YouSaid · the spoken record

Jesse Genet

lines on the record
22
first
2018-05-04
most recent
2018-05-04
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “It becomes easier kind of in the same way Shopify made it so much easier for us all to launch our ideas on a whim, it becomes easier for fantastic products to get out there. There's more challengers in every consumer products category, the best products succeed, hopefully. I mean, you're talking to a product designer, so I love new products being able to succeed. So that's the future I see if we keep doing our jobs properly.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So to me, what people see when they look at Lumi is we're making packaging supply chain easier for modern brands. We produce a lot of gorgeous packaging, beautiful unboxings. But I think that what they don't see as much is what fascinates me about why we're creating Lumi is I have tremendous amount of respect for the manufacturing industry, the men and women and like people who have invested in equipment that takes up city blocks all over the world and how that connects to the people who are building product and need to tap into that manufacturing capacity. So we are really like a blind two-sided marketplace in that sense. And so what fascinates me is as Lumi grows, we're continuing to democratize access to the world's best manufacturing so that a new entrepreneur launching can access the same high level of manufacturing somewhere in the world that someone who's been at it for five years or ten years and has really networked in. And what that leads to, like if you democratize access to the best manufacturing and make supply chain easier to manage, what that leads to is”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Hopefully with grace I think that I have been I have been through enough in this is where I feel more like a weathered nine or ten year entrepreneur than a three-year entrepreneur that I have seen a lot of things that way that I try to deal with them is like batten down the hatches the worst thing to do is to react and have your reaction be the wrong one or the rash one. I love to ask the people around me. I really like to be candid. I really like to use physical comedy as well. People have come in and told me like, oh, like people have walked into my office and been like, Jesse, blah, blah, blah, happened and I'll like pretend that like it's an arrow to my heart and like literally fall over. I've actually done that physically. So I think and it makes people laugh and they and then they realize like, okay, if my CEO can like laugh at this, then all is not lost. So humor as well is a strong element of getting through a very tough situation, I think.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “There's a quote that I love that's up on our office wall. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. I like the quote not just because it is a great quote and it really reminds you to wake up every day and like create the future that you'd like to see. But I also like the quote because no one can agree on who to attribute it to. And so I love humanity in the sense it is attributed to everyone from Alan Kay, the computer scientist, to Abraham Lincoln to Peter Drucker to many others. And I love not only the quote itself, but I love the fact that no one can agree who said it first or best. So for all those reasons.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That's a fascinating one. I mean, I'll definitely go with something obvious that I would love to see there be more women involved, more diversity in general, not just women, but all types, especially at the partnership, general partnership level. I think that's something maybe funds don't realize is like how much we notice everything. I notice if the only woman involved in me seeing your firm was your assistant who scheduled me to come in. We notice all this stuff and I would love to see that change. I think more broadly speaking, aside from that, it's an industry that affects such massive change trickle down relating to what kind of companies get built. And so that's the nature of why it would be so cool to see diversity. It's not just seeing it. It's feeling it. It's actually feeling like the world is getting a broader set of perspectives and not just things that dudes think would be cool.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I find it very calming actually to be in the middle of like a very, very long book. It is like an intense character study and it is based on an extremely flawed character. And I think that I just find it fascinating. And then also the title, Gone With the Wind, is from this poem and it truly like it literally gives me chills when I think about it, but it is the nature of the title is that a change can occur in a whole way of life, whole way of being can just be poof gone with the wind. And it just, it literally gives me chills. I think that as it relates back to what we're talking about in startups and anything in life, like industries change, lives change, companies come and go, unfortunately.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I'm going to go with a weird pick here because I've read it multiple and multiple times, which is gone with the wind. So I have read this book three or four times, which says a lot because it is a massive.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “As demoralizing in any way, shape, or form. And I think that that's about cultivating threat energy around it and how you treat people.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Think there's a fascinating question as a founder because it is also my personality, I'm like, I'm in the office like 6.30. I'm here till late and running around and so enthusiastic about everything. And I think that what is really, really important to think through as a CEO and a founder is how do you take whatever your personality attributes are and turn them to be empowering and inspirational for the people around you, but not a measuring stick, right? Like it would be very demoralizing if an employee starts and they're like have incredible work ethic, incredible output, but they come in at 830. Like, it is not my goal as a leader to make anyone feel what they are doing is less than, especially when they're incredible asset to the company. So it's more that I want them to feel more bought into Lumi and our mission because they can look at me and go, wow, the person at the helm really cares about this and is really out there kind of beating our drum and working really hard on this. I hope that it is that. I hope that it is always that. It is always framed as inspirational and not framed.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Rival 10,000 in number, the 30 people I have are 30 incredible future thinking people that my competitors do not have and might not have had access to. And that puts me in a great spot.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, I think that it makes you act very, very differently. Think about your hiring very differently when you realize that, yeah, your competitors could copy paste a bunch of humans or teams of people onto different challenges and different things that you're thinking through. You have to think about how to be very smart about what you're building. And I think that something that really excites me is the types of people we're attracting. Every single person at Lumi, like even just a month before they were hired, would not have guessed that they would end up working in a packaging company. These are incredible technologists and incredible people at the top of their field, whether that be engineering or operations. And I just think that they would not have guessed that they would end up like at a packaging company. And I think that what's fascinating about that is that means that all 30 people that I have working at Lumi would not be people who would be within the scope of hiring or the candidate pipeline of any of my competitors. And so I'm attracting a completely different type of person and I like to think that the 30 people I have, even though it doesn't”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The future of what you are building, so you do, but I think that's something I haven't talked enough about in the fundraise process or publicly is the effect on the world, I think, that this company will have, like the change that we can affect for, the way that launching a new e-commerce brand should feel different or look different because we exist. So kind of our impact on others, I think, is very inspirational to VCs. And I don't think we spend a lot of time talking about that during our fundraise process.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That's something that we've always done well is communicate our passion for the challenge. And I think that that is really, really critical. So that is something I think we've done well. I think that even when a VC walks out of a room with us and goes like, I have no idea why those people are working on that thing. I don't understand. Like they at least walk out going, but they definitely care a lot about it. Whatever they're up to, I don't know. I don't know, but they definitely care a lot about it. So that is something I think we've done really well. And I really coach founders as well. I'm pulling out of themselves like not being shy. I mean, if people don't understand why you are working on this as an individual, why would they trust you're going to work on it for nearly a decade and take it full term? So that, I think, is super critical and we do a good job at that. Something that I think I would keep refining is helping them understand why this company is going to impact a lot of other companies. I think that it can be easy when you're fundraising. You're supposed to talk about your company. You're supposed to talk about it.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Right, right, right. Like, we're not talking about bugs.com. Yes, we are literally talking about boxes. So I think that that was also a good signal that they weren't a good fit and I might be boring them to death.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I'm pretty sure someone actually slept during a meeting I took with them. So that was a pretty strong signal. But they looked very, very tired and they had kind of shiny glasses on. I couldn't really see with their eyes were open. But I think that was a clear signal. I think that other signs that I was boring them would be like there was one meeting I took where someone kept asking whether I was truly talking about boxes. I would be like, and then this is happening in the industry and here's how the corrugated equipment works. And they'd be like, we're talking, like you mean actual boxes, right? Like they kept making sure that I wasn't just like talking about some new AI technology they hadn't heard of. They were just called boxes, you know?”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think that there's a bunch of angles to look at our fundraising. I mean, there's like raising money as a five foot tall female CEO. I'm literally five feet tall. There's raising money for packing tape in boxes in Silicon Valley. I think all of it was kind of fascinating. And talking to venture capitalists who sit down and take meetings of everything from future of AI to like frontier tech projects and then talking to them about packaging, it's interesting to watch how I actually found it to be incredibly clearifying because I could tell if I was boring someone to death and if I was in the first few minutes of meeting, I mean it was clear to me that this is not a fit like this person sitting across the table for me will never be sitting around a boardroom table like fascinated about these challenges. But then I would say that was the minority where I felt like I was”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “For better or worse, that might be a founder that has not run a bootstrap business because you dig into the fundamentals on a bootshop company very, very early because you have to because you have to survive.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I think that back to what VCs think, I think that there's a concern about a bootstrapped entrepreneur, about whether they think too small they're going to be too overly concerned with profitability and things of that nature because your goal, if you understand the dynamics, of course, of a venture-backed business is to grow something very, very large and impactful. And that's really the model. And I think that I knew that going in. So I approached this business fundamentally different. But I feel like the positive parts that stick with me are thinking about the unit economics, thinking about the actual fundamentals of the business very, very early, realizing that you can't really, it's a very hard to change this over time. So I think when you hear about founders falling into the trap of being like, well, we were growing so quickly and everyone was patting me on the back. But then three years later, I realized that on every transaction I lose money or something. That's really impossible for me to imagine ever saying that I just think that I think.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It's a fascinating. I think that I have never had to find out if I am employable and maybe that's by design, but it's actually to me, I don't know, I really have no concept of whether I could get a job, but I would say that I have thought more about the inverse, which is that I almost feel like I've intentionally not gotten a job because I worry, like if I had ever had a taste of like a real income where you work 40 hours a week and someone just tells you you're doing good because you've done a reasonable amount of work. I have no concept about whether I would have done any of this seems so out of reach to me that you could like put in 40 hours and have like a healthy income. So I don't know that's the inverse to me. It's like I just don't know how I would even react to that.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think it's a fascinating question. I feel like it doesn't, but I feel like I've been running companies. I started my first company when I was 16. I've never had a job. I'm 30 now, so that puts me 14 years into my entrepreneurial adventure in some ways. And so to say that like I actually just started entrepreneuring three years ago when I founded Lumi.com feels a bit absurd to me given my trajectory, but I understand what they mean. And I think that the VC community kind of understandably has a love hate relationship with bootstrapping. On the one hand, I think they respect it tremendously and there's these incredible successes like Tuft and Needle and things that they talk about. But on the other hand, the love hate piece must be, right, that they weren't involved, right? So the concept that someone can build an incredible business and they don't need to be involved is a bit bizarre of a notion that they feel their industry is very necessary and in fact it is for most many business models. So I think that from that perspective they would look at me.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Movement being really, really early users of so many products that I don't have to educate you on, like Stripe and Square and Mailchimp, Shopify. We were using all those products within like, you know, months or the first year of them launching. We learned how easy it was to launch certain aspects of an e-commerce business back then. And then other aspects which were excruciatingly difficult, which tended to be the physical parts of actually shipping and packaging what we were up to. So it was really in that first company that we landed on this idea of perfecting the supply chain for launching products.”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “A fantastic question because I actually ask everyone who I interview that same question when we're looking at them as candidates because I go like very few five-year-olds I've met have listed this as their dream job. So how did this happen to you? How do you happen to be interviewing with me right now for this job? So I think that it's usually it's a meandering story of learning about how things in the world are manufactured and slowly getting fascinated by it that ends up people in supply chain. Lumi is my second business actually with my same co-founder Stefan and the first company that we started was a product of a longstron Kickstarter while we were still in school setting industrial design. So back in 2009 when Kickstarter was just months old instead of years old we posted a project that got funded for a whopping $13,000 and that kind of kicked my first business into gear and it was a physical product company and over the course of running that business for four years there's so many fascinating things that are happening back then but the maker”

    2018-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source