you know, overlap between two and three here or there. But we have one rocket scientist, I don't think we have two. We have people who specialize in marketplaces or fintech or AI. And

So I'll tap the ones that have similar expertise to mine on some of the opportunities. But that's why we're sector agnostic, because if the partner has an affinity for our knowledge of a space, we can invest in it.

And is it something that's taking up like half your time or less?

It's less than half my time. It's really up to me, you know how much I want to be active. I choose for it to be less than half my time right now. I'll tell you Jothi one thing that's I've not quite gotten used to about being an investor is most of the job is saying no. And I know people who do it full time.

Mm-hmm.

figure out a way to be helpful to the companies they say no to whenever possible. So they don't feel like it's really just a no, that you know they've opened doors, made introductions, made suggestions. I don't think I quite have that satisfaction with that. I'm still so aware that the check did not follow that conversation. And having been on the other side of that conversation,

so many times and I call myself the queen of rejection. You know, I've probably, I don't know anyone who's had more investor rejections than me. So I find that as a full-time diet, not something I'd want to do. So I'd have to figure out how to get over that if I were gonna do it full-time.

We may share that in common about rejection, large, large number. I actually pitched to 100 different investors for Dover over the period of time. And I'm not counting angels. I'm just counting. I'm just talking about.

Hmm

Yeah.

That's a lot of institutional investors, yeah. Yeah, and it's not for the faint of heart. And I guess I can say I can take the rejection. I'm very good at it, but I don't like giving it.

I can sympathize with that. I like to say yes to pretty much people in general.

And isn't that a founder? I mean, to me, that was one of the greatest joys of being a founder is hiring the right people who had enough good ideas that you could say yes to most of them or many of them. That was my favorite part of my job probably was saying yes. And it took it harder as the company scaled because yes had complications as the company scaled. So, you know, I had to be judicious, but.

I think that's got to be an important part of your makeup. You've got to be able to trust the people who work with you, that they're bringing ideas, that they're going to put their all into it, that they understand the market and the customer well enough to have good ideas. So things like our wholesale business, that was not my idea. That was Jason McCarthy and another employee, Chris Lydell, came to me one day and said, you know, there's this weird phenomenon where

When I'm home as a consumer and I order toilet paper from Walmart, I'm treated like a king. But when it comes to dealing with these makers, like just trying to pay them or invoice them, it's such a painful existence. They don't have systems. They're so tech-starved.

And can you imagine what it's like for retailers dealing with our makers? Can you imagine having a platform that would make it easier to matchmake these, you know, non-tech savvy companies, under-resourced companies, and these large retailers with serious operational, financial, legal demands? That wasn't my idea. That was somebody in my company's idea.

Well, the yesing that you're talking about, when you're the CEO and you have to move very, very fast, it really helps your efficiency if all these people are doing a great job and they ask you something, you can trust them and you can say yes, that makes everything keep moving fast.

Yes, exactly. And the other key thing is, I used to love it when a new employee made a visible mistake because I got the chance to say to them, it's okay. If they made the mistake and they owned up to it, I could trust that person. I knew if they made a mistake and they told somebody that they understood what that meant, they were taking responsibility, and I could say to them, if you made a mistake and you're new here,

chances are it's not because you're being sloppy and careless, it's probably because we haven't taught you something, or something the way we do it doesn't work. It's probably more in the company than on you, but always, always service it, and you'll never make that same mistake again, and nor will anyone else in the company. So I love these mistakes. They were a great opportunity to make somebody feel trusted, because they deserved it.

Mm-hmm. Well, that's why I think in a book like mine, it's about telling the world about, well, here are all the mistakes that I made, and here's why it happened, and here's what I learned, and here's why you can learn from this. You know?

Exactly.

Yeah, if I call myself queen of rejection, you can be king of mistakes, right? Like, you own it and you share it, which is a gift. That is the gift, right? Like, you probably have this awareness when you're pitching or you're watching someone pitch. If you see somebody who's had some stumbles, maybe they had a successful company and a not successful one, you're way more inclined to invest than if they had two successful, nothing ever went wrong company.

I do.

Oh, I agree. I agree. Speaking of CEO, so in your career, have you felt much discrimination because you're a woman?

Right?

I would say the yes in one segment, which would be the venture capital industry. Jothi, I was shocked. I had a career that was mostly a meritocracy. There were some early career exceptions when I was really young. But I'd say the vast majority of my career, you know, I earned, I got what I deserved, I earned what I deserved.

I worked with good people who treated me fairly. And generally I would say that throughout the course of Gromit. But the part I was shocked about was when I went to make my first venture capital pitch, it wasn't an industry I knew well. I was waiting for the investor to meet with me and I looked at the walls and the pictures of all the teams and it was all men. You know, these group photos of the teams they had invested in.

I would hear the back channel like, oh, you know, she's too, I've heard like, she's literally heard I was too blonde. Uh, I heard, you know, she doesn't look like a CEO, which is kind of a code for sexism, you know, like a CEO. I remember one investor saying, I was sitting in the office. It was probably five 30 and these two 20 something startup founders started bounded by the glass windows of the conference room.

Mm-hmm.

And the investor chuckled and said, oh, those, they were resident in the VC office. Like they do sometimes let teams work in their office. Oh, those two, you know, they're here all, all those hours of the day. They're amazing. And basically he said, could you do that? And I think he thought I had to go home and like make dinner or something. And cause it's five 30 and I thought, could I do that? I already do that. Like

It's not a could, I do. I have a mortgage, I have college tuitions. This is meaningful to me, you know? I'm not supported by anybody else. So there were things that weren't direct hits, but inadvertent hits.

I witnessed a lot of, in the same community you're talking about. So first, I learned the hard way that as I was raising, trying to raise a Series A, I needed to shave my beard because of ageism. And I look 10 years younger if I don't have a beard. And then,

No.

there's an earlier stage where I was an investor in very early stage companies. And I had a really great friend who was ready to be CEO of something we were just putting together. He happens to be black. And we went into the office of the VC and we sat down in the big conference room, both of us, and we were set up by their staff.

And then the partner came in and he sat down and was his normal friendly self. They, they always are very friendly. And then we, we kind of got started and my friend put the first couple of slides up. And then the partner said, Oh, I'm sorry. I've got to, I've got to call. And he, and he, and he walked out and we're, we're sitting there and it's, it's been like 15 minutes and I said, wow, that's a

weird for him to take a call and be gone that long. And my friend turned to me and said, he's not coming back. And he started packing up his stuff. And he said, I said, what do you mean? Of course he's coming back. He said, no, I've lived with this my entire life. I will tell you, he's not coming back, we're leaving. And we left and he was right.

Oh my gosh. Well, 1% of venture capital goes to people of color. 2.5% goes to women. So it kind of doesn't matter what your friend said or I say. The numbers don't lie, right? That's what your friend lived. That's what I lived as well. It's kind of insane, right? Because certainly creative ideas and economically feasible ideas aren't limited to one segment of the population. So.

Yeah.

That's partly why I joined forces with X Factor, right? I've got to put my, I've complained about this enough. I've got to put my time into this.

Right.

Yeah, well, if not for the requirement, I'd love to be part of that, but obviously. Ha ha ha.

Well, someday, you know, we just need a really big overcorrection and a fast one now. And then someday we can have a real meritocracy, right? When we've sort of leveled things out and we're just not there yet. We will be there. You know, I don't want to be here forever. This overcorrection is painful.

Yeah.

Okay, so changing gears, I wanna talk about the traits that, because we've both talked about this to each other and we talked to other people about it a lot, the traits startup founders need to succeed and that we observe that they all have. We use words like gumption, resilience, industrious, tenacity.

By the way, the four words I just used spell grip.

Oh wow, that's good. Yeah.

So I think you told me your favorite is tenacity and I tend to just go straight to grit. And so you obviously, for a lot of observable reasons, you've got grit. I mean, dealing with some of the hassles that you get, you've gotten because of your

woman. The just the stories you've told, the three near-death experiences. And I might add, I would say that all by itself, raising three sons means you have grit. So where does it come from? What's your well?

Yeah.

Um.

This is funny. It took me a long time to be able to answer that question or even realize it was true what you're saying. When I first started pitching grommet, I thought that my resume, because I literally had kind of all the paper credentials to do a good job with this business, I thought that was the thing that mattered. And it wasn't until I listened to other people's pitches and then become an investor too, that I realized, oh my gosh,

I should have all those years been telling people what I was made of. That was far more important than what I'd done or what I'd achieved. And I think it's mostly in my case, it's that wrong side of the tracks thing I told you about earlier. Growing up, I'm the first person in my, I'm the first, I'll give you some firsts. First girl in the Detroit public schools to wear a skirt to school. I'm sorry, pants to school.

We had a dress code and I did. One day I went home and it was real. I had to go, I could go home for lunch and it was really cold and it made me mad. And I put pants on. And the next day my teacher wore pants and the next day other people wore pants. And we didn't even say anything. We just did it. And I was in that same school, the first girl to be a safety guard, remember? Like the crossing guards.

and you just violated it?

with the nice thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I liked, like I'm the first person in my family to go to college. I like figuring those things out, but probably the most formative experience. Was I was a Detroit public school student and it was a time when the teachers are still pretty good, but the families were decaying and it was really rough to maintain any kind of order, like chairs flying over my head, drugs, you know, I'm like 12, 13, and I was anticipating going to it.

a high school just like that in Detroit, and talk to one of my teachers about maybe applying to an exam school, a better public school. She endorsed the idea, but she said, you know, there are these private schools locally that you might, you know, you would qualify for. So long story short, I snuck behind my parents back, I applied to a place called Cranbrook, Kingswood, you know, closer to where, you know, up towards where you live. And oh,

and where I went to school.

Do we know this?

I went to Brookside. I went to the elementary school portion of it.

I love them all. Oh, that's such a storybook experience, I bet. It's so cute, so beautiful.

It's so cute. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we both went to Cranbrook too.

Well, that's why I don't think we knew that. So, I, Javi, imagine me, like, I never left Detroit, never been on a plane, and I show up as a boarder because there was no way for me to get there every day. And I realized as the classes started, like, I didn't have the preparation. It's a rigorous place. Like, if I started Algebra II, because I'd had Algebra I in Detroit, I'd realize, oh my God, you didn't really have Algebra I. So for the first two weeks,

I was really nauseous. Like I've got to, you know, I've got investors. I had a scholarship. Like I've got to, I've got to get a B to stay here and everything. And, um, so I started working my little fingers off, but then two weeks into it, something happened that helped our English teacher asked who did the summer reading. And it was really hard Shakespeare, Chaucer. It was painful. I was the only person who raised my hand.

And I was stunned at two things. I was stunned that the kids in the room were confident enough to admit that. They didn't have to worry about not being able to come back the next year, I suppose. But I was more stunned that they hadn't done it. I just thought, who doesn't do the work? And then I realized.

But they must have been mad at you because you're the only one that did it and they're all like, oh, she's like, you know.

I was probably completely ignorant of that, Jathi. I mean, you know, when you're scared, you're just like surviving. And I put my hand up thinking everyone else was going to be and then it was too late probably. But that was a really pivotal moment that I realized, oh, you know how to work. Like, you know, you've grown up in an environment where nobody gave you anything. And other than like, you know, health and good parents.

Hehehe

But I did have the experience of having to earn. I'd started working when I was 12 with a paid outside job. And so I think that was when I started becoming an entrepreneur as that scared high school student.

Mm-hmm. So the name of the girls' school there is Kingswood. And my sister also went there. So it was close enough that, for us, still, the parents had to drive. I don't think they had buses. They definitely didn't have buses from as far away as we were. And my parents made a funny choice. They said,

Ah.

Um, they had me go to the elementary school. So I went fourth, fifth, sixth grade. And then I was very excited for the next step. You know, I'd be going to, you know, the, the upper school, which had everything from seventh all the way up. And they said, they, they took me out to dinner. My parents never took one kid out to dinner. There were four of us. They would never did that. And they took me out to dinner.

and said, you're not going to be going to Cranbrook anymore. You're going to be going to the public school now. We have a finite resources and we want the other kids to be able to have the advantage of the elementary school starting off right and then they'll go to public school as well. But my daughter, my sister, the baby of the family, none of the same rules applied. There were three boys and then there's a girl.

Oh, right.

And when it came time for her to switch to public school, they said, oh, no, that's different. You're going to Kingswood, you'll be fine.

Oh wow. And so how did you process that at the time?

Well, because she was six years younger, I was long gone, I was in college. It didn't, I mean, it didn't matter. Um, I mean, except for the lifelong grudge against my parents that.

I see.

Thank you.

But anyway, so I think we've covered a lot of territory. It's been a total treat to talk to you this long. All of our other interactions have been like flybys at various events and whatnot. So this has been a real treat. I appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you for reaching out, Jothi. I'm glad to do it.

Well, it'll be fun to see it when it's published. And then.

Congrats, by the way. You've done the hard work, so congrats.

Well, thank you. Thank you. And it's going well. I mean, we've got today was the sixth one of my podcast was published. And I've got people scheduled out till August at this point. So. Yeah. And some weeks I'm going to go ahead and publish, too, because we've got so many so many great people. What I'm discovering is that if you if you think of

Oh, great. Good.

You know, the book represents my stories. It sort of fills this, this circle. Every single time I talked to a founder and that's just, that's just my stories of good and bad things, but each time the circle is getting bigger and bigger. And if you sort of take the aggregate of all of this, it's, you know, and flash forward a year, it's going to be another 50, 60 people and their stories.

Mmm.

um, all talking about where was the first idea and how did that come about? And why did you have the, you know, what was the problem you saw that you made you think of it and, and how did it go and, and what, what was difficult? All of that is just so interesting with each, each group. Um, and you'll be really pleased to know that, um, so far, at least it, at least a third of the people are women.

Good work. Good, glad to hear it. Are they founders? Are they corporate people? Are they a mix of people?

And I'm

No, no, no. The people I'm talking to are all founders of startup companies. With a couple of exceptions where I know somebody who represents their corporation, but they love being the lighthouse customer for a startup. So I wanted to get that angle. So I've got a couple like that.

Okay.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we need those people.

Anyway, we do. They're vital. And he was our Lighthouse customer in the earliest stages of Dover.

Oh, great.

Well, thanks so much for this and we will keep in touch.

Great, Jathi, thank you so much.