YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia DeWahl

lines on the record: 34
first: 2020-07-03
most recent: 2020-07-03
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

“My most recent publicly announced investment was in Primer where I know you're also an angel. They're building full stack homeschooling software. This one was very team driven. Ryan and Maxim are both proven get things done leaders. They are quite complementary in their skill sets. And they're both really passionate about what they're building in the space. And I believe there is enormous opportunity for innovation there.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joining Bain out of college was a big inflection point for me, actually. School had always come relatively easily, and Bain was the first time in my life where I struggled and I had to work really hard. Bain had this concept of zero defect. And for someone who's not particularly detail oriented, my job was just boot camp every day. But ultimately this paid off. I think one, I have a much stronger work ethic. And just overall stamina for working through hard things. Two, I realized the power of putting effort into something.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. It's painful. You're going to experience pain along the way, but that's what gets you to the top faster than your competitor. This is what makes your muscles grow stronger over time. Both can benefit from that hulk mentality that you get stronger with adversity.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the saying by Maya Angelou, which is I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And I think this works for me both ways. I like to be intentional about being present with people, listening, and how I might make others feel. And then it goes the other way too. I try to listen to my gut more on people. How do they make me feel? Do I want more or less of them in my life? My favorite is when I feel more curious and optimistic when I'm with someone. And I say to myself, this is the type of person I want to be around more.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For most people, it's finding the time to get to know others, to be out there in the Twitter sphere or wherever it is where people are talking about ideas. I think finding the time to really get to know the problem space and the team once they've engaged with someone, because most angels aren't investing full-time, they have day jobs, they're focused on, and it can be hard to carve out time within a few days' notice to research a space and get to know founders.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The courage to be disliked is one of my favorite books. It is a philosophical book written by two Japanese authors that explore the work of the psychologist Alfred Adler. And this is one of those books where you just want to pick up a notebook while you read it. There's so many little nuggets of wisdom in it. And overall, the book discourages people to really own their outlook and their mindset and to chart their own path from there. Would highly recommend.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's hard at the very early stage. You can try to look for benchmarks, right? But you won't really know what that cat cost is going to look like. I do look for people who have given it some thought. So they say, hey, we acknowledge we're going to use paid marketing here, but we also have a unique and creative strategy over here about how we want to generate word of mouth, how we want to generate referrals, how we want to use content, maybe try to lean into SEO. I don't think SEO is dead. So if someone is being sort of holistic about how they're thinking about that blended CAC, I think that's really important. But at the very early stages, I think it's hard to know.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of the vitamin painkiller metaphor as more of a spectrum than maybe a one or the other when it's applied to startups. It's really a rule of thumb to make sure you're being rigorous in evaluating whether a product is actually 10x better than whatever already exists out there. I've seen people develop products that I just feel like they're kind of forcing the narrative on it being better than the alternatives. And so I'm very wary of that. I also think that you can risk things like high CAC and low conversion and high churn if you're not really clear up front about the product being 10x better than the alternatives today. And I also finally find that vitamin type products are often the first to go in a downturn. So you want to be that must-have product, not the nice to have.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are some people who I've actually never met who've been influential on me. I think about Paul Graham and his essays. I think about the P-Marka archive that I've read. I haven't met either of those, although maybe at some point I will. And then there are people like Mike Maples who has been generous. We've had a couple Zoom calls, love listening to him on podcasts. I think he has some amazing thinking. Mike Fernal's been amazing over at Sequoia. He always takes the time to respond to my emails where I'm kind of outlining, hey, you know, met with this company, here's how I'm thinking about it. He'll ask some great probing questions back. We always have a lot of good discussion. So he's been wonderful as well.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of that zero to one product stage in hiring and people related topics did a lot of that at OpenDOR and then in building out and scaling up operations.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“JD and I both had to adapt to a lot of new roles at Open Door over the years. And angel investing in some ways isn't too different from learning anything else for the first time. I've focused a lot on learning from others. So whether that's through blog posts or Twitter or a conversation with other investors, people have been so generous with their time as I think they have been with you. It's a really special place to be here in Silicon Valley. Although it's funny, so many of them just happen on the internet too that you're kind of like, well, I also could be in London. And it's really great that I think this community really values generosity and sort of bringing people along. As for my own self-assessment, I think in some ways it's too early to tell, right? It takes at least five, if not 10 years to see a company exit. So talk to me in a decade and I will be able to give you a much better answer. But I think I have a few unicorns in there somewhere. And I think where I am strongest and best able to support founders is in thinking through customer development.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I think it's actually hard to do in sort of like a one hour coffee meeting. What I will look for are someone's ability to talk through the business structure. So how do they make money? What is their margin structure looking like? What are the costs associated with the business? How do those change over time? How do they think about deploying technology against any operational component they have in the business? And I do look for them to also acknowledge that, hey, we're going to use people here and we're going to build a playbook and hire people to do this job. It kind of reminds me of Flexport or something. It's the people who are telling you they're going to automate everything they do. I also am quite skeptical. So those are the types of questions I'll ask.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General kind of bizops and generalist operations to I'm going to go lead a sales team. And that means I'm going to go learn a lot about sales. I'm going to do sales myself. I'm going to get mentorship from other sales leaders. And I think generalists do have that ability to learn quickly on the job. And so I would say don't be afraid to lean into trying to take on a specialist role.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generalists tend to thrive in environments where there are a lot of nebulous problems to solve and kind of no overly specific skill set is needed kind of need a lot of a few things. And this happens time and time again within fast-growing startups. So generalists can be hugely valuable in those first few years. And they tend to thrive at the intersection of multiple disciplines, whether it's across quantitative and qualitative. And navigating a career here is, I almost think easier in those first few years than it is later because as organizations grow, you do need to have more specialists. You do need to have people with kind of more years of experience. So my advice here would be to first raise your hand to just say, I'm here to work on whatever's critical, like put me to work and just bring that growth mindset, right? I can go ask a question if I'm not sure how to do something or I'm going to go Google it and look it up and figure it out. And then the second thing I'll say is don't be afraid to take on a specialist role. There were myself included people who went from”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's important to actually bring the person in on the fact that you are going to be hiring someone in above them. Not necessarily to be interviewing them, but to kind of give them a bit of a heads up and to say, hey, this is what we're looking for. So here's our criteria. We want someone who has these skills or this many years of experience doing this thing. And they kind of understand the rationale and they're not blindsided by it because it kind of feels like they went behind your back or you weren't aware and you're surprised by it, not in a good way. So that would be the one thing I would say. And then the other would be to also just communicate to the team more broadly that the company is doing well. You're excited that these really experienced people want to join the team, right? And that they have done XYZ things at other places and they're going to actually add a ton of value to the team and that the bar for staying hungry, staying scrappy, being hardworking does not change and that applies to everyone, including more senior executives joining the team.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen some people scale remarkably well with the growth of fast-growing companies, and I think they all typically possess a really strong growth mindset. But that said, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that everyone would scale with a fast-growing startup. And for those who don't, it cannot always feel great to be layered, right? Get a new manager above you. But oftentimes people really do end up learning a lot from that person who is hired to be their new manager. And typically if that's happening, it means your company is probably growing and doing well. So all of that is very positive.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely not. You need to have one person accountable. This is really important for something like selling and buying a house with Open Door, where there really were a lot of steps and there were different people involved. We built an admin system with an open door where each of the things on the checklist was assigned to a role at the company. So it might be the customer experience person or the field ops manager. And then next to that within that role, there would always be a specific name. And that was really critical for making sure people knew exactly what they were responsible for. And then if there was something that went wrong, we could figure out, hey, who was supposed to be doing that?”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not a perfectionist or overly detail oriented person. So this is absolutely a hack. I wrote this book called The Checklist Manifesto with the subtitle, How to Get Things Right. And that's exactly what they're for. So checklists are really about delivering consistent quality. And if you think about what the mandate of the operations team was at OpenDOR, it was exactly that. Another thing I'll say about checklists is that the person doing the checking should be responsible for the creation and the ownership of the checklist. Nobody wants a checklist if it's not actually useful. This is not one of those things where the manager writes it and hands it down to the team. In fact, I think it would probably have a bad outcome because the team actually knows the details of what's going on in the field or on the phone with customers. And instead, having the team create and edit and manage their own checklists over time worked really well.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say keep it simple, make it memorable, and explain the why. There was a point where we were working on hitting unit profitability in our core cities where Eric decided he would show up to work every day wearing this blue t-shirt with the single most important company metric on it. And so everyone at the company knew the goal. I'm definitely not saying t-shirts are the only answer here, but keeping it simple was really key. I will say the danger to using just a single metric, though, is what might be sacrificed to get there. So it opened up, for example, if we raised our offers on people's homes, we'd see a bump in conversion. So yes, we would therefore hit our growth goals, but profitability would have suffered. Paired metrics are a great way to try to mitigate some of this. So saying, okay, this is our top line goal, but this other metric can't go below x.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great one. Moving metrics usually means they're stuck, right? If you're saying, hey, this metric doesn't go anywhere, what's going on? How do we?”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on how complex your operations are. I think it depends on the pace of the growth of the business, somewhere between a few weeks and a few months is probably around right. When you do something for a week and think it's working, like you probably just haven't hit the edge cases yet. So give it a little bit of time. And then again, inevitably, engineering resources are going to be limited. So you will find yourself naturally wanting to prioritize the areas that you do think are kind of the most locked. And so start there, let yourself kind of scrape by with spreadsheets for a while on the other stuff, but it can be almost worse to put something into code that you know kind of won't get prioritized or revisited for a while and then have to be working on something that's a little bit stale and outdated.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fully baked yet, and we're continuing to evolve. And then because engineering resources are limited, which they often are, we had to keep using these outdated systems that we had prematurely built for longer than we would have liked.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Building systems is really important to allow other people to come into the company and start operating to figure out how to enable technology to actually make you more efficient at what you're doing. It really just means putting those rules and process in place around the things that are happening repeatedly in the business. In practice, what that means kind of to get started doing that is writing everything down or drawing out the flowcharts of kind of everything that's going on in the operation. So first, this happens, then this, who's involved, what are the dependencies, what data is required, or what data is generated. At OpenDOR, we started building our first systems out in spreadsheets. We use Asana templates at one point, email workflows, Slackbot, Zapier, you name it. I think it's super important to iterate for a while in the most lightweight tools that you can get away with because inevitably you're going to be changing the way you do things. A mistake we made a few times early on was to commit to code some processes that just weren't”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The customer is not meant to be the one coming up with a vision for your product. So they're there to share their feelings, share their concerns, share their frustrations. And then it's the responsibility of the product builders to synthesize what they've heard and be the one visioning the future, right? Looking around and saying, what can we build that's better here than crafting that elegant solution? So I would say don't ask, hey, what feature do you want? Because the customer may not know. They also may not be thinking in that big way that I think here in Silicon Valley we're taught to think. So I would say definitely that's a responsibility of the product builder.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of my favorite questions to ask customers is how would you describe open door to a friend? I find that this allows you to really understand how someone else would describe the value proposition or the positioning of your company better than a realtor for XYZ reasons, those sorts of things. They really end up emphasizing what's important. I always find it's best to use a customer's own words in marketing that's going back out to those same customers.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we saw the open door product selling was often in combination with buying. And so that came through in our product marketing. And I think ultimately helped us develop a more compelling pitch to our customers.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think I always advise that people start with broad open-ended questions. You really can't go wrong there. This allows the customer to actually more proactively bring up areas of concern or frustration that they have just to share what matters to them. And if you start with a set of more specific questions, you actually risk kind of steering that customer down a certain path. And they might not have actually brought something up that is really valuable and you would have wanted to know about. For example, when we were focused on building the seller product in the beginning at OpenDor, we were again so focused on building a product that was all about selling. But when we went and started asking people to tell us about their experience selling their home, they were often talking to us about their next dream home that they were so excited about buying and how they needed to sell their current home to be able to afford the down payment for the next one. And they just wanted to remove the stress and hassle of the sale and just be done with the wholesaling part. And that really transformed the way we saw.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I think the best time to start is at the beginning, right? I'm a huge advocate for talking to customers as much as you can. And I found that over time, you really can discover that next level of nuance and insight that you actually probably don't need to get to that first kernel of an idea, right? But later on, you sort of hone it, you learn more, you discover who your power users might be. I really like the term that Mike Maples uses value hacking. He talks about just like really digging in there and understanding like, is this something really valuable? Who loves this thing? And then I do think it is important to kind of pull up, look around at the landscape. Are there other customers like this who are going to become power users or am I risking building something that's a bit too niche?”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. I would encourage everyone to begin with considering the start of startup path. I think it's like, why not? Most people, I think today don't think or dream big enough. And just going through the process would allow them to think about, okay, what might I work on? What might it take to start something? And I think that's really valuable thinking just in and of itself. That said, each of the paths has something different to offer. I think joining a larger company, you hopefully get exposed to best practices of a large organization. You probably work for someone more experienced than you, more specialized potentially. Going to a startup, you're probably going to end up taking on a role that you kind of wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. Otherwise, and so each of those paths has its pros and cons. I'd say that just whatever path you choose, the most important thing is to make sure you feel like you're working on the edge of your abilities and you're achieving the kind of growth that you want for yourself every day.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm a big believer in owning the vertical solution, the end-to-end customer experience, because ultimately you have control that way. And they're absolutely harder businesses to build, right? You have to work on a whole bunch of components at once to stand something up. So take OpenDor, you had to build out how to price something, how to price a house site unseen. You had to build out an entire stack of customer operations. And that included everything from actually talking about and selling the product, but then also actually buying and selling houses and maintaining them, renovating them, getting signage up in the front yard. But if you didn't own those little pieces, you risked having a disjointed experience when buying and selling a house. And then that's actually what happens today, right? The current experience is really fragmented. You're working with multiple parties, whereas when you go to Open Door, you're just working with one person, with one company, and you're getting this really like smooth, holistic experience, which I think makes Open Doors stand out against its.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought that focus to that part of the business that he worked on, he continues to work on to this day. And that really impacted my lens on investing, which is the founder market fit question is really important to me. So when I meet a founder, I always ask myself, is this the right person to start this business? What are the core competencies required to be successful? And do they have those skills and attributes to do those things?”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. There were so many things I learned at Open Door, but one that stands out and that I find myself thinking about frequently as an investor is people solve problems with the tools that they have. That means that a founding team and their first hires there need to be matched to the core competencies required for that business. So take OpenOR, for example. Those core competencies that we needed to be really good at were pricing. It was operations. It was capital market. With pricing, Open Door's co-founder Ian is a data scientist. And he had that depth of experience in the field. He had a network there. And it was really critical to get right. We had to make sure OpenDOR was delivering on fair offers so that we weren't coming in too low and hurting our reputation. People would call us lowballers or coming in too high, which meant that we would buy a house that then we'd take a loss on when reselling it. So really critical that he was a part of that founding team and that he brought”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He introduced me to other angels. And then my good friend Afton Vetri started modern fertility. And that became my first investment. Soon after that, I joined Sequoia Scout program and started writing some more checks. And I absolutely love it. And I don't think I'll ever stop angel investing.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I moved out to the Bay Area in 2013. I knew I'd wanted to get involved in tech in some way. I'd seen a lot of the most ambitious people I knew moving to San Francisco to start or join startups. And it just felt like this was where the action was. And I continue to think that that's true. I first heard about Open Door through a TechCrunch piece in the summer of 2014 and was really compelled by the idea. And I joined the team there as the 10th employee in an ops role, which at the time just meant everything non-technical. And while I was at Open Door, I built and led our customer operations team. I was the GM of our first market Phoenix, as well as the broader CityOps team as we expanded. And then was chief of staff to our CEO for a year. And that was really my first experience at a startup, was there for around four and a half years. But while I was at OpenDOR, I started to get some exposure to Angel Investing. And Eric Wu, Open Door CEO, was actually a big part of that. So he shared a bunch of decks on deals he was looking at.”
2020-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source