Debbie Sterling: Disrupting the Pink Aisle [Entire Talk]

Thank you.

Thanks everybody, I'm Debbie. It's so great to be here, and I'm gonna start my talk with a little logo we all know well. My story begins when I was in your shoes. I was a Stanford student, and for me, getting into Stanford was probably one of the biggest things that had ever happened to me. I grew up in a really small town in Rhode Island. I went to to a pretty average public school. And when I found out I got into Stanford, they announced it on the loudspeaker, and everyone in the cafeteria got up and cheered. Like, it was that big of a deal. And so, as I was preparing to go off to college, I remember one day my math teacher pulled me aside and asked me what I planned on majoring in. And at the time, I was a high school senior, I had no idea. And she said, well, I think that you should consider engineering. And I remember that moment she said that. I've told this story a million times, but it's so funny because in my head I pictured an old man driving a train. I had no idea what engineering was, but whatever picture I had in my head was the least appealing, interesting thing to me at all. And I kind of thought she was crazy, but sure enough, I got to Stanford, and my freshman year I had no idea what I wanted to study. And so I thought, why not try engineering? So I signed up for ME101. I walked into the room and almost just turned right out and walked out the other way because I looked around and I saw barely any girls. And I thought, you know, I'm not sure if this is really for me. But luckily, I stayed in the class, and I'm really glad that I did, because it was the first time that I learned what engineering was. And we weren't fixing train engines in that class. It was an amazing class because it was really an introduction to just the way the world works. We learned the simple machines, we learned how to build stuff, how to invent, how to be problem solvers. It was incredibly creative and inspiring to me to think that I could be an inventor and solve big problems in the world. That was something I was really passionate about, and so I decided I'm gonna study engineering. From that moment on was the first time in my life I ever got a C. It was the first time in my life I ever struggled and hoped that I would just pass a class. It was the first time in my life that I really actually challenged myself. And oftentimes in those classes, I was the only girl in group projects with all guys. And it often felt like they'd look at me and think, ah, we got stuck with the girl. And I started to feel that way about myself too. I often felt I wasn't good enough, I wasn't smart enough. I almost dropped out of the major a million times. I wasn't set up for success from my public school, not even knowing what engineering was, and looking around and seeing guys in my classes who had already learned how to program, calculators and already knew how to build a million things. But luckily, I stuck with it. I stayed in it. I studied hard, put in the midnight oil, and I ended up graduating. And that day that I graduated in 2005 was actually the year that Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech. So I was there. And it was the proudest day of my life because I had done something hard. I had really tried something hard and I had ended up achieving it. And so that feeling that you get when you actually really apply yourself and you climb that mountain and you get to the top, you feel invincible. That was how I felt, and that was kind of the gift that engineering gave to me, was proving that I could. That was an unbelievable feeling. And so years later, I had been searching ever since that day I graduated to find my passion. That thing that Steve Jobs said, go out and find your passion. I wanted to find that for myself, but I didn't know what it was. And so I spent about 7 years at different jobs. And finally, I found it. And it happened one day. I had got together with a group of friends, and we had started this tradition called Idea Brunch, where we'd get together and each person would get up in front of the group and share their latest harebrained idea for an app or a company or whatever. Just like one of those things that you kind of muse about when you're driving in the car. Of course over breakfast. And in that session one day, my friend Christy, who studied engineering with me here at Stanford, got up. She started complaining about how few women there were in our engineering classes. And she said, you know, as a little girl, I got interested in engineering because I grew up playing with my older brother's hand-me-down construction toys, like Legos and erector sets and Lincoln Logs. And that's what got me interested in engineering. And I kind of, in that moment, thought back to my childhood growing up with me and my little sister. We never played with any toys like that at all, because those were boys' toys. And I remember in my engineering classes, a lot of the assignments that we did, we built out of construction toys. And I realized that if I had grown up with this stuff, I might have thought of myself as an engineer far younger than, you know, by the time I was 18 years old. And so it sounds really corny, but the moment she had this idea at Idea Brunch, of engineering toys for girls was the moment where it was like the fireworks went off, the lightning bulb, like I just knew, oh my God, this is what I was born to do. I knew it instinctively in that moment. And so the very next day, I decided I'm gonna go to the toy store and get a lay of the land here. I'm sure times have changed since Christie and I were kids. I'm sure there's gotta be a lot of toys for girls that encourage engineering thinking. So I went to the toy store, and this is what I found. I couldn't believe it. The pink aisle. So this was like the most disgusting, like dolls that look like street corner girls. It was fairies, princesses, tea sets, ironing boards. I mean, it was all about domesticity. It's all about the way that you look. Meanwhile, in the blue aisle was all of the smart math and science games, heroes, action figures, and it just felt like, this isn't fair. So the thing about the blue aisle was that it had a lot of toys that helped develop spatial skills. Now this is something, as I started to do research into, you know, how would I advantage girls, how would I give them a leg up, give them something that might prepare them for engineering, spatial skills kept coming up as underdeveloped in girls. Well, interestingly, I also read that spatial skills are commonly found in kids who grow up playing with construction toys. Kids who play with construction toys have better spatial skills. Boys have better spatial skills because they played with construction toys. So I thought, okay, if I want to help develop girls' spatial skills, maybe if I could get them building with construction toys, then, you know, that might be a way. But other construction toys had tried this before. The genius approach was, let's make them pink, and then girls will play with them. Well, I noticed in the toy store that these pink construction toys were sitting in the corner of the aisle with dust all over them, and I thought, maybe there's a better way. And so as I started to research, I spent weeks and weeks observing, reading every book I could on child development, begging my friends to let me babysit their kids. And I observed something. I found that if I just gave a girl a bunch of construction toys, a lot of times, you know, she would play for a little bit and get disinterested. In one of my sessions, I actually asked a bunch of girls, "Well, what do you want to play with?" And a bunch of them said, "Well, we actually want to read a story. We love this new book that we got." And they ran upstairs and brought a book down. And I remember in that moment thinking, "Huh." We have all these construction toys on the floor, and then we're sitting here reading this book together. And I noticed that girls really love stories and narrative and characters. And so I had this kind of genius idea, which was, girls love stories. Why don't I incorporate storytelling with building? Because, you know, a lot of boys tend to take construction toys and build a big tower and then smash it against the wall. But girls really liked kind of building when there was more of a reason why, sort of a narrative and a context. So that was my big idea, was combining storytelling with building. So I, so this is kind of funny. My grandmother is actually a pioneer. She is one of the first female animators and created Mr. Magoo. And so I've always had this love of cartooning and art. And so my very first prototype of GoldieBlox wasn't a construction toy at all. I actually drew a sketch of a little girl who was not a princess, but not a nerd. She was gonna be a builder. And in these sketches, I had Goldie building these elaborate, cool machines. And so I started prototyping kind of what would Goldie build, what would be some of the machines that she would make. And in this first prototype, I created a belt drive where Goldie built a machine to help her dog chase his tail. So this is all stuff, like I'm going to the hardware store, I'm like rummaging through my drawers with thread spools and clay, and it was very these ramshackle prototypes, but it was enough to kind of get my idea out of, you know, a girl character and an associated building set where kids could kind of build along with Goldie. And once I'd had this prototype, I was just like, oh my God, this is genius, right? Like this, nobody has done this, this is genius. So I came up with this plan, right? This is my grand master plan where I've got this original prototype that I know is just this breakthrough idea, and one day I'm gonna disrupt the pink aisle in every toy store with this idea. So there wasn't a very straightforward path to that as I had thought, but in my talk today, what I wanna share with you all is sort of this sort of circuitous path that I took from having my kind of first prototype in hand to actually getting GoldieBlox onto the shelves of toy stores around the world. So I'm going to start with my first step and kind of my first sort of lesson learned along the way, which is at the very beginning having this first prototype, I had to learn the difference between being an inventor and being an entrepreneur. So I brought my first prototype to the New York Toy Fair to get advice from the bigwigs in the toy industry. And very early on, and in my mind I'm like, this is the best idea ever, everybody's gonna love this. This is what I heard. It was mainly old white men in suits who run the toy industry who said, you can't fight nature. They said, girls wanna play in the pink aisle. Girls don't wanna build. This idea is never gonna go mainstream. So at this point, I had quit my job and I was going off of my life savings, so this was not very good news to hear. I was pretty dejected, as you can imagine. And right after the Toy Fair, I had actually signed up to go to this social entrepreneurship conference. And to be honest, I wasn't in the mood to go at all. I kind of just wanted to go home and crawl up in a ball and hide. But I'd already signed up and I paid, so I go to the conference. And it was this conference for social entrepreneurs. There were about 100 people there. And the deal was everybody who was there had to get up and share their idea in front of the room. Well, I wasn't feeling so great about my idea at that moment because all of those old toy men had told me it was a stupid idea. But I got up anyway to share the idea. And unlike the reception at the toy fair, all of the young people at the social entrepreneurship conference, they were inspired. They all got up to their feet and cheered. They formed a line around the building, all wanting to be a part of it. And there was something that I learned that was really helpful at that conference, and it was this concept of being an inventor, being an entrepreneur. I learned that being an inventor means that you sort of hole up alone, kind of working on your idea, trying to come up with something. And that's what I'd been doing. For the last few months, I'd been kind of alone in my apartment, making those sketches and prototypes. And even though it was my passion, it was what I knew I wanted to do with my life, I was lonely. I wasn't having a lot of fun. And I was too afraid to talk to people about my idea, because I was afraid that some big toy company might steal it. And so I was just, I was lonely. The moment I went to this social entrepreneurship conference and I built up the courage to get up and share my idea without making somebody sign an NDA, which by the way, I'd even made my mom sign one, I was so paranoid. The moment I actually, I'm not even kidding, I have a copy of it. The moment I actually finally kind of put myself out there, like, everything changed. All of a sudden, I wasn't feeling lonely anymore. I had people coming to my apartment every day, evenings, weekends. We were working on the prototypes together. They were helping me. They were giving me advice. They were giving me ideas, just volunteering because they were passionate about it. They helped me kind of take that first sort of ugly prototype, and they helped me rapidly prototype it again and again and again. They helped me test it with kids. We tested it with over 100 kids, and each time we observed kids playing with it, we found ways to make it better and better. And so all of a sudden, I went from being this kind of lone hermit inventor to being an entrepreneur, because the entrepreneur is somebody who shares their vision and more importantly, brings people along. And the moment that those people lined up to be a part of it and I let them is the moment that I became an entrepreneur. And so with their help, I went from this lonely hermit prototype in my living room to a final toy that girls loved. Girls in tutus and tiaras were building belt drives and loving it. And so I knew I had it. But the problem was I knew that all of those old people in the toy industry were never going to believe me. They all thought that this was never going to sell. And so I put it up on Kickstarter. And before I knew it, I had sold about $1 million of GoldieBlox in pre-orders before manufacturing a single unit. And so the amazing thing was that this this mission that I believed in by being able to sort of share my vision in a video format was kind of the same way that I shared my vision at that conference where I just kind of talked to people about, hey, here's what I'm doing and here's why. And, you know, I was authentic and I invited people to help by taking this Kickstarter, backing it, and making it a reality. And the concept went viral. All of a sudden TechCrunch wrote it up, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, it was all over the news of, you know, can an engineering toy get girls interested? Can an engineering toy solve the gender gap? And my team of 3 full-time employees, this is our packing party where we started shipping out Kickstarter orders. And these are some of our very first backers. And so, Very quickly in my very first year, went from being an inventor to an entrepreneur. And was very proud to go back to that toy fair with my own booth one year later. And sure enough, who came over to the booth but Toys "R" Us. And they said, hey, you're making us look bad. We'd like to carry your product. And so before I knew it, 6 months later, GoldieBlox was on the shelves of Toys "R" Us nationwide. Which— thank you. So which led us to year 2 and the next kind of big lesson learned for me, which is how very limited resources can actually be a big strategic advantage. So getting into Toys "R" Us nationwide was this enormous accomplishment. I remember walking in the store for the first time and seeing the toy on the shelf, and I had tears, both of joy, tears of joy that I had accomplished the impossible, and also tears of dread because I just realized, oh my gosh, this toy is one tiny box in a sea of pink, and like, how are we gonna compete? How are we gonna compete? And what actually started to happen was we started to get our sales results in from Toys "R" Us, and the toys weren't really selling. And so we had disrupted the pink aisle, but we were going to get kicked out of there any moment unless the sales started to pick up. And so I asked Toys "R" Us, well, what do we do? How do we— what can we do? Give us some ideas. We'll do anything. We want to get the toys to start selling. And they said, well, usually our partners do national TV commercials. And that usually helps get the toys sell. So those cost about $2 million. That was really not in the cards, and so we had to get scrappy. We invited our Kickstarter backers to the Toys R Us parking lot, and we said, hey, we're gonna film a video together. And our idea was, if we want to tell the world that we're in Toys R Us, let's film a shot of a bunch of girls running through the pink aisle screaming. So we invite our Kickstarter backers, and to the parking lot. About 50 people showed up, kids and their parents. We're getting ready to kind of get this stealth shot, and then the security guards start circling. I'm like, oh my God, we're gonna like get arrested. So the manager of Toys R Us comes out with his clipboard, and they say, what's going on here? And so I told a little white lie, said we were the Lovelace Girls Club, on a field trip to the girls' favorite place in the world, Toys "R" Us. And he said, "Oh my gosh, why didn't you call me? I hope we have enough gift bags." He runs in, comes back out with Jeffrey the giraffe, handing gift bags out to the girls, announcing us, welcoming us in. We set up our video equipment, get the shot, posted the video on YouTube, and we got about a million views, and the story broke that GoldieBlox broke into Toys "R" Us. and it went viral. And all of a sudden sales started to pick up. And so we kept trying to figure out ways, like how do we, even though we're this teeny tiny team, we're only 5 people, like how do we get the word out? And we found out about a contest being run by Intuit where one small business had the chance to win a free Super Bowl commercial. So I'm like, okay, there's our national TV advertising. We gotta win this. And so again, it sounds crazy, like how could we win a Super Bowl commercial, We just put it on the wall and we said, this is our goal. And our team of 5 people every single day tried to get creative of how are we going to win this. And so we emailed our Kickstarter backers, we emailed our fans, just begged every day, vote for us, vote for us, vote for us. And sure enough, out of 30,000 small businesses who applied, GoldieBlox was the grand prize winner. And so we had a commercial in the Super Bowl, which I will play for you.

Come on, ditch your toys! Girls, make some noise! For that pink, pink, pink! We want to geek! Some pills gotta grow our minds, let me tell you, honey! Right now, our time! Right now, our time! Oh yeah, come on, bring the toys. Girls build like all the boys. Time to play with cars. GoldieBlox, toys for future innovators.

Congratulations, GoldieBlox. Intuit QuickBooks is proud to have put your small business on the big game.

So at that point, 100 million people had found out about GoldieBlox and our mission to disrupt the pink aisle. And so All of those old toy guys who said it was never gonna go mainstream in that 30 seconds were entirely proved wrong. And from there, just an amazing domino effect happened where we got the opportunity to have a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I got to meet President Obama and be inducted as the Presidential Ambassador for Entrepreneurship. Just doors started flying open left and right for GoldieBlox. Amazing and exciting time. But Houston, we had a problem. And that was the demand for our toys was growing so fast, so fast that our team didn't have time to quality check everything as well as we wanted. And so going into year 3, GoldieBlox is on top of the world. Meanwhile, we have a problem with our blocks. Which leads us to kind of the next lesson learned, which is how do you turn failure into an opportunity? So my biggest fear in starting GoldieBlox was what if the girl construction toy wasn't well engineered? What if we gave a construction toy out and little girls got frustrated and the opposite effect happened, where instead of getting them interested and excited in engineering, they got frustrated? It was literally my worst nightmare, and I was living it. So in 2014, Super Bowl commercial, Toys "R" Us nationwide were shipping tens of thousands of units from something that had less than a year before been a prototype in my living room. Anyone who has a hardware company knows that this is very common. You're going to have problems. But this was just a whole level of something I was completely unprepared for. We started getting complaints in that the blocks were not fitting right, a little bit too loose. And I was just so upset I could barely handle it. So we thought, okay, what, what would we do? What would an engineer do when you have this big hairy problem? Let's, let's break it down into simple and manageable steps, right? So what do we need to do? So first we need to fix the block hole. Okay. Can we do that? Great, we know how to fix it. Now we've been able to manufacture better blocks, the problem is solved. But now how do we go back and tell all of those people, like, hey everybody, we fixed the problem, and you should trust GoldieBlox again. Let's try building again. And so I made a pretty major executive decision. And we were a small startup at the time without a lot of resources. But I thought, there's no better way to deploy our resources than going back to all of those customers telling them that we fixed our blocks and giving them new ones. And so we did a huge campaign where we reached out to everybody to tell them about our new blocks. Filmed a video myself kind of being vulnerable and talking about the mistake that we'd made, but what we were doing to fix it. And we also actually wrote a letter from Goldie to each kid, which we had personalized with their name, talking about how engineers don't always get it right the first time, but that doesn't mean that you give up. It means that you keep going, you keep iterating, and you make it better. And we actually drew a picture of the engineering solution that got the block to fit better, and we sent it out to every kid. We actually went and replaced 1 million blocks, which was an enormous investment and worth every single penny. So we turned that failure into an opportunity, and every person that we touched fell in love with our brand even more. So then I get to my next lesson on my circuitous path, which is design for the customer, not the retailer. So GoldieBlox is flying high and every retailer wants to carry it. I mean, the brand is so hot. And sure enough, Walmart calls. And Walmart is begging for GoldieBlox. I mean, imagine. Being in the situation where Walmart is begging for your product. And so in order to sell at Walmart, we were told by a lot of the toy industry veterans that you have to have products at $9.99. You have to have low price point products. That's what sells at Walmart. And so our whole focus for the year was, okay, we're gonna go big. GoldieBlox is gonna hit the mainstream. And everybody drop everything. Let's figure out how to make toys that are $10. And so, and make a lot of them, because we have to have a lot of products to fill up a lot of room. So we had a really small team still, about 15 people. And we were just bending over backwards under insane timelines. And all we're thinking about is hitting that $9.99 price point. And hitting the shelf date on time. What ended up happening was we worked as hard and as fast as we could. From 6 products to 18 products in less than a year, getting out as many products as we could at the cheapest prices that we could. And as a result, those cheap products very quickly went on clearance. We had kind of forgotten the most important thing, which is if GoldieBlox was going to be successful, we have to design for the girls. Every product, it doesn't matter how much it costs, if it's not a product that excites and gets every girl interested in wanting to build more and more, we failed. And so by the end of the year, we had gone from sort of being on the top of the world to sort of hitting this real reality, major, major reality check, which leads me to my final lesson. Which is never ever give up. So kind of every startup is a roller coaster, you know? At one moment you're at the top of the world, and I feel like we at this moment had sort of gone right back down to the bottom again. And so we had to sort of have a soul-searching moment of like, where do we go from here? Like, what do we do now? And so we thought, okay, if we're, Let's forget about designing for the retailer. Let's forget about the toy aisle. Let's forget about disrupting the toy aisle. Let's think about making the best possible product that inspires these girls. Let's think about what have we done so far that girls really love, and let's lean into that. And so as we started to look at that and think about it more and more, we'd realized that in fact what girls were really loving about GoldieBlox They were loving building, and we were introducing it to them in a new way, which was good. But what we noticed they loved the most was they loved the idea of this character, Goldie. They were dressing up as her for Halloween. They were wanting to— they were admiring her. And every time we had kind of introduced Goldie and her friends to them, like these characters and these stories, like that was what was really engaging them, and that was what was really unique about us. Like, Tinker Toy doesn't do that, and K'Nex doesn't do that. You know, the construction toys didn't do that. That was something really special about us, was really the stories. And so we started leaning into that more and more and really kind of thinking more and more, spending our time not focusing on what can we make for $9.99, but focusing on how would we create this role model Goldie to really become a role model to girls, to really become kind of an inspiring maker. It's like, who is she? You know, like, who are her parents? Who are her friends? What town does she live in? What kinds of things does she build? We started writing much richer and deeper stories and really sort of figuring out, like, who is this girl? And can we really develop enough story about this character that she will be somebody that every girl follows falls in love with and wants to be. And so we started leaning into that more and more. And just yesterday, we actually announced chapter books with our partner Random House. And so now we'll start to get out these really rich stories about this girl who, believe it or not, is literally the first girl engineer protagonist in children's entertainment. Like, it took until 2012 for somebody to create a girl engineer in children's entertainment. And so now we have chapter books coming out about Goldie. We started figuring out, like, how do we get these stories out more? We started just experimenting on YouTube and making short videos just as quickly as we could with stories about Goldie. We took our little toy character And we created a web video series called Toy Hackers, where in each episode our little toys would have to solve engineering problems. And so they would get a prompt, and just using common household objects in each episode, these little toy figurines would build solutions to problems. And every week we put up a new episode where we just made them in our office, and the videos started to climb where we would get views and more views and more views, and our subscribers of kids watching the content started to go up. We started to think, well, how else can we get Goldie, this character, out in front of kids in a way that, you know, we can control it, we can own it, and we can do it scrappy? And we took all of our our toy parts, and we put them into curriculum kits where we could get it into the classroom and have kind of STEM educational curriculum for kindergarten through third grade. And, you know, it sounded really daunting, like how would we now create, like go into the entire education market? Well, all we did was call up our friend who was an elementary school teacher and asked her if she would help. And she literally did it in exchange for free toys. And she called up her other friends, and before we knew it, we had all of these teachers passionately wanting to create GoldieBlox curriculum for students and coming by the office every day and putting stuff together, going out into classrooms, testing it with kids. And showing how we could have this character Goldie kind of walk kids through STEM curriculum in a way that wasn't intimidating for the kids or the teachers. And so we started launching these classroom kits. We started putting out apps. And we started developing a Bible for an animated series. And so really kind of thinking about if, Disney Princess over the last 10 years has built an entire lifestyle around being a princess with cartoons and films and apps and books and room decor and costumes where every little girl gets to live out a princess fantasy. We started to kind of shift our strategy and think, well, how could GoldieBlox enable that, that maker culture, that maker lifestyle? How do we enable every little girl to be a maker? And how does GoldieBlox, the character, and her friends inspire girls to want to build and invent, not just do their hair and put on makeup? And so it's been a very circuitous path. Just to recap kind of the lessons learned over the years, so Number one, the concept of being an entrepreneur, I think, has been so important. Again, the notion of just hustling, bringing people on board. And I think one thing to point out about that that's important is when you have something like GoldieBlox that has a social mission that's bigger than you, where if you succeed, it's going to benefit other people, it's gonna help change the world, it kind of gives you the mojo to go out and make kind of audacious asks, and go ask people to get involved and be a part of it. Because it's not in some weird, gross, self-promoting kind of way. It's in a way where you know that you're doing something bigger than yourself. And I think that's what really enabled me to sort of act like that entrepreneur. When normally I often wasn't the kind of person who enjoyed networking or that kind of stuff. There was something about the social mission of it that enabled me to really start acting like an entrepreneur. The limited resources being a strategic advantage. So anyone who goes into entrepreneurship will face this. I mean, it's the whole point. If you're starting something out, you're going to have very, very limited resources. And to even think that GoldieBlox could one day become as big as Disney Princess, I mean, it's incredibly audacious. It sounds crazy. Yet, you know, to think that Debbie Sterling could graduate from Stanford with an engineering degree also seemed pretty preposterous. And yet, if you kind of put that goal out there and you work really hard and you learn that you can achieve things, you know, you start to realize like, hey, you can, you can get there if you break these things down into simple and manageable steps. And sometimes having those fewer resources means you're an underdog, you know, and people root for that. They want to be a part of it. And sometimes when you don't have that many resources, it forces you to think outside the box. Like, would a big toy company ever break into toys R Us and almost get arrested? No, but that's what makes us so awesome. The next lesson, which is turning failure into an opportunity. I think it's so important. I see it every day. I see girls being afraid to fail. I see girls, little girls, being so obsessed with perfection that they almost don't want to try something if they think they're going to be bad at it. That's something that I want to overcome with GoldieBlox. I want to let them know that engineering is all about failing, and failing is great because when you fail and you learn something from it and then you succeed later, you know, that's— there's nothing greater than that. And if you're not comfortable with failure, you're never going to be able to succeed as an entrepreneur. So, you know, rather than being so afraid to fail you don't even try, just, you know, leaning into failure and taking every failure as an opportunity to learn something new. Design for the customer. This may be the biggest lesson I've learned overall. I can't stress enough, as you go into entrepreneurship, you start building your business, you'll have investors, you'll have people kind of all pushing for different things, and at the end of the day, If you're not delivering something, if you're not focused 100% on your customer, and in our case honoring the little girl, then you've missed the mark. And so just always remembering that, who your customer is, and just staying true to that and defending it. And then the last one is never ever giving up. Entrepreneurship is so hard. For me, I think if I wasn't just so obsessed with achieving this mission, delivering this to girls, of giving every girl around the world kind of that nudge that my engineering teacher gave me, that to me, it's just what gets me up every morning. And so I've had so many failures along the way with GoldieBlox, so many moments where quietly, I wanted to give up. So many things that didn't work out the way I'd planned. And having to go back into the office every morning with a big smile. Having to go and put myself out there and pitch or be on the news when I know in the back of my head things actually aren't really working out. That's what every entrepreneur goes through. And the ones who are successful are the ones who refuse to give up. So, just closing my talk, so we're going to go into Q&A here, but it has been a wild ride toward disrupting the pink aisle. And I think what I've learned along the way is, you know, it was amazing that I achieved that in such a short amount of time, but it actually isn't, wasn't the big goal. That I really needed to do. And now I'm focused on an even bigger goal, which is really building this character brand to become sort of the face, if you will, of the maker generation. So for every little girl who grows up with her princess phase, I'm gonna give her her maker phase. I don't think that it's going to be a very straight path. I expect that that arrow will break in a million different directions, but I couldn't enjoy the ride more. So I think we have about 15-ish minutes for Q&A. Go ahead.

So I'm a guy, I'm an engineer, I have a 6-year-old daughter, and so I'm doing my best to try and encourage her in this way, creating these GoldieBlox. But I'm wondering what thinking you've given to those who maybe don't come from my background. Some of it comes naturally, then, with my daughter. But some of it also is unnatural. I didn't have sisters or things like that. So what about helping mothers and fathers who don't come from an engineering background the same as you're doing for teachers?

Yeah, so I think one of the reasons why GoldieBlox was kind of this breakout was because we, I think we realized early on that most people aren't advanced engineers, and there are very few women who are engineers, and so if this product line was only focused around people who really deeply understand engineering, we were gonna have a pretty niche market, and so really early on, And we continue to do this more and more, was how do we introduce these engineering concepts in such a way that is accessible to anybody? So you don't need to have an engineering degree. How do you make it fun? How do you make it so that kids are building and playing stuff and they don't even know that they're learning something? And so that was really our goal. And I would say that along the way, as we've been developing more and more products and kind of seeing how people have reacted with them. If anything, I've learned that really the more fun you make it and the less you try and kind of make it feel like you're in school, the better. And I think what we have found that helps is kind of from the product experience, it needs to be so fun kids don't even realize they're learning. But offering parents tools, parents who are interested in getting their kids interested in this stuff, we've been actually offering a lot in our social media. So sharing articles or tips on how to get your kids interested, like pointing out, hey, you can teach your kid this, you can teach your kid that. So we've really sort of separated it out. So the play experience, the toys have to be fun, it's a toy. But we have found ways of sort of engaging with parents sort of separately on those platforms. So it seems that you didn't have investment in the first 2 years. So what is the reason for that, and what is the biggest difference after you got the investment? Sure, the question was, it seemed like we didn't, what was the difference between both pre-investment and post-investment? So at the beginning, I was really building the company off of my life savings. So I had quit my job and I had saved up a certain amount of money in my bank account and was like, okay, I'm gonna, this money's gonna last me a year to really go for this. Because I had been kind of working on nights and weekends and in my spare time. And I had just gotten to the point where I'm like, I can't, I'm never gonna get somewhere if I just only do it in my spare time. I gotta go all in or it's never gonna happen. And so it was scary to do that because I'm like, well, what if I fail? But then I thought, okay, well, what's the worst-case scenario here is that I spend a year of my life savings, I run out of money, it didn't work out, and so I'll just go get a job. And I'll never regret kind of giving it a real go of something that I was passionate about. Even if it doesn't work out, I would never regret that. And so at the beginning, kind of going off of my life savings, one of the benefits of that was that with such few resources, I didn't have the money to spend on expensive prototypes. And as a result, I had to make quick and dirty prototypes, and they weren't as precious to me. And so I'd be willing to just toss, toss the idea because I hadn't spent $5,000 on it, convincing myself that it was a great idea even though observing kids hating it, you know. And so there was a huge advantage to just going off my life savings. Another thing was that because I didn't have a huge investment, I decided to do crowdfunding. If I had raised a bunch of money at the beginning, I probably wouldn't have done crowdfunding. I probably would have gone the traditional route of selling into brick-and-mortar stores. But by doing crowdfunding, it was actually a very great marketing tool because it put the idea out and it ended up going viral. And so these were just great things that happened out of me kind of going off at the beginning, the life savings. We raised our first major round of capital right after the Kickstarter had kind of gone through the roof. And there was a huge change after that. I think the biggest thing is once you start raising real money, It enables you to start actually hiring employees is probably one of the biggest changes. And so very quickly, it went from sort of feeling like volunteers, you're in an apartment, you're like, you know, to you're a company, you're set up, like you have weekly meetings, like you have annual reviews. Like it formalizes things pretty quickly. The other thing is once you take in money, then you have investors who have certain expectations. And a lot of times the investors want to see you make as much money as quickly as possible. And many times that's actually maybe not the best thing that you should be doing. And so one thing, one last thing, I'm kind of rambling here, but I think that I've learned that took me a real long time to learn that I know now is it's really good to, you know, it's important to find great investors, but it's also important to find really great strategic advisors as well who are really deeply knowledgeable about your space. And it's really important that when you have to formalize things, you know, whether it's quarterly board meetings or whatever, to make sure that the investors who have money in the company, but also the advisors who know the right things you should be doing are all in the same room. So that if the investor is saying, no, sell, sell, sell, more, more, more, more money, more money, more money, and you're on the phone like, okay, okay. Then on the phone with the other advisor, don't do that, like you should be focusing on this. Like, okay, okay. Bring them together, because as soon as you start taking money in, there's just a lot of pressures and outside expectations that you, need to answer to, and it's good to kind of get the right people in the room sort of discussing it as a group rather than like separately. What are your thoughts on measuring the impact of GoldieBlox on girls' sensory, motor, and cognitive skills? The question was, how do you measure the impact of GoldieBlox on girls' motor skills and their interest in engineering? So early on, I had to decide whether I was going to set up GoldieBlox as a for-profit or not-for-profit. And it was a kind of tricky thing. So I'm like, well, GoldieBlox could be a nonprofit because it's doing this great social mission. But at the same time, it's a consumer product, and it could be a for-profit company. And I wasn't sure which way to go. And actually, part of the reason why I chose the for-profit route was I felt like it would be a faster way to achieve our goals. The nonprofit route requires you to do a lot of measurement on things that I sort of felt like might be difficult to measure and might take a really long time to measure. And so, and I'd worked in the nonprofit world before and I'd seen those challenges. And so right now the way I measure my GoldieBlox success is a few things. So one, A lot of it's anecdotal. So every day we get photos and letters and videos of kids and their parents writing in telling us how GoldieBlox has changed their lives. Girls kind of calling themselves engineers. Parents saying, I can't believe that she even knows what that is. Those are kinds of anecdotal ways where we're like, wow, we're making a difference. The other way to just tell we're making a difference is how many kids are buying our toys and coming back and buying more. Because if they're buying them and playing with them, then we know that they're building and they're learning something. And then the other way is there have been universities and sort of third parties who have been interested in the effects that you're talking about. And so we have given them the green light to go and conduct research studies, which is really great because then we're not like conducting our own research study where then we can go publish some article about like the change that we made where we like stacked the deck and made it seem better than it was. Like, I actually am more interested interested in these unbiased third-party studies. One recently came out that was done by Penn State over a period of 3 years, and it's fascinating to see what they've learned, and it's going to be published publicly soon. How are you going to, um, sell, put the product in poor countries? Oh, that's a great question. How are we going to sell the product in poor countries? So growing internationally is a beast unto itself. I have learned the hard way that focusing on getting things right sort of first in the US and like under things that you can control, even when there's a lot of countries all around the world that are asking for it, It's better to kind of get things really optimized first in kind of the US, but then keeping in mind your long-term goal of wanting to make it available to little kids all around the world. Our plan for that is actually by creating an animated series for GoldieBlox and her friends and distributing that globally and finding a partner that gets that out all around the world. Will enable us for more kids to find out about GoldieBlox all around the world. And once we've done that, then that enables us to find partners who are going to create GoldieBlox products that are available to those kids around the world. And once we've done that, we'll be able to find partners like great foundations or nonprofits that want to help pay to make it available to kids who can't afford it. This is truly inspiring, and I literally moved to tears many times during your talk. It's just so important. And I'm curious about building on this last question. This Goldilocks has blonde hair and blue eyes and looks like certain types of kids. Are you planning on sort of making a more diverse set of characters that might be more relevant for kids who don't look like that? Yeah, we actually have, you can't, I don't know if you can really see, but Goldie's best friends, so Ruby, who's African American, Lee, who's Chinese, and Farah is Hispanic. So we actually already have a crew of diverse characters, which is incredibly important to me. Goldie's sort of our main hero protagonist, so she's like our Harry Potter, if you will, but she, her friends are ethnically diverse. Do you see any potential problems with having the minority characters as supporting roles as opposed to playing the protagonist role? You know, a lot of kids' properties right now are worried about that, and so what they end up creating for their franchises are sort of friend ensembles. So if you see, like, I don't know if you're familiar with DC Superhero Girls, They have like 8 girls and they all have like the same body type, but they all have like each ethnicity. LEGO Friends, same thing, like a group of 6 girls of every color. Monster High, like all of them do the same thing. They have the group. And I thought about that. And my approach is, You know, I really think, and what I'm excited about, is really creating kind of more of an iconic hero, if you will, like a girl who is an engineer. And there never really was one before. Most kind of main girl characters are princesses and beauty queens or pop stars. I wanted to create an iconic girl maker, and when I first drew the picture of her, I called her GoldieBlox, and I didn't really think anything of it. I just gave her blonde hair because her name was GoldieBlox, you know, and I kind of drew a girl that looked like me because I was almost sort of making like a little mini Debbie as a cartoon character. I feel I'm excited in the stories that we're telling about like this girl who's like a Pippi Longstocking, Punky Brewster, unique eccentric individual who's a maker. And by kind of building her up as an iconic girl, and she will have friends of other ethnicities, but I think that there's a really strong storytelling in building an icon. It seems like GoldieBlox is pretty gender-specific in its choices of color selection in advertisement. So what role do you think gender-specific toys in forming gender stereotypes in our community? The question was around gender-specific marketing or colors or like the GoldieBlox seems like it's very targeted to girls and what's my opinion on gender-specific marketing in general and toys. When I was first kind of choosing the color palette for GoldieBlox, I had a big choice to make, which was I can go pastel pink and purple, which is what's very popular for girls and is common to the pink aisle. I can go entirely gender neutral, which is like primary red, blue, and green, which in the construction category is so commonly boy that I think most people would just assume that that is for boys. And so instead of going— and I wanted to make sure that girls were going to play with it, so I didn't want it to be confused for something that was for boys because my goal was I want to really give girls an advantage that they had been missing out on because they hadn't been marketed to. And so I opted for like just an entirely different color palette which was just all kinds of bright and modern colors that include pink and purple and green and brown and all kinds of colors. And so that was the color palette that we went with. I think some people complain because they want it to be girlier, and some people complain because they want it to be more gender neutral. But I think my goal is that as long as most girls are excited about it and want to play with it, I think that's great. I'm somebody who personally really likes the color pink myself, so I don't have anything against it. And one thing that's kind of funny that I've learned is that boys, despite the fact that GoldieBlox has pink in it, couldn't care less and love playing with it anyway. And they think that this Goldie character is pretty cool. So my view on the future of gender marketing toward kids is that I think that those lines are really blurring and that kids are kind of no longer— like, it's really blurring, so, which is exciting. Well, this was truly exciting. Thank you so much for this incredibly inspiring talk. Thank you.