Sandy Jen talks about building confidence as an entrepreneur by trusting your instincts and learning from what you've already done. She shares her experience pitching to Sequoia Capital and how overcoming self-doubt shaped her approach to business.
A lot of us tend to overthink these things. We list all the. I'm sure all of you have, like, had a giant decision, and you list the pros and cons, and you make a, like, spreadsheet of, like, what's good and what's bad, and then you kind of calculate all the odds of what's the best decision that you can make. And I kind of think of it as the choose your own adventure book. You know, when you were a kid and you, like, stick your fingers between every single storyline that's possible, and then you find the one that you've already read that wasn't good, and then you picked the best one. I was knocked. And as a kid, that was what I wanted to do. And so that kind of person generally tends not to trust their gut because there's no data in gut. It's kind of a raw feeling. And so I decided to shut all that out and trust the gut and then really prove to myself that I could be an entrepreneur and I could be a really good entrepreneur. And so through getting to know my co founders, it wasn't like we formed a team. Like, the idea just shot into our brains and. And then we got funding and boom, we're like, we're a startup. No, no, nothing works like that. Took two years of sort of failing and exploring ideas and coding up prototypes and then getting disillusioned and then almost quitting and then succeeding a little bit, killing ideas, and then a lot of learning to sort of get things up and running. And all the while, I was still really uncomfortable and I was really scared because you're still. Just because you say I'm going to be an entrepreneur doesn't mean all those insecurities go away. And so even after I quit my job and I was like, I'm committed to this. And I was like, okay, I'm going to use my savings and eat junk food for the next two years. It was still really terrifying. I kept thinking, okay, what if someone asked me a question I don't know the answer to? Or, what if I'm not smart enough to do this? What if I'm not good enough? What if this? What if that? And sometimes that chatter just got really loud. And so one interesting story I want to tell is, it got really, really loud when we finally got lined up to pitch to Sequoia Capital. I'm sure a lot of you have heard Sequoia. It's a pretty good vc, I suppose. They funded Google and Yahoo and all those folks. And so we Each had our part in the presentation, and my part was to explain the technology. So I'm like, all right, I got this. So I studied for hours, like it was an exam. I was like, okay, what are the coding decisions that we made? What are the bugs that we fixed? What are the design decisions I made? Why did I architect this way? What are the giant coding obstacles that we had to overcome? And I was like, all right, I got this. I got this. And I was really, really nervous. We practiced and we practiced because you're basically in a room full of billionaires, like generally older white men. And I'm like 5:2. Like I said, I look like I'm 18 because I'm really young at the time. I have one good outfit, which I've recycled for all of my pitches. And you're sitting there thinking, okay, I'm going to ask these people for a lot of money. And then I was like, there's no way they're going to ask me a question about memory management. Why am I stressing about memory management? And that moment of realization was amazing to me because I kept thinking, I'm a fake, I'm an imposter. I'm not good enough. But I built the product. I did the work. So no one knew that product better than I did. So I wasn't an imposter. I couldn't be. Couldn't be standing here if I was an imposter. And so that sort of quieted the chatter a lot. And there are those sort of key times in my career and I think will happen to you guys, where you have all this self doubt and you have all this hesitation, and then something crystallizes where you like, why am I thinking that way? And those moments are extremely powerful. And so I tend to sort of stock those up. So when I do feel insecure or I do feel doubtful, I can kind of remember back to when I was able to overcome that.
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