KiwiCo founder Sandra Oh Lin reflects on her career before founding KiwiCo, when she ran eBay's fashion division as General Manager around 2008 to 2009.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sandra Oh Lin: Male seed VCs deferred to their wives on KiwiCo
“I mean, I think we did, I don't know, somewhere between 30 to 40 different meetings with Different folks. And even though they could see it or they would ask their wives what they thought of the concept we weren't necessarily kind of securing the funding until…”
Insight
Sandra Oh Lin: VCs pattern-match, creating fundraising friction for female 'mompreneurs'
“I do think, especially for early stage investing, there is an element of pattern matching for investors, and there is a little bit of a lens where I was a, you know a mompreneur.”
Disclosure
KiwiCo accepted a preemptive $5M Series A round instead of waiting for higher valuation
“What ended up happening is that we had a number of potential investors reach out to us, and we decided to do a preemptive Series A raise, and it was debated. At the time, like, should we do this or should we wait and potentially try to go for a higher valuatio…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sandra Oh Lin: Some families will permanently shift to homeschooling post-pandemic
“I imagine to a certain extent that some people will actually choose to continue to homeschool their children, so there actually may be a shift there.”
Assertion Supported
Oh Lin: KiwiCo's founding team included YouTube's first engineer and PayPal co-founder
“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lin: Early online ads failed because kids' subscription box search demand did not exist
“Then we started doing some online advertising, but in the beginning it really did not work that well because people weren't looking for kids subscription boxes or even necessarily science projects online at that point.”