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MARY HIMINKOOL: Hi.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning and welcome to day three of Google I/O. Hope
you've had an amazing time so far.
We are delighted to have you with us this morning for our
panel, "Designing for the Other Half: Sexy Isn't Always
Pink." My name is Mary Himinkool, and I'm the head of
Global Entrepreneurship Outreach at Google.
Our team looks after all of Google's partnerships and
programs around the world to support startups and
entrepreneurs, and we feel very privileged to work with
and learn from so many amazing
entrepreneurs around the world.
We have five of them with us here today.
And today we're going to explore a discussion of really
how to build amazing products that resonate with both women
and men, how to scale and start great companies, how to
build community, really an analysis of the business and
product landscape and opportunities
around women as well.
So I'd like to start by introducing
my fantastic panelists.
First we have Tracy Chou, who is with Pinterest.
And Tracy is a back-end
software engineer at Pinterest.
She was previously at Quora, where she was an early
engineer there.
She's also had roles at both Facebook and Google.
Tracy studied at Stanford where she earned her BS in
Electrical Engineering and her Master's in Computer Science.
We also have Leah Busque, who is the founder of TaskRabbit.
Since its founding in 2008, Leah has scaled TaskRabbit to
over 45 employees, and the services live in eight
different cities.
Prior to that, Leah was a software engineer at IBM, and
she's been recognized as one of the 100 most creative
people in business by Fast Company, and also one of the
15 women to watch by Inc. Magazine.
So we're thrilled to have her with us.
Next to me here is Margaret Wallace.
Margaret is an active entrepreneur in the gaming,
technology, and media sectors.
She is the CEO of Playmatics, which is a New York-based
company focused on rich social gaming experiences.
And before Playmatics, Margaret was the
CEO of Rebel Monkey.
She's also spent time at Shockwave.com, at PF.Magic, at
Mattel and Mindscape.
And she recently created a very cool game last year,
which is a shadow government game that lets users run their
own version of a virtual version of the US.
We're also excited to have Jess Lee, who is the
co-founder and CEO of Polyvore, which was voted one
of Fast Company's 50 most innovative companies in 2012.
Before that, Jess worked at Google, where she was the
product manager for Google Maps.
And she has a Bachelor's in Computer
Science from Stanford.
Jess is also a very talented artist, and she's an avid
comic book collector.
She has over 1,000 comic books.
We're also delighted to have Sepi Nasiri with us.
Sepi is the director of all things offline at Women 2.0.
She's responsible for global partnerships and for
sponsorships.
And Sepi got her start as a managing editor of an LA
global magazine.
A fun tidbit about Sepi is that two years ago she
launched her first app in the Apple store, and it is the
Date Saver Platinum application, which gives users
a portable bathroom fan.
So we have to ask her about that later.
But welcome, all of you.
We're delighted to have you.
And welcome to everybody here.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So I'd like to start by turning it over to our great
panelists this morning, and ask each of you to share with
us a one-minute introduction of your company and its core
mission, starting with you, Margaret.
MARGARET WALLACE: Hi.
Good morning, everybody.
It's really great to see everyone in the room.
My name is Margaret Wallace.
I am a CEO of a company called Playmatics.
I co-founded Playmatics with Nick Fortugno.
He's a game designer probably best known for having designed
"Diner Dash," which I think a few of us in this room may
have played.
I've been in gaming--
at the intersection of gaming, tech, and media-- since--
it's kind of not cool to say it-- since 1996.
And I've worked on all sides of the equation, on the
publisher sides of technology companies, I've
raised venture capital.
And Playmatics is a 15-person company
based in New York City.
About a year and a half ago, we raised some angel
investment to create a game called "Shadow Government,"
which is a real world political simulation of the
United States that runs off of a 30-year-old algorithmic
model called the T21.
But we really focus on designing engaging--
hopefully engaging--
social games for both women and men.
And we try not to clone.
So that's sort of a quick intro of who I am.
Nice to meet everybody here, too.
TRACY CHOU: Hi, I'm Tracy Chou.
I'm with Pinterest.
If you haven't used Pinterest before, it's a place online
where you can collect and find the images and things that
really inspire you and that you love.
And we're really hoping to be a place for discovery on the
web and working on building that out.
My background is in engineering, and I really love
working and building consumer web products.
So I love thinking about the technical aspects, but also
translating product ideas into the back ends.
SEPIDEH NASIRI: Good morning.
My name is Sepi Nasiri, and I'm, as mentioned, director of
all things offline at Women 2.0.
Women 2.0's mission is to increase the number of female
founders in technology startups.
And to do so, we have our online component, which is our
blog network, and we also have our offline products,
including our conference and our events.
LEAH BUSQUE: Hi, everyone.
My name is Leah Busque.
I'm the CEO of TaskRabbit.
TaskRabbit is an online marketplace where people can
go to outsource small jobs and tasks to others in their
neighborhood.
So if you need dry cleaning picked up or groceries
delivered, you can go on TaskRabbit.com or download our
mobile app, name the price you're willing to pay to have
a job done, and then we match you with our network of
hundreds of background-checked TaskRabbits in your
neighborhood.
Our mission is really to empower people to
do what they love.
JESS LEE: I'm Jess Lee, the
co-founder and CEO of Polyvore.
Polyvore is a fashion community site with over 15
million unique visitors a month.
I guess Mary just outed me as a comic book nerd and as
someone who loves to draw.
I really wanted to go to art school when I was growing up,
and my parents told me no, because they're Asian.
So I ended up studying computer science.
And I was really excited to come across Polyvore, because
Polyvore is a place where people can just mix and match
items they love in a very artistic way to
create these collages.
So we essentially have a platform and tools that
empower other people to be artistic and creative.
So it's something that I'm really passionate about.
And I think it's sort of akin to a fashion magazine, except
it's created by a global community of fashionistas from
all over the world.
Yeah.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
Thank you all for joining us.
So I'd like to start by looking a bit
at the product landscape.
And so, starting with Tracy with Pinterest.
Tell us about the evolution of Pinterest and how your users
are interacting with the site.
TRACY CHOU: Sure.
I can give a little bit of history.
So Pinterest has actually been around for a few years now.
It was founded--
started getting kicked off in 2009.
And most people didn't hear about it until late 2011.
So it's actually quite a long time of trying to iterate on
the product and get traction with users.
It's meant to be a general platform for collecting and
sharing images, and it's resonated a lot with people
who work in industries that are very inspiration-driven.
So a lot of architects were on early.
Like, one of our founders, who is a designer, was in
architecture school, and so he found a lot of similarities
between Pinterest and the physical boards in which he
would be collecting inspiration.
There's a lot of people who are doing arts
and crafts on Pinterest.
Just like getting ideas and thinking about things that
they want to do.
As we've evolved, it's just been this gradual process of
acquiring a community and thinking about reaching out to
people, figuring out what makes the most sense for them,
and responding to feedback a lot.
I guess--
I'm not sure what else there is to say.
It's just keep talking to your community,
seeing what they want.
But there's not too much, so it's like too mind blowing.
As we've evolved, we've just been acquiring more and more
people who are interested in looking at different recipes
that people are pinning, finding
inspiration for their homes.
So there's a pretty wide ranging appeal for just like--
it started off with a lot of women in the Midwest.
But it's starting to find greater appeal.
MARY HIMINKOOL: And Tracy, you're on
the engineering side.
So when you guys built the product, did you design it
specifically with women in mind?
TRACY CHOU: No.
It's meant to be a general platform.
So the founding team was actually three men.
And the team has been majority men for a long time.
We really want to build a general platform.
But as any sort of site like--
that focuses on community, who you seed the community with
will determine a lot of the early demographic.
Previously, I was at Quora, which is also meant to be a
general platform for questions and answers.
But it also started off being primarily male.
And it just is a function of who you seed
the community with.
And you can start growing beyond that initial seed as
you figure out your product.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
Thank you.
So speaking of growth and scale, Leah, I have a
question for you.
So TaskRabbit has scaled rapidly into eight cities.
And can you share with us what the trigger points are for you
to know when to invest more resources and double down in a
specific city, market, or on a product feature?
What's the inflection point for you?
LEAH BUSQUE: Yeah, it's interesting.
When I think back about a year ago, we were just in a couple
of markets.
And at that time, Boston and San Francisco were our two
main markets.
We started to dig into our database and our data, and
really did a deep dive on who our top
users were at the time.
Who were the top people posting tasks?
And so in a two-sided marketplace, we have the Task
Rabbits and we have the Task Posters.
And so once we did the analysis of who our top task
posters were in Boston and San Francisco, we started to see
some trends and some commonality.
And that was the point where we learned that our two top
demographics both skewed slightly female.
The first demo was 25 to 35-year-old young professional
living in an urban environment.
She was outsourcing things like, I need help with my
grocery shopping, handyman services, laundry.
And then the next demographic up-- it was a jump--
and it was the 35 to 45-year-old female, typically
a mom with kids, working full time.
And it wasn't just moms, because we saw on the
TaskRabbit side a lot of stay at home moms that were doing
TaskRabbit to bring in income and bring in money.
And they were out running their own errands anyway, and
didn't mind picking things up for people.
So once we had enough data to really deep dive into our main
core demographics, that's when we started to make explicit
decisions about design, about product features, about
implementation that we felt would cultivate the best user
experience around those demographics.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Margaret.
So gaming is a topic that we know resonates well with both
men and women.
You have such deep expertise in the area.
I'm hoping you can share with us more context and some data
points on the landscape of gaming.
And are there any patterns or trends that
have surprised you?
MARGARET WALLACE: Yeah.
So that's a great question.
And Playmatics, we create a range of IP, whether you're
talking about original IP.
We work with brands.
And we also work a lot in the growing and contentious field
of gamification, which is sort of adding game-like dynamics
to non-gaming consumer services.
And I would say, in gaming in particular, the biggest change
that I've seen since--
gosh, the '90s, when I was working on the first ever
virtual pets programs "Dogs and Cats"--
is, the female audiences have become a very
core demographic for--
as you probably all know in this audience-- casual games
and social games.
And I don't know how many people here are in the gaming
world, but we have a phrase called whales.
I don't know if it's used in other industry sectors, but in
the past five years, free-to-play games have really
become the cash cow, so to speak, of
social and casual games.
So these are games that are free to download, free to
play, but to progress and accelerate your experience or
have a more customizable experience, one buys virtual
currency and purchases accelerators or virtual goods
to progress through the game.
And even as recently--
there have been tons of studies which
show that 1 to 2%--
if you're lucky--
will become purchasing players in these games.
And there's a study-- there are many studies, but I found
one which was released by Papaya Mobile back in
September, 2011, which identified for their network
that 70% of the whales--
and whales are people who spend $100 or
more in your game--
are female.
And I can tell you, while there is a renewed interest in
casual social gaming around mid-core gaming--
so targeting sort of more traditional gaming audiences--
that's probably the audience that my game "Shadow
Government" appeals to--
we all know, from all the successes of social gaming
companies, especially in the Bay Area, that 70 to 80% of
their players are females and often comprise
the majority of whales.
So on the one hand, it's something to be celebrated and
pointed out that women represent a huge amount of
purchasing power within social and casual gaming.
And yet a lot of the social games that we see on the
market have often been criticized as being a bit
exploitative, playing on people's addictions.
And it's just an interesting question.
What does it mean that the largest audience for these
games are women?
So on the one hand, it's a success story.
It's something to call attention to.
But on the other hand, it kind of causes me to question how
we monetize our audience, and what are--
I know ethics can be a bad word in the world of
entrepreneurship sometimes--
but what are the ethics around monetizing that audience?
MARY HIMINKOOL: Very interesting.
So then, general question for anybody.
What patterns have you seen in how your user base monetizes?
Any interesting trends or things of note?
SEPIDEH NASIRI: I think the most important part is, what
is your user base asking for?
So for Women 2.0, it's mostly other educational components.
So we launched, last year, a video about how to build your
own iPhone app.
And within two weeks we had over 9,000 downloads.
So it shows that if you listen to your audience or your user
base, you're able to monetize.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you, Sepi.
And on that note, Women 2.0, your organization, does
specifically outreach to women.
So what have you found to be sticky?
And what are the topics and themes that resonate most
among your user base?
SEPIDEH NASIRI: Sticky questions
would be career based.
Women in tech, or women just general, they're still finding
ways to grow.
And where they would like to take their career--
particularly because women have different
responsibilities than men.
And showing that, as a mom, you can still have a company
and grow your company and educating them of how to have
a life and work balance is important.
So those would be the first questions we get everyday.
And besides that, when you have decided to build your own
company, then how do I get funding?
And most importantly, what Women 2.0 provides is the
platform for networking, for example, or networking events
where you can build your network, who is also going to
be the ones who are partnering with you and
funding you, et cetera.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Great.
So on that point about community, Jess, Polyvore is
very much about community.
You guys have over 15 million monthly unique visitors.
Can you share with us your thoughts on how to build
community among your users, both women and men?
And how do you solicit feedback from your community?
JESS LEE: Sure.
So Polyvore is very much rooted in the community.
We're nothing without our awesomely talented user base.
They're the people who grab products from all over the web
and import them into Polyvore.
They're the people who put together the beautiful
collages and sets, some of which are--
in terms of aesthetic quality and taste-- are up there with
the top editors of Vogue.
So I'm very, very proud of the community that we've built.
It's been about the community from the very beginning,
partly because--
so I think a good example is, I actually came out of our
user community.
So I was working at Google Maps and I
was very happy there.
And then one day my office--
my cube-mate showed me, hey, check out this site, Polyvore,
that my friend is working on.
And I played with it, and I was just blown away.
It was sort of like the perfect mix of art and
technology.
And I was just using it two to three hours a night.
And then I wrote to the founder at the time.
And I said, hey, this is great--
I have some feedback for you.
A lot of complaints, actually.
So I wrote him a long list of complaints.
And then he wrote back and said, hey, why don't you come
fix this yourself?
So then I ended up coming on board at Polyvore.
And so I was already part of the user community, so I
already had friends in the community.
And this is before Facebook Connect existed, so this was
like people who did not actually know each
other in real life.
But we became friends.
And so ever since then, I've always stayed in touch with
all those community members.
And we take it very seriously.
Our philosophy around the community is to always go the
extra mile.
So when people write in, we take the time to actually
write back.
For our very, very top members-- and some of these
people have been using this site for like five years,
they're so loyal.
They post their sets to Facebook, they post their sets
to Twitter.
They're the people who have actually helped us grow,
because they tell their friends about the site.
So I think a good example of how we listen to our
community--
we recently had a meetup.
We try to actually bring our members in
every once in a while.
So on Friday, we had a meetup with about 11 members.
Flew some in from-- there was one girl from Brazil,
Wisconsin, Hawaii.
These people have dedicated years of their life.
Like one girl had been using the site since she was 13
years old, and now she's 18.
So she kind of grew up on Polyvore.
So we brought them all in and we just really tried to show
them how much we appreciate them and how
much we love them.
So we pampered them.
We had a little makeup station for them to get makeovers
sponsored by Bare Essentials.
And then we did a couple of sessions with them.
One, we had our designers walk through how we roll out
changes on the site, because--
as I'm sure a lot of people know-- when you change
something on a site that people are used to, they get
really mad.
It's called change aversion, right?
It doesn't matter if it's a good change or a bad change.
Oftentimes the initial reaction is I
hate it, it's different.
So we walk them through how we look at that process.
And part of it is we actually count all the comments on the
blogs from our users.
And sometimes we change
something and get 500 comments.
So we count all of them, and then we measure how many were
positive and negative.
And I think what's special about our community is
sometimes there's a lot of negative comments, and then
someone's like, hey, leave them alone.
They're working really hard.
They answered my email immediately.
So it's good to have a community, because they in
turn defend you when something goes wrong.
And we've made mistakes, and we've rolled them back.
People are generally very understanding.
But we flew out these members.
We showed them a good time.
We previewed a couple of new features with them, got a lot
of feedback.
And it was really special.
The special day for them to meet each other as well.
There are a couple of cool stories that
came out of the community.
I found out that one of our members is--
she met a girl on the site who she's now inviting to her
wedding that she'd never met before, which
I thought was pretty--
I would never invite someone I'd never met to my wedding.
And then it turned out that three of the members had
actually been--
and we didn't know this beforehand-- but they had been
inspired to actually go to fashion school and graphic
design school because of all their time spent on Polyvore.
They really realized how good they were at graphic design.
And so now they're pursuing careers.
That's really meaningful.
It's really meaningful for us, for the team.
And then it's a good opportunity for us to really
show them how much we appreciate them, and then in
turn to get feedback from them.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Extension of that question
to any of the panelists.
Any key lessons learned or insights on how to engage user
feedback and incorporate it into your products?
LEAH BUSQUE: I can start.
So I think the key is just make it really, really easy
for your users to give you feedback.
So at TaskRabbit we have 24/7 customer service.
We have chat.
We have phones.
We're on email all the time.
In the product flow, we also have little hooks where people
can easily leave their comments and feedback.
And I think the key is, when we see something that hasn't
gone quite right, or that we could improve, we'll follow up
with the user with a phonecall or an email.
We really try to understand how we can make sure that
every time someone has an experience on
TaskRabbit, it's amazing.
And if it's not of the highest quality, then we're
immediately digging in to figure out why
and what we can improve.
And then the second thing I'd say, along the lines of what
Jess mentioned with product, is we have weekly user testing
sessions or user research sessions.
And basically every week, Thursdays, we have a group of
users come in.
We don't know what we're going to show them every week.
Sometimes the marketing team will run by some messaging or
new ad campaigns with them.
Sometimes the designers will show them what they're working
on, going forward from a user experience standpoint.
Sometimes we just have questions about pricing or
what they want to see more of.
And so I think having a consistent pattern of a way to
get in front of your users all the time is
really, really important.
MARGARET WALLACE: And just to jump in really quickly on the
gaming front.
Game designers always engage in this debate.
How much should one be led by the community?
How much can the community anticipate design?
So in gaming it's always a fine line between listening to
the community and responding, but also taking those leaps of
faith or incorporating that magic sauce that goes into
making hopefully great games.
However, I think any of us who've been in gaming the past
few years-- especially in the social gaming sector-- know
how much analytics have really risen to the forefront, almost
to a reductive fashion where game designers will come up
with an engagement loop for a game or some kind of
monetization loop, and before that even gets implemented,
that gets run through a whole series of analytics.
Real time analytics--
we use a package called Swerve which is really wonderful.
But the larger the social game company, the less and less
things are left up to chance, because it really becomes
about spreadsheets.
So it has its benefits, but I think it also has its
drawbacks on the creative front.
JESS LEE: I do think you also have to figure out the right
kinds of questions to ask your community.
What we've found is when you ask, hey, what do you think of
this idea or this feature?
They'll say, yeah, that sounds really great.
So that's not as useful as saying, here, look at this
actual prototype of this.
Tell us what you think.
Can you complete this given task?
So you really have to--
and you also have to listen not just to what users say but
what they do.
So rolling out an A/B experiment, where you try the
new feature.
You can either-- so the process that we use is
oftentimes we test with a top group of VIP members, sort of.
And then we get their feedback,
a qualitative feedback.
And then we move to like a 5% or 10% experiment.
You need to figure out what sample size actually makes
sense for you.
And then we actually measure some of the
metrics we care about.
And then we roll it out to the whole community.
And then we know that if it's a big
change they may complain.
So then we have in reserve some other things that we may
roll out soon afterwards that will sort of mitigate the
negativity.
And then we're very quick to respond.
Like, as soon as the launch happens, everyone is watching
the blog post and monitoring for comments.
Because there's definitely things we don't think of.
And then we try to implement those
things as fast as possible.
And what we find is that our community actually notices.
They say, hey, I noticed that that changed immediately after
I reported it.
I saw that you added that commenting feature I asked for
a day afterwards.
That's so cool.
Thank you.
So I think it's good to be really, really responsive
right after your launch, too.
It's not done when it's launched.
MARY HIMINKOOL: A really good insight, definitely.
TRACY CHOU: I have one thing to add which is, on the
company side, it's also very important to dedicate
resources to community in terms of employees, like the
head count.
At Pinterest we have six or seven community team people
out of a total of 50 right now.
And they are very empowered to--
I mean, they have a lot of responsibility.
And we have them sit with product and engineering when
we're making design decisions.
So it's not just responding to new product features when
we're about to roll them out.
We have community team sitting with us and saying, I'm
getting a lot of reports from users that they really like
this or they really don't like this.
So we should incorporate it into the new designs that
we're rolling out.
So just making community a priority within the company is
very important.
And the other thing is having a good system to track what
the community is saying.
So we track different types of tickets in Zendesk.
And we have graphs of how many tickets we're getting for
different types of issues.
And that just helps us to know what people care about in a
very quantitative but also qualitative way.
MARY HIMINKOOL: So on that point of building a great team
within the company and scaling a great company.
How do you guys approach hiring and building a team?
And what is your interview process like?
LEAH BUSQUE: So at TaskRabbit, we've kind of honed in on a
process over the course of about 12 months or so.
And so whoever we're interviewing, whatever
candidate comes in, typically they initially do a phone call
with Ryan, who's our talent scout.
And then they come in and they meet the hiring manager, but
then they also meet a few other key team
members on the team.
And if that goes well, they'll come in for a second round of
interviews with a wider group.
And this round of interviews is really important because we
pick people across teams and across functions.
And so we're not only looking for folks that have various
skill sets and can actually do the job really well, but also
folks that are going to work well and are a great culture
fit across the entire company.
And then from there, something that I've always been very
adamant and passionate about is, I don't care how big we
get, I want to meet every single person that comes
through the door.
And we'll see how long that scales to, I'm not sure.
But we have this sort of founder round interviews.
And it's not really set up so that I have the power to say
yea or nay on someone.
That's not what it is at all.
It's actually really important to me for those candidates to
know that I want to know who they are, and that I am a
resource to them, and that I want to be engaged
with them as well.
And it doesn't matter what team they're on or what
they're working on.
It's important to me to have that sort of open door policy,
and that starts as part of the candidate interview process.
So that's worked really well for us.
But we're continuing to change and iterate it over time.
SEPIDEH NASIRI: So we have similar, actually, ways of
interviewing when we add someone to our team.
One of the main, I guess, focus for us is personality.
Our team currently has three main people, which includes
our CEO and co-founder Shaherose Charania, and Angie
Chang, and then myself.
And what we do is we always have this philosophy, can you
share a pillow with this person if you have to?
We do work late.
And we consider everyone who we add to
our team as a family.
You eat with them, you sometimes have to share that
pillow in the office.
So making sure that we all have the same chemistry and
we're all focused on the same goals is important.
And we do have teams across the country
internationally as well.
So we do chat with them and make sure that they feel with
us that they're included.
MARGARET WALLACE: Some of the people at Playmatics are folks
that I've worked with in previous companies.
One guy who was the original programmer on the first "Diner
Dash" game, I've known and worked with him for 12 years.
And so I'm really fortunate to have good people that you keep
with you along the way.
But we're a small, scrappy startup.
And so we rely largely on not only referrals--
and if you're lucky enough to know a lot of people, it's
pretty easy to pull in resources as you need them.
My co-founder teaches at a local university in the game
design program.
So in terms of fresh talent, we're always meeting and
recruiting fresh talent.
We have something called the camping test, kind of like the
pillow test.
Can I go camping with this person?
Because really, at the end of the day-- and I've made this
mistake before.
I've made fewer and fewer mistakes in hiring than when I
first started out, where I made a bunch.
One kind of thing I've learned is culture and cultural fit.
It doesn't matter if this person is a superstar, if they
are the Einstein of whatever area they're focusing on, if
they cannot work with other people, when you're a
15-person company, it's just not going to work.
And it's going to really sour the morale of
the rest of the office.
So I've learned, and my co-founder have learned, we've
been really lucky just bringing in good people,
bringing in bright people.
And if there is a problem, just really addressing it
immediately.
Because when one runs a startup, as you can imagine,
it's the little mistakes that you don't think of, that six
months or three months down the line that you just think,
oh, why didn't I act sooner?
So that's kind of our process.
Everybody gets to meet just about everyone else.
But my co-founder and I are the final decision makers.
We're a small company.
We have to be stealth and scrappy.
So it kind of works out like that.
We do have pretty good diversity on the team, which
I'm pretty proud of.
And it's really largely because the applicants that
come to us are from diverse backgrounds.
MARY HIMINKOOL: So everybody remember the camping test and
the pillow test.
I love to talk about the process of fund-raising, as
funding is obviously a very important component of scaling
a business.
Any insights from you guys on the process, how you
approached it, what your considerations were?
MARGARET WALLACE: Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean to--
just really quickly.
It always takes longer than you think it does.
If the money is too easy to come by, that
should be a red flag.
If the money is too hard to come by, you keep getting the
same answers, that should be potentially a red flag.
It's a diligent process.
It's a process of constantly refining and improving.
Like I said, I've successfully raised venture capital, I've
unsuccessfully raised it, and I've successfully raised angel
investment.
And every single meeting that one has with potential
investors is a chance to learn.
So the biggest point of advice I would give to anyone in the
audience is, when you have these meetings, even meetings
that are quote throwaway meetings with C-level people
that you may not be interested in, C-tier people you may not
interested in working with, write everything down.
You'll find that the same questions often bubble up, and
those are things you need to address in order to probably
successfully fundraise in the future.
JESS LEE: So at Polyvore we've raised three rounds, although
the total sum is not that high.
And so A, B, and C are actually very different.
So for the A, we raised about $2.5 million from Benchmark
Capital in 2007.
And I think in the beginning when--
it could be seed, it could be A--
the easiest way to raise is to have traction.
That's kind of obvious, and also very difficult.
But that was the approach that we took at the time.
We already built--
the site was already built and sort of a little bit on its
way, so it became an easier sort of sell.
The Series B was in 2009 in the summer, and this was when
the economy was like ehh.
So a much more difficult time to raise.
Even though we were doing well, it was just much harder.
So we were hitting Sand Hill Road and
talking to all the VCs.
And I think through that process we learned--- we honed
sort of what our deck should look like.
Like, what are the key things you really need to cover,
which are product, market and team.
And of the three, it actually turns out, I think, that
market is really important.
If your product is not solving a large enough market, then
you won't get certain kinds of VCs to invest.
So we successfully raised our B from Matrix Capital-- about
$5.6 million in 2009.
And then our C, which we just closed in January--
this was before the Facebook IPO, which I've heard has
affected valuations.
But that one was, I guess, again, different market
conditions.
So this was after a lot of companies had raised a lot of
money in 2011 and the market was-- the
climate was very good.
So that was a much easier round to raise.
And then at that point we had more traction.
So we closed a $14 million round in January.
All very different.
So our C we raised from DAG, a more-- sort of a standard
Silicon Valley type VC--
great firm, and then Goldman Sachs, which is very--
not traditionally--
I think we were like the eighth company they had ever
invested in, so very different sort of due diligence process.
Due diligence is obviously much more strict in the C
stage or the later stage, but Goldman Sachs is especially
strict because they're a big public company.
So they have a lot of process they have to go through to get
the money approved.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Great.
Great.
So we have a lot of entrepreneurs here in the
audience with us today.
What advice do you ladies have for startups or companies who
are looking on how to design with women in mind?
And how targeted is your marketing?
LEAH BUSQUE: I would say just general advice is find great
mentors, advisers, people that you can surround yourself with
that you can use as a sounding board, bounce around ideas.
If you feel like going into your idea or company, you know
exactly who the demographic is, then find an adviser or
mentor that you feel matches that.
So you can use them to do a lot of research early on.
But then I would say don't assume you know who you're
building for until you actually build it and get
those users and start looking through the data.
And that's going to tell you and influence your decisions
about how to move forward.
So I think it's more about constantly just iterating on
customer feedback in your community, rather than
assuming you know exactly who you're designing
for to begin with.
TRACY CHOU: A couple points.
One is if you can try to build up your intuition as much as
possible early on, like Leah was saying.
If you can get mentors or get people to come in so you
understand generally what direction you want your
product to go in, that's most important as you're getting
started and you don't have any data to work with.
And users aren't going to tell you what they want.
And one way also to--
one hack to get better intuition about the products
that you're trying to build is getting people from those
demographics into your company working there.
If you can hire female engineers, that helps.
If you can hire female product managers, people who are
actually using the products, they're going to be there.
And that feedback loop is just so much faster than having to
go out and do user research or run some A/B tests and wait
for two weeks to get the data.
If you just have someone who's there and can say, like, I'm
part of this demographic, and this is what I like, and this
is what I think a lot of other people will like, it's just
much easier to build those products.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
In just a couple minutes, we'll start
taking audience questions.
So if anybody has questions in mind, please go ahead and line
up and we'll take them in just a few minutes.
So a question then about-- a lot of your products have
spread very virally.
And in addition to this organic growth, how do you
approach proactive marketing to the extent that you do?
LEAH BUSQUE: So for us, 75% of our users come in via word of
mouth, NPR, just general awareness.
So that's awesome.
Because it's free channels.
And it is very organic and viral.
But when we think about money that we do spend on marketing,
whether it's SEM or display or re-targeting, we try to get
very targeted about the demographic.
And so we'll do partnerships, for instance, with mom's
groups, or with community school organizations, PTAs.
So we know that those are our top heavy users.
And so finding the right outlets of where those users
are is really important if you're going to spend.
TRACY CHOU: One thing for Pinterest is, even though we
haven't done a lot of marketing per se, we are
pretty strategic about what press will do.
So if you're located in Silicon Valley and you're a
startup here, it's very easy to get a lot of coverage by
the tech blogs.
If that's not where your users are, there's not really much
point in going to the tech blogs, unless you're trying to
do recruiting.
But for us, we tend to do press or let people write
about us, if it's in some publication where we will be
the only tech piece.
And we try to be where our users are going to be.
So if we're trying to get more people in home decor, then
going to the magazines about interior decoration makes
sense, or going to the mommy bloggers,
those all make sense.
But not as much TechCrunch.
JESS LEE: So we don't actually have a marketing team, but we
do do marketing through word of
mouth through our community.
And there's a standard, build a great product and then
they'll talk about it.
There's always that.
But on top of that, we actually try to cultivate
great opportunities for our community members.
So the fashion industry is a very top
down kind of industry.
And Polyvore has a very bottoms up approach.
We're empowering all these fashionistas all over the
world to sort of have a voice in fashion.
And so we've tried to create opportunities with our
advertisers.
So they often end up being revenue generating
opportunities for us as well, which is kind of nice.
But some examples are, we partnered with Rebecca
Minkoff, who's a handbag designer, an independent
accessories designer.
And she wanted to promote her morning-after clutch, which is
her most famous sort of bag that she makes.
And so we put together a campaign on Polyvore where we
asked our members to design their own version of her bag,
and they could put studs on it and sort of *** it out.
And we got over 6,000
submissions from our community.
And then the winner, who turned out to be this girl
named Dee in Detroit, she got to travel to New York for
Fashion Week and sit in Rebecca Minkoff's show and
watch her creation-- her bag actually got produced and it
went down the runway--
she got to see that.
She had never been to New York before.
She'd never been to Fashion Week.
And so for her that was a major opportunity.
And the bag got produced and sold in Saks, so doing those
kinds of things, like, she's going to remember
that for a long time.
Our community remembered it.
Everyone was so excited.
They were so supportive of her.
The bag was named after her, it was called the Dee Clutch,
and it actually sold out.
So the things like that, I think, when you can cultivate
things around your members and have them talk about you,
that's much better than talking about yourself.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Absolutely.
So first audience question.
AUDIENCE: So has it been a problem for something like
TaskRabbit at all, or how big a problem
for nonstandard uses?
Like, someone putting a task up to maybe have a lot of
people do reviews of a site or a game, or to get promotion
and sort of Mechanical Turk kind of artificial promotion?
Is that-- any kind of outside uses like that--
is that a big problem?
MARY HIMINKOOL: Also, audience members, we'd love for you to
introduce yourselves.
AUDIENCE: Oh, sorry.
Jason Sackett.
LEAH BUSQUE: Hi, Jason.
Thanks for your question.
So it hasn't been a huge problem.
We've seen it on a couple occasions.
I think, for us, the key is we ask our task posters to put in
credit card information upfront.
And we use that to verify identity and keep our
TaskRabbit safe.
And we pre-authorize cards.
So that rules out a lot of the spam.
But then on top of that, we also have what we call a
self-policing community.
So anyone in the community can flag a task as inappropriate,
and then it's immediately looked at by our internal
operations team and taken down if it's deemed inappropriate.
So we haven't really come across a lot of those types of
issues yet.
Maybe they're coming, I don't know.
But that's how we've handled it to date.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was thinking more about the ethical
considerations of media and games and these sort of
addictive loops and stuff.
And this particular task is not necessarily inappropriate.
It depends on what's inappropriate.
So there's a lot of room there, a lot of gray area.
MARGARET WALLACE: Yes, and that is the unspoken secret.
A lot of those social mobile games kind of work their
numbers that way by finding people to write reviews.
And not necessarily using TaskRabbit,
but it's a big concern.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Pablo Perez.
I have a question for Tracy of Pinterest.
But I'd also like to hear everybody else's opinion, too.
Pinterest, it sounds like, it took a couple of years for it
to really take off.
At what point was that tipping point where you just saw it
really accelerate?
And did social networks play into it?
Or was it the users?
TRACY CHOU: Really great question.
Thank you.
We've asked ourselves this very same question.
We don't know the answer.
So if you're just looking at the numbers and the shape of
the graph, it was sometime last spring or summer where it
started to pick up a little bit more.
And there were huge growth spikes at the end of last year
and beginning of this year.
We don't actually really know what they were.
From the beginning, Facebook and Twitter were already
around, so those distribution channels already existed.
And there was no particular event that precipitated, like
an inflection point.
I think it's just keeping at it, and eventually, if you
have the right growth rate, it will start picking up.
LEAH BUSQUE: Yeah.
I would add, I think, for TaskRabbit and a lot of other
companies, it's so much about timing.
Sometimes the consumer mindset just needs time to develop.
And I started TaskRabbit back in the end of 2008.
It was September, 2008.
And actually when I launched it, right when the stock
market was crashing, and all these people were getting laid
off, and I just quit my job at IBM, which I was starting to
rethink at the time.
And what was interesting is that ended up being a really
great time to launch a platform like TaskRabbit,
because it gave people a way to make money, to make ends
meet, to get by.
And then it grew from there.
So I think so much of it is just the market needs to
develop and how the market changes.
And then the consumer mindset tends to shift as well.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm Tommy.
So I have a question about Google+.
So I hear that Google+ has a heavy skew
towards male audience.
I was curious, do you have any insight into what about their
product makes it heavily skew towards male as opposed to
female, and how could they improve?
MARGARET WALLACE: We use Google Hangouts
for our board meetings.
And so we use Google+ pretty heavily.
And I really--
I think that, personally, my opinion as a user is it
probably just needs a UI overhaul, and kind of more--
it's really, I guess, maybe the original audience it also
kind of appealed to and revolved around.
But we use it all the time.
I love it.
I think Hangouts is revolutionary.
Probably a UI thing.
It's a UI thing.
MARY HIMINKOOL: I guess an extension of that question,
though, for each of your products.
Do you notice how important is UI design when catering to a
specific sector of an audience?
JESS LEE: So I like that the panel title is like, it's not
always pink.
So if you look at Polyvore, which is definitely targeted
at women, that we don't support menswear
on the site at all.
Our UI is actually very spare and white and black.
If you took out all the sets and you looked at just the
elements we provide, you might even say that
it's kind of masculine.
We use Gotham font.
It's just very spare.
And the reason for that is we want to put our brand and our
UI in the background, and put the community in the
foreground.
Because they already make really gorgeous layouts and
sets that express who they are.
So we don't want to compete with that.
We don't want to put like a pink or a blue or anything
else that might distract from what they're already doing.
So I don't think it's actually necessary to have a
particularly feminine visual design in
order to attract women.
And about Google+, I have one theory.
It is just a theory, but I think the seed of any
community is very, very important.
Polyvore was seeded with women on fashion forums.
I think Google+ was actually seeded with Google employees.
So it was tech, and honestly, mostly male.
So I think that's part of how it grew.
So those people invited their friends, which-- and then I
think that's sort of the route.
Whereas if you look at Facebook started at colleges.
So like cool kid at college or, I don't
know, maybe not cool.
Ivy league kids at college.
Yeah.
And then MySpace, I think, probably
started with, like, music.
And so it's all about the seed.
And I think the seed for Google+ was just different.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
Next question?
AUDIENCE: My name is A.J., I'm from Montreal.
So I am actually really sad to hear that Polyvore only has
female clothing.
And I was going to try it out.
And actually, yeah, maybe that's some constructive
criticism for you.
So my question is actually--
so women are clearly, like, a minority in the tech industry
in that there's fewer of them.
How do you feel about the representation of women in the
tech industry?
We've been talking a lot about your very
inspirational stories.
And that's really inspiring for me.
But I want to know about your thoughts on the way that women
are represented.
And also, are you targeting other minorities in your
design processes?
JESS LEE: I would love to add menswear one day to Polyvore.
But our philosophy has always been do a few things well,
like a very, very narrow focus on a few things that we really
want to nail women's fashion first.
But I'd love to expand to other
categories at some point.
So women in tech in general.
So I remember when--
I think it was the year after I graduated from Stanford.
The Computer Science department had a t-shirt that
said Stanford Computer Science.
And it was--
I guess it was an unofficial t-shirt, but it was like nine
guys and one girl, like stick figures.
And it was really true.
I remember around in my CS class, and I could name all
the other girls, because there were just so few of them.
So I realized that.
And then I graduated and then I went to Google.
And I was very, very lucky that Google is a very
equitable place.
It's all about meritocracy.
And I think that's actually one of the great things about
tech in general.
It is more meritocratic, maybe, than other industries.
But I was very lucky to have key female mentors.
My first boss at Google was Marissa Mayer, who's amazing.
And I was just very lucky.
So also my mom is an entrepreneur.
She ran sort of her own--
she's an interpreter, Japanese-English interpreter.
And she ran sort of her home office.
I had a lot of female role models.
So I figured that the best thing that I could do to give
back is probably just help mentor.
And it's actually not even just specific to women.
I don't usually speak on a lot of panels about designing for
women, or women in tech.
But what I found is the most useful thing is actually just
when entrepreneurs are starting out and have
questions, just taking the time to meet--
say yes to every coffee.
And just a little bit of advice.
Because I remember all the people who really helped me
very early on at Polyvore.
There were people--
the Frenzy team let us squat in their office for like a
year without paying any rent.
So we tried to do the same.
We paid it forward.
We had another company squat with us for six months.
So just giving back a little bit of yourself, I think,
makes all the difference in the world, both
for women and men.
SEPIDEH NASIRI: I think also bringing
awareness, such as today.
We have a panel of women here talking about who they are,
what they have achieved.
You don't see that quite often.
And when you don't have those role models for
you to watch out--
OK, I can be the next generation of entrepreneur, I
can build my successful company, et cetera, et cetera,
then we don't grow up to have that passion to be the next
entrepreneur or successful individual.
For me, the same-- my dad is as an entrepreneur.
So I had that privilege to see what I could be someday,
whether studying technology, or being an engineer, or just
a founder and just creating something.
And having no limits to who I can be.
And so Google, as mentioned, has been trying to do that and
is successful.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
Well, I think we just have a few minutes left.
So what I would love is if the next two audience members
could both ask their questions, and then we can
answer them as a group.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Anthony Bowles, senior web dev at Shop It To Me.
Jess, you alluded to how data-driven decisions are
built into your product process.
Margaret, you've dropped Swerve as a
tool that you're using.
Tracy, you mentioned A/B testing, but you also talked
about intuition.
So I'm curious if I could get some information from you
about your process in managing the priorities and the
features that you think, on the one hand,
are going to be great.
But then you need to also have data behind the decisions that
are going into which features you are going to roll out to
five, 10, X percent of your user base.
So certainly we, as a company of 17 people, do not have a
dearth of ideas of things we'd love to do.
But with the limited number of resources of engineering, it's
tough to tackle all those.
So if any of you have something that you're
passionate about and you'd love to share with the
community about how you manage the product to engineering,
making sure you give them the features that you think are
going to be game changers for your respective entities.
LEAH BUSQUE: I'll answer it.
I actually have a very timely example.
Because we're in the middle of this A/B test right now.
And it's a new task form that we've been testing.
And we wanted to really simplify the user experience.
And we kept hearing from users as they would come in every
week that, oh, it's too hard to post a task, and there's
too many questions.
And so we really tried to make it simple.
And we came up with this gorgeous design.
It's just really, really pleasing and completely
different from our current task form.
And we rolled it out in three categories.
Shopping, delivery, and other.
Just sort of a catch-all.
And we A/B tested it in those categories.
And so we've been running the test now.
We thought we'd run it for a couple weeks, and we'd get
enough data to make a call which way we wanted to go.
We've been running it for like six weeks now.
And I just talked to Seema, who's our director of product.
And she's like, I have some sad news for you.
And I said, Oh my god.
What happened?
And she's like, the simple shopping form, the simple
test, it's failing.
It's just not working.
And it was such a struggle, because myself, the team,
everyone wanted it to work so badly.
And you have to live and die by the data.
It doesn't work.
And so it's sad that we ran the tests and we had the one,
the A test that we wanted to work, but it just doesn't.
And so now it's time to just kind of cut our
losses and move on.
So I would say live and die by the data.
But also have that qualitative research going on an ongoing
basis that you can get feedback with.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you very much.
AUDIENCE: Great.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Dan.
You've talked a bit about how the seed community seems to
determine how the community ends up
ultimately turning out.
And I was kind of curious if you think that's how it's
always going to be.
Like I remember reading a few weeks ago about Reddit.
They initially seeded Reddit with a bunch of articles that
they wanted to see the community support.
And so, is this something that you could
eventually move away from?
Or does your initial seed really determine the entire
lifespan of your community?
TRACY CHOU: It doesn't have to determine the entire lifespan.
I think you have to start somewhere.
And if you can do well there, then you can start figuring
out what are the adjacent areas to move into, and grow
from there.
I'm sure when Wikipedia started it was not a
comprehensive collection of articles
about all topics ever.
But they started off where they were strong and could
move into different areas.
I saw this at Quora where Quora started off with lots of
questions about startups in tech in Silicon Valley.
They ran some analysis a couple months ago, and they
were just looking at most uploaded answers
in different topics.
And there is now six very strong topic areas.
So one of them was still startups in tech, but there
was also food.
There was also screenwriting and Hollywood.
There's politics.
And so you can be strategic about branching out into
different areas.
And we've been seeing the same thing for Pinterest, where we
started off with more women, and there is a certain
demographic that we're in within the US.
But we're starting to expand internationally, and the
gender split there is much more even in the places we've
rolled out to in the Spanish speaking countries.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
MARY HIMINKOOL: So last question,
some parting thoughts.
We've talked a lot about how we've all been influenced by
mentors, by the community.
What is the most valuable piece of feedback that you've
received as an entrepreneur that you'd like to pass on?
And what's next for you?
What's top of mind for you right now?
MARGARET WALLACE: I would say the most valuable experience
I've had as an entrepreneur--
I feel fortunate in some ways, because I've had such great
experiences working in tech and media and gaming.
Point to an earlier question--
we do design our products with gender but also racial
diversity in mind.
I was just in Singapore a few weeks ago.
And the exploding game community coming out of
Indonesia was shocking.
But the thing I'm focusing on now is our game "Shadow
Government," perpetuating it in as many markets as we can.
And the best piece of advice I've ever received is accept
failure swiftly and gracefully.
Don't wallow on it.
Move on.
People might try to drag you back down in, not even
intentionally.
But be like, oh--
don't even accept it.
Just pick yourself up and move on and keep going.
[APPLAUSE]
JESS LEE: I have--
I think there's two things.
One is--
and it's almost the philosophy of our company.
It's do a few things well.
Especially in the early days, it might be tempting to build
out your prototype with every bell and whistle that you've
ever thought of.
But really think about what that core most important thing
is, and just be exceptional at that one thing first, then add
that second thing.
Because otherwise you're going to--
it's also difficult just to analyze your results.
So do a few things well.
And I think that applies to all parts of your company.
And the other piece is very similar.
It's basically just don't give up.
It's easy to look at the companies that you read about
in TechCrunch and think, wow,
everyone is doing so amazingly.
But what you don't see is sort of like the blood, sweat, and
tears underneath.
You also don't read about all the companies that are
struggling.
Right?
Like, for every one company in TechCrunch that seems to be an
overnight success, there's like 99,000 others that are
still working at it.
And you may think that, aw, I'm so far--
I'm not that company.
But just keep going.
It's common to make mistakes.
It's common to hire the wrong people.
All the great companies have made all the same mistakes
that you're probably making.
So, yeah.
SEPIDEH NASIRI: One advice I would be able to give you guys
all is don't marry yourself to one idea.
You have an overall vision, but your products may change,
or it may merge and grow.
So just focusing on one thing that you thought first, you
might get lost and your user base might move on if they
don't see a growth.
LEAH BUSQUE: The best piece of advice I ever got was from one
of my mentors, Scott Griffith, who is the CEO of Zipcar.
And he said to me-- this is what got me to leave IBM.
He said, Leah, I love your idea.
I think you're on to something.
I think you should see how far you can take it.
And he kept saying to me, see how far you can take it.
And so that's what I continue to do on a daily basis.
And I think if you can not get overwhelmed, maybe, by this
sort of big picture and all the stuff that you need to do,
but just think about pushing it forward every single day,
that eventually you'll have a company and it'll be sort of
snowballing away.
TRACY CHOU: My one thing is to always be improving.
So just continually be improving yourself and your
company and your product.
That's about it.
If you're always improving, you're in pretty good shape.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Well, you're all are remarkably talented.
And we really appreciate you taking the time to share your
insights with us.
Have a wonderful rest of the Google I/O day, and
thank you very much.
MARGARET WALLACE: Thank you.
MARY HIMINKOOL: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]