How a Career in Consulting and VC Prepared Jennifer Smith for a Life as CEO of Scribe

Onboarding is a pain point in hiring, but also when bringing new customers up to speed. Not only can it be difficult to navigate as a consumer, but it can be difficult to produce the materials and tutorials in the first place. Our guest today is aiming to fix all of that, Jennifer Smith is the Co-Founder and CEO of Scribe, a platform that makes manuals a thing of the past. She talks to us about how her platform works, what it was like fundraising while pregnant, and how her background in consulting and VC prepared her for life as a startup founder.

About Jennifer Smith:Jennifer Smith started her career in consulting at McKinsey. She left to join Coatue and then Greylock Partners, heading up their CXO Program. In 2019 she Co-Founded Scribe. She did her undergrad at Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard Business.

In this episode we discuss:

01:37 How consulting helped her become an investor03:01 Early experiences that showed Jennifer the connection between finance and tech04:56 Knowledge is not evenly distributed and how to tap into that05:47 Her experience at Greylock Partners and how it prepared her to be a founder07:54 Jennifer’s advice to VCs11:06 Fundamental problems large organizations face and how smaller companies can help solve them13:42 Employee onboarding difficulties companies face14:48 When Jennifer started thinking about launching Scribe17:16 Meeting her co-founder19:05 Why they built in stealth for over a year20:45 Early customer hypotheses’s that proved wrong22:03 How Scribe actually works24:37 Scribe’s cross-platform functionality28:26 Is video a good platform to help onboarding30:15 Use cases Jennifer is seeing for Scribe32:30 How she fundraised her Series A34:01 Some of her most helpful Angel Investors36:05 Why founders should push back against Lead investors to fit in more strategic angels

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