20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai

Anna Shedletsky is the Founder & CEO @ Instrumental, the startup that helps consumer electronics companies ship high-quality hardware, on time. They have funding from some of the best in the business including First Round Capital and a huge thanks to Phin Barnes @ First Round for the intro to Anna today. As for Anna, prior to Instrumental, Anna was a product design lead and manager for the Apple Watch and before that, a product design engineer for the Apple iPod. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Anna made the move from working on the Apple Watch to starting her own startup Instrumental? 2.) How does Anna approach the learning of new things? What is the methodology? What elements in particular has Anna found most challenging to grasp? 3.) Anna has experienced 2 very strange and different fundraising processes? What was strange about them? How did they differ? What did she learn from this experience? 4.) How can founders create a feeling of FOMO within their investors? What is core to this? What should founders be careful of when doing this? How should this be structured? 5.) Coming from Apple, Anna did not have a network among VCs and Founders. How did Anna build her network of VCs and founders? How can others founders do this? What is required for this to be done in a non-transactional organic way? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Anna’s Fave Book: The Lord of The Rings Anna’s Fave Blog: First Round Review As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anna on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout. Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with me, your host, Harry Stebbings, found hanging out on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs. It would be great to see you there. However, to the show today, and as it's Friday, we have a stellar founder for you in the hot seat today. So I'm thrilled to welcome Anna Shedletsky. Now, Anna is the founder and CEO at Instrumental, the startup that helps consumer electronics companies ship quality hardware on time. They have funding from some of the best in the business, including First Round Capital, and a huge thanks to Finn Barnes at First Round for the intro to Anna today. As for Anna, prior to Instrumental, Anna was a product design leader manager for the Apple Watch, and before that, a product design engineer for the Apple iPod. Now, in terms of strategic takeaways from an episode, today is a must-have for the pen and paper, as Anna breaks down her learning process, providing a methodology for how she scales the learning curve as fast as possible. But

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  before we dive into the show today, Founder Suite makes software for raising capital. In the last 12 months, startups using Founder Suite have raised over $130 million in angel and VC funding. Founder Suite's investor CRM is the market leader. It includes a searchable database of over 50,000 investors, as well as a beautiful new investor update tool for creating monthly or quarterly progress reports. Founder Suite's used by startups in Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Startups, and every other major accelerator. And listeners of this podcast get a whopping 40% off a monthly or annual subscription using the promo code 20MINUTEVC, that's two zero minute VC. Speaking of incredible software, Greenhouse Software designs tools that helps companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Recognized

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  as the 2017 best place to work in the US by Glassdoor, Greenhouse currently works with over 1,500 of the world's most innovative companies, such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap, Inc., and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company, but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's applicant tracking system, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people, visit greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow. But enough from me, so without further ado, I'm delighted to hand over to Anna Shedletsky, founder and CEO at Instrumental.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:17Harry Stebbings?

  Anna, it's such a pleasure to have you on the 20 Minute VC. Huge thanks to Phil at First Round for the intro, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Great to be here, Harry.

• 2:25Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to get started with a bit about you and how a rock star at Apple, this is Finn's words by the way, made the way to startup founder, and what the aha moment was for you with instrumental.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So, Apple was a great place to grow up as an engineer, and that was my first job out of school. I was a product design engineer at Apple for six years, designing mechanical components for three different iPods, and then I led system product design for the Apple Watch program. And so, as part of being at Apple, I got to learn all sorts of different things. I got access to a ton of resources, which made it, and actually a ton of responsibility, which made it possible to grow very quickly. And ultimately, my goal there was to learn how to build millions of things, and that's exactly what I got to do. I think as hardware founders will know, it's challenging just to build one thing that works, but building millions of things that function and look good is really something entirely different.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  And so, ultimately, the aha moment for me to leave that position at Apple, working on really kind of the coolest stuff that came out that year, is that it's twofold. So, the first is that I had a personal tragedy in my life that made me realize that life is uncertain and that I should spend whatever time I will get to build the world that I want to live in. And working on watch was great, but it wasn't going to result in a better world. And instrumental is working to solve a big, expensive problem in a really unloved space. And if we succeed, it will change how millions of things are made that we interact with every day. So, that was really appealing. And the second is having to do with kind of the timeframe in that I believe that the robotic revolution will happen during my lifetime,

• 4:04Speaker 02

  and I have some very unique skills and perspective to lend to the challenge. So, that's where I want to be spending my time. I think that automation has kind of a bad reputation in the United States at least. But as I wrote on my blog last week, if we don't automate... Others will and we won't be able to catch up. And I think it's important to keep that playing field as level as possible for as long as possible.

• 4:26Harry Stebbings?

  I do have to ask, before we dive into kind of automation and the processes around it, was it difficult to leave the security of Apple for founding Instrumental?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  I think the most difficult part of it was leaving my team. I really loved working with a watch product design team. But you know, really, the valley is a small place. I'm sure I'll get to work with them again in the future. You know, Apple does have a lot of resources, but there's something really exciting about striking out on your own and building something that is potentially even better.

• 4:57Harry Stebbings?

  So if I were to be really horrible here and ask you to surmise a biggest takeaway from your time at Apple and kind of condensing those years at Apple, is there any big takeaways that you have taken from your time at Apple and applied now to your new role as startup founder with Instrumental?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Well, two things. I think one at a strategic level and one at a tactical level. At a strategic level, Apple introduced me to the space that Instrumental works in. I got to see what manufacturing of consumer electronic devices is really like. And that exposure led me to understand the problems that our customers face. Essentially, I'm building a product for what I used to do. We help hardware engineers find and fix issues on their manufacturing lines. And that enables them to ship on time so they don't have to spend weeks in China like I had to do. And in the future, you know, we'll use that data that we're collecting and providing to our customers to develop artificial intelligence algorithms, which is kind of where the AI and instrumental.ai comes from.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And on a more tactical level, Apple has some great core values that I wanted to replicate at Instrumental. And the two that we've adopted are to make the decision based on what's best for the customer. That's a very unifying quality to have across the team because then people aren't arguing against each other. They're all arguing for the customer. And the second is to design down to the details. And I think that most people can agree that Apple does that really well and it creates a really high-quality product and we aspire to do the same.

• 6:25Harry Stebbings?

  And speaking of your transition there from employee at Apple to startup founder, one thing- Thing that Finn told me in particular that he was immensely impressed by is your ability to learn new elements of starting and running a business. And so with that in mind, I'd love to hear your methodology and how you approach the learning of new things.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  That's a great question and it's something that I have had to get a lot better at since I left Apple.

• 6:48Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so sorry for the meta question, that is deep.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  So I'm a career mechanical engineer, at least I was. I still feel that way at my core. And so while I know all sorts of information about the organizational structures of hardware teams, that's about it. I don't know anything about building software teams or finances, et cetera. At least that's the way I started. I had to learn that stuff. And so I've realized that I've created this repeatable process for learning of new things and new parts of building a business. And I can certainly walk through it. It might be a little tedious, but I think it'll be less tedious with an example. How does that sound, Harry?

• 7:24Harry Stebbings?

  I, I, I need to learn new things. I'm a recent VC and so I need to learn how to be a good VC, so this should be helpful.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Okay, so the first one is to identify the goal. So for this example, let's pick something that I think is pretty prevalent among founders. And let's say that's to hire your first software engineer. And the second is to identify the problem. The problem is what makes the goal not trivial. Uh, usually wouldn't be a pro- usually you wouldn't need that goal if, if that problem was easy. So in this case, the problem is that I'm a mechanical engineer. And then any software engineer that I would want to hire needs to be way better than me, but I don't know how to judge that. So the third step is research. I scour the web and books to get smart on the subject. I'm kind of a big nerd, so I read a lot. I speak to advisors, old colleagues. I've even inmailed random people on LinkedIn asking to get their advice.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  And interestingly enough, a lot of people will respond to you and get on the phone with you for 15 minutes to give you their thoughts. And I especially like to collect advice from several people and then ask those people to give me advice on the advice I've gotten from other people, uh, which is particularly useful when you're not really sure how to judge differing perspectives. And so in the case of hiring a software engineer, I read a lot online about what makes a good software engineering for an early stage. I read about the debate between requiring a coding assignment versus not. I studied a range of interview questions, tried to figure out which ones we should use. I asked some friendly founders to walk me through their software engineering hiring process, including what questions they use and how they judge responses as good or not as good.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  And then I got advice from my network on what the ideal profile for this hire would look like. Maybe this is someone that they knew wouldn't be willing to come work at our startup, but what skills do they have? What should we be looking for? And so that gave me a lot of information that I could use for step four, which is to define a plan. In this case, my co-founder and I set up a hiring interview flow, complete with the specific questions we would ask, and we started taking inbound candidates and sourcing ones we thought would be good. Fifth is, I think, kind of most important, which is to iterate until success. So in the beginning, we sucked at hiring software engineers. I think we've gotten pretty okay at it now. I'm sure we could always be better. But we made a lot of mistakes and we tried to learn from them.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Initially, it was taking us 60 minutes or more to find out that a candidate wasn't a fit, which is a really big time drain. We needed to get through a lot more applicants faster. And we actually found out it was easier and faster to figure out if someone was a fit by doing a culture screen first. It took 15 minutes. And essentially, would I want to have a conversation with this person again after this call? Or am I happy this call is over? And that's the culture screen. And so it made it much faster for us to quickly get through candidates that were going to be a good fit for instrumental. And then the other thing we've had to iterate on is how we offer, I mean, who we offer to. Managing candidate expectations at the offer stage is something I had to learn how to do kind of the hard way at the School of Hard Knocks.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And we also definitely gave an offer to at least one person that we really shouldn't have. And we've gotten better at finding the red flags earlier in that process. Luckily, that particular candidate turned us down, so we didn't end up making an irreversible mistake there.

• 10:39Harry Stebbings?

  I was about to ask, what do you do when you make the irreversible mistake?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  I think there's one more thing that's really important and that's to start a Plan B on the side. Anything that's company critical, like hiring this first hire or fundraising or whatever, you need to have a Plan B. And in this case, our Plan B was that we hired a contractor to work on our engineering, get started while we look for the right person. But ultimately, our Plan B got evolved into actually trying to reel in that particular contractor and bribing him over barbecue rib lunches to come join our company as our first engineer. And so ultimately, we had this plan to execute on, but it was our Plan B that ended up resulting in our first engineering hire.

• 11:21Harry Stebbings?

  So basically, forget all previous steps and offer Korean ribs. That is the secret. I do want to touch on the culture screening there because often if you kind of go for the would I like to have another conversation with them, it can lead to a to a company of very similar profiled people. How do you look to kind of insert an element of diversity and different thinking into the kind of fabric of the company with the culture screening like that?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And it's a great question and one that's really important to us. I think Instrumental has ended up being a team of very kind of angular people, but we're angular in different ways. And ultimately, our screen is for passion. And so we ask candidates to tell us about something they're passionate about. And that could be work related or not. Usually it's not. The best ones usually are things like food or hiking or biking. And being able to hear candidate actually get into a place where they're talking about something they're passionate about can help you to understand if this is someone that you'd want to be around. And so while everybody at Instrumental has their own unique flavor and personality and brings something different to the table, we all bring passion to the table. And I think that's really important to who we are at the core.

• 12:30Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned your workflow there for for learning new things and the methodology around it. One that you've not struggled with though, for sure, and have mastered is is obviously the engineering prioritization process. So talk to me about this and how this process begins and how you decide what to prioritize on.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, great question. I think what's really our kind of advantage here is that my co-founder and I are both Mechanical engineers and somehow we've started a software company and so we got to start out knowing nothing about how to manage a software team and engineering prioritization in a software team because hardware is fundamentally different and I think in the end that enables us to start from scratch and keep only what truly works. So we keep a running stack rank in a Google Doc of all of the potential initiatives that the engineering team could be working on and that includes things like features or security updates etc. And then we score each of those initiatives based on business goals that are identified on a quarterly basis. And so a business goal might be

• 13:31Speaker 02

  something like build XYZ feature to increase product value. What we realized though is that that didn't work out amazingly well because while it's easy to tell whether the team built the feature or not, it was difficult to understand if that actually increased product value. So we've kind of started to evolve this stack ranking process and and what we do instead is we have a we have a top line business goal which I am confident will result in an excellent business and in this case is a revenue goal. And then we have what we call the playbook which are the individual metrics underneath that support and build up to that larger goal. And the playbook items can also be things like strategic initiatives that maybe don't contribute to revenue right away

• 14:12Speaker 02

  but are important for building a healthy business. And I think what's really great about the stack rank is that it's publicly accessible to everybody on our team and the best engineers only ever want to work on the best and most important things to the company. And so making that really clear and kind of this public way makes it so that nobody's working on something that is less important. And the team has given us a lot of feedback that this is super valuable for them because it enables them to make micro decisions about should I stop my work to work on this other thing or is that other thing lower priority than what I'm working on right now. So this is this is something that we're continuing to evolve but I think is functioning really well at instrumental.

• 14:51Harry Stebbings?

  Talking about kind of what engineers want to work on there, one that's particularly interesting for me is kind of the role of kind of individual autonomy within the team. How do you view this? Is it something that you advocate for or do you look to kind of have a Whole moving entire body moving in in kind of one process.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I think that's a really hard question. I think the way that we resolve that is that because it's all public information, how we're making this decision. If someone brings new information to the table or has a new idea, it enables it to be fairly ranked against other things in the list and the staff rank. So I think that's been really great for this. I think the other thing that's been really great is that while we do have only one thing can be at the top of the list, we're often working down the list ahead of the rest of the team. And so we'll have kind of technical leads on a given initiative, work ahead to scope that initiative and understand how much will be required there. And so even on an engineering team of six,

• 15:50Speaker 02

  we have kind of two initiatives being worked on in parallel. And it's because those were the proper staffing for those initiatives.

• 15:57Harry Stebbings?

  But I do want to transition though, from your love of engineering to to my nerdy love of fundraising. Obviously, as a VC nerd, it kind of falls within that. So talking of fundraising, I know that you've been in two pretty unusual fundraisers. So I'm really intrigued to hear first, what made them unusual?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Great question. That's true. I think the things that made our fundraisers unusual were that in both cases, we were able to kind of fabricate like a FOMO, a fear of missing out. And then I think the other thing that we did is that we were able to raise significantly earlier than we were planning to raise, which gave us a really kind of the upper hand and the power in the discussion.

• 16:37Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, so many, so many good things to dig into there for me. How do you fabricate FOMO? How can you insert that element of competitiveness within the VC ecosystem, which as I know as a VC is inherently competitive?

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I think what's kind of frustrating about FOMO when you hear about it as an entrepreneur is that, you know, you kind of, you're told you need a term sheet in order to get a term sheet, but that creates a chicken and egg problem. And I think the the creativity here is in finding other ways to create FOMO when you don't have a term sheet to start with, or you don't have a preemptive, a preemptive term sheet. And so what we did. And I cannot take credit for this. This is, I fell into this and but I think that there's something really interesting here for others to take away. Is that a few months after taking angel funding, we applied to Y Combinator, fully intending to try to get in because we thought it would be a great network for our company. And our application was selected for an in-person interview and I picked a date three weeks out.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  And I happened to be meeting with a VC that I'd been kind of developing a relationship with over the last couple of months. And I asked him, what do you think about Y Combinator? Should I do Y Combinator? And he said, you don't need YC, you can raise money now. And he suggested that I go talk to all the other VCs I'd been building relationships with. Tell them that I had an interview scheduled and ask for their advice on whether we should do YC or not. And what I realized afterwards is that he had helped me create a FOMO situation with the YC interview. And so in the end, we actually got our first term sheet a week before our interview. And I even called Sam Altman to get his advice on why we should do YC instead of taking this term sheet. And frankly, he didn't convince me, so we signed the sheet and respectfully pulled out of the interview.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  And so in the end, I think we had that one term sheet, which then enabled us to get more. And we also happened to be able to raise between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which people say you can't do. But it was because we had this date that everybody else had to pony up or or miss out.

• 18:35Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, you said about building the relations there and kind of then using them with the YC connection. How did you look to to build the relations then, coming from an engineering background at Apple, where you obviously weren't so inserted into the VC community like like VCs or startup founders might traditionally be? So how did you look to build those relationships?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Great question, and it kind of goes back to the methodology of learning new things that we just talked about. The problem there being I had no, I had no entrepreneurial background when I started my company. That was the problem. And so kind of my method there was I went out to go find one. And a great way to start an entrepreneurial network is to meet other founders. So I hosted dinners at my house, several of them, with several different groups of founders. I knew like two founders, and so I asked them to bring two other founders that they knew. And I met those people and then had additional dinners where I invited those people and they invited other people. And so free food is a great way to meet founders.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Founders are how I met many of the VCs that in my early days that I had been introduced to or other people in my network. And so I didn't know what I should be doing in this proverbial like build relationships with VCs. People say that all the time, but it feels like you're always pitching anyway. So how do you build a relationship where you're not pitching? And I think what I I have kind of stumbled into is you just go and ask advice. This is a great way to get like half an hour of free consulting about what you should be worried about in your business and what you should be doing about X, Y, Z or the other. And that's kind of how I've approached it.

• 20:10Harry Stebbings?

  There's also no better referral than a founder referral for VCs. They take that as kind of the highest form of solicitation.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I've heard that. That's why you have to start by feeding founders free.

• 20:21Harry Stebbings?

  I'm noticing a trend with the Korean ribs and the dinners. This is a good way to get things done. I'm intrigued with the fundraising process. Were there any mishaps along the way or any stumbles that potentially kind of halted your progress and made it slightly difficult for you in the process?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that I have one kind of last piece of advice that I think would be great to share with the broader founder community based on what we've experienced. And really that piece of advice is that even once you get a term sheet, even if you like it, your high watermark term sheet, you love the investor, don't get lazy and start closing off other promising conversations with other investors that you'd actually consider by rushing them too much. We had our high watermark term sheet pulled on us for what we believe was no fault of our own. A week after we thought we'd finished the pre-signing due diligence and had started trading red lines back and forth. And that pulled term sheet created difficulties for us in our process because we'd already started shutting down other conversations.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  And then we couldn't really open those conversations up again. And so I think the lesson here is that even though it's very bad behavior, pulled term sheets do happen, they can happen to you, they can happen to good companies. We believe we're a good company. And I think the best defense seems to be to have at least two high watermark term sheets that you can work with in parallel and to kind of not close down conversations just because you think you're done and you just really want to be done with the fundraising process.

• 21:47Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely, portfolio approach to term sheets, nothing like creating more.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 21:52Harry Stebbings?

  But I do want to move into a quickfire round with you now. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. About sixty seconds or so, how does that sound?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  I think that's fine.

• 22:02Harry Stebbings?

  That's sixty seconds per one, don't worry, I'm not going to go through five and sixty. So let's do the most challenging aspect for you, being CEO.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  I think the most challenging aspect of being a CEO is feeling like I have three or four full-time jobs at any given time and trying to do all of them well. So hiring, fundraising, selling, running everything else that nobody else is thinking about, trying to plan ahead. These are all the things that are constantly swirling around. And then ultimately still trying to build a company that I want to work at from a selfish perspective, but also that my employees who I care about also want to work at.

• 22:37Harry Stebbings?

  What's your favourite book and why?

• 22:39Speaker 02

  This one is a great question, but I'm going to come across as such a nerd. I think that my favourite book is actually Lord of the Rings.

• 22:47Harry Stebbings?

  I've never read it or seen the film, I have to say.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  The reason is that Tolkien, I read Tolkien as a small child and I learned to appreciate the power of the well-crafted sentence and the power of the well-chosen word. And this inspired me to actually be a creative writing minor when I got my degree. And I use my writing skills every day as a CEO and I attribute my interest in writing to having read Lord of the Rings. So that has to be my favourite book.

• 23:18Harry Stebbings?

  And absolutely, that does make you sound like a nerd.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  That's fine.

• 23:23Harry Stebbings?

  No, but I do want to ask then an industry-specific question. And this is the most exciting potential application of the buzzword of the day, machine learning, in manufacturing.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  It's really a wide-open space. And so I think what's most exciting is what we are working on, which is creating closed-loop feedback control around the manufacturing line. Not just one specific process, as is kind of done today, but the entire line, the entire supply chain. And I think that's a super exciting, wide-open space for machine learning.

• 23:54Harry Stebbings?

  I can't help but ask this, it's not on the schedule. Why is manufacturing kind of so unloved?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  It's pretty antiquated and the processes are pretty antiquated and the people who work in this space are really always just focused on executing. And so they don't have a lot of time to think about how it could be better and what technologies could be better. And I think that, you know, we live in this in society of consumer software and we kind of expect that same consumer software to carry over to this industry and it just hasn't. It hasn't converted well. And so that's kind of what we're doing is we're trying to bring these new technologies that that everybody is familiar with and used to from the consumer side into an industry that that is just, you know, it's not very sexy. And I think that's maybe why.

• 24:39Harry Stebbings?

  What's your favorite blog or newsletter? What are the must reads when they come in?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  I think that I'm going to give a plug to the first round review. It's really well written and they're always talking about a topic that is useful to me as an entrepreneur.

• 24:51Harry Stebbings?

  No, it's always my must read too. And then I want to finish today with with you. And the next five years for you and for instrumental, what's the road ahead?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Oh, man, it's gonna be a bumpy ride, I'm sure. But I think I'm gonna leave this one up for time to tell. So we'll just we'll both have to wait and see. But certainly, we'll be working really hard towards it.

• 25:10Harry Stebbings?

  Anna, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. As I said, Finn could not have recommended you more highly. So I'm so thrilled that we got to do this.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Thank you for taking the time.

• 25:21Harry Stebbings?

  And again, I want to say a huge thank you to Anna for giving up her time today and revealing the incredible scaling journey of instrumental. And I'm so excited to see the future ahead for them and the team. If you like the show today with Anna, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stubbings with two Bs, or you can check out the new blog on mojito vc.com. I'd absolutely love to see your thoughts and feedback on that. But before we leave you today, Founder Suite makes software for raising capital. In the last 12 months, startups using Founder Suite have raised over $130 million in angel and VC funding. Founder Suite's investor CRM is the market leader. It includes a searchable database of over 50,000 investors, as well as a beautiful new investor update tool for creating monthly or quarterly progress reports. Founder Suite's used by startups in Y Combinator, Techstars,

• 26:04Harry Stebbings?

  500 Startups, and every other major accelerator. And listeners of this podcast get a whopping A monthly or annual subscription using the promo code 20minutevc, that's two zero minute vc. Speaking of incredible software, Greenhouse Software designs tools that helps companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Recognised as the 2017 best place to work in the US by Glassdoor, Greenhouse currently works with over 1500 of the world's most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap, Ink and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's applicant tracking system, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers.

• 26:47Harry Stebbings?

  Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people, visit greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I look very forward to bringing you next week's episodes.