YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheila Lirio Marcelo

lines on the record: 41
first: 2021-10-05
most recent: 2021-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No one knows how to be scrappy better than entrepreneurs. But as Sheila and her cohorts build Taff, they'll need to keep relying on data to grow their mission. Because no matter what type of organization you're trying to build, there is no scale without data. So look for meaningful data wherever you can at every step of your journey. I'm Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening. Master of Scale is a weightwater original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our senior producer is Jordan McLeod. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producers are Adam Skeuse, Catherine Clark Gray, Heile Bondi, Marie McCoy Thompson, and Christina Gonzalez. Our editor at large is Bob Saffler.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just as we heard in the story of art fields at the top of the show, not for profits, have to track data just as diligently as for profits. Their success is measured less by earnings than by impact.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila is now a venture partner at NEA, investing in young companies that will need to learn all of these same data lessons. She was also named Executive Chair of the Wing, a startup membership organization with co-working spaces in major cities across the US. They were founded as a women-only network, but have since opened up to all genders. And this year, Sheila helped form the inaugural board of the Asian American Foundation, or TAF. You can hear our interview with the group's founding president, Sonal Shaw, on Masters of Scale Rapid Response. Go to Masterscale. com slash rapid response slash shaw SHA TAF formed this past spring in response to the spike in violence and harassment against the Asian American community. A spike, by the way, that you can see right in the data. Anti-Asian hate crimes rose.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That social mission heart is, first of all, one of the great things about Sheila and founders like her. Without it, many leaders don't measure whether they're improving the ecosystem around their business. A strong local economy consists in many businesses. An economy decimated by low wages and mercenary marketplaces cannot. But at the end of the day, the numbers have to bear out your mission. Sheila stepped down as CO at the start of twenty twenty after Car. com sale to IAC.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila's describing is the virtuous cycle that's in so many corporate mission statements. But marketplaces have a way of demonstrating with quantifiable data whether the vision is coming true. Say a little bit more about the paying attention of the creation of the marketplace but as opposed to, as everyone who has a anti-capitalist reflex kind of thinks, oh, you're just trying to drive wages down and get labor cheaper. No, no, we're actually trying to create value and humanity across it.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once again Sheila found a way to fact find efficiently and strategically by leveraging her partnership with Ai Janpu at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, sheila was able to learn fast what steps she could take to serve the millions of caregivers in her marketplace. The problem had already been studied so she could put solutions in place fast. Not only wage protection, but something that had been missing in the freelance space for a long time.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What became very apparent very quickly was that it would be important to consider the data on both sides of the care marketplace. Because if you empower one kind of working woman by leveraging another, that's not only going to fail your social mission, it's going to destroy one side of your business”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Statistically, women are still more likely to be the primary caregivers in a household. So the more access to care they have, the more they can participate in the professional world which drives the economy.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the ones who did great. And the ones who didn't, a lot of pain. Luckily, Kerdocom was able to weather the transition to mobile and on demand, and they made a point to scale safety features like advanced caregiver screenings to accompany the fast paced nature of finding care on the fly. But there was yet another metric that sheila was tracking that mattered as much to her as any other. I think you have been one of the leading voices and entrepreneurs on this topic, which is that businesses can be massive forces for social good that aren't just a function of, hey, we created a product or service, or hey, we create jobs, which of course those are social goods, but actually, in fact, things that are fundamental to how society can become the way it should be, not just by economic productivity. And care was a central part of that. The impact that you would expect from nonprofits, that's the depth.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is actually, in fact, one of the things that I think is a good general principle for entrepreneurs to say what are the macro trends, technology trends are a key one, mobile, cloud, AI, and do they apply? And if we see those coming, what would that be? Like actually the world really sorted out between the people who really adjusted to mobile and didn't. And it was a lot of tech companies.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Care.com launched in 2007 and had scaled massively by the time the company went public in twenty fourteen. But even with a high volume of users split nearly evenly between caregivers and families, there was a change Sheila didn't see coming.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyone in the software business particularly will be familiar with this debate. Should your product be free or freemium? Or should you charge from the very beginning? But the same question applies to the intrepid cake pop founder. How many free samples can you afford to give away? In software at least I usually advocate for building your marketplace first. If your worries about getting the profitability means you start charging too soon, you may be cutting yourself off from future paying customers by missing the chance to win their love first. And you're cutting yourself off from data. The more users you get, the more data you get about what your customer wants and doesn't want. And the more information you now have to make critical decisions about the future. And even high volumes a data can miss spotting a challenge ahead.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, when we said that learning who your customer is and learning who your scale customer is isn't the same thing, Sheila had been all in on senior care in part because it had been one of her own personal drivers in starting care. com. But as it turns out, the scale market for senior care wasn't ready yet. Your user data is what gives you that snapshot, and the sooner that picture comes into focus, the sooner you're able to pivot and direct resources elsewhere. And with all the experience you have now, what would you have wanted to add in to your founding moment, your initial strategy?”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. No, exactly. And it's one of the funny things about entrepreneurship is the general rule is ideally you're two to three years in advance of the market. That's right.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of wisdom packed into these moves, so let's break it down. First, figuring out those first 20 metros and what the key care verticals were. There was a lot writing on that decision. A simple misjudgment could spell the death of the company. So not only was the data itself critical, but so was Sheila's interpretation of it. Data gives you the tea leaves. It's your job to read them. And as Sheila says, she didn't actually read all of them right.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I enjoy about this method is its simplicity hiring a small team of college students to study Craigslist is something you can stand up cheaply and fast and get results fast too. It's not just about getting data, it's about getting data with enough speed to be ahead of the competition. For this reason, marketplaces are tricky flywheels to get started, so you have to build them in places that are ready. One Sheila and her twenty interns had compiled their findings, they used it to determine which markets care dot com should pursue first.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Care.com was testing light, partly out of necessity. Until you build your marketplace, you don't have much access to user data. So Sheila also had her team do external data testing to find out which cities were most likely to have people source caregivers online.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Sheila Lear Marcello, founder of Care. com If you're enjoying this episode and want to share it with friends, send them a link masterscale dot com slash Marcello That's M A R C E L and to hear my complete interview with Sheila become a master scale member at Masterscale. com slash membership. We've been talking about the absolute centrality of data when it comes to scale. Think of your company like a cake pop and data is the baking powder that makes the dough rise. But how do you get data when you're first starting out and you don't have the instrumentation to gather large quantities of data? The answer is look for useful and cost effective data that can be gathered by asking the right questions One question you'll want to answer early is what's your total addressable market? And is that market ready for your product? Sheila set out to answer this quickly.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nick approved, and in 2006 Care.com was founded. Sheila had her mission, she had the support of a venture firm, and she had insights into her customer firsthand. Now the real search for data would begin.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This response didn't make me say, okay, never mind. Instead, it showed me what my number one obstacle was going to be, asking smart people what's wrong with your idea is the best deal on data you'll ever get. Sheila sought Nick Byme's advice while she was at Matrix from the very beginning of her time there.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Notice what Sheila is saying here. Obviously, being in residence at a VC firm gave her access to capital, something so many entrepreneurs scrambled to find, but she was equally grateful for the advice. This is valuable data gathering too. In fact, the one piece of advice I give most often to early stage entrepreneurs is to go out and ask the smartest people you know what's wrong with my idea? Why won't it work? I ask this question when I was first building LinkedIn, and my most trusted advisors had the same answer. They said the problem would be in getting the network flywheel going. After all, a professional network is only valuable if other people are there to network with.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila spent five years at YouPromise, then briefly at a job marketplace site called The Ladders. Then she was invited to become entrepreneur in residence at Matrix Partners. This would change everything.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With two young children and an ailing father, Sheila was highly motivated to solve the sandwich problem. And this drive to solve a personal struggle is actually common to many founders. It makes sense if you're going to start a company, why not have it solve a need that you yourself know? It means you're highly motivated and you understand the size and shape of the problem. You already have some data about the customer's needs because that customer is you. But be careful. This is also where a lot of entrepreneurs stumble because the next step is realizing that your experience isn't universal. The customer might be you, but you aren't the only customer. And you might not actually be the scale customer. Finding out who that scale customer is is the job of data.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Besides being a scary time for Sheila and her family, her father's illness meant that Sheila needed to find care for her parent and her children at the same time.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By now, Sheila and her husband had two young sons. They invited her father to move in and become the boy's caretaker, but then the family experienced a deeply personal setback.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you need a translation, that's okay. Multivariant testing is a way to experiment with a layout and content of consumer interfaces such as websites. It's like AB testing with a few more letters mixed in. It lets you test more than one variable at a time, like mixing and matching which headline works best with which copy. Light testing lets you gather information at relatively low cost and a high ROI. All testing costs something from collecting it to storing and analyzing it. So you want to be as active as you can in thinking about what data will help you at each next phase. The Uprise experience taught her the value and practice of getting the right information in the right ways by testing and iterating. And Sheila also learned something else. She loved helping build a company from the ground up.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila might not have known it at the time, but navigating these challenges would serve as its own fact finding mission. Though painful, it gave her critical insights into a problem she wanted to solve.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way her professors and peers reacted to her decision foreshadowed the professional world she'd be entering as a young mother in the mid nineties. Unlike the Philippines, where it was quite typical for mothers to work outside the home, Sheila was looking at a playing field that was tilted against women who wanted both career and family. So when she interviewed for her first job as a strategy consultant, she adjusted.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this moment, Sheila's mom and dad weren't just acting like caring parents. They were also acting like entrepreneurs with new data. No matter how good the original mission was, once they saw the unintended outcomes of their decisions, they made a change. The data set was small, but decisive. Sheila returned to the US for college. There she faced a decision that would shape her personal and professional mission, and give her a new data set to work from.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why go back? Because the children, especially the two youngest, had gotten so accustomed to the US that they had forgotten their first language.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila's parents were serial entrepreneurs. When she was just six years old, her family moved to Houston, Texas to pursue an opportunity. In coconuts,”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila was born in the Philippines, the second youngest of six. Her upbringing instilled in her some foundational principles, starting with one key data point.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheila sees care.com as a means to democratize childcare and give women equal access to a career. But it wasn't just a sense of purpose that drove Care dot com to scale.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I probably don't have to tell you that that's going to be a disaster. This time it's too much data, expensive to gather, and a lot less practical than simply talking to another business owner who succeeded in the space. The fact is, data is critical to scale. There's really no path without it, but data can be expensive to gather and messy to interpret. So you need to gather information regularly and strategically. I wanted to talk to Sheila Lira Marcello about this because as the founder and former CEO of Care dot com, Sheila scaled her business right past the competition by getting the right data at the right time. Is a two-sided marketplace connecting working families with care providers, from babysitters to nurses' aides, tutors, pet sitters, and house cleaners.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great news. Every single person you talk to says yes, except your uncle, who says he's watching his wait. Nine out of ten people think your cake pops will be bigger than gourmet donuts. Well, sorry to burst your bubble. That isn't very useful data. Your friends and family may support you, but they're not going to drive you to scale. Okay, let's try again. This time you take the same question and you survey ten strangers. This time every single person says no. You're crushed until you learn that everyone you asked was a type one diabetic. This isn't useful data either. Diabetics probably aren't your intended audience. At least not until you perfect your low sugar recipe. All right, one more time. This time you're really, really serious about gathering data. So you commission a survey of every single person in your city. No, the state.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is Masters of Scale. I'm Reid Hoffman, co founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe in this simple mantra, no data, no scale. But not all data is created equal, so look for the most useful and most cost effective data you can at each phase of growth. Here's a hypothetical Say you're a baker and you're trying to decide whether to open a bakery that only sells cake pops. You have a logo chosen and a name. You'd call it the pop shop, naturally. You've perfected your recipe, but you want to know if the business is going to be viable. So you reach out to some of your closest friends and family. It's just a one question survey. If I made these cake pops, would you buy one”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Collecting this kind of feedback doesn't cost a lot, and it highlights just how valuable data can be. If, you're measuring the right things in the right way. That's why I believe in this simple mantra, no data, no scale. But not all data is created equal, so look for the most useful and most cost effective data you can at each phase of growth. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it?”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Garfields wanted hard proof that they were genuinely contributing to Lake City's Renaissance. So they got just the right weapon to fight the skeptics.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Local businesses become the gallery spaces, visitors convert naturally to customers Of course, the art fair is just one piece of a larger economic puzzle, but its very existence has brought new tourism and commerce to Lake City. Even if they've had to overcome their share of doubters.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Art Field is an annual celebration of Southern visual art. Paintings, sculptures, installations, and even a quilter too. Jameson is now the organization's director. But art fields is more than an art show. It also boosts the small businesses of Lake City.”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jameson Kerr and that place in the middle of everywhere is Lake City, South Carolina. Today it's a bustling small town of just under six thousand people. What changed? In twenty thirteen, the town got an unexpected champion. An investor who had grown up in Lake City came back to found an organization that would help revive her hometown. But it wasn't a new factory or a new retail chain. So what was it?”
2021-10-05 · Masters of Scale · No data, no scale, w/Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT