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Anna Shedletsky

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26
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2017-04-07
most recent
2017-04-07
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1
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  1. “Oh man, it's going to be a bumpy ride, I'm sure, but I think I'm going to leave this one up for time to tell. So we'll both have to wait and see. But certainly we'll be working really hard towards it.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think that I'm going to give a plug to the first round review. It's really well written and they're always talking about a topic that is useful to me as an entrepreneur.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's pretty antiquated, and the processes are pretty antiquated, and the people who work in this space are really always just focused on executing. And so they don't have a lot of time to think about how it could be better and what technologies could be better. And I think that we live in this society of consumer software. And we kind of expect that same consumer software to carry over to this industry. And it just hasn't. It hasn't converted well. And so that's kind of what we're doing is we're trying to bring these new technologies that everybody is familiar with and used to from the consumer side into an industry that is just, you know, it's not very sexy. And I think that's maybe why.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's really a wide open space. And so I think what's most exciting is what we are working on, which is creating closed-loop feedback control around the manufacturing line, not just one specific process, as is kind of done today, but the entire line, the entire supply chain. And I think that's a super exciting, wide open space for machine learning.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “This one is a great question, but I'm going to come across as such a nerd. I think that my favorite book is actually Lord of the Rings.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think the most challenging aspect of being a CEO is feeling like I have three or four full-time jobs at any given time and trying to do all of them well. So hiring, fundraising, selling, running everything else that nobody else is thinking about, trying to plan ahead, these are all the things that are constantly swirling around. And then ultimately still trying to build a company that I want to work at from a selfish perspective, but also that my employees who I care about also want to work at.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is we believe we're a good company. And I think the best defense seems to be to have at least two high watermark term sheets that you can work with in parallel and to kind of not close down conversations just because you think you're done and you just really want to be done with a fundraising process.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I think that I have one kind of last piece of advice that I think would be great to share with the broader founder community based on what we've experienced. And really that piece of advice is that even once you get a term sheet, even if you like it, your high watermark term sheet, you love the investor, don't get lazy and start closing off other promising conversations with other investors that you'd actually consider by rushing them too much. We had our high watermark term sheet pulled on us for what we believe was no fault of our own. A week after we thought we'd finish the pre-signing due diligence and had started trading red lines back and forth. And that pulled term sheet created difficulties for us in our process because we'd already started shutting down other conversations and then we couldn't really open those conversations up again. And so I think the lesson here is that even though it's very bad behavior, pulled term sheets do happen, they can happen to you, they can happen to good companies.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Like you're always pitching anyway. So, how do you build a relationship where you're not pitching? And I think what I have kind of stumbled into is you just go and ask advice. This is a great way to get like half an hour of free consulting about what you should be worried about in your business and what you should be doing about X, Y, Z or the other. And that's kind of how I've approached it.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Great question, and it kind of goes back to the methodology of learning new things that we just talked about. The problem there being I had no entrepreneurial background when I started my company. That was the problem. And so kind of my method there was I went out to go find one. And a great way to start an entrepreneurial network is to meet other founders. So I hosted dinners at my house, several of them with several different groups of founders. I knew like two founders. And so I asked them to bring two other founders that they know and I met those people and then had additional dinners where I invited those people and they invited other people. And so free food is a great way to meet founders. Founders are how I met many of the VCUs that in my early days that I had been introduced or other people in my network. And so I didn't know what I should be doing in this proverbial like build relationships with VCs. People say that all the time, but it feels”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You don't need YC, you can raise money now. And he suggested that I go talk to all the other VCs I'd been building relationships with, tell them that I had an interview scheduled and ask for their advice on whether we should do YC or not. And what I realized afterwards is that he had helped me create a FOMO situation with the YC interview. And so in the end, we actually got our first term sheet a week before our interview. And I even called Sam Altman to get his advice on why we should do YC instead of taking this term sheet. And frankly, he didn't convince me, so we signed the sheet and respectfully pulled out of the interview. And so in the end, I think we had that one term sheet which then enabled us to get more. And we also happened to be able to raise between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which people say you can't do. But it was because we had this date that everybody else had the pony up for or miss out.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Absolutely. And I think what's kind of frustrating about FOMO when you hear about it as an entrepreneur is that, you know, you kind of, you're told you need a term sheet in order to get a term sheet, but that creates a chicken and egg problem. And I think the creativity here is in finding other ways to create FOMO when you don't have a term sheet to start with or you don't have a preemptive term sheet. And so what we did, and I cannot take credit for this, this is, I fell into this, but I think that there's something really interesting here for others to take away is that a few months after taking angel funding, we applied to Y Combinator, fully intending to try to get in because we thought it would be a great network for a company. And our application was selected for an in-person interview, and I picked a date three weeks out. And I happened to be meeting with a VC that I'd been kind of developing a relationship with over the last couple of months. And I asked him, what do you think about Y Combinator? Should I do Y Combinator? And he said,”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Great question. That's true. I think the things that made our fundraisers unusual were that in both cases we were able to kind of fabricate like a FOMO, a fear of missing out. And then I think the other thing that we did is that we were able to raise significantly earlier than we were planning to raise, which gave us a really kind of the upper hand and the power in the discussion”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Oh man, I think that's a really hard question. I think the way that we resolve that is that because it's all public information, how we're making this decision, if someone brings new information to the table or has a new idea, it enables it to be fairly ranked against other things in the list, in the staff rank. So I think that's been really great for”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Enables them to make micro decisions about should I stop my work to work on this other thing or is that other thing lower priority than what I'm working on right now? So this is something that we're continuing to evolve but I think is functioning really well at instrumental.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Feature or not, it was difficult to understand if that actually increased product value. So we've kind of started to evolve this stack ranking process and what we do instead is we have a top line business goal, which I am confident will result in an excellent business. And in this case, is a revenue goal. And then we have what we call the playbook, which are the individual metrics underneath that support and build up to that larger goal. And the playbook items can also be things like strategic initiatives that maybe don't contribute to revenue right away, but are important for building a healthy business. And I think what's really great about the stack rank is that it's publicly accessible to everybody on our team. And the best engineers only ever want to work on the best and most important things to the company. And so making that really clear and kind of this public way makes it so that nobody's working on something that is less important. And the team has given us a lot of feedback that this is super valuable for them because it”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, great question. I think what's really our kind of advantage here is that my co-founder and I are both mechanical engineers. And somehow we've started a software company. And so we got to start out knowing nothing about how to manage a software team and engineering prioritization in a software team because hardware is fundamentally different. And I think in the end, that enables us to start from scratch and keep only what truly works. So we keep a running stack rank in a Google Doc of all of the potential initiatives that the engineering team could be working on. And that includes things like features or security updates, et cetera. And then we score each of those initiatives based on business goals that are identified on a quarterly basis. And so a business goal might be something like build XYZ feature to increase product value. What we realized though is that that didn't work out amazingly well because while it's easy to tell whether the team built”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Absolutely, and it's a great question and one that's really important to us. I think instrumental has ended up being a team of very kind of angular people, but we're angular in different ways. And ultimately, our screen is for passion. And so we ask candidates to tell us about something they're passionate about. And that could be work-related or not. Usually it's not the best ones usually are things like food or hiking or biking and being able to hear candidate actually get into a place where they're talking about something they're passionate about can help you to understand that this is someone that you'd want to be around. And so while everybody at instrumental has their own unique flavor and personality and brings something different to the table, we all bring passion to the table. And I think that's really important to who we are at the core.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think there's one more thing that's really important, and that's to start a plan B on the side. Anything that's company critical, like hiring this first hire or fundraising or whatever, you need to have a plan B. And in this case, our plan B was that we hired a contractor to work on our engineering, get started while we look for the right person. But ultimately our plan B got evolved into actually trying to reel in that particular contractor and bribing him over barbecue rib lunches to come join our company as our first engineer. And so ultimately we had this plan to execute on, but it was our plan B that ended up resulting in our first engineering hire.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So the first one is to identify the goal. So for this example, let's pick something that I think is pretty prevalent among founders. And let's say that's to hire your first software engineer. And the second is to identify the problem. The problem is what makes the goal non-trivial. Usually wouldn't be you wouldn't need that goal if that problem was easy. So in this case, the problem is that I'm a mechanical engineer and that any software engineer that I would want to hire needs to be way better than me. But I don't know how to judge.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, I'm a career mechanical engineer, or at least I was. I still feel that way at my core. And so while I know all sorts of information about the organizational structures of hardware teams, that's about it. I don't know anything about building software teams or finances, et cetera. At least that's the way I started. I had to learn that stuff. And so I've realized that I've created this repeatable process for learning new things and new parts of building a business. And I can certainly walk through it. It might be a little tedious, but I think it'll be less tedious with an example. How does that sound hairy?”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “What's best for the customer? That's a very unifying quality to have across the team because then people aren't arguing against each other. They're all arguing for the customer. And the second is to design down to the details. And I think that most people can agree that Apple does that really well and it creates a really high quality product and we aspire to do the same.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, two things. I think one at a strategic level and one at a tactical level. At a strategic level, Apple introduced me to the space that instrumental works in. I got to see what manufacturing of consumer electronic devices is really like. And that exposure led me to understand the problems that our customers face. Essentially, I'm building a product for what I used to do. We help hardware engineers find and fix issues on their manufacturing lines. And that enables them to ship on time so they don't have to spend weeks in China like I had to do. And in the future, you know, we'll use that data that we're collecting and providing to our customers to develop artificial intelligence algorithms, which is kind of where the AI and instrumental.ai comes from. And on a more tactical level, Apple has some great core values that I wanted to replicate at instrumental. And the two that we've adopted are to make the decision based on”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think the most difficult part of it was leaving my team. I really loved working with a watch product design team. But, you know, really the Valley is a small place. I'm sure I'll get to work with them again in the future. You know, Apple does have a lot of resources, but there's something really exciting about striking out on your own and building something that is potentially even better.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “A personal tragedy in my life that made me realize that life is uncertain and that I should spend whatever time I will get to build the world that I want to live in. And working on Watch was great, but it wasn't going to result in a better world. And instrumental is working to solve a big, expensive problem in a really unloved space. And if we succeed, it will change how millions of things are made that we interact with every day. So that was really appealing. And the second is having to do with kind of the timeframe in that I believe that the robotic revolution will happen during my lifetime and I have some very unique skills and perspective to lend to the challenge. So that's where I want to be spending my time. I think that automation has kind of a bad reputation in the United States at least. But as I wrote on my blog last week, if we don't automate, others will and we won't be able to catch up. And I think it's important to keep that playing field as level as possible for us.”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Absolutely. So Apple was a great place to grow up as an engineer. And that was my first job out of school. I was a product design engineer at Apple for six years designing mechanical components for three different iPods. And then I led system product design for the Apple Watch program. And so as part of being at Apple, I got to learn all sorts of different things. I got access to a ton of resources, which made it and actually a ton of responsibility, which made it possible to grow very quickly. And ultimately, my goal there was to learn how to build millions of things. And that's exactly what I got to do. I think as hardware founders will know, it's challenging just to build one thing that works, but building millions of things that function and look good is really something entirely different. And so ultimately the aha moment for me to leave that position at Apple working on really kind of the coolest stuff that came out that year is that it's twofold. So the first is that I had”

    2017-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source