YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Enthoven

lines on the record: 29
first: 2019-09-27
most recent: 2019-09-27
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

“Yeah, Kapwang, you know, Kapwang will be the go-to brand and productivity platform for media creation, management, and collaboration. And I'll be getting it there, basically. So I'll be sort of growing the team into different verticals beyond just editing into adjacent verticals like managing your media, collaborating on it, distributing it, et cetera. And I'm hoping that Eric and I will continue to run product and technology here at Kipling as we move in that direction.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would say the first people to believe in us were our very first customers, those people put their, well, first their videos and their content and their work stream, but then their money behind the product and that was hugely valid in the beginning. Your customers are always your biggest believers, but actually Wei Zhong at Gen Fund was the first investor to really believe in it.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things. One, cadence, so regularly sending it on the same day at every month and giving your investors a peace of mind that they will receive it soon. The second is readability. So you should approach an investor update just like you would any other email should have structure, photos, colors, things that make it much easier to skim”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say one thing that baffles me about voice stock options is just that when you're talking to a really highly paid software engineer, you know, the likelihood that their options outweigh how much they're getting paid in base salary is rather low, essentially. So I think that there's an overemphasis in the valley on options and sort of becoming instantly overnight huge billion multi-billion dollar company rather than talking about like how does this fit into my lifestyle over the next five to ten years, which is more relevant if you're trying to build a company that's going to be around for a long time.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of weaknesses, but I think one of my biggest ones is that I like to be involved in everything. And so especially as they become more and more things to get involved with, I need more focus and more discipline about getting the one thing down that I'm doing well.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say definitely the number of software engineers in the world, especially the number of female software engineers, I think that software engineers are just so, so valuable, can create so much impact at such a high pace. And I would encourage anyone who's going into college to at least take one CS class and think about a career in computer science.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highly recommend influenced by Robert Caldini. It just gives you a great approach to how you can put more meaning behind your words and move people in the direction that is right.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, we recorded a video of Eric and I, just like a single take video with subtitles, and posted as a Facebook ad targeting software engineers, basically just telling people, here's who we are, here's what a company does, like, please come work for us. And that Facebook ad actually sourced one of our hires. So I think we spent like $200 in advertising costs, and that's so small compared to like a $15,000 recruiting fee. So, yeah, I mean, I think we've tried a ton of different things. We're not afraid to put ourselves out there, and that has worked for us in both marketing and recruiting.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So have learned a huge amount about this issue. I would say that we were patient with hiring and at the time it felt scary. I mean, we just closed a seed round and, you know, two months later, we still hadn't had anyone joy after we closed the seed, even though we were spending a huge amount of our own time on recruiting and getting coffees of people and things like that. So I would say, you know, don't be afraid to be patient. It matters so much who your very first five hires are because they're the people that are going to carry the culture and carry who you're hiring down the road. So I would say in San Francisco at least, there's absolutely no silver bullet to hiring. Lots of companies are building distributed workforces or remote workforces, which I think is great for some companies, but for us, we've always been local and we knew we wanted to build a local team. I won't go into that here, but we approach hiring the same way that we approach everything else, which is with a huge amount of experimentation and hustle, just trying a lot of different things, trying to do things that are non-traditional and see what sticks.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been able to bring on a team with different expertise than us, which brings in a lot of new talent but also perspectives and makes growing a company and just makes the learning curve even steeper, which is great. I also think I'm learning a lot about being a manager, building a company, thinking about culture and people, roles aligned with the people's expectations of what they want down the road and all of those learnings are super valuable for my career. And yeah, I mean, I definitely think that the bottom line for both bootstrapping and for venture-backed founders is that success cures a lot of things. about making sure that we're building the right things at every moment and it's not about spending 14 hours in the office every day or hiring a team that's going to spend 14 hours in the office it's about making smart prioritization decisions and being right about what you go after”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, yeah, definitely life change. I think one thing that I have come to recognize is that investors and sort of most of the literature out there, which is mostly written by investors, oftentimes they'll basically talk about things from the investor's perspective, like talk about raising money early or the kinds of ways you should spend on marketing and customer acquisition and other pressure that they put on entrepreneurs because they're trying to get that one winner who's just going to return the fund or whatever. I think that for us we've definitely had to stick to some of our bootstrapping roots, even as we've transitioned towards venture-backed growth because we recognize that founders shouldn't spend quickly, like you need to have money in the bank so that you can make mistakes and afford to go on a crooked path sometimes. Founders shouldn't scale prematurely. You need to be so sure that you have product market fit before you bring people on to fill a need that doesn't exist yet. And so I think that we've been really careful about those things even as we've started to grow. Outside of that, I definitely think life has changed in the better in a lot of ways. So first of all,”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's two elements of this. So, the first is, to be totally honest with you, we thought a lot about it in the early days. And when we saw that we had the opportunity to work on building a big business rather than just a smaller lifestyle business, we wanted to move on it because we want to build something that has a huge amount of impact in the world. So the first time that we thought about raising money was when we basically had someone write us a term sheet and tell us like we should and that we could. The second thing I would say here is that we got lucky in that happened when it did because it's highly competitive space and I think now in retrospect I see that we have advantages in certain ways because of our timing and we knew we needed to move quickly so that we didn't lose out on those advantages. And I think that capital helps you just move faster and capture the market in a speedier way. And for this market in particular, I think there's the competitive dynamics require that.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It until you have some real business validation. So for us, I would say was it the right decision for us to bootstrap versus raising at the beginning? I will caveat all of that by saying, you know, it definitely depends. We're not the kind of founders who even could have just gone out and raised an acute valuation. We didn't have like the right personal relationships or resume or track record or whatever behind us just to go out and raise with nothing. So I think that for other kinds of ideas, you have to have capital up front. For our idea, which is a pure software idea,”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I could speak about this for days. You know, we wanted validation before we raised money in the beginning. So, for example, Eric and I worked on a different idea first for like two and a half months before we started working on Kapwang. And we really liked the idea. I think it still is a great idea and could exist one day, but we just couldn't get traction for it in the early days. And we realized that quickly and could sunset it rather than needing to sort of, you know, we didn't have like six figures in the bank that we needed to figure out how to spend or investors that had put trust in us around that idea who didn't want us to kill it. So I think that there's a lot of incentive for the VCs to put money into a lot of different ideas with the hope that one or two of them truly become businesses. But for the founder, you don't want to spend your time working on a bad business idea. And so you really want to make sure that you have a thing that has potential before you go out and raise. And my advice to founders around that is that you do not really know if your idea has potential until you start trying to get some traction.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely blending of the two. I mean, I think every modern SaaS product understands that the experience has to be good for the end user nowadays or else a startup just like us could come in and disrupt your access to the end user and ultimately reduce the value that your product adds. So I think that definitely we think about how can we add value for the end user and also for the person above them if they're inside of a company. The second thing I would say is that there are many prosumer media entrepreneurs, even a huge company like Adobe still makes a lot of money from the individual creators who subscribe to the creative cloud. So even though Kapoiang is moving up market trying to serve teams and creative professionals, it will not lose its loyalty to helping creative people get things done because that's still so important for the business and for the product value proposition.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that we're building a two layer value proposition so that we add value not only for individual creators, but also for their managers or for their clients who want visibility into what's happening and want to understand how they can collaborate and review content as it's being created. So those three things are big initiatives for us right now. And it's definitely a shift away from just how do we build products for individual creators towards how do we build products for creative teams and eventually for creative companies. We definitely need to continue innovating on the tools, but it's a very different focus and cadence than building tools for teams and for professionals. So we've had to do a lot more like user research and customer research on people that don't already use Kaplan to understand like what is the need.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think there's a lot of bottoms up SaaS companies or companies that aspire to become bottoms-up SaaS companies that face a similar kind of transition. No, we are really, we've had success with the individual tools that we've built for individuals, but we are moving now towards thinking about how can we add value not just at the individual level, but also at the team and also at the team level. So there's kind of three things I would say I think about in sort of this crossing this quote unquote enterprise chasm. The first is that you need to create a product that's really integrated into professional workflows that are adjacent to your product and that is something that just adds a lot of value at its step in a professional workflow. The second is you need to build team features like I mentioned. So you need to build time saving has to increase as more people come onto the product so that there's an incentive for the product to be shared within a company rather than just used by one individual. And the third for us”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More people exploring how they can share stories digitally on the internet, which is part of the basis, of course, the hypothesis for Kapway”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few pieces of this. So, first of all, I think it relates to what I was just saying about controlling your own audience or having your own audience that you can distribute to. If you can develop your own audience and carve out your own following, then you have people that could be buyers who you're distributing content to and building a relationship with over time. So I think in that way, every company sort of empires and wants to develop that and have some function around that. But at higher level, I think people are great storytellers. It's something that we do a lot better than computers do. So I think that over the next 10 years as automation takes over more jobs, more people will move into creative careers and sort of storytelling and media. And so I think there's a lot of sort of modern media entrepreneurs that we can look at, like Glossier in some ways like Dollar Shave Club, hymns, Kylie Cosmetics, Gary V, this podcast, being an entrepreneur and a storyteller has enormous business value. And I think more and more companies recognize that that's the case in every domain and every vertical. So there's many, many more.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I definitely think that you control your own destiny the most if you can build up your own following and your own base, if you have your own audience, then you control the distribution of channel completely. And the way you build up your own audience is through your own personality or your own brand. I definitely agree that the marginal cost of every marketing channel decreases over time. The highest return thing you can do is to discover a new channel before anyone else does. And so that requires just a lot of experimentation, a lot of creativity. Like I said yesterday, I heard from Claire Bird at Twilio formerly at Envision and Marketing at Invision. And she was arguing that every SaaS company is like a lifestyle brand. So even though we're running a tech company, we learn a lot from the disruptive direct-to-consumer brands that are building kind of a cult following and false scarcity and using other tactics that consumer brands have pioneered to try and apply them to the SaaS product and the SaaS company.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tactics to get attention, otherwise, you're not going Rise above the And that was something I did not anticipate when I left Because I was sort of so bought into this product myth. And I think it's extremely important. To think about how they innovate. Marketing and distribution rather than just think about how they innovate in product and kind of be discouraged. Ask”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So I feel Because it was Something I didn't expect when I left Just king, you know, if you build Great products Does a lot to shield its product managers from marketing or sales or any other Outside of product development. In engineering. But when you're not a huge company with an existing brand following, when you're a new company, a new brand and you're just trying to get your very first users, you need really like radical.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in some ways, we've started to move slowly in places where it makes sense to move slowly, like making sure we're investing in quality, performance, scale, and a deeper competitive boat without losing that step function changes that set us apart in the beginning.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Co founder working on our own, and we were bootstrapping with limited savings, so we were forced to be highly iterative and super responsive to needs that we could directly solve. And in some ways, that was our advantage because we built things really quickly and we built things, some of which didn't work, but most of which did, and those directly solve people's problems rather than having feature creep into the products. After we raised the seed round, we were really patient with hiring. We brought on a really excellent engineer as our first employee who has experience as a manager. So he's helped increase our cadence by introducing a sprint process for our engineering team as a group, helping with hiring and people management, all sorts of other things that Eric and I had less experience with. So I do think that we have refined our iterative approach to productivity.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over apps. First of all, Apple or Google takes a significant piece of any transaction that goes through a native app, so that reduces the margins on your payments. And people are just more willing to use their company credit card when it works on their computer versus a mobile-only experience. The Kapoang Pro subscription, which is the premium version, costs $20 a month.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the reason that I have written about this topic and that I care about it is because I think a lot of entrepreneurs sort of think about apps as startups or like as software that they should dive right into and don't think of websites first, even though I think it's wiser to build a website first. And I'll caveat this by saying, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but in general, I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to build a website first when they're in the early stages of product development. There's four reasons for why that's or why I think the websites have an advantage over apps or early stage startups. We've acquired a Kipling. We've acquired most of our users for free through Google Search, which is a super accessible distribution channel, even for bootstrapping founders. The second reason is it's easier to make money with websites.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you could install Adobe Premiere and like figure out how to use that, which was very challenging and expensive and heavyweight. Or you could use a mobile app, but then you had to transfer things back and forth between your computer and that. And so really the inspiration for Kapwing just came from our own pain as consumers trying to create this kind of content. And we set out to build what we wanted to use for one very specific type of media format. And yeah, in the early days was just us bootstrapping ourselves. And we built the very first version of the product just for one very specific kind of video. And from there, we basically listened to our users on the different kinds of tools, editing tools that we were building for the browser.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While we were there, we learned a lot about products related to multimedia, like videos and GIFs, images, music on Google search, and we were witnessing just how much the market demand was growing for that sort of content. So that kind of gave us a context for our thinking around the product. But once we left Google in the December of 2017, the idea for Kippwing actually came from just our own product pane using existing options for video editing software and multimedia editing software. Just casually something I was doing at home. Eric was trying to add subtitles or like timed text annotations to his family's vacation video. And we were just both jamming on how crazy it was the options that were available to us that could use these spammy websites.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So my dad was an entrepreneur when I was young, and I always admired him a lot and wanted to have my own business or dreamed of that when I was acquiring that when I was older. But I didn't really know what industry that would be in until I came to Stanford in 2011 and started studying CS, took a CS class my sophomore year and just fell in love with the pace and the radical impact that tech has. So I studied computer science and then after school decided to join Google as an associate product manager, which is their training program basically for entry level PMs. And I happened to be randomly assigned to the same team as my now co-founder who had graduated the year before me. So we were co-workers at Google for two years and that serendipitous assignment obviously led us to develop a super important working relationship. So that made this jump into startups a lot easier. In terms of the aha moment, it didn't come until after I had left Google. Eric and I were both working on Google image search together in our second year.”
2019-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source