Tag Archives: Startup company

A Guide to Picking Partners Who Are Provocative

08 August,2014 by Poornima Vijayashanker in Mentorship, My Experience, Personal Development, Professional Relationship BuildingDave McClure, Diane, Diane Loviglio, EIR, Gil, New York City, Startup company 0 Comments

By Poornima Vijayshanker

We all know the common adage ‘no man is an island’. This applies to our professional lives as well as our personal ones. The consequences of picking partners for any project can hinge on the side of progress or peril!

Picking partners is indeed a difficult decision – you want someone you can rely on during the best and worst of times, who complements you well, and who can also nudge you when you know you need it. Too often, we’re told who we should and shouldn’t partner with (loved ones or family members are often not recommended), but sometimes it just comes down to who we know best.

Take, for example, the husband and wife team of a new startup called ShareSomeStyle. The founders are Diane Loviglio and Gilman (Gil) Tolle. Their goal is to make you feel more confident by pairing you up with a stylist.

I met Diane a little over a year ago, when she was just getting started and reached out to ask me what my take on the service was. As someone who loves the show What NOT to Wear, I thought it was a much-needed service, especially for working professionals. I was reunited with Diane and Gil recently, when they were accepted to participate in the 500 Startups accelerator program, where I’m an EIR (entrepreneur-in-residence). I was thrilled to have them as my advisees.

Since then, I’ve had deeper interactions with these two, and I’ve learned some of the secrets of how they make it work:

Clear ownership areas. Diane is the CEO while Gil is the CTO. Initially, they both worked on the product together. Diane recently has taken on more projects related to fundraising, pursuing partnerships, and growing the business, while Gil continues to stay focused on the technology side of the business.

Be OK with a little opposition. Just because you’re partners doesn’t mean that you can’t push each other a little bit and that conflicts won’t come up. It boils down to how you approach each other. I’ve noticed that Diane and Gil are pretty good about communicating what is and isn’t working, not as an indictment on one another, but in order to bring up issues. They then focus on solving the problem.

Offer support when it’s needed. During the accelerator, Diane was pregnant and concerned that she might have her baby on a day that she needed to be pitching investors. She worked with Gil and prepped him to do the pitch as well, and wouldn’t you know it – they had their baby girl Joscelin Blake Tolle two days before their first big demo day!

Ultimately, you want to partner with someone to help you make progress on a project. Picking partners is your decision. There may be some who judge your choice in a partner, especially if they’ve had a bad experience with it themselves – but if you’ve figured out a way to make it work, then their judgements don’t really matter.

Now I want to know: have you ever thought about partnering with someone but were concerned about what others might think? Or have you had a really positive experience partnering with someone you initially weren’t sure about?

Successfully Showcasing a Startup

21 May,2013 by Poornima in Events, Hiring, Recruiting, StartupsBlogger, Chief technology officer, Engineer, Evan Williams, Startup company 0 Comments

Gone are the days of free soda, snacks, and meals! It’s not that engineers have suddenly become more demanding. In fact many still don’t know their own value, especially femgineers…

Joining a startup as an engineer used to primarily be about believing in the startup’s vision, team dynamics, technology stack, equity, salary, and role along with employee number. These are still important factors, but the dynamics of decision making have dramatically deepened due to the increasing number of startups that are competing for a stagnant number of engineers.

It’s become harder to recruit engineers, because engineers have many startups to choose from, and especially within the same category: gaming, marketplaces, payments, SMBs, fin tech, etc. As a result, recruiting top talent has caused companies to become more creative when showcasing themselves.

One company that recently caught my attention is Medium, originally named Obvious Corp. Medium was founded by Twitter and Blogger co-founder Ev Williams. Medium is focused on being a platform where people can share ideas and stories about their lives, creative pursuits, and careers. It aims to be more collaborative than Ev’s previous product Blogger. Still in beta, the company is putting a lot of effort into hiring top talent.

I was introduced to Medium by its CTO Don Neufeld. Don and I met at a previous Femgineer Forum I was hosting at CoverHound. He candidly shared his approach to hiring top talent, team building, and some of the challenges he had faced when trying to attract technical women.

After meeting Don, I dug in to learn more about Medium, because as a blogger I’m generally curious about what platforms are out there. What I discovered that was even more appealing than the product, was how the company had built a culture where employees naturally wanted to share their experiences on motherhood and being recruited (as a candidate who needed a visa).

You may think that employees who work there will only want to say good things, but then there are those who are around for a just bit, and feel strongly enough that they want to share their experience.

Medium also understands that recruiting and retaining talent is about the long term. This summer Don has a group of incoming interns, and wants them to have the best experience possible. Part of that experience is having me come and host a Femgineer Forum at Medium to discuss a rather sensitive topic: Overcoming Insecurities to Innovate.

While Medium is a young startup, its led by notable veterans, who have learned that the secret sauce to building a tech company is hiring the best talent. There’s no secret formula to attracting top talent, startups have to become better at showcasing themselves, and creating alignment with a young company’s goals. What’s working for Medium happens to be an extension of it’s company’s core experience, storytelling.

#1 Reason YOU Should Build a Product

24 October,2012 by Poornima in My Experience, Product Development, Software Development, Startupsfemgineer, New product development, Startup company 0 Comments

I’m not sure they why the call it software, it’s so damn hard to build. In fact I’m convinced the only reason they call it software is because hardware is harder to build 😀 So maybe this great marketing tactic is what draws people into building software, and the number of those who are building is certainly growing. While I’ve been building software for 8 years, 6 in startup land, I’ve noticed a definite trend in the past 2 years, which is that there is a really high proportion of people who want to build products. In fact their desire is so great that they go to length to do things like: raise capital, hire people, and then proceed to build. But then something strange happens… they hit a brick wall, not just once, but again and again. They’re unable to ship even the first version, and after some hard work they throw in the towel and claim: “there just wasn’t a product-market-fit”. There never is and there never will be if you’re driven by a want. This of doesn’t just happen in a startup, it happens at any stage of the company, its just most prevalent in startups.

The truth is like anything in life, you don’t build products for the fame, the glory, or the exit. The #1 reason you build a product is passion. And if you ain’t got it, then you need to figure out how to get it, because honestly it cannot be taught, and this is coming from someone who wants to increase ticket sales of her Intro to Product Development class 🙂

The reason I say passion should be the #1 driver is because a lot of things will go wrong. While I’m not a fortune teller I can be certain that things will go wrong. I could even come up with a list of 100 things that I’ve personally experienced, but I need to save time and get back to building my product, so here are the top three that you need to be able to stomach:

You’re co-founder leaving you.
Running out of money.
People not believing in you and thinking you’re insane.

If you can handle those 3 then I’d say you’re good to go! The rest like deadlines slipping and losing sleep are easy by comparison. You need to use your passion for building a product to help you get through those 3+ difficult moments, and they aren’t really moments, they will feel like an era.

While passion cannot be taught, it can be harvested, and cultivated. Here’s the secret sauce: build a product you believe in. It doesn’t matter if you’re the founder, engineer, designer, or whatever in a company. You have to believe in what you are building. Its great if it solves a problem for you, but even if it doesn’t that OK. Only if you believe in the product will you want to build it and improve it. If you don’t believe in the product, you’ll concoct excuses to jump ship the minute you spot an iceberg ahead.

Discovering what you’re passionate about takes time. For some people it can be years and for others its a lifetime. While it can take time to find inspiration, I’d definitely encourage you to learn the process of building a product. That process is important.

Understanding the process, putting in place, and then falling back on it during those tough moments is how you know you’re passionate.

So if you want to learn the process come to my Introduction to Product Development course on Saturday October 27th in SF. I canot guarantee you’ll walk away passionate, but once you find it you’ll have the right process to make things happen! Use the discount code Femgineer to save 15%. Looking forward to meeting YOU!