Ep 31: Tracy DiNunzio (Part 2), Founder of Tradesy, on Rapid Growth and Rapid Learning

Part 2 of 3. Tracy DiNunzio is a killer. She's the self-taught founder and CEO of Tradesy.com, which has taken off like a rocket ship. She's raised $13 million from investors including Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins, and yours truly, and board members include the legendary John Doerr. Tradesy is on a mission to make the resale value of anything you own available on demand. Their tagline is "cash in on your closet." Tracy is in the trenches 24/7, making it the perfect time to ask her... How has she created such high-velocity growth? How did she recruit the investors she did? What's been her experience as a female founder? What are her biggest mistakes made and lessons learned? This multi-part series, fueled by wine, will answer all this and more. Even if you have no desire to start your own company, this 3-part series will get you amped to do big things. This series is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss Book Club at www.audible.com/timsbooks

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss Book Club. Check it out on Audible. These are books that have had a huge impact on my life. Audible.com/Tim'sBooks. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part conversation with Tracy DiNanzio, founder and CEO of Tradesy. She talks about hustle. She talks about lessons learned. She talks about big mistakes made. And above all, she talks about perhaps learning to fly after jumping off of the cliff. She's very impressive. If you didn't catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in. But if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening.

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  The questions bounce all over the place, so chances are you could get value out of this even if you don't listen to part one. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Tracy DiNanzio.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:04Tracy DiNunzio?

  No, I would have seen it a lot of times.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:18Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose an accelerator as opposed to going directly to venture capitalists? And the reason I ask is, I don't know how Launchpad is formatted, but typically with these accelerators, they, and maybe this is public. If it is, then please talk about it.

• 1:34Tracy DiNunzio?

  Sure.

• 1:35Tim Ferriss?

  But they will give you 50 grand or maybe in some cases, less for, say, 5% to 10% of the company. Is that how Launchpad works?

• 1:44Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes. At the time, it was 50 grand for 6%. I think it's a little bit different now. I think it's actually 100 grand for new companies. And it was the best 50 grand I ever got and the best 6% I ever spent. So, you know, I think it would be easy to look back and at our current valuation and say, oh goodness, I gave away 6% of the company for $50,000 and it wasn't that long ago. But I don't feel that way at all. The tools that I kind of learned while in Launchpad and the exposure that I got to such a wide variety of investors and mentors, I couldn't have continued on the journey without that. As for why I chose to go that route, again, I really wish that I had a more impressive answer.

• 2:27Tracy DiNunzio?

  It was in my Facebook newsfeed. Somebody posted something that said, Launchpad now offering $50,000 to all incoming companies. And I, at the time, that day, had decided that I needed $50,000 to launch Tradesy, which was wrong. It was dead wrong. I needed way, way more than that. But at the time, that was what I thought. I thought, you know, a new platform, some new technology, I could handle the rest. And so I saw that number and just blind applied. In retrospect, I could definitely invent a good answer for why one might go the accelerator route. I do think it's extremely valuable because for me, it's one reason only. So there's mentorship, and there's learning, and there's community, and all that can be valuable.

• 3:10Tracy DiNunzio?

  But I'm like a little bit of a weirdo introvert in certain ways, and I like to learn on my own by reading stuff. So while all that was valuable, I think the most important thing was that for four months, I sat in a shared office space with the other Launchpad companies, and every day, three to five investors came there. And if I had had to reach out to those investors or try to plow my network for introductions, that would have literally taken that whole four months. And you're kind of pre-vetted, once you're in an incubator, so the investors are more likely to give you more time and see your prospects as better. So for that alone, if you're like I was, and you're kind of getting started,

• 3:50Tracy DiNunzio?

  you see a big opportunity, but you're not hyper-connected to this network of investors, that alone makes it more than worth the trade-off.

• 3:58Tim Ferriss?

  What are the skills that you alluded to just a moment ago that you acquired or developed while at the incubator? Aside from the obvious access to investors, which I do think, at least in some cases, is one of the benefits of an accelerator. But what were the skills that you developed that ended up being crucial over that period of time?

• 4:20Tracy DiNunzio?

  So there were two. One was pitching, which I was miserable at.

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  Pitching investors.

• 4:28Tracy DiNunzio?

  Pitching investors. So it ties into the investor thing, but it's, I mean, it's a sales skill that you need for a number of different things. It helps with doing press. It helps with selling candidates on joining your company at a certain point, when you're, when you're ready for that kind of a thing. But the art of pitching investors, there are a lot of different aspects to it, but the one that was most valuable to me, that I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggling with, is that it's very hard to tell your own story succinctly and in a way that people can digest easily. When you're in it, when you're on the inside, you've got all this data and all these numbers and all these ideas and forming that whole kind of like buckets full of stuff into a coherent, clear story that's inspiring and

• 5:13Tracy DiNunzio?

  exciting is probably one of the biggest challenges. Sorry, I had a little background noise there. It's probably one of the biggest challenges.

• 5:21Tim Ferriss?

  It was a very tech-appropriate noise. It's okay.

• 5:23Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes, exactly. So, so that was what I spent a lot of time learning at Launchpad and failing at miserably. So, you know, if anybody listening is going to go out and pitch investors, my advice is to make your first 10 meetings with investors that you don't really want funding from because you're probably going to suck in the beginning. It's, I, I sucked for a really long time. And the other thing that I learned there was forecasting and financial modeling. I started Launchpad in January 2012 and I had never used Excel. And the investors who ended up leading our seed round, Rincon Venture Partners, there was a guy named Jim Andelman, who's now on our board and, and led our first round, who was involved in Launchpad. And he would come in every week, meet with me and say,

• 6:08Tracy DiNunzio?

  well, you know, you need a financial model. And I'd put something together and he'd show me what I did wrong and I'd go back and try again and try to act cool, like I didn't stay up all night trying to make all those numbers fit together and. And so two things happened there. I learned how to forecast and how to use Excel, which was a really necessary skill. But more importantly, I saw how thoughtful investor approaches an entrepreneur at the early stages when so much is uncertain. And so I look back on that and I see that to have a really quality investor come in and really be your partner, you kind of do have to build a relationship that progresses. So it's always good to start that relationship early and to go back to every meeting with them, having made some progress

• 6:51Tracy DiNunzio?

  on the very specific things that you talked about last time. So I learned how to model and also I learned how to prove myself to to investors through that process.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  And in the pitch itself, the Tradesy pitch, or the presentation, depending on how we look at it, what were your biggest mistakes that you made? And I agree definitely with the fact, and I think it is fact, that pitches fail from too much information, not too little information. And that's true for writing and teaching also. But aside from just concision, if that's the right word, conciseness, I have no idea. I'm no writer or anything.

• 7:25Tracy DiNunzio?

  One of those.

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, one of those.

• 7:27Tracy DiNunzio?

  I don't know.

• 7:27Tim Ferriss?

  Brevity. There we go. Pull a Porky Pig substitute. Aside from that, just really tightening the valves and making it more concise. Aside from that, what were the biggest mistakes that you made in your pitches before all the practice?

• 7:44Tracy DiNunzio?

  So that brevity thing is number one. I won't, I won't belabor the point, but it reminds me of a quote that's often misattributed to Mark Twain. I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time, which just alludes to the amount of laboring it takes to take your very big, wonderful, long idea and shorten it down into something digestible. I think, you know, the other big mistake that I made was, well, two things. One, I obsessed over metrics that are impossible to derive. So I probably spent three weeks trying to figure out the size of our target market. Realistically, it's just, and I see, Andre, it sounds so simple, but I see entrepreneurs doing this all the time because you get really stuck on that, on certain very big numbers that seem very far away. And I just had this

• 8:27Tracy DiNunzio?

  idea that like, I, everything in my deck had to be so defensible that I would fall down rabbit holes and waste time. Researching things that didn't really matter. So I think, you know, don't make that mistake. Rather, keep the focus on telling the story. Cause the story is really what, you know, if you, if you overestimated your size of market by 20%, nobody else knows how to find that number anyway. So it doesn't matter. You could just as well say it's huge as long as it is and everyone understands. So that's like a, a small thing. And then in the actual pitches, I just had no confidence. It was early, it was all new. I was just getting my feet wet and I was really eager to share a lot, but I didn't know how to like,

• 9:12Tracy DiNunzio?

  play it cool and surface the headlines and sit back and wait for the investor to demonstrate interest in certain areas so I could expound. I would just kind of dive in and try to tell them everything I knew about every little point, because I wanted to prove that I was knowledgeable. And if you've gotten the meeting, you're probably knowledgeable enough. Like it's a, it's better to go in with a baseline expectation that everybody assumes everybody else is qualified to be here and not overdo it, which I think does reveal a lack of confidence.

• 9:43Tim Ferriss?

  Which, by the way, for people listening is also true, and I hate this term, but we'll use it for lack of a better substitute, in any type of in-person networking. And I'll just call it socializing that might become professional. The eagerness and not to stereotype, but guys usually have trouble with this more than women, not always, is this desire to prove that they are the smartest person in the room by just brain vomiting information at people. It is not endearing and it does not help.

• 10:17Tracy DiNunzio?

  It's unimpressive.

• 10:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:19Tracy DiNunzio?

  And by the way, it's also true in dating. The same dynamics apply. Like you, the, the eagerness, like I think that's relatable for a lot of people, because a lot of people who might've like, kind of figured out how to deal with dating, but haven't figured out how to deal with entrepreneurship. You know, you wouldn't go on a first date and run up to someone and be like, listen, I have all these great qualities and I'm going to be a great dad. And, you know, so if you, you know, if you wouldn't do that, the same applies to an investor. They're, they're a human being. They want to feel like there's other interests out there, like, you know, like you're not falling all over yourself, you're not desperate, because if you have a quality business, you'll feel desperate at times, but you shouldn't, you don't let it show.

• 10:55Tim Ferriss?

  How to date a venture capitalist? That's a headline that somebody could use.

• 11:00Tim Ferriss?

  Terrible, but also click incredible clickbait.

• 11:03Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes.

• 11:05Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned the importance of story, telling the story. What are some of the aspects of your story that resonated most with investors? And you can like, give me the exact verbiage if it helps. I mean, it might be a little past that point in your development, but like, what are the pieces of the story that really struck people and got attention?

• 11:29Tracy DiNunzio?

  Sure. I think, you know, I think that I thought of story. Everyone told me that I needed to focus on the story. And so I thought of it as something linear. And I would start my pitches by telling people where I started and how this all started.

• 11:41Tim Ferriss?

  Dr. Evil style. So you was just sort of chronological, right?

• 11:45Tracy DiNunzio?

  Exactly. And, and that was a misinterpretation on my part of what story really means. And I had a big breakthrough when I surfaced the vision to the kind of front of the pitch. And the vision being what if everybody in the world could instantly access the resale value of anything they own via their phone or their desktop or whatever other devices we're using? How might that change our concept of ownership and the way that we interact with commerce and, and the durable goods and products that we consume in a capitalist society? And when you start a pitch like that with a kind of clear vision of the future, even

• 12:27Tracy DiNunzio?

  if it's a question, I always pose it as a question because I don't know the answer. I just think it would be really exciting to find out. But that really tends to capture everybody's attention because if there's one thing that VCs love, it's the potential for something huge and transformative in society, in culture, in commerce. And so leading with that vision, all the other pieces of the story kind of fell into place because then I could walk the investors through, well, how do we get from here to there? And the whole thing kind of took shape. So just like SEO won't be everybody's golden ticket and, you know, lots of other things that I did aren't the exact things that will work for everybody.

• 13:09Tracy DiNunzio?

  But I think that in many cases, if there is an underlying vision that feels transformative, that can be really exciting to lead with.

• 13:16Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And a couple of. Very closely related thoughts. The first is to learn how to pitch a startup is the same as learning how to pitch anything. And at the end of the day, pitching a startup is persuading. You are persuading someone to do something, whatever that next action is. And that could be talk to me after the presentation. That could be click my headline to read an article. I think Seth Godin is one of the preeminent masters of short form content and his headlines, it's unbelievable. I mean, everything he puts out gets a few hundred shares on every

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  platform. It's incredible. And you can learn a lot about headlines, opening slides in a deck, or questions by looking at what Seth writes. Another way to do that, and this is going to get a couple of laughs, I'm sure, but look at a homepage like Yahoo. I actually look at the homepage of Yahoo.com almost every day just to see how they're testing headlines, because I find it so fascinating. And then lastly, I would say, watch TED Talks that have amassed more than three to five million views. Why three to five million? Because there are a lot of people out there who recognize that a good TED Talk could be

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  the meal ticket to a book deal or whatever, so they can manufacture one million views, even if they have to pay for it, which is disgusting, but it's true. So, look at people who've had three to five million. That outstrips most people's budgets. And what you'll notice is that they're selling an idea. It's not a company, but they're selling an idea. And the process is the same. So, those would be just a few thoughts on that. Now, you get this funding, then what? What happens? And what are the most important decisions in retrospect that you made with that money?

• 15:10Tracy DiNunzio?

  So, this is now going back again to July 2012 with the 1.5 million appearing in the bank account. And, and at that time, I had already brought on my first co-founder, our Chief Technology Officer, John Hall.

• 15:25Tim Ferriss?

  How did you find John?

• 15:27Tracy DiNunzio?

  Craigslist.

• 15:28Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 15:29Tracy DiNunzio?

  No joke.

• 15:30Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a second. What did you do? Did you just like click on Los Angeles and then do looking for a job? And boom, there he was?

• 15:38Tracy DiNunzio?

  I posted a listing, seeking CTO.

• 15:42Tim Ferriss?

  That was the headline, seeking CTO?

• 15:44Tracy DiNunzio?

  Something along those lines. Yeah, it was a creatively written listing. And he responded and of all the people who responded, he was virtually the only qualified one.

• 15:55Tim Ferriss?

  How did, how did you know that he was qualified? What did he, what did he put in that response that made you know he was qualified?

• 16:01Tracy DiNunzio?

  So he was at the time, the West Coast Director of Technology for Cars.com. And before that, he had been a Director of Technology at Shopzilla. So just based on his resume and the fact that both of those companies are marketplaces of sorts. I knew that he had kind of the chops. I was not qualified to interview a CTO because I didn't understand enough about backend technology at the time to even really vet his skills. So I did something kind of funny. I had a, I was still using my kind of my outsourced dev shop here in LA to do all of our technology work and I just brought him in to meet the guys that had been helping me with Recycled Bride for a few years.

• 16:45Tracy DiNunzio?

  And they helped me vet him, but I hired him in the first meeting, really. The vetting came after and more than anything, I got incredibly lucky because I really didn't know how to go through a proper hiring process. But it's worked out beautifully and we're, we're happily ever after. So that was the first very important thing, but that did happen kind of pre-funding because a lot of the investors that I was meeting with and even Launchpad at the time, they were concerned that I didn't have a tech team and that I didn't have a-

• 17:14Tim Ferriss?

  I can understand the concern.

• 17:16Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes. They were like, well, how are you going to build this billion dollar company using that dev shop? And so I had made an agreement with Sam Teller, the Director of Launchpad when I signed on. It was actually a funny story because initially after our first meeting, I could tell that he had some doubts. And I knew that his biggest doubt was the fact that I didn't have a technical co-founder, which was a prerequisite of Launchpad. So that night I stayed up late and I made him a mini deck called No Technical Co-Founder, No Problem. And just outlined how I would go about finding one as soon as I was into Launchpad and how the Launchpad kind of credentials would help me attract a better partner.

• 17:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's genius. I love it.

• 17:55Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yeah, it was good. Glad I did that.

• 17:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very, yeah, good, good, good move on your part.

• 18:00Tracy DiNunzio?

  So it was a night well spent. So bringing him on was the first key that helped to actually get the money in the door. And then, once we raised, we were operating out of my living room. And I would say the most important decisions, it's all about people. And so those first five or six hires who are all still with us and make up kind of the core heart and soul of Tradesy, they all came on between July 2012 and our launch in late October 2012. And those were all the most important decisions by far. But I think, you know, a few other strategic decisions that we made when we saw how much competition there was in the market were also important. For example, we have the lowest commission of any of the resale marketplaces. And we did that for two reasons. We wanted to be

• 18:44Tracy DiNunzio?

  competitive, but I also had a bunch of data from Recycled Bride that suggested that a higher commission led to sellers engaging into negative behaviors. They would either try to transact off platform to avoid the fee, or they would inflate their pricing, which destroys the kind of beautiful fair market value integrity of a marketplace in order to compensate for those platform fees. So we made some radical decisions around our business model in the early days that were all based on how we saw the market shaping up. And those ended up becoming our key factors in our positioning. So you were talking about positioning before. And I think that we made positioning decisions in those early

• 19:27Tracy DiNunzio?

  days, very aggressively, that really worked for us.

• 19:32Tim Ferriss?

  And a few follow up questions, no big surprise coming from me. The first is, you mentioned your Craigslist post for your technical co-founder.

• 19:41Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes.

• 19:41Tim Ferriss?

  Was creatively written. Could you please elaborate and give perhaps an example?

• 19:47Tracy DiNunzio?

  Gosh, I wish I remember more, but it was something along the lines of like, do you have a taste for adventure? And an appetite for risk. Come on a crazy journey with a Launchpad LA backed company. You'll be the second person on the team and we'll take it all the way.

• 20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. I dig it. That's very, I think it's Shackleton who is recruiting for his, God, I'm going to mangle this, but Antarctica expedition and the classified ad was something like, you know, return uncertain, glory guaranteed, seeking rough men, you know, ready for danger and higher risk.

• 20:28Tracy DiNunzio?

  You know, that's actually, I just was reading something about how the Army is now doing much better at recruiting, or maybe it's, maybe it's firefighters. Gosh, I don't remember, but one of those two has been doing really well at recruiting people because they've changed their positioning and their ads are now all about how hard it is and how noble it is. And it's like, can you handle this?

• 20:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's awesome.

• 20:51Tracy DiNunzio?

  And it seems to be really working and their, you know, their rates of application are going up and.

• 20:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not only that, but they're going to get more qualified people, right?

• 20:59Tracy DiNunzio?

  Exactly.

• 21:00Tim Ferriss?

  They're going to have to do less vetting after the fact, which is, yeah, huge savings.

• 21:07Tim Ferriss?

  The, yeah, I can't let the cat out of the bag yet, but I'll be launching something soon that'll have all sorts of Shackleton-like caveats for people to sign up for, which I'm kind of excited about.

• 21:18Tracy DiNunzio?

  Suspense.

• 21:19Tim Ferriss?

  This suspense, this suspense. So looking at, you take this money, you start building. Now, as a side note, do you think that as far as accelerators go, I'm sure it goes without saying that not all accelerators are created equal. And you have very hot debate at the moment, at least among technologists, Peter Thiel being certainly one of the extremes on one end, about the value of a college education. And I think this applies strongly to many people with developed computer science abilities or a predisposition in that direction. But a lot of people would, would argue that college is worth it. Other people would argue that college is not worth it. And then there's a contingent that would argue it's not worth going to college unless you can go to say

• 22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Top 20 or 35 because they give you a certain mark of credibility that gives you a hall pass, which is kind of ridiculous, but it is what it is, where everyone assumes that you're smart based on this association. Do you think that also holds true for accelerators where if you can't get into the top three or five accelerators, that you should not go to an accelerator?

• 22:30Tracy DiNunzio?

  I don't know. So I think that on the college thing, I'm absolutely on the radical side where, you know, at least in this sector, I think that the college education has become virtually obsolete, even if it's a top 20 school, you know, the day you graduate, everything you learned is already obsolete. So it's, you know, things move so quickly. However, I think with accelerators that can be, I don't know. I don't know if that's true with accelerators because the number one thing that I would look for to get out of an accelerator would be the connections to early-stage investors. And I've noticed that even though not all of the accelerators here in LA are ranked high, they don't make the top 10 list, etc. Launchpad does, but some of the others don't.

• 23:15Tracy DiNunzio?

  The people running those incubators still have great connections and the VCs who come to town still stop in. I also know that when you're as early-stage as companies that are applying to accelerators, the accelerators have a really hard time figuring out who's going to be successful. So you might have a great thing and not get into one of the top-tier accelerators. And I don't think that necessarily means that you should just scrap the whole idea because everything's just one foot in front of the other. So something's better than nothing. And as long as the deal you're getting feels fair and you think it's going to be a stepping stone, why not?

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. What are the most, and this is, this is difficult perhaps in some cases to objectively assess, but what would Launchpad consider their most successful companies to date that have come out of their classes? And you don't have to speak for them. You could say, what do you expect someone at Launchpad might say about their most successful companies to date?

• 24:13Tracy DiNunzio?

  Oh, well, I hope I don't butcher this. I know that we're one of them now, which is nice. And, um, and there was a company in our class called Chromatic that's doing quite well. And there was another company in our class called Big Frame that recently had a healthy acquisition. And another called Chow Now that's really thriving. So that was just in my class. I can't remember some of the better companies that came before us in the two classes before, but I know that there were a few. And Sam Teller will, will be sad that I don't remember all the names of them.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  He can leave some, he can leave some intelligent, yet angry.

• 24:49Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes.

• 24:49Tim Ferriss?

  Comments on my, on my, on my blog post that relates to this. You know, I just noticed, I'm looking at the website, that one of the companies was Listen, L I S T N, in the spring 2013 class. And I love that company. That was actually started by a, well, in this case, female founder who read The Four Hour Workweek. So I've, I've had a lot of interaction with her. And on that note, you know, I just have to, let's, let's just kind of slay the pink elephant in the room because I want to get it out of the way. Since a lot of people will be wondering, this relates to the, what is it like to be a female founder question? And I just have to vent for a second about this because I've

• 25:33Tim Ferriss?

  supported a number of female founders. And I've been told on multiple occasions, it's really good that you support female founders. And that rankles me and it pisses me off because I really could not give less of a fuck about the genitalia that someone has. I only invest in people who are good founders, period. And, you know, I have nonprofit activities, but investing in startups is not one of them. I don't do charity investing. So I'd love to, and you can expound on this in any way that you'd like, but what are your thoughts on being a female founder of a tech company?

• 26:15Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yeah, it's funny. We're like the mystical unicorns of the tech world. And, and, and everybody always asks me, my first response is, I have no idea because I've never been a male CEO. So I just don't have any, I don't have any data. Like, I don't have a basis for comparison. I can't say whether I've had a harder time fundraising because I'm a woman. Because I would have had to go and do the same pitch with a penis in order to really know. You know, if, if the negative responses, and there were plenty of them, if they were at all related to, you know, the fact that I'm a woman. I will say my views on this have softened a lot. So the whole women in tech conversation is, you know, it's always a headline. It's always, it's good clickbait and, and people are interested.

• 26:57Tracy DiNunzio?

  And for a long time, I kind of said it's irrelevant, you know, like, and because in my experience, it has felt irrelevant. But at this point, I've met enough female founders and also women who are working on the technical side of startups and, and the rest who have experienced things that while nobody can ever say definitively that it wouldn't have happened if they were a man, eh, you kind of get the impression that there's something going on. So I don't want to, you know, disparage or, or belittle my sisters in arms by saying like, hey, it's no big deal. Although if I'm being honest about my experience, I can't say that I've encountered anything that's felt impropriatous or negative.

• 27:41Tracy DiNunzio?

  And in some ways, there are benefits too, because, you know, you're certainly along the journey. I got some invites to some dinners last minute where I knew that it was just because they looked at the guest list and went, holy shit, there's no, there are no women coming. Let's get, who's, who do we know that's, that's female? And I got to go to some cool events because of that. So I think there's an effort, I guess that the one thing I would say is that I think that there's a real difference between overt sexism, which I don't believe exists that much i- in, in the tech sector. Um, and subtle, like behavioral lightly discriminatory stuff, which I do think does exist, even if it doesn't exist in my world and is, it's a difficult beast to battle

• 28:26Tracy DiNunzio?

  because it's, it's non-obvious and it's not always clear. And so. You know, I'm kind of on the fence about the whole thing because I, and I guess one other thing I can say is that I, I, until recently, our team was actually very guy-heavy. It was like, we have a female CEO, two other women, and all men on the team for a little while. Now it's much more balanced. I think that as a female-led company, we attract really evolved men, both as investors and as team members. And so I have to say that for the men that are in my world.

• 29:00Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, I've never been called evolved before. I'm very, I'm very excited about this.

• 29:05Tracy DiNunzio?

  I think you're a hump. And I mean, it's amazing, like, the more I talk to our various investors, many of them have daughters, many of them have wives who are powerhouses in their own right. Our team, most of the guys who are, you know, who have families, they, they seem to have a very healthy respect for the women in their lives. We get a lot of guys going home and asking their girlfriends and their wives for feedback about what we're building and taking their opinions very seriously. And our world is good for women. The tradesy world is a good place for a woman to be, and, and I hope that the rest of the tech sector evolves to a place where that's the way all women feel about their workplace.

• 29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I should point out also that Stephanie Telenius was the one who introduced us, and she's, of course, involved with Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, one of the more notable Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms. Also, she's on the board of Coach, if I'm not mistaken.

• 30:02Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yes.

• 30:03Tim Ferriss?

  So she's just a killer in her own right. Yeah, she's awesome. And I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I, I think it's worth exploring a little bit. So the, the composition of your team, for instance, you said was guy-heavy. How much of that, if any, do you think is attributable to the fact that a lot, at least, let's just say for the last 15 years, and this could change, but it seems to me when I talk to guys who are extremely adept in computer science, that they were socially awkward in high school, spent a lot of time alone, and as guys, they were less physically developed than females, less emotionally developed than females, generally speaking.

• 30:44Tracy DiNunzio?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Tim Ferriss?

  And either decided they wanted to create video games because they spent a lot of time alone playing video games, or Dungeons and Dragons, which I hate to say, that was my choice, and it was, seems to be the wrong path. It's hard to monetize the 20-sided die throwing ability, uh, it turns out. But it seems to be a kind of supply chain issue on some level when you're looking for technical hires. And I'm wondering how you think that's going to change and how important is it that it changes? I know that's a touchy way to phrase it, but I worry that sometimes people are either asking the wrong questions or two, getting so emotionally loaded that

• 31:30Tim Ferriss?

  they take positions that they don't reason themselves into. And if they take positions that they don't reason themselves into, it's impossible to reason them out of those positions. So that's, that's a bit of a long ass self indulgent question, but I

• 31:45Tracy DiNunzio?

  I get what you're getting at.

• 31:46Tim Ferriss?

  But I just, I, because I imagine you've had more conversations about this than I have. How do you think about these things? You know, how do you feel about these things?

• 31:55Tracy DiNunzio?

  So I think, so when we were 18 people and we're 50 now, it was myself and two other women who were both in junior positions and the rest of the team was all guys. And that is 100% directly attributable to a pipeline issue, meaning that at that time, we were hiring a lot of developers, a lot of product people, and the applicants for those positions were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively male. And we were a fast growing startup, super time crunched. And so, and really, I shouldn't even say that. We, we have always hired the best person for the position and we always will, regardless of gender. I think that that

• 32:35Tracy DiNunzio?

  is the best way to approach this whole issue in general, because nobody wants to be a quote unquote, charity hire. And it's, it does a disservice to women too, if you hire women just to be able to publish your diversity numbers. The pipeline issue goes all the way back to, you know, how do little girls perceive their abilities and their interests? And is it nature or nurture that drives more women into creative fields and more men into technical and engineering type fields? And yeah, I don't know the answer. Nobody knows the answer definitively, but I can speak to, I mean, I'm 36, so I'm old now. I don't know that my growing up even applies to.

• 33:16Tim Ferriss?

  Old.

• 33:17Tracy DiNunzio?

  Oldish, older than I was yesterday.

• 33:20Tim Ferriss?

  True.

• 33:22Tracy DiNunzio?

  And I know that as a young woman, I reached a certain point where I, cause, cause I was, I was terrible studier, but I was good in school anyway. But I reached a point where I felt like being a woman and being smart, it was kind of like being a, a neurosurgeon in a marathon, like it's nice to have, but it's not really applicable to what you're supposed to be doing. And that may also speak to where I grew up and et cetera, but I definitely got messages that being like a, a super smart woman was not the best thing you could do with your womanhood, that being like attractive and cool might be.

• 33:54Tim Ferriss?

  You mean for, for a, for mating purposes or, that sounds weird, but for, for finding a mate or for professional purposes or both?

• 34:02Tracy DiNunzio?

  Even before finding a mate was like a thing on my radar, just as a, as a young girl, just for life purposes, you know, it didn't feel like, I see it with, um, with kids today too, a little bit like, you just tend to look at a, a young girl and say, oh, she's so cute and praise a boy for being tough or smart. And that's just definitely something we do.

• 34:24Tim Ferriss?

  That's cause little boys are not cute.

• 34:26Tracy DiNunzio?

  They're not, they stink. No, um, no, they're, but, but yeah, you know, I think that the pipeline problem definitely has to do with some societal and cultural influences on young women as they're developing their, their interests. And you can just imagine if you're an 11 year old girl and you like to sit in front of your computer and, and hack away all day, it's not going to make you popular. It's not going to make people respond to you as well as if you were, you know, in training for your debutante ball or whatever people do. So I think that, you know, that's a larger kind of cultural and societal shift. But I see a lot of really amazing people of my generation raising young ladies to be incredibly

• 35:08Tracy DiNunzio?

  technical and Renaissance women. And, and I think we'll continue to do that and move in the right direction.

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