Product Hunt Radio

Abadesi is back to talk to Ben Halpern, creator, founder, and webmaster of DEV, an online community where developers share ideas and help each other grow. He is also behind @ThePracticalDev on Twitter and runs DEV alongside his two other co-founders, Jess Lee and Peter Frank. Fun fact: Ben is a Canadian who moved to NYC to join a startup and never left. He spoke to Aba from Brooklyn. In this episode we talk about: Why you need to lead by example when you're building an online community and how your behavior as a founder on the site can be more effective in setting a tone than complicated rules. How DEV manages their distributed team, the advantages of working from home, and being honest with yourself about when you need to take a break from your work as a founder, even if it's not easy to do. His love for open source, his predictions for future trends on the web and his very unique personal website, which is a throwback to the web of years past. We also talk about his love for Tiles, the surprising usefulness of Android's Measure app, and why Ben says if you're not using a password manager, you're “not living your digital life to the fullest.” We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “[On creating good communities] It didn’t just happen by accident, we really tried to foster this stuff by example. Anytime we try to create something new, some kind of new behavior or anything, we really try to do it by leading the way and being good ourselves and then rewarding those who get it, who share our understanding of what a good community needs to be.” “You can really do anything you can want on the web. It’s a really fascinating platform. Anything you can hear or visualize is possible, it’s just our imagination that limits it.” “[On remote work] I would say that it’s a good idea, but it’s not going to be something you get right at first, so you’re going to have to be accepting of it being a gradual thing that you don’t give up on but you also don’t just jump in and do without the expectation that anything’s going to go wrong.” Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Amazon Alexa — Get information, news, weather, and more using just your voice. LastPass — Essential password manager. Measure — Measure anything with your phone. Phillips Hue Smart Bulbs — Internet-connected color-changing lightbulbs that you can program yourself. Tile — Track your lost items.

On this episode I'm visiting Benchmark Capital, one of the world's most renowned venture capital firms, at their offices in the heart of the Tenderloin in San Francisco to chat with two of its general partners, Sarah Tavel and Eric Vishria. Sarah Tavel has a unique background as an investor, then operator, and back to investor. In the mid-2000s she joined Silicon Valley-based Bessemer where she led an investment in Pinterest and others. She went on to join Pinterest back when they were only a few dozen people before returning to venture three and a half years later. She's now a GP at Benchmark and on the board of Hipcamp and Chainalysis. Eric Vishria started his career as an operator, working at Opsware and HP before founding Rockmelt, a social take on the web browser, back in 2008. Later the company was acquired by Yahoo where Eric joined as a VP before making a leap into venture at Benchmark. Over the past four-plus years he's lead investments in Confluent, Contentful, Amplitude, and others. In this episode we talk about: What it's like to go from operating to investing and the different skillsets involved in those jobs, and why Benchmark has bucked the trend of venture firms expanding both in headcount and fund size. What Sarah and Eric are looking for in an investment, which spaces they're most excited about (hint: they say that contrary to reports of its death, consumer is very much alive), and why each partner at the firm only does on average one or two investments in a year. The importance of starting a company in Silicon Valley (or not) and why we're seeing more startups build outside the Valley. We also discuss some of her favorite products, including a couple apps that are enabling new forms of communication on mobile, an “Airbnb for campsites,” and why Sarah has been playing Fortnite for “research purposes.” We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes From This Episode “When I meet with a company that's outside the Valley, I would get on a soapbox and talk about how they have to be here if they want to scale and I always kind of thought that from zero to a couple hundred million market cap, you can build that anywhere, but to be that multibillion-dollar company, you have to be here. I still believe that but not as a strongly as I used to and it's because you do see so many examples of companies that are getting started and are getting to some scale outside of the Valley.” — Sarah “As soon as you think it’s over, it’ll probably come from an unexpected place. It won’t be a direct competitor to Facebook, it won’t be Facebook reborn. That isn’t the way it’s going to happen, it will be something unexpected, orthogonal, that comes out of nowhere but that meets this need for people to connect. I think that it’ll happen — I don’t know where, I don’t know how.” — Eric “It's incredible to see how big many of the other venture firms are getting, and not just from a fund perspective, but from a people perspective. It's almost like they're vertically integrating. They've got seed investing, early stage investing, growth investing, some even have you know, public equity investing, debt, you know, as part of their platform. They've got talent teams and marketing teams and customer development teams and we've just decided to stay very very focused on what we do, which is being a close partner.” — Sarah “It's really about looking at a lot of stuff, falling in love with an opportunity and an entrepreneur and deeply engaging, whereas operating is mostly figuring out how to get stuff done and very little of figuring out what to do, in a lot of ways venture is like 90% or 95% figuring out what to do and like 5% getting it done.” — Eric Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode AutoSleep — Automatically track your sleep from your Apple Watch. Bitmoji — Turns your avatar into stickers and emoji. Breaker — The social podcast app. Chainalysis — Building trust in blockchains. Discord — Find people who share your interests. Hipcamp — Airbnb for campsites. Marco Polo — Keep in touch on the go. Nextdoor — Connect to your neighbors.

Aba is back to host this episode with Jessica Lessin, journalist, founder, and editor-in-chief of The Information. Founded in 2013, The Information breaks exclusive stories and publishes deeply reported articles about tech and startups. In this episode we talk about: What attracted to her to journalism in the first place, how she got her start at the Wall Street Journal, and why the distortion of the news industry's business model by the internet led her to start The Information. What she's learned after five years running The Information, her insights on leadership, and the importance of resilience and self-awareness. And of course, her take on the big tech trends on the horizon, including the possibility of tokenizing everything and the future of Facebook. We also discuss some of her favorite products, including Google Maps, Google Photos, and Asana, which they use extensively at The Information. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I caught the reporting bug early. I thought being a reporter and never having to pick one job, but having license to learn about the world and ask smart people questions, is really just an awesome profession and also believe really passionately again that the news industry has in many ways been devastated by the internet and really needs to have a renaissance.” — Jessica “Not only was digital advertising not going to pay the bills for these newsrooms, but it was also distorting the content, and I felt that the subscription business — which is what we are at The Information — was the antidote to that. It was the business that only worked if you delivered a quality product and earned your real relationship with your user and that loyalty. And so, in seeing what I felt was the bad reaction of the new industry to the internet, I felt like there was an opportunity to do it differently and approach coverage differently.” — Jessica “You know, in studying and reporting on startups for so long, you see it’s never a smooth ride. What you see is only a fraction of what’s really going on.” — Jessica Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Asana — The task management tool, completely redesigned. Google Maps — Essential mapping app. Google Photos — Automatic backup and unlimited storage for all your photos.

Bryce Roberts is co-founder and managing director of a different kind of VC firm, Indie.VC. He recently announced v3 of their fund model which is focused on backing revenue-generating companies that are seeking financial independence from the traditional VC rat race. Prior to starting the fund four years ago, Bryce invested in seed stage startups in the mid-2000's out of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). Portfolio companies include Bitly, Chartbeat, Codecademy, Foursquare, Hipcamp, OpenX, and a bunch of others. He joins me all the way from his home base in Utah. In this episode: We talk all things venture capital, including how it's changed over the past decade and where it's going in the future. We've previously talked a bit about distributed teams on the startup side, but here we also talk about distributed teams when it comes to investing, including when Bryce moved from the Bay Area to Utah in the middle of a fund. How founders can be more honest with themselves about what they really want, and why so many want to quit chasing venture funding that they don't really want, and which leaves them in an escalating cycle of constantly reaching for the next funding milestone. We talk about which geographies in Bryce is most bullish on for startups, besides the Bay Area. We also get sidetracked talking about Bryce's membership in the “first name club” on Twitter (his username is @bryce) and whether we might be seeing any of the videos he's created on TikTok anytime soon (we won't). We also talk about some of Bryce's favorite products, including the Apple Watch, a headband that is supposed to help you sleep, and why TikTok is so addictive. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Part of the idea behind Indie.VC was, what kinds of companies, ideas, products and founders could exist in the world and could have their ideas and company cultures embodied in the world through technology? How would it be different or what would it look like if they didn’t have to keep asking investors for permission to exist or if they didn’t have to keep contorting and forcing themselves into the box that looks like it has a stamp on it that says 'fundable?'” — Bryce “If you look at where funding goes, if you look at the fact that 90% of it still goes to one gender, if you look at the fact that 75 to 80% of it still goes to essentially three cities, that starts to highlight the idea that if that next milestone isn’t necessarily funding, how could you invest differently? If you could support founders who had an aversion to raising venture money because they’ve been burned by it in the past or they wanted to do things that didn’t necessarily fit that mold or people in places or who don’t look like what VCs have traditionally funded, the best way to ensure those ideas exist in them world in the short term at least is to not necessarily rely on that next fundable milestone mindset that that I think is more prevalent in venture maybe than we’d like to admit.” — Bryce Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Apple Watch — The most powerful and advanced smartwatch yet. Bevel — A complete shaving system. Domo — A digitally connected business, right on your phone. Dreem — A solution that acts on your brain to enhance sleep. Freshly Picked — Quality mom and baby products. Pluralsight — World's largest tech and creative training library. Qualtrics — Leading research and experience software. TikTok — A creative music video clip maker. Walker and Company — Making health and beauty simple for people of color.

Aba is back to host this fun episode with Taylor Lorenz. Aba is part of the team at Product Hunt and the author of Dream Big, Hustle Hard: The Millennial Woman's Guide to Success in Tech. Taylor Lorenz is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology and culture. We love the way she always finds a way to be entertaining while stirring up thought-provoking debate. She's also an all-around social media superstar. In this episode we talk about: The origins of her obsession with the web and social media, and why people always seem to be nostalgic for the internet as it was when they first discovered it. Why deeming tech either universally good or universally bad is a false dichotomy and the need for a more nuanced discussion around the topic. Her obsession with horror movies and the psychology of horror, and why she would never want to live on Mars. We also discuss some of Taylor's favorite products including “Netflix for horror movies,” one of her favorite mobile community apps, and how she uses Google Maps to discover some of the best places and events near her. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I think the most important thing is to recognize that sometimes it can feel like the entire internet hates you or is ganging up on you or is angry at you and it’s really important to remember that that’s not true and that’s why you have to have a lot of good offline friendships too.” — Taylor “The founders have a responsibility to take into account the negative ways their platforms can be used. I think so many founders are delusional about how their own products are used and they want to think it’s used in some way but you are also letting Nazis on here.” — Taylor “It’s funny, everyone seems to be nostalgic for whenever they discovered the internet, like I have a lot of colleagues that were online in the 90s and we’re just like oh, early forums or Usenets. I think maybe just being young online is a different experience.” — Taylor Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Amino — Authentic mobile communities for whatever you're into. Google Maps — Essential mapping app, now with great discovery features. Shudder — Stream horror, thrillers and suspense. Tik Tok — A creative music video clip maker.

We have a special guest host for this episode, my teammate at Product Hunt, Abadesi Osunsade. She is the author of Dream Big, Hustle Hard: The Millennial Woman's Guide to Success in Tech. She'll be hosting more episodes alongside me this year. Ann Miura-Ko is a founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm in Palo Alto. She has been called “the most powerful woman in startups” by Forbes and is an early investor in Lyft and TaskRabbit. She is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford's School of Engineering and a founding member of All Raise. In this episode we talk about: Ann recounts how she got to where she is today, including what it was like growing up with a NASA scientist for a dad. She talks about some of the formative moments in her career and explains why she says that a “career path” is a misnomer. The mentors that have helped Ann throughout her career, and why she never approaches a relationship with an expectation of mentorship, but instead always “begins with an act of service.” Why the tech industry should always take a step back to question whether everyone prospers from its work, the five values that drive her investments at Floodgate, and why they tell entrepreneurs “your life's work is our life's work.” How she manages her children's relationships with social media (“browsing Instagram feels like not being invited to every party everyone else is having”), how she is personally working to increase the number of underrepresented founders, and the business benefit of diversity. We also discuss some of their favorite products including an old-fashioned note-taking system for the digital age, a better way to organize your tabs in Chrome, and a built-in CRM for your Gmail inbox. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Rally Rd and AngelList, for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “My belief has always been that I never asked someone to be my mentor. I would start off with an act of service, and it wasn’t built on a belief that that act of service would then lead to mentorship.” — Ann “In ten years, I’ve seen huge changes in the funding landscape. The opportunity for someone to access capital is so much greater than when I first got started. The playing field is not level at all but it is so much more accessible than it was ten years ago.” — Ann “When we think about economic opportunity for the masses, when we think of better education for the masses, I believe that people envision technology playing a critical role in that. To separate out prosperity from technology advances, I think is crazy. We need to have a way of creating a better future that’s characterized by optimism and hope rather than insecurity and fear.” — Ann Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Bullet Journal — An analog note-taking system for the digital age. Streak — CRM in your inbox, for Gmail. Trello — Organize anything, together. Workona — Transform Chrome into a professional work tool for free.

On this episode I'm visiting Atrium's headquarters in SoMA in San Francisco to chat with two serial entrepreneurs, Justin Kan and Ranidu. Justin Kan's career blew up in the mid-2000s when he started livestreaming himself 24/7 on Justin.tv, a Y Combinator backed startup that he co-founded. Justin.tv eventually turned into Twitch and sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. He has gone on to found multiple startups since then, including Exec, Whale, and now Atrium. Ranidu has a unique background. Before jumping into tech, he rose to fame as an R&B and hip-hop artist (check him out here). He went on to join Google before founding the first of many startups, many of which have been centered around his passion for music. We talk about a few of them including The Drop, The Artist Union, and Audius, a decentralized audio distribution platform he started earlier this year. In this episode we talk about: What they've learned from building products and startups, what lessons they would give to entrepreneurs starting out today, and how the startup and investing landscape has changed. Justin explains why he says that 2010-2013 was the “sweet spot” for building and scaling a company in the Bay Area. We talk about whether distributed teams make sense due to the escalating cost of living and the battle for talent in San Francisco. Whether an Apple Watch can replace your smartphone. Justin talks about how he survives in Silicon Valley without a phone, how going phone-free has changed how he works and lives and why he compares compulsive smartphone use to an addiction. He says a smartphone is a “Juul for your mind.” We're all big music fans, so we also talk about artists we've been loving recently, why the lines between music genres are being blurred, and the economics of creating music for artists. We also discuss some of their favorite products including a gratitude journal app that will improve your mental health, a “social network for athletes,” and a tool to help organize your tasks at work. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Rally Rd and AngelList, for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “We [at Atrium] have some resources, [we] have expanded, but measuring your company’s success in headcount is like measuring an airplane in weight, so it's not exactly the right measure of success.” — Justin “As an independent artist today, it takes between three months and eighteen months between the time you stream my music to get paid, and we [at his new company Audius] think that’s wrong in 2018.” — Ranidu “I think the sweet spot [to build a company in the Bay Area] was in 2010 through 2013 or so, where the costs were relatively much lower on the startup salary side. Now your million dollars is good for hiring two machine learning engineers.” — Justin “A lot of days [in my gratitude journal] I write about how awesome it is to live in San Francisco and have all these resources and friends. Life here is great and I think we get caught up in the little bit that is bad and think that everything is bad. To hate on San Francisco is very fashionable.” — Ranidu Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Airtable — Real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid. Apple Watch — The most powerful and advanced smart watch yet. The Artist Union — Discover and support the next generation of artists. Atrium — Legal services for startups, powered by machine learning. Audius — The future of music streaming on the blockchain. Five Minute Journal — The simplest, most effective way to be happier every day. Headspace — Learn to meditate and live mindfully. Insight Timer — The best free meditation timer, redesigned. Monday — Simplify the way your team works. Pacemaker — DJ with artificial intelligence from your Spotify. Strava — Run and cycling tracking on the social network for athletes. The Drop (RIP) — EDM discovery community.

Today I'm at Kleiner Perkins in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood to talk to Eugene Wei and Eric Feng. Eugene Wei has worked at Oculus, Flipboard, Amazon and Hulu. He actually left Amazon in the mid-2000s to attend film school before jumping back into tech. He’s also a prolific writer on his blog, Remains of the Day. Eric Feng is co-founder of Packagd and General Partner at Kleiner Perkins. He has previously worked at Microsoft, Flipboard and Hulu, where he and Eugene worked together. Fun fact: Eugene actually married Eric! (Eugene was the officiant at his wedding). In this episode we talk about: The uniqueness of video as a medium of communication and the future of how video will be created and consumed. Eric and Eugene worked together at Hulu and they talk about the background to the recent trend of tech moving in on Hollywood's turf. Creating tighter feedback loops when you're trying to learn something new or change your behavior. Eugene tells the story of adding after-market sensors to his golf clubs that give him all kinds of information on the speed and length of his swing. He calls it a swing coach on your phone and talks about how the trend of sensors and immediate feedback could be used to improve peoples' overall health, not just their short game. As some of the most plugged-in individuals in tech these days, they also discuss some of the trends they've been seeing in the tech industry and make some predictions about what they expect to see in the future. They discuss changes in how young people communicate these days, how the Chinese tech industry is different from the West's and why they expect to see the shift to e-commerce from advertising continue. We also discuss some of their favorite products including sensors you can stick on your golf clubs to give you pro-level stats, a tech-enabled meat smoker, and a way to solve the perennial 'baby with a stuffy nose' problem. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Post-Google and post-Facebook there was this huge shift to ad-supported monetization for everything. The entire world had moved to ads and that was the only way that you could build a company… but that pendulum has swung really far back over, because of this new paradigm shift of people being comfortable with e-commerce and now mobile facilitating that more. Commerce is now a much more interesting monetization model for startups than advertising.” — Eric “VR/AR, if you lump it in with self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, generalized artificial intelligence, all of these things are going to take longer than people expect, and that’s fine. They’re going to require a lot of big hardware advances, finding the right use cases, all of that is just going to be slower. But they’re all going to change the world in huge ways.” — Eugene “Take for example the shirt I’m wearing. It got made in some textile factory, the distribution was through a retail store, I paid in cash in-person and then I put it on. But in the era of technology two of those things have really fundamentally changed — the way it’s distributed and the way I purchase it. Now I buy it online and it’s sent to my home. But the way it’s created and the way it’s used are still the same, I’m still wearing it one sleeve at a time.” — Eric “The history of Hollywood is one where the studios went from really being vertically integrated to just being financiers and marketers. The thing about SV vs Hollywood is that SV tech companies have a lot more cash than all the studios put together. They’re a lot more profitable because of all their other businesses.” — Eugene Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Blast — Sensors for sport. Hulu — Live and on-demand TV. Mindie (RIP) – 7-second music videos Nosefrida — Stuffy nose solution for babies. Reflect — AI-powered face swap. Sandbox VR — In-person, social VR experiences. Tik Tok — Creative music video clip maker. Traeger — Tech-enabled smokers.

Today I'm visiting Garry Tan at Initialized HQ, a multi-stage fund that he started with Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of reddit. The fund has grown tremendously over the past six years with nearly $1B under management, a team of more than 10, and investments in a few companies you might be a customer of, including Coinbase, Instacart, Algolia, GOAT, Opendoor, and a bunch of others. They were also investors in Product Hunt. In this episode we talk about: Garry's early years working as a software engineer in tech, including some major missed opportunities (in hindsight). He recounts the story of Peter Thiel trying to hire him away from Microsoft to join what became the multi-billion dollar company, Palantir. Initialized's decision-making framework for figuring out which companies to pass on and which companies to invest in, as well as their honey badger mascot. Why an often overlooked skill for founders is managing conflict, even when the team is still small. Garry explains why he backed a company that aims to help create harmonious startup teams founded by his former therapist. We also discuss some of the Initialized portfolio companies that Garry is most excited about and the “megatrends” that are creating opportunities for investors and founders in tech today. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “The hard part about being a founder is you have this fog of war: you have no idea why you’re growing and a lot of times you also have no idea why you’ve stopped growing.” — Garry “Peter looked at me and said, 'you’re a great engineer, why are you doing that?' Come join us, we are going to change the world. How much do you make at Microsoft? He got out his check book and started writing and said, 'here’s a personal check from me to you; you can cash this and this is a risk-free opportunity for you...' So I said, 'thank you very much Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted next year at Microsoft' and I didn’t take the check. Opportunity knocked and I said no, and that company turned out to be Palantir.” — Garry “Basically everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face, and as a startup you're going to get your face punched in. The important thing is 'what do you do next?'” — Garry Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode LogDNA — Instantly collect and analyze logs real-time on any platform. Standard Cognition— AI-powered checkout. Torch.io — Leadership growth driven by data, powered by people. Check out www.initialized.com for a shot of Initialized's honey badger mascot.

Today I'm visiting San Francisco's Mission district to chat with Winnie co-founders, Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall. They have a unique background working at large tech companies like Google, Twitter, Quora, and Postmates, where they worked together before starting Winnie, “the companion app for parents.” As someone who's built and admires community-driven businesses, it was a pleasure to dive into how Winnie is creating community and a platform for parents. As mothers, Sara and Anne exemplify founder/market fit and are uniquely qualified to build a product for parents. In this episode we talk about: How Anne and Sara found founder/market fit and how their personal experience — Sara and Anne both have two children — informs not only how they built Winnie the product, but also how they built Winnie the company. How Winnie combats fake parenting news, and why it was important for them to take a stance on certain issues and actively moderate out certain topics. The power of communities aligned around a single vertical. We compare custom-built communities to generalized community-building tools like Facebook and Reddit. Of course, we also talk about some of their favorite products, including a way to continuously share your location with other members of your family, an app to share photos with family members, and another that captures one second every day and over time turns it into a highlight reel for your life. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Anne and I were very explicit from the beginning that we wanted to build the most family-friendly startup. We decided that we are not going to work long hours, our employees are not going to work long hours, and they’re not going to work on the weekends. We’re going to give employees flexibility and have them go on vacations. It’s a huge competitive advantage to be family-friendly.” — Sara [On including the option to post anonymously on Winnie] “Sometimes parenting questions are tough — tough, real stuff that you don’t want to put on your Facebook profile, where you can’t help but use your real name. You may not even feel comfortable talking to your mother’s group about some of the problems that you are having. So, we felt really motivated to make it work from the beginning.” — Anne “Having children has helped me a ton in putting the highs and lows of a startup in perspective. It’s just not that serious. It’s helped me build that resilience because the lows aren’t really that low. The stakes just don’t seem that high, and its actually enabled me to persevere through things where other people would have quit.” — Sara “We have other special features tailored to our audience, such as the ability to mask photos. We have these cute little stickers (that are adorable) and there’s a face-detection feature that will put little animals masks over the faces of any children that are in the photos that you’re posting. We make it super-easy and even fun to anonymize that photo.” — Anne Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode 1 Second Everyday — Turn your favorite moments into meaningful movies. Google Photos — Free storage and automatic organization for all your memories. Life360 — Your new family circle.