YouSaid · the spoken record

Debbie Sterling

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27
first
2017-12-01
most recent
2017-12-01
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah, well, I mean, I'm really proud of what we've achieved so far. I think we set out to disrupt the pink aisle, and I think that we did that a lot sooner than we thought that we would. But ultimately, what I really want to build is a global franchise of the size and scale and influence of Barbie, Disney Princess, Jor the Explorer. These are franchises that bann toys, books, apps, cartoons, apparel, merchandise. They really form a lifestyle that pretty much every little girl around the world experiences in her formative years and how great would it be if every little girl who had her princess phase then gets to have her maker phase with Goldie Blocks? I think that that would change the world.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh, wow. Okay. I think Tony was incredible. He was hugely inspiring. The highlight for me was I was with a group of incredible other mentors, so Joe Gebia, who's the co-founder of Airbnb, Tim Ferris of the Four Hour Work Week, Marie Forlio. We had such a blast. I think that the highlight was we were actually at the airport waiting on our way to head back. And there was this unexpected delay. And we were all really tired and jet lagged. And all of a sudden, one of the stores was playing like a top 40 song, I can't remember. And I don't know. I think it might have been Marie who told them to turn it up. And all of a sudden, we just started this impromptu dance party at the airport. And there's like Harley and Joe and me and like everybody was just like full-on dancing like a nightclub and even the Fijian employees were like kind of like coming out, busting some moves and it was hilarious.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Thank you. And I was really worried because I didn't know what this would mean. How would I be able to raise a child and continue to grow my company? And what ended up happening is it actually forced me to spend more time with my family, to figure stuff out, to hire the executives that I needed to hire so that I wasn't doing everything. It forced me to take time off, to take breaks. And as soon as I started doing that, I realized, wow, I'm such a better leader. I'm not betting my time worrying about the little stuff that's not significant. I'm not micromanaging. It was a huge discovery that it took me probably way too long to figure out.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, I think for the first war years of building Goldie Blocks, I didn't have any balance. I worked 24-7 on Goldie Blocks, and I was pretty run ragged. And actually, the first time that I ever found balance, it was sort of forced upon me because I got pregnant and I had my first child. I had a son, ironically enough, a year ago.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Would be Maxine Clark, who's the founder and former CEO of Builder Bear Workshop. She read an article about Goldie Blocks and two other female-owned startup toy companies, I think in the Wall Street Journal. She cold emailed each company, and apparently I was the only one who wrote back. And we set up a phone call, and two hours went by. I was scribbling down notes. I filled up an entire notebook. And in that first call, she said, you know, I think Goldie Block should have a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade someday. And sure enough, just a year and a half later, there we were. And it was really a huge part thanks to her help.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I always hear that husband and wife teams should have a red flag, and I completely disagree. If it weren't for my husband, Goldie Blocks wouldn't be here and he's been absolutely invaluable in supporting me in my dreams and helping to really grow and scale Goldie Blocks to the brand that it is today.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think my biggest learning is how fortunate I am to have been born in the United States and in a culture that even though there's still a long way to go in terms of gender equity, we're so much further along than countries like India where women are really treated as second-class citizens and it's made me even more passionate than I already was about empowering girls and women.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Okay, this is gonna sound really nerdy, but the honest answer is that my favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “distribution prototy I've been really fortunate to have incredible investors, and I think that the one thing that my investors have in common is I think that they really understand the power of building an incredible, long-lasting brand. And I think that all of the investors that I've been fortunate enough to work with at Goldie Blocks understand that it takes patience. It takes time. And rather than focusing on short-term gains, I think kind of thinking about the big picture and what it's going to take to get there and sort of breaking down that big, audacious, what do we want to be in five, ten year goals into incremental small but manageable steps toward getting there? I think that that's been immensely valuable.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Over inventoried, and you can be really particular about the distribution. And I think that that just takes a bit more strategy, a bit more patience, and it's a different model than trying to see scalable digital growth doubling year after year. I don't think that that's a healthy business model for a hardware company, especially a startup hardware company. All of these companies that could see being massively, massively successful, but it just takes a bit of a different model.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “As quickly as possible. I think that in the CPG space, I think that there's a real opportunity for investors who can be helpful, who have had success themselves in the consumer product space, and can bring capital to these kind of companies maybe in a different way. Because I think with hardware, I think part of the challenge is that there are these startup companies now in the hardware space, and they're having a lot of success on crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. And so they're able to sort of take an idea and a prototype and sort of do an initial production run just via pre-orders, which is great. But I think that the challenges that going from there, I think it takes at least a few years to really hone in and develop that product and test it slowly. And then I think when you bring it to market, it makes sense to do it in a measured way so that you're never”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, I've never thought about our toys as a hit striven business because with Goldy Blocks my vision was from the very beginning I just wanted to provide girls and boys with really great tools that could enable them to make things and get excited about engineering. And our toys are really an open-ended system of parts that you can put together in an infinite number of ways to create things. And it's sort of similar to Lego in a sense that it's just incredibly open-ended. And to me, that's not about hits. That's about kids investing in a library of parts that they can use to tinker and prototype. And so, you know, I hear things like, oh, we avoid a hit stream in business, but I've just never thought about it that way, at least not for our business. I can understand why they're interested in putting in as little money as possible and scaling.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The market. So, how if you kind of delve one step deeper? How would you respond to that with the common VC concern of maybe it being a hits-driven business? How would you respond to toys being a hits-driven business?”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, when Goldie Blocks went after the toy industry, we really pushed back against all of these things that were conventional wisdom, like construction toys for girls won't sell, or ridiculous things. Like girls hate the color yellow. You can't have yellow in your products or they'll never sell for girls. It's so weird things that just become common knowledge. And I think that the same is true in VC. So many VCs, they don't want to touch the children's space with a 10-foot pole. They don't like physical products. They don't want to take on any inventory risk. And I think it's a shame because I see so many really, really exciting young entrepreneurs and innovators who are tackling really, really hard problems and building really exciting things. And they're having trouble getting access to capital.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Element there about the Kickstarter and the virality element. He asked the question, why do you think all of your promotional videos went so viral and created such a strong brand that they did? What do you think was caught at that success in virality? Well, I had a secret weapon, and that's my co-founder and husband Bo. And prior to joining me at Goldiblocks, he had started his own viral video production and distribution company, which he grew over five years and then sold. And so he knew a thing or two about how to make things go viral. For him, he was really inspired by what I was doing at Goldie Blocks and like many of our fellow millennials. We really want to spend our time doing things that are going to have an impact in the world. And so he jumped in and we just started brainstorming how do we make Goldie Blocks go viral?”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And it takes startup companies and innovators and people who are willing to take risks and believe in something to really prove them wrong. And as soon as we did, it was fascinating to see how quickly all of the big toy companies and media companies started to come up with their MeToo products. And only five years later now, there's been a huge domino effect. Target has taken down its gender labeling and its toy aisles. We have companies like the creators of Bratt who are the epitome of prostitute dolls for girls coming out with a line of stem dolls. I mean, it's an even Barbie now getting into computer science and body diversity. I think Goldie Bulldox has played a huge role in not only pressuring those companies to do the right thing, but I think more importantly showing that they could make a lot of money doing it too.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Point in the change, your Kickstar For this in the market, do you think that we are at an inflection point or do you think that's potentially overexaggerated of me? No, I think we're at a huge inflection point. Before I started Goldie Blocks in 2012, I brought my prototypes to the New York Toy Fair to get advice from folks in the toy industry. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. They all said, girls don't want to build. Girls aren't ever going to be interested in engineering. Girls just want princesses. They want the pink aisle. That's what sells. This will never go mainstream. I mean, nobody believed it. And then we launched Goldie Blocks in 2012, and it practically went viral overnight. And what ended up happening was that Goldiblocks had finally shown that there was market demand for more empowering toys and characters for girls. And it was something that I just to me it was such common sense. They just glom on to these pieces of conventional wisdom that they believe to be true.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Blocks in the spinning machine, which was a toy in the book about a girl engineer building and fixing things. They kept the same version and then they did another version where the protagonist was a male and they observed differences in how parents and kids played with one versus the other. And what they found was that when the protagonist was a male, the parents actually played with it more with their daughters than when it was the female because for some reason they had this unconscious bias that boys are engineers. The other thing that was interesting was that when parents played with both products, when they played with the boy, they spent more time building and when they played with the girls they spent more time reading the books. And so there are just there are so many things that parents and teachers are doing that they don't even realize that are impacting our kids into kind of thinking what they can be, what they should be, and what they're capable of.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “In the right way equally, I think there are a few issues that I like to look at. One is I look at our pop culture. If you look at children's toys and media, gender stereotype are so pervasive. These big kids' toys and media companies have found formulas that work. They have discovered that girls are into princess culture and they have monetized that upwards to multi billions of dollars around the world where every girl grows up having a princess phase. Can you imagine how different things would be if instead of the focus always being on princess, what if the toy and media companies wanted every girl around the world to grow up having a maker face? And that's what I'm really focused on at GoldieBlox. I think that parents and teachers play a huge role too. It's actually fascinating. There was a study done at Penn State about Goldie Blocks and they actually took our very first product.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “People talk a lot about middle school and girls really start to lose interest in middle school. Age six is a really critical time even before middle school when girls are losing confidence in their ability in math and science. And then you have them kind of dropping out through college, then through their careers. And so it's a big hairy problem, but I've decided that my focus will be at the very beginning because I think that that's where we lose the most of them. themselves or is it with the education system and the teachers who maybe don't support them and provide those tools.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, I think it's a very complex problem. I think that there's definitely, there's a pipeline problem in the sense that what I'm most passionate about is what is the root of this problem? And I believe that the root of the problem is that from as young as age three or four, and that's the age when kids start to form a sense of gender identity, that's the age when kids, because of the toys and media that they're surrounded with, particularly in North America and in Western Europe, the toys and media for kids three and four is that boys are builders and superheroes and girls are princesses and dolls. And so to have those kinds of gender stereotypes root in that young becomes harder and harder to sort of overcome that when as a kid you're trying to figure out what it means to be a boy and what it means to be a girl. And there are many, many other problems along the way.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, I think see down. I've always been such a feminist and I've always believed that women can do anything men can do. And I guess early on I sort of took this as a challenge. As soon as I declared engineering as my major, everyone, my classmates, some of the teachers, just some of my friends were just sort of”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And all guy group projects, and I always just felt kind of ignored or pushed out. And it was difficult to fit in and difficult to feel like I was smart enough to be there.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I never really felt like I fit into the engineering boys club. It all started at Stanford, where I was just one of very few women in my classes. And at Stanford, the engineering program was a weed out program in a pretty aggressive culture where they made a point to tell all of the students that they're really trying to weed out the weak and have only the strong survive. And it was very intimidating because many of my classmates, I mean, they had been playing with engineering toys, they had been programming robots from a very young age and I had never been exposed to any of that. And I was definitely toward the bottom of the class just simply because I hadn't had any training. And so early on, I almost dropped out a million times because I'd look around and I think to myself, all of these guys in my classes, these are geniuses, and how am I ever going to keep up? And so many times I was the only girl.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Really, the proudest moment of my life because it was really the first time in my life that I really pushed myself and did something that was really hard for me. And so it was years later after I'd graduated that I was talking with a girlfriend and we were complaining about how few women there were in our engineering classes. And she argued that she got interested in engineering when she was a young girl because she had three older brothers and she grew up playing with their handmade out toys. And those toys happened to be Legos and Lincoln logs and erector sets and all very engineering based toys. And she made the argument that most girls don't play with those toys because those toys were very explicitly boys toys and that maybe if more girls had exposure to toys like those maybe there would have been more girls in our engineering classes. And the moment she said that it just kind of hit me that that was what I was born to do. And so that's how Goldie Blocks”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “What was this math teacher talking about, and why does she think that I would be good at engineering? And so in mechanical engineering 101, it was the first time that I ever actually learned what engineering was, which was just basically learning the tools to how do you solve problems? How does the world work? How do you invent things to make the world a better place and help people? And so to me, that was incredibly exciting. And I knew instantly that I wanted to be an engineer. The next four years was a struggle because I didn't really have any engineering training in my entire K-12 education. And I was at a pretty big disadvantage. I was pretty far behind. I often felt like I was in the bottom of my class. There were hardly any other women in my classes, which made me feel like an even bigger outsider. And I really struggled with the material. I really had to push and challenge myself. But I did. And when I graduated with an engineering degree, it was”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Sure. Well, my story starts with my first discovery of engineering, which wasn't until I was a freshman in college. For me, my big break was that I got into Stanford. And coming from a small town and a public school, nobody in my town ever went to a school like Stanford. So I really wanted to make the most of it. And like many young people who have no idea what they want to be when they grow up, I was the same and I had no idea what I wanted to major in. And my math teacher in high school actually suggested to me that I look into engineering. And at the time, I was a senior in high school and I literally had no idea what engineering was. And I tell this joke a million times, but I pictured an old man driving a train. And I never thought that engineering was something that I would like. Anyway, off to Stanford, freshman year, trying to figure out what I want my major to be, and I took an engineering class just because I was curious.”

    2017-12-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source