Laura Malcolm of Give InKind on Art of Story telling and her Bootstrapping Journey

(upbeat music) Hello Seattle and Pacific Northwest. Welcome to the eighth episode of the Startup Seattle Podcast. At Startup Seattle, we feature leading members of the Pacific Northwest Startup ecosystem. We seek to have engaging conversations with founders, investors and other key players in this community. Hope you find this interesting and support us by sharing with your friends and colleagues. Today, we welcome Laura Malcolm, founder and CEO of Give In Kind, a Seattle based startup, seeking to make an impact on how people help and support each other in times of need. Laura, welcome and thanks for coming onto the podcast. - Thanks, Chris, I'm really happy to be here. - Excellent. So tell us what Give In Kind does and why that is important. - Absolutely. So we are a marketplace for organizing and sending support through challenging life moments. And we think that everybody is touched by these challenging moments ourselves or someone that we know, right? For us, it's everything from new babies to surgery, recovery, illness, grief and loss, these moments that are constant throughout our lives, right? I think it's important that we create ways for people to come together, rally their communities, show up for one another, whether we're near or far from each other. So if you ever thought about someone that you care about across the country going through a big moment in life, we've been sort of limited in ways that we can can give that support to them. So we wanted to create a platform that made it really easy to give those kinds of in-person support, pat on the back, visit, drop off a hot meal that you might give if you were living in the same cul-de-sac as your family to be able to do that from anywhere. - Yeah, that's right. Yeah, people struggled with putting together their own ad hoc solutions like a Google Sheets or email-based lists and stuff like that. So I'm sure that this would be a really useful thing for people to organize how to support other people. So Laura, over the last year, thousands of people have needed support. What's times when you look back on the impact you've had? - Yeah, so the last year, I mean, it's been incredible, right? And in, you know, sort of awesome in the sense of the word that it was designed for massive, right? Touching everybody. I think that, you know, what we saw was, we saw our recognition from people that these sort of moments, these challenges can, can, well, they can come from out from nowhere, right? The sort of black swan of, you know, hopefully our lifetime and that no one is immune to those challenges. So one of the things that we really saw in the last year was, you know, and for better or worse, I think better at the beginning of the pandemic was that we're all in this together. How can we support one another? You know, the outpourings of support that we saw for frontline workers, for people taking care of healthcare providers of making sure that members of their own community were fed, were, had transport, you know, pickups for prescriptions or things that they needed to be able to stay home because there were a lot of people right who were, who were and still are extra vulnerable to impacts of the pandemic. So whether they're, you know, immunocompromised or even just, you know, living in a multi-generational household. And so I think that what we saw was a recognition of how important it is to give those tangible forms of support, you know, people have asked us in the past, well, how is, how is given kind different from a GoFundMe, right? Why is it different from crowdfunding? And the fact is is that, you know, when we're faced with the last year, we really saw that like, you know, a GoFundMe isn't gonna help my grandma stay out of the pharmacy to pick up her prescriptions, right? We need to come together to help give that tangible support. And so I think what we saw is we had over a million people come to give and kind in 2020 to find out how they could help someone that they cared about. They were there because somebody had an in-kind page and they wanted to give support. It was over 10,000 of those pages activated in 2020. - Wow. - And it was, you know, that I think one of the things that we really saw too was that life was still happening. It was just very much under different circumstances. So while we saw a growth in pages created for people who were under quarantine or who were very sick or whose, you know, entire families were impacted from being in the hospital with COVID, we saw a lot of pages created for frontline workers specifically for all of the, feed the front lines campaigns that were happening around the country. But what we really noticed was the number of pages that were created for the same situations that were still happening, right? We don't, we all sort of felt like our lives stopped a little bit because of COVID, but people's babies were still being born. People were still getting diagnosed with cancer, right? People were still dying of heart attacks. Like, and the way that they're, the way that their community is where we would go in, whether we would go and sit with someone or attend a funeral or be by somebody's side, you know, in the waiting room of a hospital, we couldn't do that this year. And so they were forced to think about ways that you can have that same sense of community and camaraderie but find ways to do it more virtually. And I think that that really created an additional conversation for us about ways that you can give that kind of practical support even if you're not on a plane to be next to someone. - Right, absolutely. And did you find that people came organically to your platform and created pages or did you have to do extra in terms of making people aware that you know such a platform existed and can make their lives easier? - Oh yeah, well, we did, you know, we did both. We, you know, we have a split, pretty even split right now of people who come in due to our marketing or people who come in organically. I think that people were looking for more creative ways to be able to support someone. It's interesting too when you look at, you know, we track our own viral metrics. And so how many people come into support someone and then turn around to make a page for someone else, right? That's an important metric to us. And what we saw, it's really interesting, there's one, there's one real sort of anomaly cohort there. And those are people who came in just before the pandemic to support someone who then that group of people made pages in March and April and May and June for members of their community at rates that we didn't see in any other month. And so, you know, it's, I think that once people find us, you know, we do really get that sort of viral word amount. It's the way that these sort of, the way that that support is spreading anyways, right? But in churches, within mom groups. So we see a lot of acquisition that way. - I mean, a lot of us have heard about the term or not during the pandemic, right? It's the vital coefficient. So I probably, you probably are tracking something like that. - Yes, yes, exactly, that's exactly it. - So let's rewind a little bit. So sometime ago, maybe, you know, a few years ago, you realized that the world needed a platform like given kind, you know, between that realization and making a real company out of it. I think, you know, it needed conviction, convincing other people to build it with you, some sacrifices along the way, and of course money. So tell us how you navigated the journey, you know, from the time you conceived the idea to, you know, making a real company out of it. - Oh, man, yeah, and what a journey. What a journey it was and continues to be. So, you know, we built, given kind out of a deep personal need. We went through a devastating personal loss and we were living far away, we being my husband and myself, living far away from our families. We were, I'm a Northwest native, but we were living in Los Angeles and my husband's family is on the East Coast. And, you know, I'd been in product management for 10 years. I come out of the local listings space of the internet yellow pages companies. And so I was on leave from, you know, a role where I was leading reputation management tools for SMBs, small and medium-sized businesses. And so, you know, we're sitting at a home and we have all these friends and family who are trying to triage this help for us, right? We're gonna send them dinner, who's their local florist, how do we get groceries delivered to them? And that year was 2013. And in 2013, in LA, we had Instacart. We had Uber Eats, but nobody else in the country did. So nobody else knew about it. And so I just, I sat there and I thought, and I thought, and then I put pen to paper, there has to be a better way to help connect these people who are looking for businesses in my area who can serve the specific need. And we were using a tool that now is one of our competitors called MuleTrain, which is very just, it was a data technology in it. It just didn't close the loop for them. It didn't actually solve that problem, which was that they said, we're gonna send them dinner on Wednesday night, but where do we send it from? What do they actually want? How do we order it? And I thought that we could finish closing that loop. So like any good product manager, before I had even really spoken with anyone because I was grieving, I was wire-framing. And I'm building pages and pages in this notebook of drawing literal wires of checkout flows of what happens after somebody clicks. I want to help, what happens next? So built out those wires and then sat on it for a little while and then decided that it was time to bring given kind to market. - Was it a way of coping with your grief to jump in and do the design for this product, if you will? - I think it partially was. I think it was, I also think that there was some work that needed to be done first, right? Before we could start thinking about taking on other people's grief, which is a part of what, we now deal with every day at given kind. I think it was partially also, we had had another baby. And so we had an 18-month-old that my husband had been working in, he was our director working in big advertising firms for many years. And I think you just, you know, you hit that phase in life with small kids, mid 30s and 60-hour work weeks and say, let's trade these 60-hour work weeks for 100-hour work weeks. We didn't know what we were doing. No, but we decided we were gonna give it a shot where we wanted to bring this thing and with our, with my background in product and his background in design, we knew that we could, I think, have a good chance as anyone at bringing a platform to market. And I think that part of that comes from, you know, a product managers, you know, many product managers, you know, sit in such a cross-functional role that I spoke, you know, you know, I say that I speak conversational depth, like, you know, just enough to get by. I'm technical enough, I'm not a technical PM, but I'm technical enough to write requirements and test them. So we thought that we could hire a dev team and bring the first beta of given kind to market. And we started interviewing some dev shops or groups, you know, companies we could hire in the US and quickly realized that even with selling our house and putting our life savings into this that, you know, also knowing that, you know, whatever we were estimating, it would cost to build a first version of this since we don't write code. Would probably, you know, cost three times as much and take three times as long as we're estimating. And so we went on a whim and we hired a development team in Chiang Mai, Thailand. - My goodness. How did you find them? - So the, well, we knew that we had a friend who was living in sort of a, I think sort of a peak time and this digital nomad community. And we had a developer friend who was living in Bangkok and sort of touting the cost of living and the developer culture there. And so we started researching and found that the city in the north of Thailand, the second largest city in Thailand, has this incredible family-friendly culture and it has a thriving tech community because it has a large CS program at a large university there. And that it was a good place to go for, you know, you could go there relatively easy as an American. And so we did, we sold our house and we packed up in 18 month old and we went and we worked side-by-side in the office every day with our development team, half of which is still our development team today, just just amazing. And we released the beta of "Givenkind" in the fall of 2016, almost five years ago. - Wow, that's really a fascinating story. How long were you embedded with your dev team in Thailand? - Well, it was three months that time. And then, and then we did two years of slow growth and sort of chipping away, not really finding product market fit. And then we came to a crossroads at the end of 2018 and we had to decide if we were gonna keep self-funding. So at this point, we were completely bootstrapping and we're paying the developers, we're paying the developers, working other projects. And now we had two children that we needed to put in daycare and that childcare expense was the same as our developers. - Right. - And so we had to choose and we chose, we chose developers. And so we pulled two kids again out of the US and went back to Thailand because, you know, I just wanted to release what I felt was like a V1 that I could be really proud of. And we did. So we went for four or more months and we came out of beta and we started seeing 20% month-over-month growth as people really then started to organically come on to give and kind. So we knew that we were onto something special. Started, you know, rekindling conversations with some early investors we had talked to. We had enough customers that we needed to be doing some form of customer support and being a 14-hour time difference wasn't going to work. And so we needed to be on US time zones but couldn't quite afford to come back to the US just yet. So we took the family to Mexico for three months where we closed our first angel investor checks. I flew back and forth from Medida, Mexico in the Yucatan and I came back to Seattle for meetings and when we got our first angel investor check that's when I said, okay, we can go back to the US and I think we can, you know, start to take given kind to its next phase of growth. - Wow, I think this could easily fill a book and possibly a short movie. - Absolutely, it's been an adventure. - Right, right, I mean, you know, that really, I mean, this is a topic for one of the podcasts is how the US can support, you know, startup entrepreneurs with, you know, better child, you know, affordable childcare, healthcare insurance and all that stuff, right? So that more people can step in and do take risks along that access. But that's a wonderful story, Laura. That's, so here you are. You know, you've effectively, you know, grown the company and you found a great product market fit and 2020 looks like it was a great year for you. So now, how do you, in your daily work today, given where you are? How do you draw upon this experience, you know, from the last three, four years of, you know, going from here to Thailand to the Yucatan Peninsula and back to here, how does that help you in your daily work? - Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I'm incredibly biased, but I think that anyone who has bootstrapped for a period of time, you know, approaches the next phases of their company in a different way, right? We still operate as a, well, we're pretty a pretty time agnostic team. So I will say that, you know, we have people, we have people, we have a team in Thailand, we have another development, a small development group in Poland. And so I think that, you know, it's flexibility, it's creativity, it's, you know, I think that it really set the tone early on that we would do whatever it takes. And I think that that's a culture that we have really hired for now as our team has grown. And I don't, you know, I think there's sort of a difference between a, you know, a fast paced startup and sort of expectations of the startup life or the commitments that it takes to grow a startup. - Right. - Versus the idea that, you know, we have a team that sees how much we did sacrifice or put into it or the faith that we had to have, I think, and I think that we just sort of instilled that in the company. And I think that we've seen it as it's grown up that it was, you know, the given kind was built because of an incredible amount of faith and courage and love and that the impact, right, every day that we have impact on more and more and more people, it's all, I mean, it was worth it a long time ago if there was a definition of worth it, right? - Absolutely. Now those returns are just in multiple. - Right. It almost seems like, you know, you've built a reservoir of energy and effort into the company that there's, there's no way but to, you know, keep moving forward. - Yeah. - Absolutely. - So, so yours is a story rich environment, you know, your users are telling stories with their pages, though it might just look like a collection of tasks, in order to help someone in need. Have you always been a storyteller? How do you use storytelling effectively? - Yeah, I have always been a storyteller. I was, my late father was a storyteller. He was also an entrepreneur. I think it's interesting. I think that founders have to have an element of being a storyteller. And this is something that I have actually had to work on. I consider myself to be a strong storyteller, although actually reflecting on it in this moment, I think that I am a better historical storyteller. You're a really good job, I think of, you know, being able to articulate, I consider myself a writer. I think that to be a founder, you have to be able to sort of write that story in advance, right, like pave the road ahead of you, articulate what that future is going to look like, because you have to share that with employees, with bringing people onto your team, with bringing partners on board, with bringing investors on board, painting that picture of what something will look like. And so I think that that is really important. One of the best compliments, though, that somebody gave me about "Givenkind" in the last year or so, was that I was making a decision about in telling my story, and my story in "Givenkind" story, was how much emphasis was placed on the, you know, the loss that inspired "Givenkind". And when I first started pitching it, you know, up on a stage at a, you know, whether it's Seattle Startup Week or, you know, Founders Live or some event, "Givenkind" story very much so anchored on mine. And as we made the decision to focus on other people's stories, the compliment I got was, "Givenkind isn't your story anymore." It's everybody else's story. It's all of these people who've been touched. It's their stories. And I thought that was such a pivotal moment in our company's growth, because it's so much bigger than me. It's not, that was just the spark, right? And now it's this fire of people helping other people and the stories that we see every day are so powerful of people in, you know, living these moments, these good and bad moments, and the ways that their communities have come around them. And so, and then we do pull out some of their stories to go and share with others. So, you know, we amplified their stories to be able to tell in the media. We've added more storytelling options throughout the platform. So we added a way for people to journal and share updates with their supporters and really create even more of that community. And so I think that it, you know, I think it leaves its way throughout all sides of our, of our company's story. - Yeah. So, you know, I just wanted to also share a personal story. My wife is an artist and over the last year, she has painted around 150 portraits of healthcare and frontline workers. And each one of them has a very distinct and unique story of how they have served during COVID. And it's just amazing to see each portrait, you know, convey the story of the unique story of each person as they have gone through that the whole, the process of supporting other people, you know, in the hospitals, you know, in their homes. And it's just like, you know, so amazing to see how one person in this case, my wife and in your case, your company can be a channel for hundreds of people to convey the stories to the public. - Wow. Yeah, that's absolutely, that's wonderful. How beautiful I would love to see those. Is there a place that she's sharing those? - Absolutely, yeah, yeah. It's on a website and I'll put it up in the show notes later on. So if you're talking to Laura Malcolm of Given Kind, a Seattle startup that provides a platform for people to help other people in need, we will take a short break and we will be right back. We are talking to Laura Malcolm, CEO of Given Kind. And Laura, you are, as a startup CEO, you know, you cause a lot of things to happen around you and a lot of things are happening around you every day, right? I mean, lots of activity. How do you manage to stay focused? How do you manage to find some balance amidst all the hectic activity of being a startup CEO? - Wow, that's a great question. I think balance is key, right? And I think that if you had asked me this a year ago, my answer probably would have been very different than it is now, of course, when, you know, I'm also a parent to two young children and that has brought its own challenges in the pandemic, of course. I think that, you know, flexibility for me is absolutely the key to keeping focus. I think there's still a lot of hats that I have to wear. And I think that that flex is a lot, depending on what the needs are from the business on me at any given time. So right now is we're preparing to think about fundraising again. My, you know, that's almost the entirety of my focus. Then it will move into recruiting. You know, we're doing, you know, I think there are different projects that I take on. And so sometimes it's going to be how are we looking at how we're treating goals in the company or what are our marketing initiatives. And so, you know, I think that, you know, I wouldn't say that focus is one of my strong suits in that sitting and, you know, spending a block of time, you know, four hours knocking something out, I will never be at inbox zero. That is not something even on my radar. But I think that, you know, I work to just set goals for myself and, you know, keeping good project management or task management tools. A lot of transparency with my team. And then surrounding myself with people who help give me accountable for the things that I am responsible for, you know, good tools. We are a, we're a notion company which took me a little while to get fully on board with. And now I use it for absolutely everything. And so I think that it's, you know, it's that flexibility to carve aside the time when you need it. And, you know, the ability to say no to things when you need to have that focus. But I think that part of a CEO's job is also to leave that space for the creativity or for jumping in with your team. And so for me, that works. You know, being able to devote, say, you know, four or five hours on a specific project, you know, that's a luxury. But if you can do it and that, if that helps the company move forward and be able to tackle, say, you know, the medium of the long term objectives, that's definitely a blessing. - Yep, absolutely. - So I want to, you know, talk about fundraising, you know, in my analysis, I have found that most startup founders struggle with fundraising, you know, that's one of the challenging and, you know, possibly anxiety filled time of their journey. So you, I believe have, you know, been able to manage that relatively successfully over the last two years. So tell us what is your, what is your secret of your fundraising strategy? - Yeah. So we, you know, I do feel fortunate that I, I guess, you know, successful would be a, that, you know, we can have that attribute and it was a long time that I didn't know if that was going to be the case. I will give credit where credit is due that I, you know, we participated in the accelerator from the female founders alliance, ready set, raise last October, so October of 2019 when we raised our first round. And so I do think that's a, you know, that was a piece of it in that, you know, that really created an opportunity for developing a framework. And I think you, you know, you take from any program like that when you put into it, but an opportunity to create a framework and get some context around fundraising that I don't think that certainly most first time founders are exposed to or female founders or founders of color, any, you know, they don't sort of fit the typical well who gets, you know, 95% of venture capital funding, so who doesn't, you know, the other 5%. And, and so I think that it, you know, people say that when a founder is fundraising, that needs to be the core of focus. And it's really hard when you are a, when you have a small team, when you're a first time founder, when you're a solo founder, to, you know, think about how could you possibly dedicate 100% of your time to fundraising? You know, you still have a, have a company to run. I think that in that case, doing ready set, raise forced that focus on fundraising and allowed me to learn what how fundraising can go if you run a tight process. And so I used that to raise another round last May. And I'm using that same process again right now. And I think that it is about setting a really tight process, you know, my best success with raising came when I did a lot of prep work and I put some really tight deadlines around it on myself. I think that when fundraising unsuccessfully comes from casually fundraising or, you know, having conversations and, you know, getting up, you know, working on it, iterating on a pitch deck sort of as you go. In each of these processes, I build a list that is ranked and prioritized for all of my target investors, making sure that they invest in our, you know, in our industry. So in our case, do they invest in consumer in marketplaces? Do they invest at our stage? Are they currently investing? Do they have a, you know, a fund with dry powder in it? Have they invested in any of our competitors? Do they invest in companies that could be complimentary? Who are the partners? What are their theses? You know, we have a, I have a very robust investor CRM that I use to start with. That's really unusual and insightful because I don't think I have, I haven't heard the term investor CRM from any founder that I've met. - Well, it is really helpful, right? I keep good track of notes and what people have said along the way, but that's, so that's one piece of it. The other is the way that I write my pitch. And so I actually write my, you know, until we have multiple Daxwell fundraising. So I go all the way to the end and I write the script of my full pitch and I work on writing that whole script first because what that does without any slides is it allows me to make sure that I have a chance to articulate everything that I want to share. Let me get all of the points down, make sure that they totally make sense and are sort of cohesive and then I can pull out the themes. And it's a lot easier to put slides to words than it is to put words to slides. Otherwise, you know, you find your like saying something that's kind of awkward. And so I do that. I write the whole script and I get feedback on that. And then I get slides and I get feedback on that. And the feedback is coming from advisors, from our board of advisors, from investors. You know, in this case, it's coming from angel investors from our first round, who I wouldn't, you know, maybe be pitching for our, you know, for our next raise. And so they're giving it that, you know, that looking at it through a lens where they're being, you know, they're always being supportive, but, you know, in an advisory way. And I iterate and iterate and iterate on that. Then I can cut that down into an introduction blurb into a teaser deck. I'm also a big fan of an open investor call. I did it with my first two rounds by how it's scheduled now for my third, where I give an opportunity for, you know, an investor who might not have their own diligence team. So all of our angels, for example, to come in and do a lengthy call and give updates and run through our, through our model, through our data room, do a Q&A. And by scheduling that for me, that gives me a deadline, right, to be sort of ready. And so it's just, I have really learned, 'cause we built a lot of momentum with our very first round. And so we set out to raise a $500,000 precede, we closed just under a million and a half in about two and a half weeks. And it was that seeing the impact that that momentum had in doing multiple pitches at that time and making sure that everybody's questions were answered quickly. And then in doing that investor call where I was able to say like, this is the day and time and all of your questions will be answered, it allowed us to move quickly and I wanted to replicate that speed in future rounds because it's very intense. It's intense in an emotional and physical way that I could not have been prepared for even if you can sort of, you know, you can imagine it, that it's hard and it's taxing, but it's really draining. And so I think that the best that you can do in keeping that process, it is, you know, they say that entrepreneurship is a marathon and not a sprint, but I actually think that fundraising is the sprint within the marathon. - Yeah. - Right. And so you do really have to take care of yourself to get through that portion of it. - I think there's a lot of insight in there and you can, you know, take that into, you know, multiple threads, but the thing that I'm taking away from what you've said is, you know, you've, you've said, you know, you're controlling your destiny. You know, you have visualized what the process would look like and you're pulling people into that process rather than other people pulling you away from your goals and requirements. Is that a fair way of saying that? - Yeah, it is. I certainly, I do try to. And so maybe that goes back to that, you know, that storytelling topic, right? If I write the story and I visualize how this story is going to go, maybe I better my chances of being able to insert, you know, insert those pieces of the story to get us to the end that I've tried to write and work backwards to take a piece from, you know, a methodology here in Seattle. - Sure, you know, you're trying to build momentum for the race and you have a deadline. How do you manage to be, you know, authentic realistic and not come across as, you know, not come across in a way that could impact your fundraising capability. You know, how do you thread that? - Yeah, I think that it's confidence. I think that there's a difference. And I've said before that I think that there's a difference in founders where if you go into a process feeling defensible, I think that that, to me, is almost the opposite of defensive. And I think that the absolute best thing that any founder can do, and you know, I see this not just in fundraising, right? But with our, with our teams, with our partners, with these sort of big conversations we have, is that by being prepared and knowing and like, I'll, any of our investors will tell you that I'm probably in the weeds in my numbers to a fault. I'm a very, very metrics focused founder. But it is knowing those numbers and those metrics that makes me feel very defensible in the asks that I make in the numbers that I share. And that, I think, gives the confidence that gives investors and team members and partners, it gives them confidence, right? When you are confident in what you know, they will be confident in you. But if you go out of process feeling defensive, then I think that other people read that and it shows in the relationships that you build going forward. And so I think that it's, I think that it's being prepared knowing your numbers and letting that confidence that you know, that you know what you're talking about. Shine through is the best way. - I don't know if what I'm saying is fair, but I see most founders wait until the very last moment to discuss the financial model. The financial model doesn't come up, you know, until a lot of stuff has been, you know, poured through. So almost like you could flip the script and say, you know, do the financial model first. I know, it may not be the right way, but it's a strategy. - It is a strategy. I think there is that I would recommend somewhere in the middle. I do exactly what you're saying, but again, to a fault. I do, I tend to lead with numbers and models. And I think that to a certain extent, we have to sell our vision. I'm literally talking to myself here. We have to sell our vision. And I think that it is a mix there, right? You have to tell that story, but then give the numbers to back it up. And so I think that there's a sweet spot in there, probably that all of us founders could work on finding. - Absolutely. - All right, so tell us about your experience as a woman CEO and founder, have people, you know, being kind to you, what a surprised and shocked you in that role. - Yeah, I mean, yeah, certainly everyone has been kind. I wonder if, but I think it's in my, it's literally in our name. So they, I think I'm into the conversation, hoping they will be. You know, I wonder at times, if being not just a female founder, but a female founder in a impact or a mission driven company hasn't led to my, you know, my tendency to lead with metrics. I think that we, I think the female founders do look at, at business differently, you know, unfortunately are, well, fortunately our returns are better. It's proven that we drive better business results. Unfortunately, we still get, you know, two and a half percent of venture capital funding to female founded teams. That number has dropped over the last year. So, you know, is there a chip on, you know, our and I don't want to speak for all female founders, shoulders, yes, absolutely probably. I think one of the, one of the other big discrepancies is that, you know, we do tend to build businesses that touch women and families more often, right? Because we build sort of what we know we see these problems. But again, women control, is it 80% of household spending? And so, I think that for me, one of the biggest challenges is, is people not understanding the scope of my business or many other businesses that are primarily have audiences that are, you know, touching women or families. And so, you know, I think that's one of the biggest gaps for female founders is that there are massive, massive opportunities that just aren't on the radar of the typical, of the typical VC. And I hope, I hope that these conversations are changing as we see more diversity in the investment community across boards in companies in the C suite. Because I think what we'll start to see, I hope, is better alignment. You know, understanding the massive potential of the companies, the female founders are building. - I mean, many, many people have described, you know, venture capital and investment as pattern matching and it's time to, or, you know, the patterns should be broken to be able to accommodate a wide variety of investments. - Yes, yes, yes. - Yeah, all right. So, what is the most common thing, most popular thing, let's say, that people do on the give-in-kind platform? - Yeah, it's so, it's really interesting. It's digital, it's digital gift cards. I mean, far and away, we have seen just incredible, tremendous growth with the transaction of digital gift cards. And the reason is, I think it's combination of, I think this was accelerated by the pandemic. But we saw it before and we have, have absolutely, you know, not shifted our business at all, but looked for where to accelerate certain channels based on, you know, our user's behavior. And so, what we, we did a partnership with another Seattle company here called Tango Card and they do a lot of B2B and employer rewards, digital gift cards. They're now powering a digital gift card marketplace for us. And so, we actually allow people within their, a care calendar is one component of a given kind page. And that's where people say, like, there's a new baby, people can, you know, take care of dinner every night for the next month. It's a really nice way to take care of new families. But what ends up happening is that people say, "I'll help with dinner on Tuesday." And then in two clicks, they can just send an Uber Eats gift card. And that, that has grown so much. I mean, we see, we see calendars that are full every day where it's like, I'm sending an Instacart card. I'm sending a Postmates card. But they're specific, right? It is specific needs. And I think that that's, that's the difference in that use case, right? Where again, you know, somebody might ask, well, how is that, how is that different than just sending money? It's psychologically different. It is logically, and I sent you a $50 Uber Eats for dinner on Wednesday. That just, it just feels different than you sending me money. If I'm a mom with a child in the hospital and you send me a $25 Starbucks card because there's a Starbucks in the lobby of Swedish, like that just every time I use it, I'm gonna know that you took care of me in that way. And so it's that psychological impact is very different from just sending money. And so I think that that's been the quickest, most effective way that people are really activating that support again from anywhere. - So low friction, high psychological value and satisfaction. - Yes. - Yeah, okay. So when I looked at your LinkedIn profile, I noticed that you had a psychology degree, undergraduate degree. Is that your secret sauce? - I actually think so. And it's funny when I first moved into technology in 2007, people would ask, right, how did a psychology degree lead to product management? And I would say, well, product management is psychology. That is what it is. I think that it's, I actually think that a psychology degree is the secret sauce to be a successful product manager. Because when you build something, right, you were constantly having to think about, right now, we call it all sorts of specialties in user experience, but I think until there was a user experience designer, there was just a product manager and a designer who tried to build an experience that would make people use something. So I think that when you're thinking about, should this button be orange or should it be purple, that is psychology. When you're thinking about, does somebody want to provide their email address at this point, that is psychology? And so I absolutely think that it played a role in developing my career in tech. And then in building given kind, there's obviously a much deeper layer of that. Because now we're dealing with multiple types of users going through different situations. And so the most common use case is that the person who creates an in kind of page is not the person who is going through a situation that is somebody who is close to them. So now you have a person who wants to help someone is sort of a second degree connection to some sort of challenging moment. They're wanting to help. They're making decisions for someone else. And then they're rallying a community of people who are experiencing these feelings of wanting to help. And so it's, it isn't very intricate. And when you think about then trying to design user experience around all of these different personas and situations, I absolutely think that it has played a role in how we think about all of those users. - Okay, all right, excellent. So let's do a quick lightning round. I'm going to give you two choices for each and you got to pick one, okay? Tacos are part-time. - Oh, man, this is your trick in me because I ate a lot of Thai food, but not Pad Thai. But we eat tacos multiple days a week in this house. So that's tacos. Okay, by the way, I didn't know that you, you know, I didn't know your journey into Thailand and Mexico before asking that question. So it just happened, okay? Summer or winter? - Oh, well summer, less summer. I don't have to qualify that. It's summer. - Okay, early mornings or late nights? - Oh. I just run up CEO like all day. - Yeah, exactly. It's late night calls with our dev team. Sometimes my husband and I are on separate calls at 11.30 pm talking to two different sides of the tech team. And then we have small children. So it's both. - It's both. - Okay, excellent. So Laura, you know, obviously shared a lot with us on this podcast. But what is something that people don't know about you and you're okay to share on this podcast. - Oh man, this is a fun. - Like are you a secret member of a rock band or something like that? - No. - Okay. - No, but I was, here's a fun fact actually. I was a, some people would call a gifted youth and there's a program at the University of Washington called the Early Entrance Program. And it accepts a handful of youth ages 12 to 14 for a one year program before they go in the University of Washington. And I was in my class. My very small class was Emmett Sheer, the founder of Twitch. And in the year before us was Andrew Chen. There's no Andrews and Horowitz and both incredible, incredible leaders in the tech community who both came out of this little program at the University of Washington. I joke that I'm a, you know, formerly gifted youth. But I turned out okay. - Absolutely, all right. Okay, the final question for you today, what's one thing you look forward in 2021? - Oh, travel. I wanna get on a plane. I wanna see my team and I want to go anywhere else. I love the Pacific Northwest, but man, I'm really looking forward to getting on a plane going somewhere and I've never been a hugger, but I'm ready to hug some, ready to hug some people. So look out, networking events might get really awkward as people start running around hugging each other. - On that positive expectation note. Thank you, Laura, for coming onto this podcast. And it was a delightful conversation to have with you. And I wish you all the best for you and for given kind for this year and for the future. Hope we can touch base again, you know, later this year or early next year and see how things are going. - Thank you so much, Chris, really appreciate it. - Thank you. - Take care, bye-bye. - Bye. - Thanks to you for tuning in. We always like to hear feedback from you. You can tweet to us at Carabiner Media One. That is C-A-R-A-B-I-N-E-R-M-E-D-I-A and the number one. You can also send us email at startup feedback at CarabinerMedia.com. We hope you share this podcast with your friends and colleagues and also reach us in your favorite podcast platform. See you next time. (upbeat music)