Bio

Analisa Goodin is the Founder and CEO of Catch+Release, a venture-backed startup building a marketplace to support brands in building authentic, award-winning marketing campaigns, using content from anywhere on the web, while ensuring creators are compensated for their work. She is passionate about improv and the creator economy.

Intro

Analisa Gooden, founder and CEO of Catch and Release, discusses her innovative approach to licensing content from the internet, addressing the complexities of intellectual property in the digital age. Her company aims to create a seamless licensing layer that connects content creators with brands, ensuring that creators are fairly compensated while brands can utilize authentic content for their marketing campaigns. Gooden shares her personal journey, from her early experiences with entrepreneurship to navigating the challenges of transitioning from a service-based model to a product-focused company. Highlighting the importance of grit and resilience, she reflects on her formative experiences, including the emotional toll of losing her family home in a fire at a young age. Throughout the conversation, Goodin emphasizes the value of authenticity in content creation and the role of AI in enhancing workflows, ultimately advocating for a future where genuine human connection remains paramount amidst the rise of automated content generation.

Story

Analisa Goodin's story is one of resilience and innovation, taking listeners on a journey from her childhood in the Oakland Hills to becoming the founder and CEO of Catch and Release. At the age of eleven, Goodin faced a significant turning point when her family lost their home in a fire, an experience that profoundly influenced her understanding of loss and recovery. This early challenge sparked her entrepreneurial spirit, driving her to explore various creative pathways, including a graduate degree in art theory. Despite the allure of academia, Goodin's path led her to the advertising industry, where she encountered the intricate landscape of intellectual property rights. This pivotal experience opened her eyes to the pressing need for an efficient licensing solution, ultimately leading to the inception of Catch and Release.

The podcast delves into the operational hurdles and strategic pivots that startups often face, particularly during the transition from service-based offerings to more scalable product solutions. Goodin emphasizes the significance of transparency and authenticity in leadership, especially during tumultuous times like the recent financial crisis stemming from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. By maintaining open lines of communication with her team, she cultivated a sense of trust and resilience that proved vital in navigating uncertainty. Goodin's insights into understanding customer pain points and leveraging them to develop successful solutions provide valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. Her narrative is a testament to the importance of adaptability, grit, and a customer-centric approach in building a thriving business.

Moreover, the discussion extends to the evolving role of artificial intelligence in the creative sector, prompting critical reflections on authenticity in an age where generative AI is becoming increasingly prevalent. Goodin articulates the challenges of ensuring that human creativity remains at the forefront of digital content creation amidst the rise of AI-generated imagery and video. She asserts that while AI can enhance operational efficiency, the demand for genuine, authentic experiences will persist. Goodin's vision for Catch and Release reflects a commitment to not only streamlining content licensing but also celebrating the artistry and originality of human creators. This perspective urges listeners to contemplate the future of creativity in a digital landscape increasingly influenced by technology, emphasizing the enduring value of authentic human connections in the realm of content.

Takeaways

• Analisa Goodin emphasizes the importance of using transparency and authenticity when leading during crises.
• Her startup, Catch and Release, aims to automate the licensing process for online content.
• The transition from a service-based model to a product-based model can be challenging for startups.
• Analisa's experiences with loss and rebuilding have shaped her understanding of grit and resilience.
• Investors who have been entrepreneurs themselves can provide invaluable support and insights to startups.
• The future of content licensing may heavily rely on AI while maintaining a focus on authenticity.

Links

Catch+Release: https://www.catchandrelease.com

Analisa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/analisagoodin

C+R Creator Community Marketplace: https://www.catchandrelease.com/discover

C+R LinkedIn Page: https: //www.linkedin.com/company/3188629/admin/

Instagram (Storyteller Account): https://www.linkedin.com/company/3188629/admin/

TikTok (Creator Account): https://www.tiktok.com/@catchandrelease.creators?_t=ZT-8sH5vE7Vz38&_r=1 

Leave a review: https://podchaser.com/DesigningSuccessfulStartups

Jothy’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Startup-Toolkit-launch-strong/dp/1633438422/

Site with  podcasts: https://jothyrosenberg.com/podcast

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DesigningSuccessfulStartups

Jothy’s non-profit: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Foreign.

Rosenberg, the host of Designing Successful Startups, where today's guest is Annalisa Gooden.

I've always worked for me for a young age.

I worked as a scooper at an ice cream store when I was 14, 15 years old.

I was always interested in, I broke the rules a lot.

I snuck out, I took the car before I had a driver's license.

I was always kind of, I felt I was kind of driving my parents crazy.

I think, yeah, I think it's part of who I am.

Analisa Gooden is the founder and CEO of Catch and Release, a venture backed startup building a marketplace to support brands in building authentic award winning marketing campaigns using content from anywhere on the web while ensuring creators are compensated for their work.

She is passionate about improv and the creator economy.

Welcome Analisa.

Thank you for having me.

It's great to be here.

Jyothi.

Yeah, you're so I know you're in Berkeley now, but tell us where you originally are from.

I'm born in San Francisco, moved to the East Bay when I was three, lived in the Oakland Hills.

And then When I was 11, in 91, we lost our home in the Oakland Hills fire, which was a blessing in disguise, really.

I mean it's, there's fires going on right now in Southern California and the Pacific Palisades fire, it's a huge event, really, really hard to go through.

But there are, there are blessings in disguise on the other and I've, I've been the recipient of many of those.

So we now live in, in the home that my parents designed and built after the fire, which is in a different location than our original home was.

But that's where I now live in the Berkeley hills.

I can relate to this experience as an 11 year old, but I can't.

I've always tried to imagine what it was like for my parents to go through it because they had to.

But my parents did share that they had to go through the insurance process which asked them to identify everything that they could possibly think of that they owned in the house.

Everything from a photograph that they had.

You know, my parents were both photography collectors, just scrappy in their 20s, you know, following artists that they loved and they had all their photography under the bed.

But then they're also itemizing how many pairs of underwear their kids had and all this sort of, to your point, the nail clippers also had to be itemized and it's a, a very strangely tactical and tedious process to go through when you're also dealing with the emotional loss of.

And the emotional process of, of dealing with the loss to also then to be having to think about Nail Clippers is a very, a very, a very strange surreal experience.

You have a startup now called Catch and Release and, and I, I think it's.

What you're doing is really fascinating.

Maybe you could start us there with and well then I'd like to back up after that to where the idea come from.

But if you could kind of talk about what you have going now, that would be a great start.

Sure.

I'd also like for the audience because we had an opportunity to debrief on this before that we're both wearing, we're both remiss to let go of the holidays and we're in our holiday reds.

No, I'm happy to share.

So Caption Release is a super interesting, very in some ways very obvious company, especially in today's content, imagery, photography and intellectual property world.

What we are doing is creating the licensing layer of the Internet.

So what that means is we identify the intellectual property owners, you, me, anyone on, on the Internet who is uploading content, whether that's images, videos, music, writing, art.

These are all owners of data and owners of their content.

And there are brands and advertisers out in the world that want to use your stuff, your images, your videos, et cetera in advertising.

And in order to do that, they need your explicit permission.

You need to sign off on the terms of that license.

You need to be compensated for that license.

If an image or a video contains other people in it, which most of our images and videos do, so maybe it's your family, your friends, every single person needs to sign off and give permission.

That's a very tedious, very non scalable process.

That Catch and Release is automated and turned into a button that customers can use to license what they love from the web and protects people like you and me who, who are using the Internet as a place to share, to share our content.

So Catch and Release is the name and we call.

Our mission as a company is to license the Internet.

We want to be the licensing infrastructure for the Internet.

Connecting, protecting and celebrating creators and buyers.

When you said at the outset that it's kind of obvious.

I agree.

And here's sort of from the, from the perspective of, of someone that doesn't want to do the wrong thing but definitely wants to use images, I'm this person and I'm using, using images and I have a subscription to Shutterstock, but because Getty's like a lot more expensive, so Shutterstock's more affordable, but it's still not cheap.

And a lot of times they'll get an image that works for me, but not always.

And, and a lot of times the image I want is just a Google search right there.

It's right there now.

And, and, and before I became aware of, of, you know, oh, you can't just use it.

I was using, I just was using things and I put them in a PowerPoint deck or, or whatever.

And one, one time we actually put one on the website.

And you know, there are crawlers that are really good at finding where your content may be being used incorrectly.

And you'll get a letter that says, you know, here's the, here's the, here's the terms and here's the royalty that you owe me.

You really shouldn't have used that.

But I think a lot of people don't know that.

Yeah.

And I, and I think the, that pain that you're describing, that pain point is extremely acute for large brands that, where those royalties and that the risk of, of not clearing or licensing something correctly is in the, you know, hundreds of millions to billions of dollars if they make an error like that.

So our customers, who are large enterprise customers with large reach, large audiences and more to lose than maybe you or I, that risk, they're not, they're just not willing to take.

I just described a scenario where if I had the right mindset, which you obviously did, I, I might have thought, yeah, well, this is an opportunity.

This is a problem that needs to be solved.

You came out of the advertising business, so you were very well aware of this problem.

Tell us about the, you know, the light bulb going off for you.

Yeah, well, I was, this is, you know, and I think to anyone who is thinking about starting a business or has an idea or knows that they want to be an entrepreneur but doesn't have an idea yet.

There are so many ways to land on an idea.

The way I landed on one was just to hustle my way through lots of different job opportunities and freelance opportunities until I found something that I, that interested me.

I was, I graduated from California College of the Arts with a graduate degree in art theory.

I was a practicing artist.

I had gone through and gotten my BFA before that.

And the out of school, the obvious track would have been academia.

It would have been, you know, get a PhD or start writing papers, teach other students about art theory, and I wasn't really interested in that.

I was always more entrepreneurial.

I didn't see myself sort of in the classroom.

The other option would have been to become a commercially successful artist, which is a hard, hard job to do.

And I think I.

I was always interested in keeping that somewhat separate from my career.

And so I just out of necessity, started freelancing for whoever would take me.

So I was a freelance curator for a few museums in the Bay Area.

I worked in the production industry.

I had friends that were producers at advertising agencies who brought me in to do photography and video research for them.

And that's where I found a vein of gold that really captured my curiosity.

My job in the production industry started the same way you described your workflow, which was, hey, I found the great.

This great shot on Google.

And that's half of the equation, right?

The Internet's a big place.

So finding the right thing for my clients, based on their brief, based on their articulation of what they were looking for, was really fun.

You know, they'd have really highly specific asks, like, we're looking for a video clip of a father and daughter on the beach, but it can't feel stocky and staged.

It has to feel authentic, which means the camera should be sort of handheld and somewhat shaky.

And we want it to be around sunsets.

I mean, they had, like, completely as if they were going to go shoot it themselves, like specific ask.

And that was such a fun detective process to go to the Internet and try and input the keywords that would generate the results and sort of reverse engineer how some of these algorithms and search engines worked in order to uncover where these little pockets of content would live.

So that was challenge one, by the way.

There was no elegant workflow tool for collecting all of this stuff.

I would just hand my.

My clients, you know, a spreadsheet with tons of URLs in them, right?

And creatives don't love that.

They want to see and engage with the content up front.

So there was a bunch of broken stuff in there.

So I started fixing parts of the process that I could just because I wanted to make the experience better for my clients.

But the aha was when, you know, I was finding great stuff, my clients were engaging with it, they wanted to use it.

And then I got, you know, a producer or a business affairs person who's like, a lawyer at an agency came to my desk and said, the team wants to use this video of the father and daughter at the beach.

How much does it cost?

Do we have talent releases for the dad.

Will he sign off on his daughter's likeness?

How much will it cost?

How quickly can we get the high res master file?

And you know, I'm looking back at them and saying like I, no idea.

I mean I found this on Flickr.

It's I what do you mean it's not for sale?

And they were like, well you better go make it for sale because the client wants to use it.

And so that drive to come back to my client and say yes, you can have it is really what helped me dig into the process of licensing, which was not my area of expertise.

I was a creative.

So it really is this catch and releases.

Two sides of this equation.

It's find the right thing, you have to find the right thing.

But if you can't license the right thing, then it doesn't matter that you found the right thing like it, it just negates the entire process.

And so I looked around for tools that would help me with licensing.

I thought, well this is obvious.

The Internet's getting populated with more and more content every day.

Camera technology is only getting better.

When I first started it was pre iPhone.

So the Canon 5D Mark II was a search term that I used to look through Vimeo and Flickr because I knew that that camera was high enough quality to meet the needs of my clients, you know, out of home and broadcast productions.

But once the iPhone launched, the whole game changed.

And it felt very clear to me and obvious to me that you, you can't have a supply chain grow without a mechanism for liquidity, without a mechanism for letting that content be bought and sold.

And I expected Getty to build it, I expected Google to build it, I expected, you know, Meta to build it.

And it, I was really sitting on the process, I knew the process intimately cause I was having to do it all by hand.

And so I thought, I went down to stairs and talked to my husband and I said, I think I have an idea, I think I need to build this.

I think it's not going to get built by anyone else.

And he's like, let's go.

So that's how it, that's how it happened.

And it was the market opportunity was obvious to me because I was inside of the Pro.

I was freelancing for these agencies and brands doing the same thing over and over again, rebuilding the wheel, every single job, every single project.

And that gave me an intimate understanding of what the roadmap needed to be.

And so I think there's, that's a, an Example for anyone out there who's thinking about starting something or wants to start something, start with a pain point you really understand and know it's just fun to.

I mean, being in pain isn't fun, but it's fun to be thinking about knowing your pain well enough or your customer's pain well enough to really be the expert on the solution is a fun place to be.

Hi.

The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book Tech Startup Toolkit, how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.

This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years.

I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong.

You could get it from all the usual booksellers.

I hope you like it.

It's a true labor of love.

Now back to the show.

When I first saw the name and you and you write it, I think you're obviously a creative because it's not the way a lot of people would have written it.

It's catch plus, you know, release.

And, and of course the thing that came to my mind at first was it sounds like a fishing analogy which would be catch and release.

But what yours is is catch and get a released.

Yeah, right.

That's exactly right.

Well, another thing you do when you're starting something early because you've got no resources is you.

You look around to who your network is, friends, family, advisors, and you get as much free advice as you possibly can.

That's what you do.

You do that in the beginning a lot.

My in laws, my husband's parents were both professional namers.

They named Amazon kindle, they named TiVo.

And so my husband actually is the one who came up with the name.

When I described to him what the technology would do, I said, listen, we, this was also at the beginning of the gig economy where we had Airbnb, we had Uber, we had Lyft.

And I said, why doesn't the same thing apply to content?

Why do we all have to own a library of assets in order to create a marketplace?

Shouldn't we be able to go out onto the Internet, acquire the rights on demand, pay the creator, and then go and get the next one when the next one is needed.

And his response to that was, it reminds me of fly fishing because he's a fly fisherman.

He said it reminds me of fly fish.

It reminds me of the, of the catch and release motion.

And I said that you just named it, you named the company.

And I, I, I, that was, that Was it?

That was the day.

And I, I brought it to my, my in laws and said, what do you guys think?

And they said, oh absolutely, yeah, go for it.

Oh wow.

They, they approve.

Cause that, they, that's, that's a high bar.

You know the, the names that they've come up with.

Well, when you've got the resources, you gotta, you take whatever you can get.

In those early days, like you don't, don't wait around, ask anybod for feedback.

It's just a, it's the way you get going.

So speaking of early days, you did something that I, I think is a, is a very useful way to think about how to get going.

Even when you know that your long term vision or maybe medium term vision is a product.

If, if you can, you can implement it first as a service.

Well, first of all, it's can generate revenue much earlier than waiting until you get the product perfected.

It's not always easy, it's not always obvious what is the minimum viable product.

And a way to get there is to have a service and have it, you know, generating revenue.

You started off it was a service, but you've slowly automated more and more of it to the point where like you said a few minutes ago, it's a button push.

Yeah.

It's such a good topic.

Right.

Because it also speaks to the various ways a company can, can be funded in the early days.

It just, it doesn't always have to be taking an idea to a venture capitalist and getting, giving up 20% of your company at the outset just to get an idea started.

There are other ways to do that.

So for us, sort of by accident just started as a service because I had no tech, I had no engineers, I had no team, knew the process well and I'd started to think about what this would look like if it were a product.

Which means every single time we took a project on, every single time I worked with my team to execute something, I was thinking about, well, how would this translate if this was a piece of software and not a, not a, not a human, a human driven emotion.

So I was thinking about software from the early days, but we bootstrapped for about three years before we raised any outside capital.

So that was a three year period of just learning, executing and capturing as much, as much as possible.

Documenting.

Right.

In a way that we probably wouldn't have done if we were just committed to keeping it as a services company.

So that by the time we had an engineering team and I had a partner on the technical side, it was possible for me to translate a lot of what we knew to that team.

So it did shortcut quite a bit for the technical build.

There were other challenges, I mean, there are other challenges with converting a company from a service to a product because the service is always going to be ahead of what the product is able to do.

A service isn't minimum viable.

Service is maximum viable.

It's.

You respond to whatever the, whatever the customer needs, you figure out how to do for them.

And so there's the shift from that mode to now we're going to try and start from a minimum viable place and build from there.

Is very clunky and really uncomfortable and doesn't.

Isn't very pretty.

I described that phase of the company as like ducks on the water for the customer.

We wanted them to just see this, right.

Just very, very soft underneath the surface.

We're like really trying to figure out how to duct tape it all together to make it not look chaotic.

So the, the service model, the answer to every question is yes.

So yeah, that's yes.

But one big difference is margin.

So, you know, the best margin I ever got in a service business was 35% and on a product.

Wow.

It's, it's like, it's not difficult to get north of 90%.

That's true.

You do have to make that.

You got to decide when you're going to flip that switch.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

It's tricky.

When you raised money, was it a series A or was it a seed?

We raised a seed round and actually our investors from that seed round from Servant Ventures are still involved in the company today.

They're still on our board and have participated in every round since.

So finding.

That's a whole other conversation is, you know, finding great investors from the outset.

I'll give you the hack code for that.

Find X operators bring investors on in the early stages who've operated companies before.

There's plenty of them out there.

That's what you want, that's what you want around the table.

They tend to be very founder friendly because they themselves have been entrepreneurs before.

They also can give great advice because they've actually gone through the motions of hiring, firing, building, failing, succeeding.

So that's, that's the cheat code for you when it comes to raising money from VCDs in the early days.

So yeah, we raised the seed round and then we raised our Series A.

A couple years later we still had services helping to offset, burn, offset our, we weren't profitable.

So we were using our, our investment capital to fund the losses of the business that were fueling our growth.

But we had some services still that were offsetting that.

So it allowed us to take a little bit more time to build before going out and raising the Series A.

I have a great relationship with my, my board member there.

Yeah, that was a, that was a really great.

That was a great round and a testament really to our commitment to the vision and being able to build through these kind of changing modes of service to product, which was not easy.

And a lot of investors who were less, a little less visionary weren't able to really see.

They weren't able to see past the services.

Accel really was.

They were able to say, hey, I see you've used services strategically to get to this point, but just confirming that you're building a tool and if that's the case, we're super interested.

If, if you're actually just really building an agency, it's not that interesting.

They were so smart to ask that question.

Other investors would have just said, I see services, we'll pass.

Right?

Not interested.

And so they, they did a lot, A lot.

Couldn't see past the services to, to get to the software.

Yeah, Just for the listeners.

Because another formula that's important to keep in mind is that services businesses typically are sold for 1 times revenues.

Product companies are sold for, it depends on the area, but anywhere from 5 to 15 times revenues.

So that's a big difference in why you would have investors that would not be interested to the service.

And it actually goes back to your margin point too.

That's a lot of, a lot of.

It's about the margin.

So if a services business which requires a lot of human capital to deliver, deliver something, is you're getting 35% margin and software can get 90% because most of it's automated.

That's clearly what investors are looking for.

I was able to show that, that margin growth.

We were able to say, hey, our margins are at, you know, I think they were in the low end at like 40, 50% initially.

And we were able to show like, here's what it looks like at, you know, 80, 90%.

But it does take some belief on the part of the investor to say, I believe you can get there.

I see the path.

And not all investors are going to see the path, partly because you're probably not articulating it very well.

Like, I think for sure, a lot of the rejections we got in the early days were just a function of us not telling our story as well as we could have.

But you also need, in the early days, you need investors that want to come along for the vision.

They're coming along the ride for what you're going to build.

And they're captivated by that and infected by that.

And that's what they're signing up to do.

Even if your numbers don't look great at the beginnings, because they're not investing for that, they're investing for the future.

Promise.

Well, we already, we're already benefiting massively from AI as a tool for helping us with our workflows, with helping us be much more efficient.

We're training models that can take everything we've learned about communicating with strangers on the Internet.

Because essentially that's what we do.

I mean, essentially what we do is a customer says, I found this video on YouTube and I want to use it in an ad.

And they use catch and release to manage the entire transaction.

Which means catch and release is the entity that's reaching out to the YouTube video owner and saying, hi, you've never heard of us, or maybe you have, we have a customer who wants to use your video.

Trust us, this isn't spam.

We want to pay you fairly, we want to make sure your data is protected and we'd like to manage a marketplace transaction with you and our client.

Right?

So essentially that's, that's what we do, right?

We reach out to strangers on the Internet all day long and we earn their trust as quickly as possible.

So we use AI to assist with the process of identifying who the owner is.

We've trained models on how to speak to creators in a way that we know they will respond to and feel safe engaging with.

We use AI through, you know, in our discovery process.

So how we structure our search engine, our customers are often looking for feeling more than they are looking for subject matter.

The going back to the example of a father and daughter on the beach, it's not just any shot.

It has to feel authentic, it has to tell a story.

And so the way that we've structured our search engine, AI has helped us without having to use any humans and tagging has helped us create sentiment based searching.

So we use it all over, all over the product.

The question you might be asking is, which would be A fair question is what is the future of generative AI when AI is generating images and videos for us?

What is the role of companies that license imagery and video?

And I, I think the answer to that is, has to sit with how, how much you believe AI can produce authentic results.

If you look at AI today, especially in the generative AI world, they, the first place generative AI is going to disrupt is traditional generic stock photography because it can create generic images.

So a staged shot of people in a boardroom is relatively uncomplicated.

A video that has a handheld, shaky, authentic quality of a father and clearly his daughter having a nice connective moment on a beach at a particular time of day, very, very hard to create in a way that a human would believe when they see it.

So generative video is really quite far away from having that, that believability factor that advertisers need.

So I think the future of, of imagery is authenticity.

Imagery and video is authenticity.

I think AI is a wonderful way to augment workflow and make companies run more efficiently.

But I think the more, the more pervasive AI generated content becomes, the more hungry we are going to be for authentic human connection.

Yeah.

And that's really where we're focused.

I, I agree and I hope that that lasts a long time.

Even as it gets better, I think it will still last.

I, I honestly believe actually that if, if generated, if AI generated content, I'm already seeing it on LinkedIn.

I mean, I already see chat GPT everywhere on LinkedIn.

When I read someone's post, I'm like, oh, it sounds like chat.

That sounds like a chat GPT created post.

And it's not bad.

There's still insight in there.

I use it myself.

Like, I, I, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of benefit to that.

Right.

It's fun to be in dialogue with chat GPT.

I, I, like, I use the speech function and I constantly am debating things with it all the time.

I, I think it's really, really interesting.

But I think we have to also imagine a world where if everything's generated that way, we're going to be really, I think we're really going to be thirsty for something that's authentically human and I think there will be a premium for that.

That's the, that's the bet we're making.

When you're in a chat GPT session, do you, do you find yourself saying.

Please, like being polite to the robot and saying thank you for the responses?

And yeah, I do.

I Think that my husband jokes about that.

He's like, when the robots take over, I want them to, like, look at my account and say, this guy was always really nice to us.

Yes.

I don't, I don't go out of my way, but I try to engage with it as I would a human being.

So, yes, I think I naturally say please and thank you.

What I.

But I, I do give, Give it feedback is in not having to, like, placate and validate everything I say.

Like, I, I don't need it to say what a great idea or a fantastic insight.

I really.

I'm like, take all that.

I don't need the.

I don't need a yes.

I don't need a yes GPT.

I need, like, push back on this.

Like, tell me what you really think.

Okay, so tell me about what has been most challenging.

You know, was there a point at which, you know, you thought maybe you would lose the company or, you know, anything?

That has been a real challenging situation.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, that, that's.

There are many times when I thought I would lose the company.

Where you're, you know, startups are all about putting all of your resources, which means your time, your money, your, Your people's time, your own personal money, whatever it might be, toward an idea that's not proven yet.

And you.

It's a game of how far to the edge can I push this before we're either gonna, you know, we're gonna jump off the cliff and there'll be a parachute or we jump off a cliff and there won't.

So there have been many instances, I mean, in the transition from service to product, where it was unclear if we were going to be able to raise our, Our next round.

Granted, we have enough product momentum to raise a venture round.

We needed the revenue from services, so we couldn't just turn that off.

There were many, many moments where we had to hit another inflection point.

And that inflection point happened, you know, months or maybe even some cases weeks before the money came in from.

From the investors.

So there's a lot of examples of that.

And I think as the CEO, you have to.

It's a.

It's a tricky throttle.

You.

Because you can't.

You need to push.

You need to push the company forward.

That's how innovation happens.

And sometimes even in those.

I can even look back at some of those moments and say, those were, Those were defining moments for me as a leader.

They were defining moments for our company.

Then there's other things that happened that were completely out of your control.

I mean, when Silicon Valley bank crashed, all of our money was with SVB.

We were going out and raising our next round right then.

It was scary, right?

It was a scary time.

I remember being holed up in my office all weekend while the SVD sort of closure was happening.

And no one.

There was a lot of speculation, there was a lot of noise.

Employees were very concerned about what was going to happen.

I just, that was a moment.

I said, okay, as a leader, how do I want to behave right now?

I might feel really scared.

I might feel like I really don't know what the future holds.

So how do I want to show up?

And I decided I wanted to show up without promising answers I didn't have, but with as much transparency as possible.

So I would just write.

I wrote to the company every single day, twice a day and said, here's the latest, here's what I know.

Just got off the.

With the board.

This is what they said.

This is what I think is right.

We'll update you if that changes.

And I just, you know, it's, it's never.

It doesn't feel comfortable to tell your employees.

I don't know if we're going to be okay or not.

I don't know if we're going to get our cash back.

I don't know.

It.

It feels wrong in the moment to say that.

But actually that is, I think was totally the right thing to do because you can't promise that you have the answers.

You can't promise certainty.

That's not what people signed up for when they joined a startup.

But you can promise authenticity, you can promise transparency.

You can promise being candid.

And sometimes being candid means saying, I don't know what's going to happen, but you'll be the first to know when I have an inkling or when I have any information.

You'll be the first.

So that was a hard moment, but a really, a catalyzing one.

The other part of that, that, that I think about was not just how I wanted to show up as a leader, but what kind of board do we have?

Like we have, you know, when you have a company that's venture, either venture back with investors or not, you, you have a, you can have a board of directors that helps hold you and the team accountable to things that you need to do and also who support you hopefully when times are tough.

And so it was a very interesting moment to see like what kind of board do I have.

Are these people that are, you know, they've always said they would be supportive.

Are they going to be supportive?

And yes, they, they, they were incredibly supportive.

Right.

One of them work, works for a huge venture capital firm where, you know, decisions are for the most, you know, in many situ.

In many cases are outside of his control and said, even if I can't get them to move, I will write a personal check to help.

So, so it, it, you know, it goes back a little bit actually, to we were talking about with the fire.

Fires are scary.

Losing your home is really, really scary.

But out of the, out of what burns comes new growth and, and new information.

There's a lot of information in going through a crisis, like, for yourself as a leader, for the people who surround you, it's just, it's like, it's like holding up a mirror.

And that's, that's great.

That's really, really great.

Yeah.

And then you, and then of course, you also look back on situations like that and you say, huh, could I have prevented the Silicon Valley bank?

I couldn't have prevented.

Obviously I don't have that kind of power.

But, but, you know, execution errors, you know, you hired the wrong person, but you let them stay in the position for too long and the company lost momentum and you should have made the move six months ago, but you didn't.

Or, you know, could I have changed the company strategy so we were a little less close to the cliff's edge when we needed to raise our next round?

Could I have cut costs earlier?

Like, there are certain things you look back on and say, could I have, should I have?

But that's also, you're going to make mistakes.

And the, the key, I think, is to learn from them and bring those learnings to the next series of mistakes you're going to make.

Yeah.

So.

Absolutely.

So, you know, one of the things we, I think we all know and talk about, startup people have grit and, and this whole conversation of 37 minutes so far is you, like, exude grit.

Well, hope, hopefully you take that as a copy.

I know I do.

I love it.

I.

So I'm, as an artist and working with many different kinds of media, when I hear grit, I think of, like, texture.

And I, I was recently exchanging texts with my head of finance, my cfo, and we were having like, a difficulty with something and it was like one of those things where it was just like bad news after bad news after bad news.

And I said, man, this is exactly what we needed, isn't it?

And he wrote back, said, it just adds texture.

And I just love that.

I just love that answer so much.

Okay, so, but here's the, here's my question is where, where does, where does it come from for you?

Did it evolve out of something else?

You know, did the fire experience at 11?

I think about this a lot.

A couple things.

I'm the oldest of three.

My mom actually had a miscarriage right before I was born, so her first baby didn't make it, and very late in the pregnancy.

So I always sort of think about my.

I always think actually about my mom's relationship to having Trying again and succeeding as being an inherent example of grit or her grit.

Right.

Because that's a, That's a tough thing, right?

To lose a baby at eight months in the pregnancy and.

And then feel like, okay, I'm gonna do this again, and then do it two more times after that.

I, I, I really think about her a lot when I think about grit.

I think about my.

I think about my family history.

I think about my.

My mom's parents.

My mom's dad's family immigrated from Croatia to San Francisco.

My mom's mother was from Venezuela and immigrated here when she married my grandfather.

My par.

My parents on my dad's side, both came, Grew up through the Depression.

I, I think about the grit in our society and in our generation as part of my lived experience and my, like, genetic experience.

The fire is a hundred percent up there.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, how do you take.

And I was like, we said I was 11.

I wasn't bearing the responsibility for leading a family through this experience.

But I do remember my response to that being like, okay, let's go.

How are we going to turn this into something that we can pull from and that we can learn from and that we can turn into something.

My art practice helped me do that.

I spent a few years in Italy studying abroad, and that was when I first started using the fire as a source of inspiration for my artwork and exploring what that experience really meant through the medium of painting, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media.

I've always worked for me for a young age.

I worked as a.

As a scooper at an ice cream store when I was 14, 15 years old.

I was always interested in.

I broke the rules a lot.

I snuck out.

I took the car before I had a driver's license.

I was always kind of driving my parents crazy, I think.

Yeah, I think it's part of who I am, for sure.

And I think a lot of the Experience.

I think it's part of who I am and my DNA.

And then a lot of the experience I've, I've had have just kind of lent themselves to grow that quality, I guess.

Are you conscious of trying to instill that similar kind of grit in your seven year old daughter?

She already has it.

I don't have to instill it.

She's like, there's, she's already there.

Both my kids, actually.

My, my.

I have a 14 year old and 7 year old.

My 14 year old is a bit more cautious.

She's.

She likes to keep herself pretty organized.

She kind of likes to know what's going on, wants to know the plan.

But then again, she went base jumping with us when she was 12, so, you know, that's not nothing.

And then the younger one is just a, the seven year old, Sid is just a fireball of yes.

She's just like, yep, yes, yes, I'm doing.

I'll do it.

Yes, do it.

Let's.

It could be, hey, Sid, do you want to come to the store with me?

And she'll be like, yes.

Or it could be, hey, Sid, do you want to go like ski down this black diamond run with me?

And she'll be like, oh, yes, I do like it.

It's.

She's just loves to say yes.

So that's an awesome quality in her.

That's an awesome quality.

It sure is.

This has been really a great conversation in spite of the fact that both of us are in red.

It's Christmas.

We're Christmas adjacent.

We're holiday adjacent.

We're only, it's only the 10th of January.

I think we're allowed.

Yeah.

And I got this for Christmas and my wife, so I, I made sure she knew I was wearing it today and that I was wearing it to record.

All right, well, thank you very much for giving me and the audience some of yourself today.

It was wonderful.

Thank you very much.

It was a great conversation and I really appreciate it.

That's a wrap.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Designing Successful Startups podcast.

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This is Jothi Rosenberg saying ttfn ta ta for now.