The Exchanges

Q Um, alright, so, okay, so you have this experience, and was it immediately revelatory to you? Was it like a lightbulb moment, or did it kind of percolate for some time and, and, and get you thinking there, you know, like, there should be a better way to do this?

A Yeah, I thought, a baby registry, it's a list of products, you can go buy the products. But I could see exactly how I wanted it to work. And so, one example is, they all looked terrible. They were pink and blue with giraffes. It felt embarrassing to send that out to family and friends. I was like, I want this to actually feel modern and to feel cool to send out. I really wanted it to work across retailers. Most baby registries were single store registries, and so you could only add items from Babies R Us, and then you'd have a second registry for Amazon.com. Or there were a couple, like, general, universal wishlists where you could add items from a few sites, but it would be a wishlist, and I wanted to ask for these other things. So we had a dog, we had adopted her in Mexico, Pasa, and it was like, if someone could walk her every morning, like, that's such a meaningful gift. In retrospect, this was a terrible idea, but I was very into cloth diapering. Like, I thought cloth diapering was, like, the right thing to do. The cloth diaper service, it cost 60 dollars a month, which was a lot of money, and so if someone could be like, we'll get you February for your cloth diapering service in 60 dollars, that felt amazing, and so I just, so what it felt like is I knew exactly what needed to be built. I think my aspirations for it at the time were like, Oh, maybe this will be a great si…

AI assessment note: “what it felt like is I knew exactly what needed to be built.”

Q Yeah. And you guys were sort of on a roll at this point, right? Because I think the next year, which, which is 2021, uh, you were able to raise a substantial amount of money in another fundraising round, like forty million dollars.

A Yeah. So again, just like our seed round, I like was not sure I was going to be able to do this, but it was, it was the right time. It felt like a really important maturation and like inflection point for the business. So created a pitch deck. And this was all over Zoom, because it was this COVID time period. So without meeting anyone, I would meet them over Zoom, and I would give them the pitch, and they would all start with no. They would, the investors would be like, we don't, it would be a really soft no. Like, we don't really ever invest in anyone. We're meeting for the first time, um, but it'd be great to hear what you're up to. I, I Ordered the pitch in this very specific way. That was like the very first slide was our revenue. And I'd be like, here's our revenue in that year. It was going to be two hundred fifty million dollars. And they'd be like, oh no, you mean this is your, your GMV, which is your gross merchandise value, like what you're actually sending to other retailers for their sales. And I was like, no, this is our revenue. And they would lean in. They'd be like, oh, I have to get my partner on the call. And so the, the process, it absolutely had rejection, but the investor we eventually went with, um, was actually it's Norwest Venture Partners. And I've seen companies raise too much money. And I think part of it is this wishful thinking of like, how is the b…

AI assessment note: “the investor we eventually went with, um, was actually it's Norwest Venture Partners.”

Q Hmm. But still, I, I guess, at this point, to, to get some support and a bit of money, uh, you decided to apply to an accelerator program in the Bay Area, uh, called 500 Startups, I think, um, and you got in, you were accepted. So how did that go? Like, what, what was it like to be, uh, to be part of that?

A Yeah, they give you 50,000 dollars for a percentage of your company, so it was really that first funding round, and life was gonna get really busy, and I was gonna drive now from San Francisco to Mountain View every single day, and I, I've been asked the question, like, what was it like going through that program with a toddler, and that part was fine. It was Really hard, though, going through the program as a solo founder. It felt like I, I might have been the only solo founder, and so it felt like I was the only person with a company of one person, and there were teams with five founders, or at least with three founders, and so you want to take advantage of every part of this program, and Everything's set up because they're kind of acting like you're three or four people, plus I'm literally still doing all of the customer support for BabyList, so it felt like completely overwhelming to be doing it all myself, and I had this new 50,000 dollars, and so it was really, really clear that I had to, for the first time, had to bring on new people, and when you kind of talk about Like, was it scary to go to it full time? I don't think it was, but it was really scary to say, oh, you're now going to join me. I have this real responsibility to you as an employee.

AI assessment note: “It was Really hard, though, going through the program as a solo founder.”

Q startup, and you're running your second startup, and it's already getting a little bit of traction, you know, I mean, you know, in the, in the first days and weeks after you launch, so come walk me through the first few months of Max's life while you are, you know, you're, With him, I think, right? Um, probably mostly on your own. Tell me about how you were doing that.

A I really wanted to stay home with Max for, like, up to a year, and, um, August was going to university in Vancouver. It was actually, like, a very difficult time. It was very isolating. It was very lonely. Um, Max was Like a Velcro baby. He needed to be held all of the time, and I feel even saying all of this, like, I feel like I need to caveat, like, and he's literally the most wonderful fourteen-year-old, and like, it was, but at that time, it was like, this is what the next 18 years of my life is gonna be like. Like, what have we done? It was winter in Vancouver. Um, I was home all day, and for me, like, Babyless was this really interesting thing I could think about.

AI assessment note: “It was actually, like, a very difficult time. It was very isolating.”

Q And, and what about raising money? Because up until this point, you hadn't raised money. Now you're in an incubator. So how did you go about starting to think about bringing in some, some significant money to start building the, you know, hiring people?

A I found it a really, really, really difficult decision. On the one hand, I really liked that I hadn't raised money. I liked that I, I didn't have investors who had expectations, but on the other hand, I was like, I think if I raise money, like, it's gonna really turn this into a real business. I, I really, I made the decision to raise a seed round, and my actual framing was like, I think I will learn much more by doing this path, even if it's the more difficult path. Like, it felt like it was really adding, like, a new part of my job, which would be managing investors, having other people really own parts of BabyList, and really wanting it to succeed. And I also didn't know if I could raise money. Like, it's something I had never done before, and what it really felt like was, like, people were doing me a favor by investing in this business. It didn't feel like I did not have the vision and the confidence to say, like, this business is going to be a hundred million dollar business. It was really hard for me to say, and then, like, this is actually how big this company will get.

AI assessment note: “I found it a really, really, really difficult decision.”

Q Okay, I got it. Okay. So while you're on this trip, um, I guess you get an idea for, because you have to do something, right? You can't, I mean, you quit, but clearly in the back of your mind, and you, you must be thinking, hey, uh, I'm, you know, gonna do something when I'm done with it. Like I'm, and so what, what did you come up with?

A Well, not, I, not at all. Like, I, I don't think I ever thought of myself as an entrepreneur. Um, I, the first place we were was Havana, Cuba, and at that time, there was very limited access to the internet there, and so it was actually this total digital detox where, um, I was learning Spanish all day, like, walking to the University of Havana, really exploring that city, making some friends. And I started feeling really excited that I wanted to build something, and my actual framing for it was, I went to college for four years, I worked at Amazon for four years, and like, I don't actually know how to build an app or a website from end to end, like where you're setting up the web server and the database and choosing the language, and so that was, and it felt like A gap. It felt like something that I had some imposter syndrome over, and so that was the thing I was excited to do.

AI assessment note: “I started feeling really excited that I wanted to build something”

Q I mean, the, the sort of the affiliate programs with Amazon and Target and others, that's, you just kind of plug that in, but then you started to work directly with smaller vendors, right, that, that maybe weren't at Target and Walmart and, and, and on Amazon. Um, was a lot of that traffic incoming, people starting to connect with you guys saying, hey, can you sell my stuff too?

A So at this point, we were never selling stuff directly. We had this really, really big decision where more and more people are using BabyList, and we're like, what's next? Like, what's the next big thing that BabyList is gonna be? And the really obvious choice was, like, we should now go into a wedding. We're this tech company. We've created this fantastic Baby registry. The technology would apply to wedding registries. Like, that's what we are. We're this tech company. And the other option was the most valuable thing we've really created is this trust and engagement with women and parents when they're having a baby. And everything we do should be really serving them in more and more ways. This was a big decision. I think I learned a lot about weddings. I talked to a lot of people and really made the clear decision. We're not doing that. We are going to be this company. Everything we're going to do is going to be for expecting and new parents, which really then opened up. So like, what is babyless going to be?

AI assessment note: “So at this point, we were never selling stuff directly. We had this really, really big decision”