(Music playing)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Welcome, it's great to see everyone today.
My name is Matt Yalowitz, and I lead Stripe's
investment portfolio team.
We'll let the stragglers come in from the sides.
I'm excited to be moderating today's panel.
We have a really incredible group of founders.
They'll be sharing their stories, tips, and candid advice
on what they've done over the past several years to
survive and thrive despite the shifting market landscape and
the need to do more with less.
Please take advantage, also, of the last five minutes
of today's session to ask some direct questions.
We'll have a mic runner, who will raise their hands
when we get to that section of the program.
So without further ado, please welcome with me to
the stage cofounder and CEO of Pulley, Yin Wu.
(Applause & Cheers)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Cofounder and CEO of Arketa,
Rachel Lea Fishman.
(Applause & Cheers)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Cofounder and CEO of Forma, Jason Fan.
And cofounder and CEO of CrowdAI, Devaki Raj.
(Applause)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Really appreciate you all
joining us today.
Thank you.
Let's do a quick lightning round of introductions.
I'm going to ask our panelists to say their name, company, and
what their company is building.
Devaki, let's start with you.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: Hi, my name is Devaki.
I'm CEO and cofounder of CrowdAI.
We build a no-code tool for computer vision.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Jason.
>> JASON FAN: Jason Fan, founder and CEO of a company called
Forma, and our mission is to give every employee the ability
to choose benefits that are meaningful to them.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Rachel Lea.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Hi, I'm Rachel Lea, cofounder
and CEO of Arketa.
We are a wellness business platform that helps studios
grow beyond classes.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Yin.
>> YIN WU: Hi, everyone; I'm Yin, and I'm the cofounder
and CEO of Pulley, and we help companies manage their
equity and cap tables.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Awesome, so we'll jump right
into the questions.
My first question is related to a book that Stripe exec, Claire
Hughes Johnson, just wrote.
You can actually get a free copy of it today at the
Tap to Pay demo station.
Highly recommend it.
Scaling People is the book, and it's a handbook for operators
and leaders of fast-growing companies, all of you.
So with that, one observation that really stood out to me
in the book is that great managers say the thing you
think you cannot say.
So to our panelists, what's one difficult conversation
you've had to have with your team recently?
And, Yin, we'll start with you on this one.
>> YIN WU: So one of the things that we really thought about I
think when we were starting with Pulley was how is it
that you can also set the right culture of the team as
you continue to grow.
And one thing that we're very opinionated on is to
say that Pulley is not a family; we're a team.
And we like to think of ourselves as a high-performance
sports team and I think the distinction between the two is
that if your partner makes a meal and it's not great, you're
not necessarily giving them 10 pointers on what is it you can
do better next time in order to really knock it out of the park.
You're kind of just grateful for this food on the table
because you're all so busy.
But as a team, it's, like, there's goals
that we have to hit.
If you didn't hit your revenue goals, if the product
didn't ship on time, well, what do you actually do?
How do you actually make it better?
How do you give feedback to each other?
At the time when we said this, I think it was actually kind of
controversial to say that you're not a family, but rather you're
aiming to be a team, but now I think it's actually
one of the core cultural tenets of Pulley, too.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thanks, Yin.
Jason, I know you have some thoughts on this one as well.
>> JASON FAN: Yeah, for sure.
You know, the story I wanted to share is if we rewind back the
clock for our team, roughly call it 18 months before maturing
business, starting to build out more processes, and so we
started to bring up really assemble our executive team.
And the first thing I started to think about to myself as a
first-time founder was, great, we got experienced
people, executives coming in.
They're going to build the team.
They're going to build the processes.
I'm going to hand off all the great work to them.
They're going to build a great business.
Perfect, I thought there were great days coming.
Turned out not to be the case.
They were certainly very smart people, very experienced
executives, mean very well for the business, but what I found
out was very quickly if you don't manage the team well, if
you don't actively build out the team, sometimes they
roll in different directions.
That's what we noticed.
So we recently, a couple weeks ago, sat everybody
down, brought in a executive coach that started to
help ushey, let's open up.
Let's have authentic, real conversations, try to understand
where everybody is coming from, what their background,
what their motivations are.
It turned out to be a very difficult conversation.
Eight hours, full-day workshop.
Then we got but we started to get to know
each other a lot more.
And coming out of that session, there was just
a lot more cohesion amongst the leadership teams.
So that was something that worked really well for us.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thanks, Jason.
Another direct one for our panelists.
What's the most unpopular decision you've made
in the last six months?
I want everyone to jump in on this one.
So, Rachel Lea, I'll start with you.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Yeah, of course.
So we've made a lot of decisions around hiring that haven't
been popular by everyone.
And some things that we've tried implementing in probably the
past six months is making all of our decision-making metrics
driven, meaning each hire we scale from 1 to 7, and everybody
actually votes in their own chair by themselves in a room.
What that really allows everyone to do is have an open and honest
opinion with themselves, and then they vote by themselves.
We all come together, and then we decide, based on what we
decide are the higher needs, how that decision is being made.
By being really transparent with our employees in what we're
hiring for, what we're looking for, how we're making the
decision, and then actually sharing postdecision why that
was made, even if it's not unanimous or popular, has really
proven successful for our team.
It builds trust for everybody.
And then even if somebody doesn't agree with you or it's
not the most popular decision, it really allows everyone to
wrap around the fact that this new hire is joining and get
really excited about that.
>> YIN WU: It may be echoing a little bit what Rachel said.
One piece of advice that I've gotten that was useful is, like,
if you talk to three different people that you respect and they
tell you the same thing, they usually go and do that thing.
But I feel like as founders, most of the
time that's not the case.
You talk to three different people.
They have wildly different opinions.
And then you got to go and pick something, and then that means
that you're doing one thing that two out of three people
don't actually agree with.
So much of it I think for us is also about people, whether it's
hiring new folks to the team, where when it feels like you're
growing really quickly, there's not enough bodies, and then yet
you still want to keep the talent bar; or it's someone
joined the team and people really like them, but then
they may not be performing for that role, and it's
not actually a good fit.
And I think those are always the toughest conversations to have.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: Yeah, for us it was a little bit different.
So it was getting rid of our office.
So we had an office in San Francisco, you know, two or
three people used to come, but during COVID we hired a lot of
people that were remote.
And so when we decided to get rid of the office, we did it as
an executive team rather than, you know, letting the
team know in advance.
So they saw that as a harbinger potentially for something worse.
And so I think what was important to know, especially in
this kind of economy is, like, let your team know what's coming
down the line so they don't build these stories in their
head about what potentially is coming down the line.
So that was, like, a learning lesson.
So even if it feels small, it actually potentially could mean
a lot when the economy is like what it is right now.
>> JASON FAN: A couple months ago, September of last year,
one of the most difficult decisions I've had to make on
business was we had to lay off around 15% of our team.
Throughout that process it was a necessity.
There were a lot of changes happening, a lot of uncertainty
around the market, just like everybody else is experiencing.
I would say across that time, just like Devaki mentioned, make
sure that transparency is at the center of everything you do, how
you communicate, how you show up in front of your employees,
making sure that you're staying true to your mission, to
your business, and also treat people right, right?
Those were some of the principles that I followed.
It was still a very, very difficult
decision regardless, right?
And so I just wanted to do a shout-out out there.
I know there's a lot of founders and operators and
also leaders in the audience.
It's a tough market out there.
Hang in there.
Do the best you can.
We're going to get past this stage soon enough.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Another direct question, which is: What's the
worst piece of advice you've gotten, either from an adviser
or a VC, that you didn't follow and it turned out
to be the right choice?
Yin, let's start with you on this one.
>> YIN WU: Yeah, I think a lot of the advice that you get, it
also comes back down to context.
Like if you're the founder at your company or you work at a
company, you're thinking about the problems 24/7.
So any advice that you're getting from someone else you're
teeing up five minutes of context and then asking,
wait, what do you think?
And it's hard for them, I think, to be able to actually
understand that well, too.
So for us, like, one of the pieces of feedback we gotthis
was back in 2021, when the market for fundraising was
actually really goodwas, you know, maybe don't fundraise.
Like if you fundraise too muchif you fundraise too much,
then it's really hard for the team to still stay motivated.
You may burn through all the cash.
There's definitely a lot of negatives.
We've seen this with WeWork and other companies as well.
But I think it comes back to also understanding who
are you as a founder.
For us it's the case that I know it's very unlikely
that we're going to go and take that same path.
And having that extra capital actually allows us to be able
to scale faster and take the bets that we want to take.
So I think so much of the advice that you have thateven the ones
that we're giving is so generic.
You have to apply it to who you are in order to
actually make it work.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Trust your gut.
Rachel Lea, let's have your thoughts on this one too.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
People we always have this phrase at Arketa that people
are default nice, right?
Assume the best intention.
But when people are giving you advice, they're giving you
advice having 1% of knowledge.
They're not at your company all day, every day.
They're not in the weeds.
They don't see what's really happening behind the scenes.
And so when we were first starting Arketa, every piece of
advice I was given, I would totally take blindly.
I'd absorb it and be, like, someone gave me this advice.
Time to go do it.
So we had aone of our investors was, like,
you're doing really well.
Let's put some pedal into the metal.
Time to grow, grow, grow, scale, scale, scale.
We had no signs of repeatability.
And I remember one month we spent $2,000 on Facebook ads.
Literally the next month we spent $25,000
on Facebook ads, blindly.
Like, oh, yeah, let's grow.
And we saw this.
We were, like, this is not the direction we want
to run the company in.
We want to build something that is sustainable, scalable,
all the words we're hearing now a year later.
We want to build a great business model.
And we said, hey, we're actually going to stop doing that.
We're not going to grow, grow until we burn and
then go raise more money.
And at first that advice was, like, what are you doing?
Why are you doing this?
This is antithetical to what "startup" means.
Of course, now we're all in this room, and we all know how
important every dollar is.
So it was the right decision at the time.
And so the biggest piece of advice I can give is no
need to follow it blindly.
Take advice.
Take what serves you.
Leave the rest and really make the decision that's
best for you at the time.
>> JASON FAN: Speaking of unhelpful advice, let me
tell you all about this one time I heard from a
guy named Matt Yalowitz.
Just joking, Matt's great.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thank you.
>> JASON FAN: Amazing adviser, amazing partner for us.
I'm going to take this one in a slightly different direction.
You know, it's real.
There are a lot of people who give out advice.
Advice is free.
Talk is easy.
So to Rachel Lea's point, you've got to make sure that what is
the most meaningful to you, what is applicable to you, you
need to filter that through.
This is one story.
Very fortunately we didn't end up taking this investor's money,
but I remember an investor a couple years ago told me, hey,
we're a value-add investor.
How many of you have heard that term before?
They're going to add value to your business, right?
And what ended up happening was, you know, as a first-time
founder back then, I was, like, oh, great, free advice,
free connections, and all this information, I'm going
to absorb it all in.
And once it started to come through, all the advice, all the
recommendations, all the introductions, man, deep
down inside I just knew most of it was B.S., right?
And, look, this guy is an investor.
I couldn't tell the guy this is useless, man.
Stop giving away the advice.
Fortunately, didn't end up taking his money.
So just a warning out there.
Be careful who you listen to.
Be very selective and be very careful with your time.
Sometimes they send you down the path of chasing
down a wild goose.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: I appreciate that you all touched on the need
for efficiency and running a lean ship during these times.
So on the topic of doing more with less, something everybody
here in the audience is thinking about, we know the economic
climate is a concern for businesses of all sizes.
How have you evolved your product strategy when
customers are cutting back?
Devaki, can you start on this one?
>> DEVAKI RAJ: Yeah, so what we did was we focused on a customer
segment that we know was cutting seven-figure checks.
So for us we primarily focused on the public sector.
We actually did a revamp of our website.
We still have a freemium for CrowdAI that all, like, Fortune
500 companies sign up for, but in terms of how we get the
narrative directly to the customer that's currently
paying a lot more, we actually changed our website.
We talked to the team about, hey, we're going to support all
types of customers, and for the purposes of just getting our
information out there, we're going to focus our blogs, our
PR, our marketing on that one type of customer segment even
though our product is a horizontal platform.
So it was very much let's focus on the buyer and less
so on a marketing strategy.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Rachel Lea, I'd love your thoughts,
too, on this one, too.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Yeah, I mean, it's so funny that a
year later, when cash is not free, we all change the
way we run our business.
And at Arketa we believe in really strong unit economics and
also building something people can't live without truly.
Like if they can't cut you, then you'll be there forever.
And so for us, we take payments for studios and
fitness-and-wellness professionals, meaning they
literally can't run their business without Arketa,
which means it's essential.
So they're not thinking about when they have budget costs,
what's the first thing to go.
We oftentimes replace other products, which I think could be
really good as you think about when your value
proposition isn't, hey, spend more; it's actually
consolidation of products.
And then the last thing we really think about is finding
people that are obsessed with your product.
In these markets, when we're not spending as much money on
marketing, your customers are going to be your best advocates.
I spend half of my day talking to customers, phone calling
customers, texting them, live-chatting them.
I inherently become embedded in our customers so much
so that we hope that they become obsessed and they do
that marketing for us.
They tell their friends, we're top of mind, and that's really
helped us thrive in a world where you're not just
going on every single channel to spend money.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Fantastic; Yin, Jason, any thoughts on
this one as well?
>> YIN WU: I think all of that is very much true.
I think some of the tactical things that we think about is if
companies are really crunched for fundingPulley sells to a
lot of startupsis can you make it a win-win, where
you have a two-year contract instead of one.
And the other that we also think about is that we actually
doubled down more on customer success during this time.
We were actually chatting backstage, and my title on
LinkedIn is "Customer Success" because I also want to send a
signal to our team is, like, that is the function that
matters the most, which is how do we serve our users when there
are a ton of companies thinking about down rounds or
they're not doing that well and thinking about, "How do I
explain employee equity?"
When we feel like we may be struggling, well, that's
where Pulley can also help.
And when we think about the long term is, like, we want to help
these companies really succeed in the long term
so they can continue to be Pulley users, too.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: I think the feedback that you're getting
across the board is a little bit different
from each person, right?
We've got folks on this panel that sell to startups, folks
that sell to small businesses and individuals, a person that
sells to both startups and enterprise, and then
I primarily sell to enterprise and government.
So each piece of advice is going to be a little
bit different, especially for this kind of question.
>> YIN WU: Yeah.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: And I love the focus on customers, though,
throughout, which is something that  as you heard from
our keynoteis the top of mind for Stripe, too.
On the theme of doing more with less, how are you also reducing
structural costs, which enable you to then develop and put more
money into the product?
Yin, do you want to start with this one?
>> YIN WU: Yeah, I think for some of the structural costs,
this is a case where, like, maybe similar to Rachel and
so many folks on the panel, is, like, the being mindful of what
your unit economics were feels like it's one where it's like
now is sexy in 2023, and very much forgotten in 2021, when
you had extremely low interest rates.
I consider myself a paranoid optimist, where you're, like,
always waiting for the other shoe to drop, but, like, very
optimistic in the long term.
So for us as a team is, like, we've burned less than
what we make in AR this year, and what we need to
do is continue to invest in building a really great team.
I think one of the benefits that you have in today's macro is
when you're in a bull market, hiring is incredibly
tough because every single candidate that comes on board
has 50 different offers.
Now it's the case that you can actually afford to be actually a
bit more picky about who's the right person on the team, having
more conversations, like, well, do we actually want to scale by
bringing on 10 people next year, or do we think that we can
actually make do with less, too?
>> MATT YALOWITZ: I'm going to do two lightning-round
questions that I'd like each of you to answer.
And then get ready, we'll turn it to the audience after that
for all of your questions.
The first is: Anything you wish you had done differently in the
current economic climate?
And what advice would you give to company founders and leaders
here in this audience?
Devaki, we'll start with you.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: Yeah, I want to give a specific example, which
is on our website we actually had a lot of job openings, and
then we were starting to get a lot of people applying.
But, really, internally in terms of the way we thought about
cutting costs was, like, hey, we're actually really hiring for
one particular role really strongly, maybe two.
And so what I decided and as part of transparency and I
think it's also just ethical behavior is take down job
postings if you don't actually hire, because it honestly
gives a lot of false hope.
It's a waste of a lot of candidates' time.
And, in fact, like, it's also a waste of your own employees'
time, as well, just to review all the résumés.
So I think that's, like, the one thing that I think in this
economy, a lot of people put up a lot of job postings to show
that it's a healthy company.
But you're really wasting a lot of people's time in this economy
that there's, like, a lot of layoffs at large companies.
>> JASON FAN: For us...
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Jason.
>> JASON FAN: ... encouraging creativity was something that
turned out to be pretty helpful.
It might seem obvious to everybody here, especially
building at the early stage, of course, we're creative.
Of course, we're nimble.
Of course, we're looking to adapt.
But I found it surprising that if you just put your team
together in a room and to say, "Hey, let's take a step back and
try to be creative," it surprises me sometimes how these
different creative ideas can truly be brought to the table.
So highly encouraged it.
We tried it a couple times to get people to talk, and
sometimes great ideas come out.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Yeah, I think two things are really
important, looking back.
One is focusing on your north star metric.
So when we were first starting the company, I
would look at competitors.
Wow, they're raising so much money.
Wow, look at these incredible logos they have.
They just did this amazing partnership.
And at the end of the day, focusing on your north star
metric is what matters most.
For us that's revenue.
I hope for most of you all it's also something similar.
And then, also, being honest with yourself
when it's not working.
Oftentimes we change the metrics to change the story.
Don't do that; it never works.
And then the second piece of advice is you
own your own destiny.
And I like to use the metaphor if anyone has ever had a
backseat driver in the car and you're driving the car and you
know exactly where you're going, and then you have that backseat
driver that, like, one in ten times they help you, but
normally they're, like, stop, and, like, you were
never going to hit the car.
Like you were never going to mess up in any way.
And so I always encourage  if I had to tell myself a year
later, you drive that car.
Of course, there are going to be people to the right side of you
giving you advice, random investors that are value adds,
friends that have just come up with a brand-new product that
they think is going to be a billion-dollar company.
But what you should really be focusing on is
you own your company.
Nobody owns, we hope, as much as you do, and you really
make your own destiny there.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: I appreciate that advice.
Because last time I tried to pitch Rachel Lea an
idea, and she was, like, no, we're not doing that.
(Laughter)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: So good.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Thank you.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Shooting us down is important.
Yin.
>> YIN WU: Yeah, I think all of that is very true.
The thing I think a lot about is I feel like one of
the biggest advantages you have as a startup is speed.
You have to move quickly.
You can't pretend to be a worse version of someone else.
When one of thethere's four cultural tenets at Pulley,
and the one that we always go back to as a team is
think in first principles.
The reason we think it matters so much is oftentimes I think
people have a tendency to take what worked previously and
apply it to your current situation even though the
context has changed.
It's like to your point about competitors, you can't do the
same playbook as your competitor because your competitor didn't
exist when they were coming on.
So, great, if the climate is actually changed, you need to
revamp what you're doing.
So I think for us it's, like, maybe the theme here is, like,
go back to what you think is right and keep asking the "why"
questions, not just to yourself, but to your whole team, too.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thank you, last question before I turn
it to the audience.
AI, hot topic right now.
We have Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, joining
us this afternoon.
How are you all thinking about using AI to become more
efficient and effective in your businesses?
Devaki, I'll let you start, given you're an AI company.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: I'll push it the other because we've been
doing AI since 2016, well before it was very cool.
So specifically I want to talk a little bit about how startups
out here are thinking about AI and what the market looks like.
So I think there'sI'm going to answer the question two ways,
one for startups and one for large enterprises.
So startups right now, there's a lot of companies
that are wanting to build AI-based companies.
I think right now it's very easy toas a smaller company to
potentially raise money, but if you look at the competitive
market right now, you need to raise a lot of money
to build foundation models.
So I think as startups think about it, what is your  what
is a startup that you're going to build using AI?
I personally believe that a vertical-specific focus that's
very deep in one particular area is going to be the most
successful on that side.
When you think on the other side as an enterprise, they're going
to have to make a build versus buy decision.
ChatGPT, OpenAI, a lot of these open-source tools have
made it really easy to create wrappers for these
enterprises to bring in.
I'm talking about Fortune 500 companies that may not
have deep stacks of deeply technical people.
So it's going to be really interesting around the build
versus buy decision, because now the cost of talent has
potentially dropped, so  but maybe they're going to be
bringing people in rather than buying.
So it's very interesting dynamics.
I don't have an exact solution for it, but I think, like, those
are the interesting dynamics between what a startup is
looking like now in this economy and what a large enterprise is
thinking about when integrating AI into their products.
>> JASON FAN: Yeah, Devaki, I think what you're saying
about build versus buy is very interesting.
And that's kind of how our team has been thinking about it.
Clearly, there is a startup being built and really just
building a foundational tool in the AI space,
of course, go ahead.
There are a lot of businesses out there, like,
for example, like ours.
We're in the HR space.
We help employee employers optimize
their benefits programs.
I believe there's going to be a lot of applications being built
in the coming months, in the coming years that will save you
a lot of time in case we probably don't need to
invest a ton into building out solutions in house where there
will be just amazing solutions that come out.
Maybe some of them are going to be built by one of you.
Some of them may not exist as of now.
So just be mindful around how you apply that strategy.
Everybody is probably going to find some benefit in the AI
space, but how it manifests itself in your business, in your
product, be mindful, and make sure that things are
actually it's, you know, in tune with how  what your
business operates like.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Yeah, I think something for us is  we
think about AI and how it helps us  is there are two
ways to apply it.
One is your product as a company, and then the second
is your internal tooling.
So for us as a product, we think, is this a problem that we
need to solve, and does this solve it for our core customer?
For us, that is not our business model, so we're not all of a
sudden going to go to left field and build some AI
product just because everyone else is doing it.
And so what you really need to think about is can you build
something that your customers are just obsessed with and focus
on the basics, because in two years there's going to be
something else that's trendy, something else that's cool,
and everyone is going to hop on that rocket ship.
For us with ChatGPT, AI, all of those tools, we use them to make
our teams more efficient.
So I literally used it to help me with this talk today.
I, we used it for customer-support tickets,
product requirements.
Our engineering team loves using it for unlocking them in code.
So for us, it's really helped unlock efficiency
and time internally.
>> YIN WU: Yeah, I think, I'm curious what Sam is going
to talk about at the session when he keynotes.
For us I think it's really similar, thinking about
how do you make the team more efficient.
And the other part that we think about is how is itespecially
for Pulley is, like, how do we help our customers also get
answers to questions they have with legal questions
around equity and more?
And I feel like we're just at the beginning of
all of this, too.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thank you; all right, we have time to take a
handful of audience questions.
You all have had enough time to prepare, so hopefully there are
a couple in the audience.
Please stand if you have a question.
And the mic runners, if you can identify yourselves,
will bring you the mic.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Start over here, thank you.
>> QUINN GOLDSTEIN: Hi, Quinn Goldstein from YepChat.
We help restaurants manage their phones.
I'm a cofounder and CEO.
And when I, seven years ago, stopped consulting and started
this business, I firmly believed that my personal wealth
maximizing or expected value of my lifetime wealth would have
been higher if I stayed in consulting or stayed at, you
know, working at Apple or Google or Stripe, but I
chose to do a startup.
Do you agree with that?
>> YIN WU: Yeah, I would say on a risk-adjusted basis,
that is 100% true.
What you're giving up instead of aif you work at a FAANG
company, if you go anywhere else, your expected return is
much higher because you look at this year by year and how these
companies have continued to perform, of course.
But what you give up I think as a trade-off is
that outlier return.
You're not going to make a billion dollars or create
that impact on the world.
I think one of the things that you have to believe when you're
starting a company is you have to be desperate for something.
Like desperate for this mission, desperate for this product to
exist, desperate to make an impact; otherwise, I think it's
really tough to convince yourself of getting up every day
when a startup is not going through happy patches, too.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: I couldn't agree more.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: You're also not going to be on
the stage at Sessions.
So that's a pretty big positive point.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: No, I couldn't agree more.
For us, something like running a startup is not easy.
There are a million times when you're, like, I want to quit.
I'm done with this.
Why am I doing this?
There's no return on my investment.
For me, I believe we're going to change the world.
And no one else in the world is working on this problem, and I'm
so obsessed personally with wellness and how we're
increasing access to wellness, how we're solving problems for
studio owners who can't take payments behind the
desk with touchless pay.
Like I'm just obsessed with what we're building.
You can't be in this for the money.
You can't be in this to have a billion-dollar exit, because
you're not going to be able to get through those hard times.
So, at least for me, it's how am I changing the world
and why am I in it.
But you're right, there are a million and one other things I
could be doing to be making way more money and having
a more comfortable life.
For me, it's finding something I was just obsessed
and passionate about.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thank you.
>> JASON FAN: Flip that around a little bit, though, right?
If you found something that you actually don't mind waking up
every day and going back to 12 hours a day, you just keep on
going back and having things slam against your face, but you
keep on going back, if you've found that something
in your life, don't give up.
>> RACHEL LEA FISHMAN: Yeah.
>> JASON FAN: That is actually very rare, so...
>> DEVAKI RAJ: I mean, it's like chewing glass
and liking it, right?
I saw something on LinkedIn on this.
So that's pretty much what it is.
I've been, obviously, I've been doing this for
seven years, right?
So I was at a FAANG company before.
So right now, as we look at it, like, paper versus cash, yeah,
it's not so great.
So I think in terms of the way we think about it, it'sI think
there's also  it depends on why you started a company; right?
Like there's mission driven.
There's product driven.
I'm the only one that can do it.
But there's alsothere's also strategies for optimizing, like,
an exit faster for cash.
So, really, everybody's got different motivations, and I
think that, like, you need to figure out what your motivation
is when you start your company.
Am I going to do this until IPO?
Am I going to do this because in 23 years I'm
going to flip it and make a couple hundred million?
It really depends.
I'm not going to say it's just every person that starts a
startup has a similar motivation, but there are
strategies for you to optimize on wealth if that's what you're
trying to do, versus product.
And it really depends on  I don't think in this
economy people should shy away from either answer.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: And you also have the quote of the day.
Being a startup founder is like chewing glass and liking it.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: I stole it.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: So that is very memorable.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: I just can't remember who I
stole it from, though.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thank you.
There were a couple of other questions I saw over here.
>> AUDIENCE: Can I speak my question?
>> AUDIENCE: Hello?
This is Mannoy from iVoting.
I want to ask you: What's the best growth hack or growth
strategy that worked for you?
And also...
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Could you just speak up a little bit?
>> AUDIENCE: So what's the best growth hack or growth
strategy that worked for you?
>> DEVAKI RAJ: Growth-hack strategy.
>> YIN WU: I think it really depends on who your customer is.
And I would also say is, like, a growth hack iscan only get you
maybe that initial bit of first traction, but it is not
the way to scale because it's not repeatable.
Like product-market fit is literally two words, product
and you have a sustainable way to bring it to market.
Like growth hacks, there's  by definition, it's a hack, so it's
kind of like a one-off.
Post on Reddit, post on Twitter, depending on who
your audience is, and see if something picks up.
But I think it's really going to be tough for us to say, like,
this is the one thing you should try and then it'll work,
because if that was the case, then everybody would
go and do that too.
>> AUDIENCE: And, also, I mean, did you ever have moments when
you felt that your product was, like, the best in the market,
but still you were, like, a distant number two, and how
did you, like, deal with that?
>> DEVAKI RAJ: I think he said best in the market
and what did...
>> AUDIENCE: So when you, like, looked at the
marketscape space and your competitors and you felt that
your product was the best, and yet, I mean, you were,
like, a distant number two.
>> DEVAKI RAJ: Yeah, so I can talk quickly about this,
which is we've been working with the US government for a long
time now, and so for a very long time we were one of the
few companies that are doing computer vision in this space.
And so when a lot of companies realized that, okay, the federal
government is actually a really great place, Silicon Valley
companies and large cloud companies started getting more
into this space, right, they, obviously, have deeper
resources than we do from a deep-learning perspective.
So we were first in, which means that we're still a player, but
as we think about competitors, right, we need to continue to
find I guess more of a niche so you could continue
to compete in that space.
I think that's probably the best way to deal with competitors,
because you're always going to find a competitor that has a
lot more money than you.
So it's about relationships and niche.
So the amount of people that I'm on a texting basis with
who are customers, right, is, like, part of it is you
build that relationship.
And it's not really about product, it's about
relationship at that point.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: I know there are a lot of questions we didn't
get a chance to answer today, but the panelists will be
available after to chat through these additional questions.
Unfortunately, we are running short on time because we had to
shorten this panel a little bit.
So I do want to thank our panelists today for joining us.
It's been a really great discussion.
(Applause)
>> YIN WU: Thank you, guys.
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Appreciate your candor.
(Applause)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: And, really, thank you for taking the time.
Much appreciated.
>> JASON FAN: Thanks, Matt.
(Applause)
>> MATT YALOWITZ: Thank you.