Avni Patel Thompson
Founder & CEO, The Commons Company · 2 appearances on the record.
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Avni Patel Thompson is an entrepreneur who founded the Y Combinator-backed childcare marketplace Poppy and the AI household assistant Milo. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and previously worked at Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, and adidas.
39statements → 10claims → 0claims resolved → 3.93/5average certainty → 1.85/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓
1 not yet assessed 9 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
10 assertions · 3 opinions · 17 insights · 7 disclosures · 2 what ifs · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Avni Patel Thompson said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Patel Thompson rejected pivoting Poppy into a profitable, high-priced boutique agency
“There was also an option to say, let's just make this a nice high-end tech-enabled agency, and folks were like, why didn't you just raise prices and do all that? I could have, I hundred percent could have, and turned it into a nice kind of like side business o…”
Childcare platforms struggle with tight margins between parent budgets and caregiver wages
“If you know the category that I'm working within is child care it's already an inherently margin-challenged kind of category. So what I mean by that is, like, what parents are willing and able to pay for this kind of work, and then what caregivers need to make…”
Unfiltered financial transparency creates pointless anxiety for junior startup staff
“What I soon realized as we started to grow towards eight, 10 people is that I can talk about these super ambiguous things, but I also have the power to do something about it. For more junior folks, you have to be, you know, what's the kinder thing, because you…”
Patel Thompson argues Poppy was not a failure despite lacking venture scale
“I think you could take a look and say Poppy was a failure. I think in some lenses, like that's the narrative, but I sort of pushed back on that because I don't think Poppy was a failure. Poppy set out to do and did the thing. Especially for thousands of parent…”
Thompson: Never give early products to friends and family for free
“This is also why I don't believe in friends and family discounts. And it's not to say that you don't maybe give them discounts or things like that, but just don't give it to them for free, right? Because that won't give you the right signal for where, whether …”
Thompson: Curiosity and frustration are better motivators than passion
“The tricky thing about passion is that it can make you confident. It can make you feel like you know the answer. But with curiosity, it keeps you humble and it keeps you asking the questions. And frustration just gives you the motivation to get going.”
Thompson: Innovative startups have no experts aside from users
“You're trying to do something that's never been done before. There are no experts. The only way you can do this is by talking to your users, and then iterating your way forward, inching forward.”
Scaling caregiving platforms degrades the personal relationship into generic gig work
“At a bigger scale, it turns into yet another kind of gig economy job, which isn't good or bad, but it just, you know, has an implication when we're looking at, is that what that labor pool wants to do is yet another kind of gig job. And so that just changed th…”
Pivoting Poppy would have required cutting the team six months earlier
“I think the truth of the matter is, is if we had wanted to pivot, we probably should have done that, you know, six months prior. If I was going to cut the team and leave a good chunk of money in the in the bank to be able to do that I probably needed more time…”
Patel Thompson shared exact bank balances and default dates with all employees
“Even towards the end, our investor update went to everybody. From the most junior folks to my COO I believe in transparency. I believe in educating people on what do the numbers mean. So, Even that very last investor update, every single person saw exactly how…”
Patel Thompson shut down Poppy quickly to conserve remaining runway for severance
“Every month that you continue to kind of persist, you're burning money, right? And for me, it didn't feel responsible to continue to do that. Instead, could I repurpose that and say, Hey, we're going to call it as quickly as possible, conserve a little bit of …”
Thompson: Surveys fail because users struggle to articulate their problems
“That's where I think also like surveys and things like that can be limiting because people sometimes a can't articulate what their problem is in the way that they want to. But sometimes there's other emotions at war like shame or embarrassment or things like t…”
Thompson: There is never an ideal time for kids or startups
“The same way that there's no good time to start a startup, there's no good time to have kids. You'll figure it out.”
Thompson: In 2011 Shanghai, 40% corporate growth felt like sandbagging
“You start working there and 40% growth rates feel like sandbagging. And if you can imagine something like that, and we're coming from the U S where one to two percent is like, cool, we're growing. 40% is sandbagging.”
Thompson: The only real startup idea validation is paying customers
“When people tell me, oh, I've been talking about my idea and everyone loves it. I say, be careful. Because everyone loves you, or you can sell an idea, and there's nothing, no skin off their back to say, no, that's a really great idea. I can't believe no one's…”
Thompson: Modern parents lack reliable support networks, not just babysitters
“As I started to hear that, I realized that what people weren't talking about was just needing a sitter or nanny. What they were missing was this idea of their village. And so everyone says it takes a village to raise a child, but you know, all of us are moving…”
Thompson: Childcare support networks require vetting, matching, and scheduling
“And so for me, it was that if a village is a function of, you know, someone that you trust is a fit for your family from like a values standpoint and is there when you need them to be could you break it down from technology, from a vetting mechanism, a matchin…”
Thompson: Founders can validate a startup's viability within a four-week test
“And so if you use the construct of a four week test inside of four weeks, you can know whether you have something or if you don't.”
Thompson: Ask every rejecting investor for three introductions
“So every person, even if you say no, introduce me to three others. And that's sort of like this little kind of breadcrumb trail that leads you to all the craziest kind of places, but eventually you will find your people and a couple will tip and that's the mom…”
Thompson: Product-market fit solves friction so completely users have no choice
“Stripping it down for me again, I think about it from a consumer standpoint, product market fit has to do with the fact that you're solving their problem. You're solving their problem, the friction that they experience in their lives so well, so completely tha…”
Thompson: Parents need a replacement village, not just sitter matchmaking
“And as I started talking to different people, I realized that the thing that they didn't need was a parent connecting to a sitter. The thing that wasn't being said was that we were all missing our village.”
Patel Thompson: Raising startup capital merely buys time to run experiments
“The money is not something to be celebrating. It was more relief because the money buys us time and time to run those valuable kind of experiments and to be able to figure out the next thing.”
Patel Thompson shut down Poppy due to unscalable unit economics
“Recently decided that looking at all of the things the economics and everything that it wasn't a viable, scalable proposition. And so made the hard decision to shut it down in December”
Poppy's steady monthly growth missed high-growth venture capital marketplace expectations
“Throughout, you know, the growth of poppy, we've always been solid. Like we've always been solid and growing. But to the point of like maybe five to 10%, and that's not bad. I mean, in fact, like for some of these kind of marketplaces, that's really good. It w…”
The other half of the tape: Avni Patel Thompson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
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Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| What Shutting Down Your Startup Feels Like - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy with Kat Manalac | Jan 30, 2019 | 44m |
| The Number One Goal is Getting Started - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy · Y Combinator | Mar 2, 2018 | 38m |
Played on the show (1)
Episodes where a recording of Avni Patel Thompson was played rather than Avni taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.
| Episode | Date | On tape | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building a Startup is About Solving a Problem - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy · Y Combinato | Sep 21, 2017 | 22m | aired address |