Maureen Fan built her startup's advisory board through relentless networking: she cold-emailed Stanford's alumni database and got a response from Larry, befriended Glenn Entice's wife to meet him, and demonstrated a mobile VR headset to convince Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith to advise her. She secured Pixar and Disney animators as advisors by asking repeatedly, even after rejection.
Chapters
So the reason I put this slide up isn't to brag, even though they're sweet. The reason I put this up is to explain how I got in touch with these people and how the path helped Eric Darnell. I met through Glenn Entice. Glenn Entice is a co founder of PDI DreamWorks Animation. And this former CTO of DreamWorks Interactive and the CEO, wait, became Eala and he was the CEO of DreamWorks Interactive. He was a consultant advisor at Zynga. And as soon as I realized what he did in the past. You will be my mentor. He said, no, I'm retired. I don't time and my wife wants me at home. I don't tie for you. And I said, I'm going to become best friends with your wife. And he says, we'll see about that. So it all worked out. I'm friends with his wife and he's now my advisor. And so when I decided to start this company, I asked him, hey, can you introduce me to Eric? Because he hired Eric into DreamWorks for his first job. Eric was an animation intern and became a big badass director. So he introduced me to him. Now, Larry, remember when I said I emailed everyone in the Stanford alumni database to get a job? He was one of the people I emailed and he was one of the people who responded. He said, do not go to business school. Actually, everyone said, do not go to business school. And I totally ignored everything they said, which he says was a good decision. Now you can always justify your past. So Larry, I kept in touch with and I ran into him during a Chinese New Year's parade and in San Francisco, where he was taking pictures of his daughter fan dancing. I was like, hey. He's like, what are you doing? I said, I'm starting a company. He's like, oh, maybe I should join you. And that's how it all happens. Within one month, I found my two co founders. And then Glenn Entice introduced me to Alvy Ray Smith, the co founder of Pixar. I emailed him to be my advisor. He's like, listen, Maureen, I hate games. I don't believe in VR. Sorry, it's not going to happen. I said, listen, let me just meet you. So I met him at the Crepe Vine. I put the headset on him, which is a mobile headset. He's like, I'm going to be your advisor. So it's about persistence and constantly asking. And then he introduced me to Glen Keane, who is my favorite out of all these. I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but he's my favorite out of these because he was the directing animator of Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, all those things there. Tarzan, Tangled, Aladdin. He's the most famous animator alive. So he joined our advisory board as well. Eric knew Mirei Soya, the president. She's now the president of Paramount. She was the president of DreamWorks Animation. And then through all this stuff, I applied to Tribeca Film Festival to show our piece and then became friends with Jane Rosenthal, who headed up Tribeca Film Festival and is Robert De Niro's producing partner. But the point of all this is it's all through networking, and it's all through being persistent and asking each person to help you introduce you to another person. And even if they say no, you persist until they say yes, because people in general do want to help you.
