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Amanda Bradford

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19
first
2018-06-15
most recent
2018-06-15
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1
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  1. “Of meeting someone that's in my preferences. So I think really merging that so that we're not keeping our users online. We want to be sending our users offline.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh man, so many things. I'm actually working on a presentation about this right now, but a couple things I'm excited about are merging online and offline officially in the sense that when you want to go out to a bar in New York City and let's say you're fresh off a breakup yourself, which bar do you want to go to and where are the people that meet your preferences within New York City and are they going to the West Village? Are they going to the Lower East Side? And where should you go out with your friends that night? And so I think having a little bit more of a compass on not in a creepy way by any means, but more, you know, I call it a heat map or a compass in the sense that it helps you live your life offline with more efficiency and more focus and I guess increased probabilities of meeting someone interesting without having to kind of change the way you want to live your life. And to me that when we get there, that's what dating should be like. I should be able to go to a music show that I wanted to go to anyway and happen to bump into someone that's there because I know that from this map that, you know, this is a good chance of.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I just get busy, man. I love taking on projects. I always have a thousand things going on in my life. I think, you know, I tend to deal with stress by getting in and doing more work. And so I think, you know, it's not the most healthy, of course, but I think focusing on stuff and getting through it because it always gets, you know, it always gets better. No.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I think for me, I think it's usually the end of relationships when I tend to have the most personal growth and those relationships can be professional relationships or personal relationships. I've had quite a few end, I guess, in the last five years for different reasons. And I think really understanding what you want out of life and who you want to spend it with and what kind of person you want to be. And yeah, so I say breakups and breakups professionally and breakups personally. And when they happen at the same time, which happened to me, I think you go through a lot of self-reflection.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Do the work. I would say that's one of our lead values. That's something that me, my VP of Inge, my director of analytics, we always put that on our values and we always remind each other and hashtag it around the office. But I think to me it means just rather than kind of talking about the problem and hypothesizing about it, just like roll up your sleeves and go in and do the work and figure it out and come up with some sort of solution. So I think it's just kind of persistence and getting in there and do the work.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I'll give you my childhood favorite book, which was The Giver. And the reason I would say that book resonates with me is just always stayed with me as I guess I've gone through my life journey just because it was such a book of self-discovery and I read it at such a young age when I was kind of understanding the world. And so I think I always just think back on, you know, he learned that there was a history and there was a future and sometimes I feel like when you're going through life, you start to realize, oh, wow, I took you start to see the world a little bit differently. I think as you age and that's now I understand the giver a lot more, I feel.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Awesome engineers, which is again one of the hardest things to be able to provide value to even as a VC. So it's, you know, I would say sourcing engineers in Silicon Valley is probably one of the most difficult projects I've had. We're just now getting to a point where we can start to actually recruit kind of consistently and bring people on, but it's been hard. I think the dating space doesn't always attract kind of the Google type engineers. I think people kind of write it off sometimes when it's actually quite fascinating data and actually quite tech forward, at least the way we're running our company. But I think dating gets kind of a bad rap. And so a lot of people will say, oh, I don't want to go. They think of match.com or they think of these kind of old school visions in their head. So I think we kind of run up against that as well. I think the other thing in BC does for me is just tell me what their other portfolio companies are doing. I think especially as a single founder, I sometimes feel like I'm paranoid or crazy. I'm like, is this a good idea or bad idea? Or am I running the company right to think that we should be thinking?”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Went the alternate route. I actually priced my own round and it got negotiated down a little bit, but ended up kind of closing the round pretty much led by Amanda, I like to say. I haven't really had the need to have any of my investors go to bat for the company. I don't know if that's just because I like to fight and I like to go to myself, but I guess I can't comment on that in particular. I've commented that when I do need help from my investors, I think they help me just like they would if they had put in $2 million or $5 million, even if they've only put in 25K. So I haven't noticed a difference based on the responsiveness or their willingness to take a phone call or give me advice. And so I really think it's about the people you have on your cap table and actual, you know, the names and not so much the funds. I think you want the funds because they have the connections that help the people with the names provide value to you. But I think at the end of the day, it's about the people who do you want in your family?”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's not fun. I mean, I don't think fundraising is fun for anyone. And to be fair, our first $75,000 that we collected was very painless. It was people have relations with. Three people gave me $25K checks. So that was easier than the normal process. But the next 300K was quite the uphill battle. I think that was four to six months of just kind of going to coffee meetings, talking to people, trying to get the money in. And so what I ended up doing is more or less a kind of a party round strategy where I had some awesome VCs in that kind of gave me the credibility, had some great angels in that gave me credibility. And so I said, I think I can get a bunch of 100K, 50K checks, and get this round to a million faster than I could by going and trying to get kind of a classic VC to lead the round in a dating space with a single founder with a product that the back end was not even a real back end. It was built on Facebook's parse, which is no longer allowed. So, I mean, it's no longer alive. So, I mean, we had, you know, we kind of had an uphill battle as far as trying to get kind of a classically led VC round.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I'm not doing as well on the league as I'm on these other apps, and it's, you know, we're like, it's not you, it's literally that we're keeping the ratio balanced and we're doing this as a service to both women and men, but it does change kind of the experience that people are used to. And so we'll constantly get women complaining that these guys don't write me and I write them and they don't write back. And because great guys, they had a lot of great girls messaging them. So we say, okay, well, you might need to message first or maybe work on your openers. And I think it's kind of amusing to me because it's, you know, women have had such a privileged kind of dating experience. So it's interesting to see kind of how the tides have turned in this day and age.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'm intrigued. Would you agree with this kind of having seen the observations with the league and how do you think about finding that equilibrium? With dating, it's interesting because you can kind of, there's a lot of different marketplace dynamics in play. There's obviously the kind of gender one, which is, you know, the majority of our user base is men and women seeking each other. So you have that. And then I think for us, because we have the wait list and because we're a curated community, we can actually choose what ratio to keep the league. So we could make it way more female, less male, or we could make it way more male, less female. And you'll notice, you know, I don't know if you what other dating apps we use, but most of them don't curate their community. So it's just about who decided to log in that day. And usually on average, dating apps are about like 70% active users are men, 30% women. So usually women are very outnumbered. They get a lot of attention. You know, it's pretty easy to be a woman on a dating app on most of them. And I would say on the league, it's actually quite hard in the sense that we keep the ratio 50-50. So, you know, the women feel like they're kind of doing less well, they say.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Constantly, you know, anytime someone says to download the league, anyone anywhere can. And so these waitlists are building up in the background while we're working on this R&D and development. And so when we were ready to kind of focus back on expansion, we could just say which cities have the most people who've already registered. So it's actually a pretty simple algorithm from that perspective. Minutes ago, and I think there were 18,000 that viewed it to me as on the way. Yes, and we had Leah from Tars Rabbit and Fuel Castle on the show the other day, and she suggested that she”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Mentioned the bridge around there. I spoke to many of your investors before the show and agreed. Mansion was this incredible scaling and growth trajectory that you have enjoyed with the I wish it was a really complicated answer, but again, finding this under the engineering nightmares thread, I guess, you know, we were behind on launching in the sense that, you know, we had people knocking down our doors saying, when is my city live? And we were only in San Francisco. And so we were on this pretty crappy MVP product that was actually breaking down in the sense that you couldn't, when you log in, it would take about four or even five minutes to get your matches every day. And so it was, you know, we were having like massive scale issues. And so what we ended up doing was deciding that in New York, for instance, we had over 10,000 people on the wait list. So we said, okay, we're going to kind of have New York be our very last city. We're going to kind of band-aid this infrastructure up until we can. And then we switched focus and started rebuilding that new product. So because of that, we were way behind in all the cities. So by the time we kind of were in a good place from a technical non-product perspective, we were kind of way behind where we probably should have been from a city launching perspective. So I guess we could just, we were lucky enough to have a waitlist in the app.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Those are the first few people, especially on the technical side, because I was technical, but technical enough to be annoying basically, but not technical enough to really be able to build the back end of the stack and trying to find people to bring onto the team that believed this was going somewhere. When you only have one person on the team, it's pretty hard for anyone to take that jump. And so I think you have to be, I like to say it's like, you can't really get the eight players. So then you have a couple different options. You can hire B players or you can contract out A players and pay a hefty price tag. And so I chose the latter and really built the company on the back of A player contractors that know they're A players and they charge accordingly. And I think building an app with an awesome engineer now we have engineers in house and they really are appreciative that we really went above and beyond it to make sure we got great people building that foundation and whether they were in-house or not. So I think we've learned a lot about contractors versus employees and I think you need to be in the right stage before you can kind of expect people to leap from their”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The direction of the company, and now something that was really important to me, I didn't feel like I was good enough at these difficult conversations with humans that I wanted to have them all the time. I was like, I don't want to constantly be fighting and dealing with power struggles. And that was something kind of I knew going into it. And if you don't have a partner that you know kind of inside and out, I don't think it's worth having one. So, you know, I think the two things they say startups fail is one, you know, co-founder issues and two is running out of money. And so those are the two things I was like, I'm going to make sure those two things don't happen. And you can eliminate one of them pretty easily by being a solo founder.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I totally disagree with it. I mean, I say it's the same advice I give to single people when they're struggling with the dating game. I say it's really hard to date when you don't know who you are or what you want in a relationship or what your definition of love is and all these other things that you kind of need to be able to enter a healthy relationship. And I think a company is the same thing. You need to find out who your company is, what it does. Does it have legs? Do you have a profitable business model? Is there a service or product here that people want? And then once you know that, once you have that and you kind of have that truth, I think attracting people onto your ship is a lot easier. And so I think people try to do that too early rather than focusing on, you know, can I build something that delivers value? So I think actually a solo founder is a nice way to really focus on that. You have no distractions and you actually can keep a lot more of your company if you can figure it out without having to kind of find someone to share the burden with. So, you know, I feel like I have regained a lot of control of the company. It's in my vision. I have complete control over.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, I like to think that I was interested in connecting with people digitally from a very young age. I think I recognized the efficiency of being able to talk to someone across the country when that was what I was excited and focused on. I was excited to kind of start building my new life there. And the internet let me do that. And so I think, you know, I saw value really early on from that. I remember I met my college boyfriend. I reunited with him through Facebook. So I'm a big Facebook fangirl in the sense that any service that connects people to people they might not have met in everyday life, that people that are life-changing and transformative people, I have a lot of love and respect for. And so I think subliminally maybe that sort of pushed me in this direction. I don't know, you know, I didn't throw up saying I wanted to build a dating site or a matchmaking site, but I've always sort of been kind of on social network creep, I guess we can say.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That Internet Amanda is coming for about six months in North Carolina. And so they all thought I was kind of crazy because I was coming from Silicon Valley where we kind of grew up around computers. My dad worked in startups, helped build the Unix operating system. So we were a pretty geeky family. And so we came from California to Texas and then Texas to North Carolina. So by the time we got to North Carolina, we were probably a pretty crazy Californians.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I love that you asked that question because I was actually known as Internet Amanda as a girl because I was sort of crawling the social networks before there were social networks. So I was one of the people that used AOL Instant Messenger as a search for friends tool. There was ByteChat. And if you filled out certain profiles in BuddyChat in AOL, you were able to find other people that match your middle school, for an example. That's actually how I sourced my best friend, who's still my best friend to this day. I sourced her from AOL, Buddy Messenger, because I found a guy who went to my middle school where I was moving to in three or four months, or maybe I was even six months ahead. That's how weird I was. And so he connected me with a girl named Molly. He said, Molly knows everybody. She'll hook you up. You'll have a good experience in middle school. Be friends with Molly. So I said, cool. That sounds like something I can do. So I messaged her and said, hey, I'm this new girl coming to school. You want to hang out when I get there. And so we became fast friends on AOL, but I always joke that I guess the rumor was around school.”

    2018-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source