YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Sacks

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29
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2015-07-17
most recent
2015-07-17
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1
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  1. “So, in five years, I want Kindara to be the go-to women's health app for women all over the world, for women from when they get their period all the way through to menopause. I want us to be able to offer value and help them understand their cycles better, and to have a suite of connected devices that make that easier.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh, nice, yet tell him to say hi. So he's a VC, but half the time he writes about very personal things and the inner game of entrepreneurship, which I find really valuable.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think the hardest thing is that it's a marathon and a lot of people think it's a sprint. And I thought it was a sprint at the beginning. And it's not a sprint. It's a marathon. So you got to pace yourself.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I mean, the V in MVP viable, like that's the hard one because how do you know what's viable? Maybe something, maybe what you think is your MVP is not quite viable. It needs just a little bit more polish in order to be viable and then it can be a success. So that's what's difficult is you launch something and then you're always thinking, wait, maybe if it had been a little bit more polished, we would have gotten a different result and taken things in a different direction. So that's the hard part about Maline's startup for me.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think four steps to the epiphany by Steve Blank and Lean Startup by Eric Rees. They're kind of the same book. One is condensed and one is much longer.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Serving that mission. And that's how I've inspired people to join the team and to invest and to be part of what we're doing because we're trying to create a world that works better for everybody and specifically works better for women. And I think that's inspiring.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, definitely. The narrative that I told and that I still tell is that in our society it still sucks to be a woman in so many ways. Like we don't live in a society where women are given same kind of opportunities, the same kind of technology, same kind of information, same kind of respect as men are, and that I want a world where women and men are treated as equals. And Kindar is a company that exists to create beautiful technology for women, to help empower them around their bodies and their health so that they can feel good in their bodies and feel respected and celebrated. And so what we're doing is”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah So hardware is harder I would say than software It takes more capital. The turnaround time from when you have an idea to when you actually have a product that works and is ready to go is much longer. So I would say just be prepared for that if anybody is thinking about doing that takes my money takes longer. I think ultimately it builds more of a competitive advantage just because hardware is hard, like it's not easy people can't rip you off on a weekend hackathon like they can with an app potentially so I just say be prepared for that and what else? Yeah like it's different skill sets too so you need people who can do firmware, mechanical, electrical engineers, it's just different people that are needed so if anybody was going to build a connected device just make sure you find people who've done it before and know”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's not quite there. So I'd say get it all together. And sometimes I could take months. Like if the team's not right, before you go fundraise, you might have to spend time figuring that out and finding the person you need to join the team to make the team right.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Oh, cool. Yeah, it's a really long article. It takes like half an hour, 45 minutes to read, but it's just exceptional. So I'd say that's step one. Educate yourself on how it's done, what to look out for, just so you know the right words to use. And Mark Andreessen also has another great article on fundraising, which is basically like all the reasons your startup won't get funded. And so he's like, if your team is not good, you won't get funded. If your market is too small, you won't get funded. You know, if there's giant competitors and you need too much money to even compete, you won't get funded. And he goes through all those reasons and lays out what to do in each case. And so I think that's really important before you even start, you want to make sure that your plan and your company and your team is fundable because it's so much easier going out with a tight story and a team that's fundable than it is going out with something that's”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, well I would break it down into like a 12-step program, you know. And the step one would be just educate yourself about fundraising. Spend a week reading everything you can on people's experiences, Paul Graham from YC has an amazing article on fundraising that you can just Google and find.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's the hardest thing that I found is how to balance keeping the company growing and doing the fundraising. And we're just about to announce some more funding and this time around it was a lot easier because we finally got to the scale where we have a team that can keep the company running and then I basically just checked out and said, told the whole team I'm going to be fundraising for the next 90 days. I basically can't do anything else. Good luck with the company. I'll see you in 90 days kind of thing.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think the hardest part was that at the beginning I didn't know what I didn't know. And that's what's great about your podcast and just the amount of information that's available out there now about how to start a startup, how to raise money, what to focus on, what words to use, what questions to be able to answer. I didn't know any of that when we started in 2011. And so we raised a little bit of money from friends and family. I had very little startup like fund adventure-funded startup experience. And then I think the hardest thing from then till now has been keeping the company going and growing while fundraising. I've always found that to be incredibly difficult because fundraising takes so much energy. It's like a full-time job and then some. And then running a company is like a full-time job and then some.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think for us it's been mostly word of mouth, honestly, and that word of mouth has come from building a product that really serves people's needs. So Seth Godin's got this Circles of Marketing Diagram, and in the middle is the product. And he's like, if you don't nail the product, whatever you do outside of that is not going to be as effective. And so we've really focused on make the product really good and get people to tell their friends about it because they think it's awesome. And that's worked for us.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, well, we launched in 2012, and this was when the Lean Startup was really popular, you know, that whole concept of minimum viable product. The pendulum has kind of swung a little bit back the other way now, but what we did is we spent two weeks coding and then launched what we had. So it barely did anything. It was like a very initial version of the app on iOS only. It had two screens and barely did anything and like 50 people downloaded it. Of those 50 people who downloaded it, 10 sent us emails saying like, hey, this is really cool, but I wish I could do this. And then we just been really attentive to listening to what people want from the beginning and building the product around serving their needs.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, well, there's a great book that I'd recommend on this subject called Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and somebody else. And basically the thesis of that book is that every company grows differently. There's a different strategy. For growth, each company will have a different strategy. And there's a bunch of them. And in this book, they go through all of them and list them all out. And so the way that we've grown is by fostering our community, like being incredibly attentive to what our users want in the product and then giving it to them and telling them, hey, we listened to what you said you wanted. Now we built it. Here it is.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, definitely I don't have a uterus and I. So I don't know what that's like. And I can't pretend to know. Have an experience of what it's like for women to experience a monthly cycle. So at least I know what I don't know.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And so it's not something that a lot of people talk about or know a lot about. To know what I know about it now, and to talk about that to other people Katie and I came to this from the birth control angle when Katie introduced me to this subject matter fertility charting it was in the context of a conversation about birth control and I was asking her if she would go on the pill she said no she hated the pill and she asked me if I'd get a vasectomy and I said no I don't want to get a vasectomy and then she introduced me to fertility charting and and I thought that it was like BS. I thought it was the rhythm method that it wasn't effective and she gave me a textbook to read and I read that textbook and realized wow I don't know anything about this and moreover this is legit like this has been scientifically proven there's studies that show that it can be used as a method of contraception as effectively as the birth control pill and and so we have a personal experience now of using this as our method of birth control for the last five years so I definitely have that personal experience to talk out of and that gives me some credibility”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, and it's kind of cool, you know, when I'm talking to other guys about it, because even other women too, like a lot of people don't know about this stuff. It's a taboo topic, at least in the US, and I think in most places.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, it's pretty cool. At the beginning, I was not as comfortable as I am with this stuff now. I talk about this every day now.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We use balsamic. This is way back. I think balsamic has a web version now. Yeah, there's pencil and paper, I think, is a great tool. We made a lot of, like, you can make really cool mock ups of pencil and paper. I've seen people do cool stuff where you have an iPhone on one piece of paper with the screen cutout, and then you have different screens behind that screen, and you can show transitions. And you can get a long way in terms of user experience with pencil and paper.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “No, because I am a product guy. Like, that's part of my skill set and what I like to do and what I think I'm good at is conceptualizing a product and turning it into wireframes. I think that's where Skills end. Like it ends at the wireframe. So I can make the wireframe and understand the user flow and the user experience that we're going for. And then we hired a designer to take those wireframes and make them look nice and wrap them in a cohesive brand. And then we gave that to our CTO to build.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “feeds me more than developing. But for other people, I think the answer would be the opposite. Like if somebody likes coding and that's what feeds them, I think it's a great option to just build it yourself and get it out there, get users, build some traction. And then all of that is worth a lot.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's a great question. There are two very different paths I think for me, I'm happy that I didn't become a developer. And just because that's not really what feeds my soul, I always, we did some coding in university and I spent a bunch of time on MATLAB. And after four or five hours on MATLAB, my brain was fried. I couldn't even have a conversation with people. It was just using this part of my brain that That felt not the part that I love to use that really rejuvenated me as a person. So I think for me the right answer was to focus on how to build a team, how to build a company, how to raise money, how to motivate people, how to communicate a vision, like all of that.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, man, we brought on a friend who, I can't remember if we gave him the title CTO or not, but we were looking for a CTO, and it was very difficult because we didn't have anything at that point. It was me, my wife, and an idea and a few thousand dollars. And so we wrote a posting for CTO and we were looking around, and one of our friends said, hey, I can do this. So we ended up working with him for a couple years right at the beginning. And that was more of my education in entrepreneurship and how to build something versus actually building something that people wanted to use”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “No, that was a big question at the beginning because right when we started I was thinking should I teach myself to code because I had an engineering degree mechanical engineering but I had done some developing. Or should we hire somebody? And I decided that the skill set I wanted more was how to build a company. And so we decided to hire somebody else to do the development.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Was very bored in all my classes and thought that I couldn't see how I were going to be useful to me in my life. And so I started building stuff in college with a bunch of other guys and we built a solar-powered race car and raced that from Chicago to Los Angeles. And that was the first time I really had built something like that and something that we had all seen in our minds and then we made it real and I was like, well, this is pretty much the coolest. So this is what I want to do. And so since then I've started a couple of companies. One was a DVD vending machine company. Then I had a lighting company and then I got interested through a conversation with my wife in fertility and reproductive health and started Kandara. And since then I moved from Canada, lived in New York and lived in China briefly and now we live in Boulder, Colorado in the U.S.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “If a woman is trying to get pregnant, Kendar can be an incredibly valuable tool to help her do that. It's based on tracking fertility signs and then analyzing those signs so a woman and her partner can understand what's going on with their bodies and what's going on with their fertility and help them get pregnant faster. Or for women who don't want to be on the pill for whatever reason, Kandara is an effective form of, or can be used to avoid pregnancy naturally and it's been shown to be, the method that we use has been shown to be as effective as the pill are the two main uses and we have some other things planned in the future that we can talk about. And then my background, so I grew up in Canada, I studied engineering.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, sure. So Kandara is a reproductive health platform for women. We make at an app that's very popular on iOS and Android, and we make a connected fertility device. And so Kandara, we have two main uses.”

    2015-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source