YouSaid · the spoken record

Audrey Gelman

lines on the record: 70
first: 2019-09-11
most recent: 2019-09-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, you know, we've definitely been in sort of dense urban environments, but we have some. Interesting things coming up in the future that relate to smaller markets. But yeah, I mean, they're a London or a New Yorker, LA, you can have so many, you know, and yes.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, in a lot of different ways, not just physically. But yes, we are in Boston, we're in Chicago, we're in LA, we're in San Francisco, we're in Washington, D.C., and soon to be London as well.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't yet, but yeah, I mean, people work there for the day or they're using it again between things. They'll, you know, run over the bridge and then take a shower there and then go to meetings for the day. People will land from planes and go directly to the wing rather than, you know, going to their hotel. So it's very convenient for travel and just, again, this sort of nomadic women live like six lives in one day. Sure. Absolutely.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's not daycare. For us, it was about iterative steps forward to make life easier for women, not necessarily the entire leap, but we're continuing to figure out how we can extend the business. And what we hear from members is like, it's a lifesaver.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was interesting because my co founder, when we raised a round of capital, she was eight months pregnant and supremely difficult. And we were, you know, really, again, thinking about innovation in the business, what new things we could create that would make women's lives easier. And everyone told us, like, it is impossible to do childcare. Like, that's why every big company in the world doesn't have it. It's just too hard. There's too much oversight and regulation. And we were like, anything is possible. It's just that you don't have people at the top that really are affected or care enough to break through the bricks. So we figured it out. And we have, it's a child care space where you can, you know, leave your child for up to three hours. It's $25 for three hours. And you can go and attend an event, have a meeting, you know, take a shower, whatever it is you need to do. There's classes. They meet other kids. You meet other moms and parents. And it's been really incredible to watch.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So you can, you know, there's spaces to co work. So you'll find people with their laptop and a cup of coffee working for the day. There's meeting rooms, there's a cafe. We do events at night. We have childcare. So we introduce the little wing. So you can leave your room. Explain that.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. In Brooklyn and Manhattan Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think that. Women spend their entire lives worrying and caring about other people. And so there is something that is profoundly liberating about walking into a space and feeling like someone has been worrying and caring about you. And the way that people describe it is really like your shoulders, you know, relax and release and you just feel this calm. And we call it the warm fuzzy feeling. It is an amazing feeling that is, you know, it's hard to describe or quantify. And the world is really like, the world is a men's club, you know, right? When you think about just like everything from office temperatures to the height of shelves to the ergonomics of chairs, like everything is built with a six foot one guy in a suit in mind. That's the standard. So when you walk into the wing, we have really tried to create a new world for women. Right.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's not the growth plan that we have. That's not the, again, the fundamentals of the two businesses look very, very different. Right.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're expanding our physical footprint. We're opening our first international occasion next month in London. We do have physical spaces, but again, the actual fundamentals of the business is really different because it's not sort of taking real estate, cutting it up, and re-releasing it. It's about building a community and about over half of our members don't use the wing as their office. They use it as a place, as a community, as a network, as a place to meet people. They get clients from the network, and they attend events, et cetera. So it's a much kind of broader addressable market. And it's, yeah, it's just very different, even though people do take their laptops there. Some of our members and work for the day.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an experiment, honestly. We didn't know how people were going to use it. What we found was that people were there all day long working. They lived their whole lives there. They were showering there. They were working there. They were attending events. They were making friends. They were starting businesses.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It represents something powerful that it's not just, you know, again, a desk. In terms of fundraising, I think we did, I would say, zag when everyone else was zigging. Like there was this, I felt very strongly that to build real community and to ever get to a place where you're going to take it to a massive scale digitally, you have to start locally and in real life. Even Facebook, you know, they had to create the behavior and the escape velocity. They needed the physical college campuses originally that's where that behavior took cult. So we were like, no, we're going to do a physical space and is not the direction investors were keen on, but it's really paid off for us because I think, again, it's built that credibility.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, the fundamentals of our business are really different. So we don't take spaces and cut them up and have desks or anything like that. It's an annual subscription business and it was really the vision was also to build a brand. You know, for us, we have like an e-comm business associated with the wing that does really well. And there's like girls in Oklahoma that want to wear winged t-shirts and have wing keychains and like.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in two years. Yeah, I mean, the other thing was I'm a public school kid. I didn't have friends and family that were like investors, you know. You know, I had friends of friends of friends and just kind of was relentless and bugged people and got meetings. And then they acquiesced and introduced me to other people. Right. And we finally got a couple people who knew what they were doing and that we really liked to invest as angels.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I never even, I mean, basically worked in the private sector. I'd really only worked on in government and on campaigns. So I was pretty unqualified.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for all the women's studies classes I had taken in college, I knew very little about them. But then we worked with a historian named Alexis Coe. She had written her thesis on it. And there were thousands of these clubs. They played a huge role in suffrage and the overall advancement of women in this country. And they were really powerful force of sort of organizing and spaces, voting spaces for women to kind of scheme and plot, honestly. And, you know, and they had just kind of gone out of fashion. But the idea of women gathering together was very, very powerful. And so we poured over like, you know, the menus, the membership cards, like all the ephemera from these clubs. And we were very inspired to create something that was obviously more modern and progressive. And diverse, but that had some of the spirit of those clubs.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, talking a little about women's clubs, and we'll talk about you have men allowed to join, correct, but we'll get to that in a second. But the history of women's clubs, what were you trying to get at for that part of it?”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's like brass plaques that you'll see on a building that's like the women's club of Indianapolis. But it's sort of, at least for me, like my grandmother's generation, there were dying out. And she really believed it could be a place for community. And so we had this idea of kind of like resurrecting the concept of the historical women's club with some of the convenience of a pit stop. So like women's utopia, you know, with bathrooms and showers. Right, right.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, inconsistent Wi Fi, just like inconsistent everything. And I think that there's men, my husband, God bless him, but he gets to like roll out of bed and go, you know, go to work. It's different for women. And so there were other things I needed too. Like, you know, I didn't want to pack my entire bathroom into my shoulder bag and like, you know, get a hernia or whatever. So I had this idea of like a pit stop almost. And then. I met my partner, Lauren Casson, and she had built physical businesses, really understood construction and operations, and I had no idea how to do any of that. And we really learned about the history of women's clubs. And there had actually been about 5,000 of them.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, random coffee shops and just kind of dealing with like the indignity of a guy hitting on you or like it being loud or dirty or gross and like just not having.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in New York City. My dream was to work in politics. So I started out in my 20s working on campaigns and in government. And I was living a very kind of nomadic lifestyle. I was like on the sea. For Hillary, then I worked in New York City politics. I did some races against Elliot Spitzer and other folks like that and then worked at a consulting firm, SKD Knickerbacher. And so I was constantly on the Acela, like working in every place except a desk, like a lot of young people. I was like schlepping a lot, to be honest. And so the original idea for the wing really came from that need of like a place that you could go in the city where you could kind of get some work done.”
2019-09-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT