Ep. 229 - Xiaoyin Qu, Founder of Run The World, on Launching a Virtual Events Platform in Covid and Beyond

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Xiaoyin Qu. Xiaoyin is the founder of Run The World, the new virtual events platform startup. This interview took place at our IO2020 New Innovators' Summit in October. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Xiaoyin Qu, Founder of Run The World

Brian Ardinger:  My name's Brian Ardinger. I'm Director of Innovation at Nelnet and Founder of Inside Outside Innovation. And I wanted to have Xiaoyin on, obviously, as I started trying to think about what we’re going to do with this particular event now that COVID hit and we weren't going to be able to have it live. 

I started looking at a lot of different platforms out there and I ran into Run The World and Xiaoyin and I was really impressed with not only her, but what she's pulled together in a very short amount of time. And so, I figured I'd invite her to the conference and expose her to what we're building on this particular platform and give her an opportunity to showcase what they're doing and tell you the story of what it's like as an early-stage founder, to go from seven failed ideas, to raising $15 million in the middle of a pandemic and launching and scaling and building a business.

So, with that Xiaoyin Qu is the founder of Run The World. She used to work at Facebook and Instagram as a product manager, she was an MBA at Stanford before she decided to start Run The World. And went out and raised $15 million, I believe, from Andreessen Horowitz and a number of other folks. With that, I will turn it over to you to give your story.

Xiaoyin Qu: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for coming to Run The World. I'm Xiaoyin, the founder and CEO of Run The World. You mentioned one fun fact. I actually didn't finish my degree at Sanford. I dropped out after a year, to start Run The World. It was actually around July last year. We started the company.

Initially the idea came because my mom was a doctor in China. She still is a doctor, and she has never been to an international conference before, until last year. So, she had an opportunity to fly to Chicago. And that was a great experience. She met another doctor from Dubai. Turns out they share the same, like rare patient case, but because she's from China, it's really hard for her to get visa.

She had to fly to Beijing just to get visa and it's getting unpredictable because Trump has a new policy, you know, every now and then. Basically, it's just really hard for her to travel all of that and really expensive. So, she told me that she doesn't think herself can make it to the next conference. You know, even though that was a great experience.

So, the original idea was really like, how can I help my mom? And meet other doctors like her, if she cannot really travel herself. So, we figured the only way it will be, we have to like digitize the whole experiences, especially the social part, so that my mom can meet other doctors.

Obviously at that time was before COVID, so saying that you have an online event was consider stupid because people thought, Oh, I'm going to fly to Vegas for fun. My company's paying for it. You know, why do I have to do this online? Doesn't really make any sense. So we do have sell pretty hard, but we actually then decided to run our own event to see if people can actually show up.

So at the very beginning, I am a product manager. I knew a lot of product managers. I just got a bunch of product managers from Google and Facebook. When we did our first PM conference, I was the organizer back then. We. just wanted to see if people will buy the ticket to attend it.  We just promoted in some Facebook groups and it turns out in a week. We sold like 300 tickets in like two weeks. The people who bought the ticket are not people necessarily from Silicon Valley. Those are people from 20 different countries in 20 different States. 

And by that time, we didn't have anything still. We hack around like Zoom and Slack and like even Brian, it was a jaunty experiences, but people like it because they couldn't get it elsewhere. You know, they couldn't have access to other people elsewhere, but it was still pretty broken. You have to share like six different links. At the right time, you know, at least we proved the concept. 

And then we, that's when we started raising from Andreessen was October last year. And then obviously when we launched, it was February, March time this year, that was our alpha version. And we immediately saw a lot of demand and interest. So yeah, so now we kind of have around 45 people in the company now across three times, Europe, Asia, and US, and we had around six people at the beginning of the year. So, it's kind of been crazy, trying to scale a team and hiring everybody. So. 

Brian Ardinger: I can attest to that. I mean, when I was looking for different platforms out there, I think I got to you guys really early. And I think what I was most impressed with is you said, well, here's your roadmap. You were very transparent with here's what we're building and where we're going with this. And then every week I'd go to the next demo and find the next platform feature that was put into it.

And so, the ability to move that fast was pretty interesting to me. One of the things that you wrote about in a LinkedIn piece, your story and that. And you talked about how as a founder, you iteratively mapped out different ideas. And I think you said that you had seven failed ideas before you came upon this particular one. Can you talk a little bit about that journey of looking at ideas, iteratively, figuring out if you're on the right path, and then eventually getting to the path where you're on right now? 

Xiaoyin Qu: When I first wanted to start a company, it was probably a year before that. I mean, I kind of want to start a company even when I was a Facebook. And so, it kind of took me, I will say, in total of a year, to try a bunch of different ideas to see which one I'm interested in. I would say like, there's like seven ideas and as I tried more and more, I think I'm getting better and better. And just engaging if the idea makes sense or not. 

But the first idea was I still think that's a good idea. I just, I thought at that time, mental health was a huge problem. Have a lot of friends, who've got pretty stressed out, burnout at work. And so, we're just thinking what if we can have some kind of an AI system that will help people whenever they want to talk to somebody, you know, there's some kind of AI system, they can talk to them.

That was kind of the intention of the idea. And then I guess what we did is we tried to figure it out, like I've no idea how people like with depression or anxiety, so we basically read some books and are trying to build something, and then we thought, you know, when you're anxious, or when you're depressed, you just want to hear certain things.

And as soon as we tell you how to think, then that will work. So, then we try a bunch of different things. We were trying to build some kind of bot. Then as the more we delve into that...