David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It was supposed to be a longer meeting, then there was traffic because it was raining or something, and by the time he got down there, there was only 10 minutes for the meeting. Of course, it’s interesting enough that you just skip your flight. But yeah, I think we should put a stake in the ground right here and say, “Just let’s notice a trend of amazing women doing things like naming a company, pounding the table to make the investment.” I think Sarah should get a huge amount of credit for this for spotting it super early. Exactly. It’s Divya who comes up with the name, it’s Victoria Smith in the Alt Summit—an all women-focused bloggers and designers—that lands the product market fit for the company, it was Shana at IAC who was the lead angel investor to recognize the potential of the company and want to invest, and then it was Sarah who found them and pounded the table to do the Series A. At the same time—this is super fun—SV Angel, Ron Conway’s firm, had passed on the company during the angel round. A great friend of ours, Leslie Kincaid was working as SV Angel at the time here in Silicon Valley and Kevin Carter who was also there at SV Angel, was like, “Man, I think we might have missed this,” during the angel round that it happened with Scott, Kevin, and Shana the past summer, “and maybe we should not really do Series A but we might want to really try another look here. ” So, Leslie and Kevin lobbied within the firm that, “Okay, we’ve made a mistake. We should try and push our way into this round, too.” Kevin specifically was like, “Leslie, what do you think? This is a female-focused site or at least that seems to be the user base.” So, Leslie pulls together a focus group of three women at the firm and basically went back to him and said, “Yeah, I know we passed but there’s no way we can miss this.”…

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