20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early

Julia Enthoven is the Founder & CEO @ Kapwing, the startup that provides a new, collaborative platform for creating images, videos, and GIFs. To date they have raised $13m from some dear friends of the show including Saar Guur @ CRV, Mamoon Hamid @ Kleiner Perkins, Niv Dror @ Shrug and Nikhil Basu Trivedi @ Shasta. Prior to founding Kapwing, Julia was an Associate Product Manager @ Google where she worked on everything from image search to sign up workflows. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups and came to found the future of content editing with Kapwing? 2.) What does Julia believe are the 4 benefits to building a website over an app today? How does this change your development cadence and speed of product iteration? How does this change your economics and margin structure? Where does Julia see many founders making mistakes here? 3.) Why does Julia believe that marketing innovation is as important as product innovation? Kapwing is now at 1m users per month, what has been Julia's biggest lessons in scaling a customer base to this size with very little spend? How does Julia think about marketing channel mortality rate? How should founders approach this? 4.) Why did Julia decide it was better to bootstrap than straight away trying to raise VC dollars? What were the benefits of this? Was it the right decision? What was the turning point when Julia realised was the moment to raise external funding? How did her mindset change as a result of the funding? How does bootstrap life compare to VC funded startup? 5.) How is Julia finding the personal scaling journey from PM to CEO? What have been some of the biggest challenges? What has she done to overcome them? What advice would Julia have for other newly minted CEOs? What have been some of Julia's biggest lessons in what it takes to hire the very best talent early? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Julia’s Fave Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Julia on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to the 20 minute VC and Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings, at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs on Instagram. And what a special episode we have in store for you today. So this interview was very, very unique. After the episode, I was so impressed and excited by the vision and all that could be built here that there was no way I couldn't not ask if I could invest. I'm thrilled to say that this exceptional founder let me and I personally joined their Series A led by Sarah at CRV, announced earlier this week. The question is, have you guessed the company yet? Well, I'm super excited to welcome Julia Antoven, founder and CEO at Kapuin, the startup that provides a new collaborative platform for creating images, videos and GIFs. To date, they've raised $13 million from some dear friends of the show, including the likes of Saagar at CRV, Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins, Niv Dror at Shrug,

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  and Nikhil Basutrivedi at Shasta. And prior to founding Kapuin, Julia was an Associate Product Manager at Google, where she worked on everything from image search to sign up workflows. And I do also want to say a huge thank you to the wonderful Dylan at Figma for the interest to Julia, without which this episode wouldn't have happened, the angel investment wouldn't have happened. Dylan, I owe you one, my friend, and many mojitos on me to thank you for that. I want to start today with a big shout out to my friends over at ActiveCampaign. With their platform, you can create unique customer experiences that attract, nurture and convert leads into customers, into repeat customers. Over 80,000 companies use ActiveCampaign to hit their sales targets with intelligent automations that send the right message to the right person using the right method at the right time. If you already have sales and marketing tools you love,

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:52Harry Stebbings?

  in the coming weeks. The Ezra Full Body Scan costs $1,950, and they also offer installment plans for as little as $180 per month. Also, 20 Minute VC listeners get 10% off their first Ezra scan by signing up at ezra.com/10vc. That's forward slash 10 vc. But enough from me, so now I'm very excited to hand over to Julia Entovin, founder and CEO at Capwing.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:24Harry Stebbings?

  Julia, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. As I said before, I've heard so many great things from Nicholas Shasta, Eric Tornberg, Mamun KP. So thank you so much for joining me today, Julia.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm super grateful to have those awesome investors behind us.

• 3:38Harry Stebbings?

  Well, as I said, listen, I'm a huge fan of the product as well, which I actually haven't had a chance to tell you. But I do want to kick off today with a little bit about you and some context. So before we dive into that, how did you make your way into the world of startups and come to change the way that we think about editing today with Kapwing? What was that aha moment?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So my dad was an entrepreneur when I was young, and I always admired him a lot and wanted to have my own business or dreamed of that when I was, growing that when I was older. But I didn't really know what industry that would be in until I came to Stanford in 2011 and started studying CS, took a CS class my sophomore year and just fell in love with the pace and the radical impact that tech has. So I studied computer science and then after school, I decided to join Google as an associate. Associate Product Manager, which is their training program basically for entry level PMs. And I happened to be randomly assigned to the same team as my now co-founder, who had graduated the year before me. So we were coworkers at Google for two years. And that serendipitous assignment obviously led us to develop a super important working relationship.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  So that made the jump into startups a lot easier. In terms of the aha moment, it didn't come until after I had left Google. Eric and I were both working on Google Image Search together in our second year. So while we were there, we'd learned a lot about products related to multimedia, like videos and GIFs, images, music on Google Search. And we were witnessing just how much the market demand was growing for that sort of content. So that kind of gave us the context for our thinking around the product. But once we left Google in the summer of 2017, the idea for Kapwing actually came from just our own product pain using existing options for video editing software and multimedia editing software. We both happened to experience at the same time independently

• 5:21Speaker 02

  a struggle around making a certain kind of simple video edit. So I was trying to append photos together into like a slideshow for my grandma's birthday, just casually, something I was doing at home. Eric was trying to add subtitles or like timed text annotations to his family's vacation video. And we were just both jamming on how crazy it was, the options that were available to us, that could use these spammy websites or you could install Adobe Premiere and like figure out how to use that, which was very challenging and expensive and heavyweight. Or you could use a Google app, but then you had to transfer the things back and forth between your computer and that. And so really the inspiration for Kapwing just came from our own pain as consumers trying to create this kind of content.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  And we set out to build what we wanted to use for one very specific type of media format. And yeah, in the early days, it was just us, you know, bootstrapping ourselves. And we built the very first version of the product just for one very specific kind of video. And from there, we basically listened to our users on the different kinds of tools, editing tools that we were building for the browser.

• 6:22Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I totally agree with you in terms of that pain point. And I want to start on, as you said there about the first build, because I've read before a piece that you wrote brilliantly. Well, and when we chatted before, you said to me, build a website and not an app. So I want to start with that because that almost seems contradictory and stays kind of app driven world that it seems. So why would you say build a website and not an app? And what are the benefits to that in two thousand and nineteen?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the reason that I have written about this topic and that I care about it is because I think a lot of entrepreneurs sort of think about apps as startups or like as software that they should dive right into. And don't think of websites first, even though I think it's wiser to build a website first. And I'll caveat this by saying, of course, there are exceptions to every rule. But in general, I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to build a website first when they're in the early stages of product development. There's four reasons for why that's or why I think that websites have an advantage over apps for early stage startups. The first is that getting users is easier when you have a website. Users don't want to download apps anymore and users are more willing to discover new publishers when they're browsing the web versus when they're browsing the App Store. Users browse the web a lot more often than they browse the App Store.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  We've acquired a Kapwing, we've acquired most of our users for free through Google Search, which is a super accessible distribution channel even for bootstrapping founders. The second reason is it's easier to make money with websites over apps. First of all, Apple or Google takes a significant piece of any transaction that goes through a native app. So that reduces the margins on your payments and people are just more willing to use their company credit card when it works on their computer versus a mobile only experience. The Kapwing Pro subscription, which is the premium version of Wang, costs twenty dollars a month. Whereas comparable subscriptions for native apps like Fly or TV, for example, costs like five dollars a month. So we've seen that people are much more willing to invest when it works on their computers. The third reason is it's easier to scale a website than to scale a native app.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  So if you do see success in your early product, then it's easier to get that to more users. Internationalization is easier because the Chrome browser automatically translates websites as users browse them. And so even if you're an English speaker or some other language, you can reach foreign nationals or foreign language speakers with your website. And that's true, complaining only forty percent of our users today are based in the U.S. Also, websites automatically work on all devices. If you use responsive design, then you can reach mobile users and desktop users rather than just. Or the other. And the last reason that I think is maybe the most compelling for an early stage founder is you can just build the MVP faster on the web than you can with an app. There's no independent review process, so you can just ship things without having to worry about the constraints or requirements of the app store.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Your engineers only need to work in one front end language, JavaScript, and you can push things out here like every single day without gating features behind a release version. So that has been super instrumental for Kapuei. In the early days, we were pushing things all the time, almost daily. And it allowed us to fix problems as they came up rather than needing to really like deeply QA the product before it even had users. So I think that's a super important thing when you're still trying to validate business ideas.

• 9:20Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I love that breakdown. I'm fully bought into the side over the app now, but I do want to touch on the first, let's start on actually the last one there. You mentioned the ease of iteration and deployment on web versus delayed deployment cycles with app publishers. When I spoke to Nicholas Shasta, one of your investors, he said that you're constantly launching new products and features, as you just mentioned. And his question to you was, what enables you to move so quickly on building products?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  So in the beginning, it was just me and my co-founder working on our own and we were bootstrapping with limited savings. So we were forced to be highly iterative and super responsive to needs that we could directly solve. And in some ways that was our advantage because we built things really quickly and we built things, some of which, you know, didn't work, but most of which did. And those directly solved people's problems rather than having like feature creep into the products. After we raised the seed round, we were really patient with hiring. We brought on a really excellent engineer as our first employee who has experience as a manager. So he's helped increase our cadence by introducing a sprint process for our engineering team as it grew, helping with hiring and people management, all sorts of other things that Eric and I had less experience with. So that's helped us keep up our engineering velocity over the last year.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  And then I would say that also this approach has been great for solving some problems and it's good for getting early traction, but other problems just take longer to solve. So I do think that like we have refined our iterative approach to product development. And in some ways, we've started to move slowly in places where it makes sense to move slowly, like making sure we're investing in quality, performance, scale, and a deeper competitive vote without losing that step function changes that set us apart in the beginning.

• 10:52Harry Stebbings?

  I totally see that in terms of those foundational elements in terms of the products and what a product it is. And in terms of the next element, you said about ease of gaining users and how that differs versus apps. And I want to discuss that because you said to me, marketing innovation is just as important as product innovation. So I can't not pick this. Why did you think this and what leads your thinking there?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So the reason I feel this so strongly is because it was such a learning of mine, something I didn't expect when I left Google. At Google, product is king. You know, if you build great products, people will come. The organization does a lot to shield its product managers from marketing or sales or any other function outside of product development and engineering. But when you're not a huge company with an existing brand following, when you're a new company and new brand and you're just trying to get your very first users, you need really like radical tactics to get attention. Otherwise, you're not going to sort of rise above the noise. And that was something I did not anticipate when I left Google because I was sort of so bought into this product myth. And I think it's extremely important for early entrepreneurs to think about how they innovate in marketing and distribution,

• 11:57Speaker 02

  rather than just think about how they innovate in product and kind of be discouraged when people ask them, how will you get people to use it?

• 12:03Harry Stebbings?

  Ma, what moves the needle for you in terms of your marketing innovation? Because you decided on obviously the structure being the site over the app in the early days. What really worked for you in terms of the marketing innovation to really acquire those early customers?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yep. So the first thing was we were lucky in that we knew a lot about search and we knew how SEO works. And so just from the very early days, we understood that we needed to create, have a domain name. We needed to be able to drive backlinks to that domain. And we needed to have pages that would rank for large queries. So we came into it already understanding the importance of SEO and the kind of volume and quality that that could get you if you did it right. And then to drive backlinks, to get people on the internet to start talking about KuPig and to get people to start building brand awareness. We did so many things. We were super experimental in the beginning and most of those things didn't work. And I think that's always been sort of fundamental to how we approach marketing innovation is to be really experimental and to throw a lot at the wall and sort of learn a lot as you go,

• 12:59Speaker 02

  rather than trying to be super strategic about each change. And sort of like invest a lot in a channel before you've proven it out. It's kind of like the saying, like, you want to build it in a lab before you built it in a factory. The same thing applies to marketing innovation for sure. We had a few channels that have been great for us, although I'll caveat this by saying the channels that worked for us probably won't work for other entrepreneurs because there are decreasing marginal returns after someone discovers a marketing channel. But we were really successful with Product Hunt. We put out a lot of design collections and free tools on Product Hunt for the sort of maker audience. And we were nominated for Product Hunt Makers of the Year in 2018, last year. So that channel has been great for us. The second is, we did a lot of content marketing.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So I have written a lot of blog articles that are somewhat controversial, but mostly just like really open and try and be really real. Those articles have done well on Hacker News, which has driven a lot of backlinks to the site. And we also did just like a lot of press stunts, like sort of little newsworthy things that got us into publications, really high authority publications like KQED and Wired and The Atlantic, etc. So those things, you know, I think Eric and I, my co-founder and I, have always said we're lucky because we're young and had nothing to lose. So we did so many things and most of them didn't work, but it was fine because the ones that did got us our initial traction.

• 14:14Harry Stebbings?

  That's fantastic to hear about the experimental approach and always gonna be an interesting one in terms of the successes and failures. I do have to ask, and this is off schedule, but I'm too intrigued. How do you think about channel mortality today? And when you're riding the wave high on one, that transitionary moment of when you have to jump to the subsequent one and always have the next in your mind, how do you think about that?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think about it as you sort of have two different pieces when you're thinking about marketing strategy. The first is, you have to be just a radical brainstormer, coming up with a lot of ideas, being really plugged into what things are happening in the world and on the internet. One of our like fundamental values at Quing actually is get people talking. So we, even just as a team cultural tenet, we talk about what things in the world are trending, what fads are happening and why. The second is the more analytical side, which is that you have to take those ideas and prioritize them in some way to try the right things. And we're building our discipline around this, but basically it comes from just keeping an eye on like, what is the revenue impact of every new channel or new idea?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  How might it over time affect our revenue impact and just setting up a way that we can sort of try the most impactful ideas first? And like I said, I mean, I think unlike product development, when you are exploring new marketing channels, a lot of them don't go well. And that has to be something you expect at the beginning.

• 15:28Harry Stebbings?

  Totally, it is indeed. In terms of the platforms themselves, it's interesting. I had Henry Ward, the founder of Carter on the show. And he said the best companies grow through owning their lines of distribution. I'm really interested, would you agree with him here in the importance of specifically owning the lines of distribution? And how do you think about leveraging the existing powers that be in terms of the incumbent platforms?

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I definitely think that, you know, you control your own destiny the most. If you can build up your own following and your own base, if you have your own audience, then you control the distribution of channel completely. And the way you build up your own audience is through your own personality or your own brand. I definitely agree that the marginal cost of every marketing channel decreases over time. The highest return thing you can do is to discover a new channel before anyone else does. And so that requires just a lot of experimentation, a lot of creativity, like I said. Yesterday I heard from Claire Bird at Twilio, formerly at Envision and Marketing at Envision. And she was arguing that every SaaS company is like a lifestyle brand. So even though we're, we're running a tech company, we learn a lot from the disruptive, direct to consumer brands

• 16:29Speaker 02

  that are building kind of a cult following and false scarcity and using other tactics that consumer brands have pioneered to try and apply them to the SaaS product and the SaaS company.

• 16:38Harry Stebbings?

  That's super interesting to hear about, but consumer brand, a preference and outlook that we need to adopt in this world today. I, I do want to ask another one, and it's another statement that you said that intrigued me, and it's every company is becoming a media company. What did you mean by this transition to media being that so centric piece? And maybe kind of how does that correlate to brand marketing moving forward?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a few pieces of this. So first of all, I think it relates to what I was just saying about controlling your own audience or having your own audience that you can distribute to. If you can develop your own audience and carve out your own following, then you have people that could be buyers who you're distributing content to and building a relationship with over time. So I think in that way, every company is sort of in buyers and wants to develop that and have some function around that. But at a higher level, I think people are great storytellers. It's something. That we do a lot better than computers do. So I think that over the next 10 years as automation takes over more jobs, more people will move into creative careers, sort of storytelling and media. And so I think there's a lot of sort of modern media entrepreneurs that you can look at like Glossier,

• 17:38Speaker 02

  in some ways like Dollar Shave Club, Hims, Kylie Cosmetics, Gary Vee. This podcast, being an entrepreneur and a storyteller, has enormous business value. And I think more and more companies recognize that that's the case in every domain and every vertical. So there's many, many more people exploring how they can share stories digitally on the internet, which is part of the basis, of course, the hypothesis for deploying.

• 17:58Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, my words, you know how to flatten my ego, including me alongside those names, but I like that a lot. I do want to ask it because you mentioned like building that almost consumer brand like feel. And it was something that I discussed with Mamoon when we had a chat before. And he said, ask about the movement from prosumer to enterprise. How do you think about making that transition today, Julia?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of bottoms up SaaS companies or companies that aspire to become bottoms up SaaS companies that face a similar kind of transition. You know, we are really, we've had success with the individual tools that we've built for individuals. But we are moving now towards thinking about how can we add value, not just at the individual level, but also at the team and also at the team level. So there's kind of three things I would say I think about in sort of this crossing this quote unquote enterprise chasm. The first is that you need to create a product that's really integrated into professional workflows. So that works well with SAML off, that works well with the different products that are adjacent to your product. And that is something that just adds a lot of value at its step in a professional workflow. The second is you need to build team features, like I mentioned.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  So you need to build time saving has to increase as more people come onto the product. So that there's an incentive for the product to be shared within a company rather than just used by one individual. And the third for us is that we're building a two-layer value proposition. So that we add value not only for individual creators, but also for their managers or for their clients who want visibility into what's happening and want to understand how they can collaborate and review content as it's being created. So those three things are big initiatives for us right now and it's definitely. A shift away from just how do we build products for individual creators towards how do we build products for creative teams and eventually for creative companies. Not easy. There's a lot of challenges in this move. One of the challenges is that we have to split our own focus.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  So we can't lose adding value for individuals' side. We definitely need to continue innovating on the tools. But it's a very different focus and cadence than building tools for teams and for professionals. The second is, I would say, we're building for a buyer who's not our user. So we've had to do a lot more like user research and customer research on people that don't already use Kapwing to understand like what is the need of a manager or of a reviewer rather than just what is the need of a creator.

• 20:11Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, in terms of the audiences and the split between the two, do you segment the teams into prosumer versus enterprise? Or do you think actually there's beauty in the blending of the two in terms of both product and sales and marketing disciplines?

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely blending of the two. I mean, I think every modern SaaS product understands that the experience has to be good for the end user nowadays. Or else a startup just like us could come in and disrupt your access to the end user and ultimately reduce the value that your product adds. So I think that definitely we think about how can we add value for the end user and also for the person above them if they're inside of a company. And the second thing I would say is that there are many prosumer media entrepreneurs, even a huge company like Adobe still makes a lot of money from their individual creators who subscribe to the Creative Cloud. So even though Kapwing is moving up market trying to serve teams and creative professionals, it will not lose its loyalty to helping creative people get things done.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Because that's still so important for the business and for the product value proposition.

• 21:09Harry Stebbings?

  It absolutely is. But I mean, you mentioned one thing in particular there, which was the value creation across the different layers. And I do want to dig into that specifically with regards to kind of your business model, so to speak. Because when I chatted to Nikhil in particular, he mentioned this and the striking element, which is why did you take the approach of bootstrapping and monetizing from day one? Which actually is very contrarian today compared to many people who immediately go out and raise with the pre-seed round. Why did you choose this route and what were the benefits for you?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I could speak about this for days. You know, we wanted validation before we raised money in the beginning. So for example, Eric and I worked on a different idea first for like two and a half months before we started working on Kapwen. And we really liked the idea. I think it still is a great idea and could exist one day. But we just couldn't get traction for it in the early days. And we realized that quickly and could sunset it rather than needing to sort of, you know, we didn't have like six figures in the bank that we needed to figure out how to spend or investors that had put trust in us around that idea who who didn't want us to kill it. So I think that there's a lot of incentive for the VCs to put money into a lot of different ideas with the hope that a one or two of them truly become businesses. But for the founder, you don't want to spend your time working on a bad business idea.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  And so you really want to make sure that you have a thing that has potential before you go out and raise. And my advice to founders around that is that you do not really know if your idea has potential until you start trying to get some traction for it, until you have some real business validation. So for us, I would say, was it the right decision for us to bootstrap versus versus raising at the beginning? I will caveat all of that by saying, you know, it definitely depends. We're not the kind of founders who even could have just gone out and raised at a huge valuation. We didn't have like the right personal relationships or resume or track record or whatever behind us to just to go out and raise with nothing. So I think that for other kinds of ideas, you have to have capital upfront. For our idea, which is a pure software idea, we could get to, one, we could get some business validation without needing capital upfront.

• 23:05Harry Stebbings?

  I'm really intrigued because you said there about getting to that point of validation in terms of the product itself and the traction that you see. You did decide obviously to raise in the end from our fans Mamoon and then Nikhil obviously and Shasta and then obviously with the series A. So I do want to ask, what was that inflection moment for you, which changed your mindset as to now's the right time to raise venture?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's two elements of this. So the first is, you know, to be totally honest with you, like we thought a lot about it in the early days. And when we saw that we had the opportunity to work on building, you know, a big business rather than just a smaller like lifestyle business, you know, we wanted to move on it because we want to build something that has a huge amount of impact in the world. So the first time that we thought about raising money was when we basically had some. Write us a term sheet and tell us like we should and that we could. The second thing I would say here is that we got lucky and that happened when it did because it's a highly competitive space and I think now in retrospect, I see that we have advantages in certain ways because of our timing and we knew we needed to move quickly so that we didn't lose out on those advantages. And I think that capital helps you just move faster and capture the market in a speedier way.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  And for this market in particular, I think there's the competitive dynamics require that.

• 24:14Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, how did you find, and this is a bit of a strange one, but how did you find the transition from bootstrap life where it's you and your co-founder and a very different life to a venture-backed life where you have real institutional investors on board and behind you? Did life change and did that expectation weight differ?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Definitely, yeah, definitely life changed. I think one thing that I have come to recognize is that investors and sort of most of the literature out there, which is mostly written by investors, oftentimes will basically talk about things from the investor's perspective, like talk about raising money early or other kinds of ways you should spend on marketing, customer acquisition and other pressures that they put on entrepreneurs because they're trying to get that one winner who's just going to return the fund or whatever. I think that for us, like we've definitely had to stick to some of our bootstrapping roots, even as we've transitioned towards venture-backed growth because we recognize that founders shouldn't spend quickly, like you need to have money in the bank so that you can make mistakes and afford to go on a crooked path sometimes. Founders shouldn't scale prematurely. You need to be so sure that you have product market fit before you bring people on to fill

• 25:14Speaker 02

  a need that doesn't exist yet. And so I think that we've been really careful about those things, even as we've started to grow. Outside of that, I definitely think life has changed in the better in a lot of ways. So first of all, we've been able to bring on a team with different expertise than us, which brings in a lot of new talent, but also perspectives and makes growing a company and just makes the learning curve even steeper, which is great. I also think I'm learning a lot about being a manager, building a company, thinking about culture and people, roles aligned with the people's expectations of what they want down the road and all of those learnings are super valuable for my career. And yeah, I mean, I definitely think that the bottom line for both bootstrapping and for venture-backed founders is that success cures a lot of things. Like we've been super deliberate about making sure that we're building

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Right things every moment and it's not about spending fourteen hours in the office every day or hiring a team that's going to spend fourteen hours in the office. It's about making smart prioritization decisions and being right about what you go after.

• 26:08Harry Stebbings?

  I love that kind of mindset of prioritization. I do want to touch on the element of, you said there about building the initial team. Cause it's when I spoke to Mamoon, something that he very much picked up on. He said, the team that you've assembled is amazing. And he asked, how did you think about the initial team build out? And what've been some big lessons for you on what it takes to really get the best talent early?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so have learned a huge amount about this issue. I would say that we were patient with hiring and at the time it felt scary. I mean, we just closed a seed round and you know, two months later, we still hadn't had anyone join. And after we closed the seed, even though we were spending a huge amount of our own time on recruiting and getting coffees with people and things like that. So I would say, you know, don't be afraid to be patient. It matters so much who your very first five hires are because they're the people that are going to carry the culture and carry who you're hiring down the road. So I would say in San Francisco, at least, there's absolutely no silver bullet to hiring. Lots of companies are building distributed workforces or remote workforces, which I think is great for some companies, but for us, you know, we've always been local. We knew we wanted to build a local team.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  I won't go into that here, but we approach hiring the same way that we approach everything else, which is with a huge amount of experimentation and hustle, just trying a lot of different things, trying to do things that are non-traditional and see what sticks. For example, we recorded a video of Eric and I, just like a single take video with subtitles and posted it as a Facebook ad targeting software engineers, basically just telling people, here's who we are, here's what our company does, like, please come work for us. And that Facebook ad actually sourced one of our hires. So I think we spent like $200 in advertising costs. And that's so small compared to like a $15,000 recruiting fee. So yeah, I mean, I think we've tried a ton of different things. We're not afraid to put ourselves out there and that has worked for us in both marketing and in recruiting.

• 27:51Harry Stebbings?

  If you could see my face, I have a massive grin on my face. I absolutely love the kind of grassroots hustle there of that video. And I didn't know about that. So that's very funny to hear. I do want to move into my favorite element of any episode though, Julia, being the quickfire round. So I say a short statement and you hit me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to rock and roll?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:09Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. So your favorite book and why? What must I read?

• 28:12Speaker 02

  I highly recommend Influence by Robert Choudini. It just gives you a great approach to how you can put more meaning behind your words and move people toward in the direction that is right.

• 28:23Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about the Valley and the tech ecosystem around it today?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  I would say definitely the number of software engineers in the world, especially the number of female software engineers. I think that software engineers are just so, so valuable, can create so much impact at such a high pace. And I would encourage anyone who's going into college to at least take one CS class and think about a career in computer science.

• 28:44Harry Stebbings?

  When you self-analyze, what's your biggest weakness and what are you doing to improve it?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  I have a lot of weaknesses, but I think one of my biggest ones is that I like to be involved in everything. And so especially as there become more and more things to get involved with, I need more focus and more discipline about getting the one thing down that I'm doing well.

• 29:01Harry Stebbings?

  I could definitely share that one with you. It's not a strength of mine either. Tell me, employee stock options, a lot is often discussed. What needs to change in your mind?

• 29:09Speaker 02

  I would say one thing that baffles me about employee stock options is just that when you're talking to a really highly paid software engineer, you know, the likelihood that their options outweigh how much they're getting paid in base salary is rather low, essentially. So I think that there's an overemphasis in the Valley on on options and sort of becoming instantly overnight a huge billion, multi-billion dollar company, rather than talking about like, how does this fit into my lifestyle over the next five to 10 years, which is more relevant if you're trying to build a company that's going to be around for a long time.

• 29:38Harry Stebbings?

  Now, this one was from Eric Torrenberg, so I have to give him credit. But he asked, what makes a great investor update?

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Two things. One, cadence. So regularly sending it on the same day of every month and giving your investors peace of mind that they will receive it soon. The second is readability. So you should approach an investor update just like you would any other email. It should have structure, photos, colors, things that make it much easier to skim.

• 30:03Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. Love that. And I couldn't agree more in terms of the cadence and the organizational discipline that that shows to the investor. Who was the first person to believe in you with Kapwing? And what did they do?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  I would say the first people to believe in us were our very first customers. Those people put their, well, first their videos and their content and their work stream, but then their money behind the product. And that was hugely validating in the beginning. Your customers are always your biggest believers. But actually Wei Zhang at Gen Fund was the first investor to really believe in us. I think a month after we launched Kapwing, he was meeting with us and expressing a lot of conviction about the investment. He gave us our first term sheet and pushed us to raise. And so he had a lot of conviction about the deal and really believed in us early.

• 30:41Harry Stebbings?

  I'd love to hear that. And then I do want to finish on probably the most exciting of all. What do the next five years hold for you and for Kapwing? What's that exciting roadmap ahead?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, Kapwing, you know, Kapwing will be the go-to brand and productivity platform for media creation, management and collaboration. And I'll be getting it there, basically. So I'll be sort of growing the team into different verticals beyond just editing to adjacent verticals like managing your media, collaborating on it, distributing it, et cetera. And, you know, I'm hoping that Eric and I will continue to run product and technology here at Kapwing as we move in that direction.

• 31:15Harry Stebbings?

  Julia, I can't wait to see you make it happen. I have no doubt you will. And seriously, this has been such a pleasure. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you so much, Harry. I appreciate the conversation.

• 31:27Harry Stebbings?

  Such an incredible guest. And as I said at the beginning there, I had to ask if I could invest post that episode recording, and I'm thrilled that Julia let me. And if you'd like to see more from Julia, you can find her on Twitter at Julia Antoven. Likewise, it'd be great to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do so on Instagram at HStubbings1996 with two Bs. That would be awesome. But before we leave you today, big shout out to my friends over at ActiveCampaign. With their platform, you can create unique customer experiences that attract, nurture and convert leads into customers, into repeat customers. Over 80,000 companies use ActiveCampaign to hit their sales targets with intelligent automations that send the right message to the right person using the right method at the right time. If you already have sales and marketing tools you love, keep them. ActiveCampaign will work with them and give you automations to make them even better.

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• 32:54Harry Stebbings?

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• 33:39Harry Stebbings?

  little as $180 per month. Also, 20 Minute VC listeners get 10% off their first Ezra scan by signing up at ezra.com/10vc. That's /10vc. As always, I cannot thank you enough for all your support, and I can't wait to bring you another set of fantastic episodes next week.