The Secrets Of Women Running
Billion-Dollar Companies
Billion-dollar startups are so rare
they're called unicorns. Those led by a woman? Even rarer. Here, three share
what they've learned.
When you’re running a billion-dollar
tech company, there isn’t a lot of time to stop running, step back, and take in
all that you’ve built.
For
Eventbrite’s Julia
Hartz,
those moments have probably happened twice. Once was in 2008 when she was in the hospital after giving birth to her first
child, and her husband and cofounder, Kevin, had to leave to let their first
employee into the office. "I’ll never forget that," says Hartz, now a
mother of two running Eventbrite’s eight offices and 500 employees.
The next time happened in Central
Park, when the company held its first large event, which involved the Black
Eyed Peas and 60,000 people.
"I remember standing at the
entrance and watching thousands of people stream in and walk right in and be
scanned in with our technology, and that was a moment that I’ll never
forget," Hartz tells Fast Company.
Today,
there aren’t many people who haven’t used or heard of Eventbrite. Last year, the company
processed $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales and sold 80 million tickets to 1.7
million events. In March 2014, the online ticketing service became a unicorn, a term dubbed by venture capitalist
Aileen Lee
for companies that have crossed the billion-dollar mark.
A recent Fortune cover story
titled "The Age of Unicorns" details how these rare companies—more than 80
startups named after the rare mythical creatures—are on the rise. While
unicorns remain exclusive and rare, what’s even rarer is the small handful of
women running them.
As
cofounder and president of Eventbrite, Hartz is part of that small group, which
also includes Michelle Zatlyn of CloudFlare and Adi Tatarko of Houzz.
Below,
Hartz, Zatlyn, and Tatarko share their secrets of being part of the Unicorn
club.
Solve a Problem
They all agree that the best
companies are the ones that started because nothing else like them existed.
The
idea for home renovation and design platform Houzz came in 2009 when Tatarko
and her cofounder and husband, Alon
Cohen,
couldn’t find an easy and affordable way to renovate their newly bought 1950s
ranch home in Palo Alto.
"We didn’t set out to build a
business. We started Houzz to solve a problem for ourselves and quickly learned
that others were experiencing the same pain point," she says. "We had
big dreams for our home and were excited to renovate it together.
Unfortunately, we found the renovation process to be incredibly difficult and
frustrating. We had a hard time finding good resources and inspiration to help
us articulate a vision for our home, and to find the right professionals to
make our vision a reality."
The husband-wife team created Houzz
as a "side project" for themselves and other homeowners—mostly
parents from their children’s school—and architects and designers from their
community. Five years later, the platform has proven so useful, it attracts
more than 25 million monthly unique visitors and over 600,000 active home professionals
who all enjoy the shoppable photo galleries.
According to Zatlyn, there is no
"silver bullet" when it comes to building a unicorn, but a good
indicator is whether there’s a massive market waiting for your product or service.
While
students at Harvard Business School, Zatlyn and her cofounder
Matthew Prince realized there was a huge need in the market to provide website
security to web properties, whether it was a small
business or a blogger. At the time, Zatlyn recalls, most of the Internet security resources available were reserved
for Internet giants, but nothing existed for
the rest of the web. In other words, there was a big hole in the market.
Zatlyn
was right on target with her prediction, and two years after CloudFlare
launched, it was named Most Innovative Technology company by the Wall Street
Journal and a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. The company protects
around 2 million web properties today.
Have An Easy-To-Use Product
Your product needs to be easy to use
compared to your competitors, says Zatlyn.
"People
talk about easy-to-use all the time, but very few services really are easy to use. We’ve made it super
simple and it takes people less than five minutes to sign up. We’ve timed
it," she says. "And the fact that we were able to do that, which took
a ton of engineering resources on our side up front, has made it so that
anybody can sign up whether you’re a food blog or an e-commerce small business or large enterprises, like
eHarmony."
"We’ve just made it so simple
to adopt us, where our next competitor takes two to six weeks to set up,"
Zatlyn continues. "I mean, that’s a game-changer."
Focus On Your People
If Hartz could give one piece of
advice to all entrepreneurs, it would be to "really invest in the
people." If you can’t hire right away, then get great advisers, but always
be seeking people who can help get you from Point A to Point B, she says.
For the first two years, there were
only three Eventbrite employees, and the focus was solely on getting the
company off the ground. After raising their first round of funding, Hartz had a
moment of self-realization where she decided that she would spend her time on
growing the team.
"We wanted to triple the team,
more than triple the team in less than a year," she says. "We wanted
to grow from 30 people to 100 because at that point, we had traction. We knew
where we needed to go and who we needed to get us there."
"And that’s where I had a
moment where I thought, I wonder what would happen if one-third of our founding
team focused solely on people. I thought, I haven’t really seen a founder just
focus on people and just coming to the table for every major decision thinking
about how it will affect people or advocating and amplifying the work of
people."
"We knew that if I focused on
that, it would mean really great things to the company. That was in the
beginning of 2010," she continues. "I haven’t looked back since. I’ve
spent the last five years really focusing the majority of my time on the people
of Eventbrite."
Bootstrap In The Beginning
Bootstrapping is "one of the
smartest decisions" that Tatarko says the company has made. Most of the
time, entrepreneurs spend months chasing down investors who often alter their
presentation and advise them to change directions. This is a waste of time.
Instead, Tatarko advises entrepreneurs to develop something meaningful before
going to investors.
"Go to investors with a real
product with traction, instead of a deck," she explains. "If you
spend the first six months to a year building a great product or service rather
than chasing investors and redoing PowerPoints, you’ll be surprised how the
dynamic with investors will change."
"When it came time for Alon and
I to bring on investors, we didn’t just have an idea of what we were going to
do. We had a proven concept with an engaged community, and knew how to
execute."
Be More Overtly Confident
When building your company from the
ground up with everything to lose, it can be hard to feel overtly confident
about the future. But this might be the most important time to show that
confidence, says Hartz.
"I think both Kevin and I are
somewhat humble people who are more quietly confident, and that can sometimes
work against you when you’re making big moves and big decisions," she
says. "That was one of the mistakes in the beginning, was we weren’t more
overtly confident. I think there’s a fine line, and once you cross it, you are
in a dangerous territory of overhyping your company, your service, and your
product, and sort of under-delivering. But I think we probably could have been
a little more overtly confident in the early days."
Never Sacrifice Quality
The opportunity to grow is a very
exciting time for companies, but, more importantly, how do you maintain quality
and culture as you grow? That is something Tatarko spends a lot of time
thinking about.
"It’s easier to maintain
quality when you’re small. Interviewing so many people by ourselves is a
challenge, but it’s super important," she explains. "Developing and
making sure that we fulfill the needs of our community is easier when the
community is smaller, but when you’re developing for so many millions of people
all over the world, and different people in the community create different
challenges ... but we’re excited about it.
"The challenge for us is
maintaining the same quality and incredible culture as our company and business
scales." she says.
No One Lives a "Balanced" Life
As long as you can remember that
while running a unicorn, you’ll make better decisions.
Zatlyn tells Fast Company
that she lacks the word "balance" and just does what she has to do to
make things work. She does do little things like live close to the office so
she doesn’t spend too much time commuting, and says all decisions she makes,
she does so with her family.
"When you’re running a company,
there’s constantly things all the time, so I don’t think of it as work and
personal," she says. "I think, okay, I have so many things to do
during the course of the week, at which some things are family and some things
are work, and I need to figure out how to fit it all together."
The husband-wife duo at Houzz also
make decisions as a family and are transparent with their children about their
work challenges.
"It happens to be that all the
great things in life come together at the same time," says Tatarko.
"Often, your career picks up at the same time that you already have a
family. It’s true for both women and men."
"We have found ways to work
together as a family to find our balance. I have to say, our children help us
live a more balanced life. When Alon and I fall out of balance, they let us
know. Weekends are for the kids, and we’ve set rules about when to talk about
work and when to check email. We find our balance together as a family."
Although the "secrets"
above are pretty simple, it can be easy to lose sight of these lessons when
you’re busy running a billion-dollar company. Even if it’s tough to break away
and look at what you’ve built, it’s important for every entrepreneur to
understand how the world is different through what they’ve started. As long as
you have a clear handle on that, secrets to running a unicorn will become a
whole lot clearer and sensible.
By Vivian Giang http://www.fastcompany.com/3042721/hit-the-ground-running/the-secrets-of-women-running-billion-dollar-
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