Stanford Seminar - Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders: Peter Fenton and Jess Lee on becoming a CEO

This presentation is delivered by the Stanford.

Center for Professional Development.

I'm going to have the opportunity to introduce Peter, then he's going to introduce Jess. My name is Tom Byers and I'm one of the instructors for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series. And this is my first Wednesday afternoon with you, and I enjoy doing this with my colleague Tina Selig and Tom Kosnik and the whole crew. Welcome to the Draper Fisher Jervison Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series, brought to you by the Stanford Technology Ventures program and basis, the business association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. This talk is archived in the future by SCPD as well as online at simply Ecorner Stanford. Edu. Ecorner Stanford. Edu. The entire series is generously underwritten by the venture capital firm dfj. So I get to introduce Peter Fenton, who's the one on the left. Peter was a student here in the 1990s as an undergraduate as a philosophy major, which really makes me happy to report, a humanities major. He goes on to get an MBA here at Stanford and then enters the venture capital industry. First seven years of being in that industry was at a firm called Accel Partners, where you may have heard of from Facebook and folks like that. But then about seven years, six. Seven years ago, he became a partner at Benchmark Capital and has been involved in a tremendous number of hits and successes there, including Yelp and OpenTable and others. And something I know you've heard about Twitter. So without further ado, let me introduce you to Peter. Peter.

So Tom threw me a curve ball and said a couple weeks ago, hey, we've got a change of plans. Can you fill in for the gentleman from Opower who couldn't make it today? And I thought the last thing you guys would want to hear from is another venture capitalist. And so I tried to put myself into your shoes and say, who would I want to have come talk? And about a millisecond later, Jess Lee popped into my mind. Jess had just won the fortune one of the 40 under 40. I can't remember what number she was, but something in the 30s, maybe the 20s. And there are really two reasons. The first is that Jess, like myself, sat in your seat. In her case, it was eight years ago in 2004, took this class. She took this class. I crashed this class a couple times. But Jess is what we affectionately call in our industry a rising star. And we spend a lot of time idolizing the people who have arrived, and I think not enough time studying people in their ascendancy to greatness. There's so many things you can learn from a first time CEO and how they go about it. What's cool about Jess is that it's immediately accessible. So she faced the same questions, the same challenges, angsts and anxieties that you may face right now in your career. Going into it, I thought what a perfect opportunity to talk to one of the rising stars. Someone will be writing books about, I think maybe in two or three decades and they'll attribute back to this some of the ideas back to what you might hear today. But first, let me spend a second on a company Jess is part of, Polyvore Benchmark invested in Polyvore in 2008, about the same time Jess joined the company. And it's a very simple thesis which is Polyvore is doing to the fashion magazine industry what Wikipedia has done to the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is truly the creative destruction of an existing industry with a modern empowered consumer model, which I think is going to change every category of media that we know. It's happened at Wikipedia, at Yelp, at TripAdvisor, at IMDb and Polyvore is doing it in the fashion market. So what does that mean? Well, there's a value chain in any industry and in the media industry, the value chain was content, editorial, distribution, advertising. And along came the Internet. And we gave people a voice. Instead of content being this creative types that wear turtlenecks that you have to pay a lot of money to, it was the community in empowering the community and giving them a voice. Instead of a value chain, it created a set of concentric circles where at the center of it there was a human being creating beautiful content. That community curated the content and they curate that at Polyvore, at Yelp, at Wikipedia. And that draws in the readership. So instead of having to print magazines and push them out on shelves, people naturally come to your site either through Google or they download your application and. And then monetization. The really powerful thing is that the advertising is actually endemic to the experience. So the ad is the content. So Polywar is an example of one of the companies that I think we'll look back on and you look at Vogue, InStyle, Lucky, Cosmopolitan, all collapsed into one company. So the numbers are compelling. The company has double digit millions of revenue, it's got triple digit growth, it's cash flow positive. And so it's one of these rising success stories. Probably doesn't get as much press as Pinterest. The companies are different. But the structural advantages of the business lead us to think about a Multi billion dollar company. And the story of Jess becoming the CEO we'll spend a little bit of time on. But it's one of those magical stories in my career where there was an act of selflessness from Pasha, the then CEO and now CTO of the company, co founder of Jess really selflessness combined with a deep ambition about the company's long term opportunity. And, and Pasha called me about this time last year in 2010 and said, or 2011 and said, hey, I've got kind of an idea you may or may not like. Kind of a crazy idea. What if we made Jess the CEO and as a director you're like, oh, what's going on? You're disoriented, you're trying to figure out, okay, how do I help Pasha? What's. He had a bad day and I thought about it and it was like thinking about Jesper today. It was immediately obvious and within moments the board unanimously, once they found out, had the same reaction I did. Within moments it was clear that Jess was the natural CEO of the company. A lot of what we do in the venture business is identifying the potentials of the CEO because we typically back first time CEOs, people who haven't done it before. And I would assert there's three traits that really define in my experience, the successful first time CEO and they're visible in Jess and hopefully we'll hear a about some of them today. The first, which we'd seen in our experience working with her, is that Jess is a learn it all and not a know it all. And it's challenging when you get into a CEO role, it's a job no one's. If it's a first time CEO, you've never done it before. And if you're a know it all, you can immediately think. You have to have the answer for everything and you can't ask for input and advice. You quickly get in the water way over your head and you're likely to drown. And, and, and Jess had proven to us that she knew how to raise her hand and ask questions, but she was a sponge for information. I saw the same thing, by the way, at Excel when we spent time with Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning. Voracious appetite to learn. The second trait, which I think is quite rare in human beings, is a clear aptitude at building the system that builds the system. And oftentimes if you're a VP in a company, you focus on your narrow area and you just say, okay, I'm going to do my job, I'm A player on the field, I'm going to crush it. Very rarely do you get someone who says, how does my job relate to all the other jobs in the company and what's the operating system of the business? And Jess had shown to us that she had a way to think about that at a more broad level. Because as a CEO, you no longer are evaluated. Are you a good VP of X, Y or Z? You're evaluated on the underlying system that you've built. Jack Dorsey likes to say his focus is on building the product that is the company, not the product that is the thing that gets shipped every day. Of course, that's a byproduct of it. And Jessica demonstrated an aptitude through her ability to identify parts of the company that weren't working well. Identifying friction points, trying to remove those friction points. And so a clear trait of a successful first time CEO. The third thing, which to me is the romantic thing, the visionary thing, the thing I'm most drawn to is clarity of purpose. And Jess said to me, we were having some conversations of does she want to do this or not? And when she talked about Polyvore, she started with the people in the community whose lives were changed by it. And it was never about Jeffs. It was about, this is a service that is taking people in Des Moines, taking people in Rio de Janeiro, turning them into the vanguard in the fashion industry. They could never do this without Polyboard. And the purpose and mission of the company of empowering people to transform the way they discover fashion, the way they buy fashion, boy, that was magnetic. And you've heard about this from other people who've come here. It's like you have to tell a story at a company. You need an epic story that draws people in. It's the way Jack talks about it. The CEO is the editor in chief. And if they don't have a clarity of purpose and ability to motivate and inspire what's possible, what happens if we get it right? And Jess had done that? There's a great. If you guys ever get a chance, Google her for a New Yorker article. Jess had. There was a Polyfour article in New Yorker, because we invest in the company, we say, hey, one day someone's going to write a story about this company that talks about some people whose lives you've transformed. Because today, to get ahead at Vogue, you got to go play politics on Madison Avenue. Backstab, maybe, but let's just say climb your way to the top. And where someone sitting in a room in the Midwest that has A fantastic fashion sensibility is just shut out of the dialogue. Your company's changed that and people are going to want to write about that. Jess in that story. She wasn't the CEO at the time. The story was really about Jess, even though it was about Polyvore. So those three traits, I think you can go to all the different skills of a CEO. Some are execution oriented, some are great relationship people, some are great visionaries. Jess was the full package from our standpoint as the first time CEO. The brief background. Then we'll jump into some questions. She was born in Hong Kong, came to Stanford in 2000 and went to Larkin was her name. Went from Larkin, had their freshman dorm again, took this class, graduated from computer science in 2004, then faced the big choice of what next, went to Google, was a sensational product manager. And I'd first heard about Jess from Brett Taylor, who was recently the CTO at Facebook. And Brett said when he started his company, FriendFeed, there's one person we have to hire out of Google and it's Jess Lee. So that's great. But she just contacted another investment we made and asked for a job. So Brett, which was Polyhor. So it was one of these serendipitous moments. But Brett maybe still hasn't forgiven me. And as I say, she's been identified by a number of people in our world as at 30 years old, one of the truly great rising star CEOs. And so it'll be a really fun set of questions today as you guys think about your own careers and the questions that Jess faced and how she answered them. I think there's a high relevance. So with that, welcome, Jesse. And so let me ask you start with the question of when you were in this seat in 2004, did you imagine you would be up here at some point?

No. So my background. So like Peter mentioned, I grew up in Hong Kong and I actually in my senior of high school, I told my parents like, hey, I want to go to art school. I'm going to draw comic books for a living. And my parents said, no, no way, they're Asian. So that was not an acceptable life choice. So I ended up coming to Stan and I ended up majoring in computer science because I discovered I really liked to build things that people could use. My favorite class here was CS248, the graphics video game class. And then I ended up at Google. I sort of became a product manager. I was doing basically using my engineering degree as a product manager. But then one day someone showed Me, Polyvore. And it was just sort of like love at first sight. So I didn't come up with the original idea for Polyvore. All the credit goes to my three co founders, Pasha, Guangwei and Jianing. Pasha in particular came up with the idea. He started to build it, they launched something and then someone showed me the site and I was just completely in love. I was playing with it two or three hours at night, just hopelessly, hopelessly addicted. And then I sent an email to Pash, I didn't know him at the time, and I just said, hey, this site is incredible. I have a lot of ideas, some suggestions. I wasn't actually asking for a job, but it's just sort of a user writing in, complete complaining about stuff. So I wrote my list of complaints.

He thought you were. That was the day of begging for a job.

And then he wrote back and said, hey, why don't we get coffee? And so we met for coffee and then we all clicked. And then I sort of ended up leaving Google. And I never imagined that I would be here. Yeah, never. I mean, I went into it thinking, okay, I've always wanted to be. I've always wanted to do a startup. My mom happens to be an entrepreneur. She runs a small interpretation translation business in Hong Kong. So very small business. But I always knew I wanted to do my own thing. And I thought, hey, Polyvore is just a way for me to learn about startups. I mean, I learned a lot at Google, but the rate of learning sort of went down as I got more and more used to what I was doing there and the company got bigger. So I thought, okay, this would be a way that I will learn everything I need to buy a startup and then I'll go do my own thing. And then it became my own thing. So, I mean, I wasn't there from the very beginning of Polyvore, but the other three founders, they sort of made me an honorary co founder after a couple of years because we just, I mean, we did everything together from the very beginning when we were working out of Pasha's living room and finally we had to find an office. Finding an office space, the toilet breaks and everything, water's overflowing. Every little thing you have to deal with. In the early days of a startup, we just had to do that together.

So going back to the decision to go to Google, I suppose a lot of people wonder, do you go to a startup or do you go to established. I know for Google is not yet public or about to go public.

It wasn't public at the time.

Okay, so it was slightly before. Slightly before, but probably you knew it was going to be a good company. Tell us about that decision and whether or not in hindsight you think it was the right move. And I guess along those lines, mentors you found at Google and how they impacted your career.

Sure. So I actually, what I finished when I graduated or right before I graduated here with a degree in computer science, I thought, hey, I'm going to be an engineer. That's what computer science majors do. And I didn't even know what a product manager was at that time. So I got an offer from Intuit and I was going to go be an engineer there. And then I got a call from a Google recruiter saying, hey, we have this thing called the Associate Product Manager program, which I highly recommend if anyone's thinking about that path.

And it was a Polyvore associate product.

But it was a program to train product managers straight out of school. And, and it was created by Marissa Mayer, who's now the CEO of Yahoo. And So I thought, OK, I'll give it a shot. I don't know what PMs are. So I went to the interview not really knowing what to expect. And I remember I actually was so green at the time that when I spoke to Marisa, I was like, hey, I don't know if I really want this job. This is very. I never imagined that I would do this. And she explained to me that all the best decisions she had ever made in life, when she had to choose between two things, she always chose the path that was more challenging. And so I thought about that and I decided, hey, you know what? I've always planned to be an engineer, but this PM thing sounds really hard. I have to lead teams of engineers who are much older than me who know their stuff, and I don't. I'm fresh out of school. So I decided to just try it based on her advice. And she did become a mentor and sort of, we've kept in touch all these years and she was a big, big influence on my entire career path through Google. I look back on that and I think, well, I could have started maybe at a startup out of school, but the great thing that being at Google provided was, well, there's a few things. One, I got to meet a lot of really, really smart people, some of whom have gone on to do amazing things in Silicon Valley and some of whom I've gotten to join Polyvore because we work together. So you sort of build your network at a larger company. The other thing is just the experience of being at a larger company and seeing all the benefits which are having infrastructure, there's a IT guy to help you when everything is your computer, everything is broken, the network's down. The great perks of the culture, the food, all that stuff. I got to experience that. And Google does have a really, really great culture. It's very engineering driven. But then I also got to experience the downsides of a big company like red tape, bureaucracy, having to work the system to get launches approved. So I got to see both sides. And then I was able to take that experience and apply it at Polywar when we were creating our own culture and our own sort of infrastructure. It made me really able to appreciate how nice it is to be on a really small team where you just get stuff done really quickly. There's no communication overhead, you know everybody, you know, everyone's significant others. Like all the great things about startups that are small, I was able to appreciate that so much more because I'd.

Been at a larger company and part of my. One of Benchmark's founding partners, Andy Ratcliffe, has a great post on this, which is that people going to a, a successful company like a Google, call it midlife, about to go public or just went public, tend to get more credit than they deserve for the success of the company. And those that go to a startup company where it fails, they tend to get more blame than they deserve. So put another way, I think the move, if you think of it in developing a career of going to a success story, there are actually far fewer ways to succeed in my experience than there are to fail. And I'm not clear what you learn from failure. There are certain personal lessons you get out of it, but success is its own unique breed of an education. And going to a successful company and today you could say it'd be a Dropbox or Twitter or one could argue is Facebook past that point? I don't know, but I think it's a pretty good proxy for getting experience of hyperscale successful culture. And you internalize that in theory. The flip side is staying there too long and oftentimes you stay somewhere too long. You can start to get the groundwater gets into your being where you start to assume everything is sort of like Google. And so I want to talk a little bit about that transition because it's a pretty abrupt shift to go from the high flying Google to the backed up toilet poly. Just the decision itself. Did you fret over it? And I know you didn't come over overnight because you seemed to wait about six months. So how did you think about that transition and maybe what did it feel like for the first phase, being in a raw startup?

Yeah. So the two things that I was thinking about were I want to go to some work on something that I'm passionate about. And I was already so addicted to polyvar, I was using it, like, literally two or three hours a night. I was a member of the community, making lots of sets or sets, collages. So that was one thing that checked that box. The other thing was I wanted to go. Besides, like, always picking the more challenging path. The other thing that I find useful is to think about maximizing your learning. And I knew that I learned a lot. I learned so much in my first year at Google. Like, I had never led any teams. Like, I had poor communications because, like, all sorts of things I learned in my first year at Google. But then the rate of learning sort of tapered off and so I decided, okay, I need to go somewhere where I'm going to learn so much all at once. And polyvoor, by virtue of being so small and only having engineers, I knew there was going to be a ton of things to learn. We needed to do a lot of things. We needed to find an office space, we needed to create a revenue model. And I just knew that there would be space and freedom and opportunity for me to do some of those things there. So that's why I ended up choosing Polyver. It wasn't an easy decision. I remember when I went to sign the offer on that day, I was like, what am I doing? Have I made a decision? And then I signed it and I walked out and I was like, oh, no, what did I just do? That wasn't crystal clear clear, but it was like, one of the best decisions I've ever made for sure.

Did you ever, in that first phase of acclimating, think you made a big mistake?

No, I actually have never thought that about polyvore. There's always been enough positive momentum and it hasn't all been. You know, you read about a lot of companies in TechCrunch and you think, wow, it's all up into the right and it's so easy. It's not easy. Like, even when things are going well, there's, like, still lots of moments of unhappiness. I actually just wrote a blog post about this. Why startup founders are always so unhappy, if you want to check it out. But yeah, I mean, it was definitely hard and in the beginning, but in the beginning, it was hard and we had no traction and we were small. But at the same time, it was so fun to just continually learn things. I was so excited to learn about Mountain View real estate prices versus Palo Alto. And, you know, that just made it sort of. That sustained. It sustained me. And then I realized after some time, maybe I should have hired a professional to do some of these things and focused on the things that mattered more. But, you know, I've immensely enjoyed all of Polyvore.

Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit about the transition to CEO and one of the Just to call out, and Jess has mentioned that she's an honorary founder. Jess is the founder of Polyvore. There's no question. I think one of the things that we. Jack Dorsey's spoken of this. We tend to use the term as though it has some sort of magical power. Like, well, if you're a founder, then everything's different. But we're all human beings and we all are founders in our own way of things, initiatives, things to take on. And I think it gets overly sensationalized. And Jess was, from the beginning, the soul of the product. I think it was very clear to us as we talk about her becoming a co founder. Well, of course she's a co founder. The company actually aggressively pushed equity onto Jess to reflect that which I thought was very, this is, after the fact, really illustrative of the culture the company has. But the transition to CEO is a big one and the statistics are most people don't make it successfully. I don't want to jinx it, so knock on wood. But you've really, in a way that I haven't seen in my venture career take into the role. Could you tell us about how it's different and a little bit about did you want the role and now that you're in it, how does it change your world?

Well, so one of my co founders and I, Pasha, we have always done a lot of the leadership together and we sort of found our natural niches for what we were good at. Peter gives me too much credit, I think. I am one of the users of the site. I like to shop, I like fashion. So I think about the product that way. But what Pasha's brilliant at is designing architecting systems and thinking about like the feedback loops and just sort of the way the product works from a systems design perspective. So I think the combination of those two things is really the soul of what made Polyvore's product take off in terms of the transition, the way we'd always split responsibilities was, you know, he was responsible for engineering. I was our product manager. But he's also a brilliant product guy. But we, as we started to add more people to the team, like we added a sales team, we added finance and people, operations, recruiting. It just naturally fell to me that those people just ended up reporting into me and engineering was reporting into him. And so as we grew and the other parts of the company grew, just became more of a natural transition. And it's exactly what Peter was referring to. It's about the company becomes the product. Not just the product, the website or the app. And we realized, both of us, Pasha and I, that the role of the CEO was shifting from being less about just building the product, but building the team that builds the product. And so that naturally became more my purview. I was always the one always recruiting for us. So it felt like a pretty natural transition. And we discussed it and we decided, all right, let's do it. But I never went into Polyvore ever expecting this to happen.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing, which Jess makes the comment, she's like, well, I wasn't looking for this. And if I could be simple about it, there are kind of two types of people that come to the role of CEO. Those that want to be CEO and those that, if you will, earn the title. And I think founders inherently, when they're founder CEOs, earn the title because they took the initiative. But it's a red flag for us as venture capitalists when someone shows up at our office and says, I'm really ready to be a CEO, so I'm looking for CEO opportunities. I'm like, well, that's great, because you're going to adverse select into the broken companies that are looking for a CEO. And there was something very natural about Jess's evolution to the role because it sort of was happening as a course of how she was scaling inside of the company. And the ambition to be a CEO can be a dangerous thing. But I actually curious, as you think about, now that you're in that role, how's it different than maybe your role was before? And what's been unexpected about it?

Well, you know, I think the role of the CEO definitely changes as the company gets larger. Right. And I went into this assuming like, okay, there's a set of things we need to do in the next, I don't know, at least a year, maybe two years, three years that I think I can do. I think I know how to do these things, or I can learn some of them. But I also went into it thinking, like, there may be a point at which I might not be the right CEO anymore. Like, maybe taking the company public requires a different sort of person. So I definitely went in with it that way. So I agree, like, you don't want to just be like, I don't have to be the CEO. It's about what does the company need and what are you actually good at. And this was sort of the right period for me. Things that have been unexpected. I thought I would be able to spend a lot more time working on the product in addition to doing a lot of the other duties that's turned out to be not the case. I spend so much of my time recruiting and meeting and thinking about architecting the right team to get what we done, we need done. So that's been a little bit surprising. As a control freak, it's been difficult sometimes to let go of some of the product responsibilities. I was the VP of Product before that. But we have an awesome pm Rachel, who it took us a while to figure out how to delegate, how to let things go, but I think we've gotten that down. So that's been surprising. Oh, the amount of external stuff that I have to do, it's also been a little surprising. I'm more of an introvert by nature, so having to do that is not the most natural thing, but it comes up a lot. So it's something you just sort of have to push and do.

How about your priorities? And so part of this is a bit of a day in the life. How do you think about your week, any period of time? And as a CEO, how do you think about setting those priorities?

Well, we have a strategic set of priorities for the company and there are parts of the things that are going very, very well that don't need attention. The important thing is I think you want to design the company to operate as a series of blocks that work well and spin on their own and have APIs to the other groups, kind of. So I look for the parts that are not that need attention or need help and try to spend my time there helping. And that might mean adding a new person or changing a new process, or it might be the interface between two teams is not correct if to rewrite the API. But a lot of the time now I'm spending on recruiting and just building parts of the team that aren't there yet. Like we've Polyvore has product and engineering, we've got a sales team, but we're actually missing a few functions like, we don't have a marketing team, we don't have pr. And that is, you know, we've always done our marketing and growth through our community, which is a very powerful tool or powerful force. Like, they go and tell their friends about this site and that's how we've grown. But now thinking about that being a function, like, how do we build that? Searching for. We found a cfo. Like, a lot of the time just goes there. But I try to figure out where I'm needed and then always make sure to pay some attention to product, because that's probably the thing I'm strongest at.

Yeah. And I think it's that building the system, there's editing the team. People have used that as. Sometimes you make the right hires, sometimes you make the wrong hires.

And.

And it's a really different role. Let me come back to. If you were to introspect in the development of your career and some mistakes that you've made, that would be instructive, maybe for the group to learn from anything that stands out.

Oh, so many. One of the biggest mistakes I probably made early on was not talking to other entrepreneurs at all. I was heads down, working really hard. Every problem that we had, we sort of dealt with internally. And I think that can be a big mistake because the only external data points you have about other companies are things you read about on TechCrunch, where everything seems to be doing great. It's all the positive stories, all the spin, all the overnight success stories. At that time, Quora wasn't around, so I didn't have that as a resource. I remember I looked at Marc Andreessen's blog. That was probably one of the best resources. But I was very insular. And so I didn't realize I didn't have enough perspective to know, like, oh, the company's actually doing fine. In fact, we're doing better than many of the other startups out there. Or this problem that I have that feels like the end of the world is actually something that many other companies have gone through and survived, or it's actually super common. Like, everybody has that problem. Like, I didn't even realize that every time someone left the company, I thought, oh, my God, this is terrible. This must mean we're screwing something up. And now I realize that's a natural part of how companies evolve. So that was a big mistake. When I started to talk to other entrepreneurs, it was great for my mental health as well as for getting data points, solutions, ideas on how to fix things. So that was a big Big mistake I think I made in the beginning. Other things. A common mistake I think most entrepreneurs make is being too slow to have someone leave. Like, you just want to, you know, you've invested in bringing someone on. They've left their awesome job at Google or Yahoo or somewhere else to join you. And it's not working for some reason. It might be role fit, it might be culture fit, but you just keep trying to make it work because you made a commitment to them and they made a commitment to you. And sometimes it's just not a fit and you just need to move on. And it's better for them in the long run and it's better for you. And that was a hard lesson, too.

Shifting gears again. And we'll get to audience questions. Part of the CEO's job is to paint the vision of the future of the company. And I'd love to hear, and I think the audience would benefit from hearing, what's the future for Polyvore look like? And what do you visualize as success for the company?

Yeah. So Peter talked about the fashion magazine side of Polyvore. There's another sort of trend that we track nicely against, which I think is the evolution of E commerce. So if you think about how e commerce came about on the web, it was driven by categories like electronics. So buying a digital camera and the way you think about buying a digital camera is, well, it's very research driven. You care about hard numbers and attributes like number of megapixels or price. And because of that, the E commerce experience, the standard e commerce experience is a search box and then a set of filters like digital camera refined by 10 to 16 megapixels under $500. And then you start to look at the reviews and that's whether you're looking at a clothing site or anything on Amazon.com, that's sort of the standard UI, but there's actually a whole category of goods that you just don't buy that way. Like, I have this, I bought this shirt. It's like a specific color. It's actually got a huge hole in the back, which is kind of impractical. But I just like it. That's my taste. I like this shirt and I like the particular brand that it came from. So I'm buying this shirt based on my personal taste, which is incredibly arbitrary and based on trends that evolve over time. Like, I'm sure this shirt will be extremely uncool in 10 years or two years.

I don't know, it'll be cool again in 10 years.

That's right. Yeah. But, you know, taste is always evolving. So I think there's a category of products that you buy based on taste. And at Polyvore, we're trying to understand people's taste. So when people mix and match products they like, that's them giving us data saying, hey, this product is cool. These two products go together. We can extract from that a trend, the hole in the back of your shirt trend or whatever, and we can track that over time. So our community is giving us tons and tons of data about taste. And from there we can do all kinds of things like build a better shopping experience that's more discovery and browse based, have friends recommend to friends what they're buying. And so that's sort of what I see as the evolution of Polygon. It doesn't just apply to fashion. It's also the way you buy a sofa or wall decor, wedding items. But I think there's actually a lot of categories of products that fall into this. So that's sort of where I see the product vision going.

I've been really moved by the community you've built and some of the stories that come out of that. I'd love to hear your description of the community and call them users, but they're not really users. They're the creators on the site and some of the personal stories that come out of that.

Yeah. So I think what people don't necessarily realize is when you look at Polyvorn, why people are making all these collages, these, that some people think, oh, they're shopping for themselves. They're creating a personalized wish list of things that they want. That's not what they're doing. It's actually a form of self expression. I think, especially for women, what you're wearing is sort of an extension of who you are. It's a form of self expression. So a lot of these people are on the site for creative reasons, for self expression reasons, and they're making friends and building a community. So we've heard all kinds of interesting stories from people in the community who've become friends. We recently had a meetup in New York where we flew members from about 11 members from Brazil, France, all over the U.S. canada. You know, someone who had. She was from a small town in Canada and she'd never been in, she'd never ridden in a taxi before. We brought her to New York for Fashion's night out, which is a big sort of party on the streets of New York right before Fashion Week. You know, limo Ride, take her to the hotel, a great breakfast with everybody. And then just seeing the stories that came out of that was really incredible. Like people saying, I used Polyvore as a form of self expression. When my father passed away, it was a way for me to get therapy and support from the other members or people making friends. And one girl said, I met someone on the site who I'm inviting to my wedding and that's the first time we're ever going to meet. So it's really amazing. When you give people tools to express themselves and the ability to connect, they really form these super strong relationships. And it doesn't have to be through Facebook. They don't have to actually know each other that well, but you just sort of, in this self expression environment, build real bonds. And that's sort of what's happened with our community. We pay a lot of attention to community management. We have a great community manager, Nadia, who actually talks to the members and meets them. And when there are issues, you know, sometimes she'll call them. We've sent flowers to people, we've had someone who was, she was very ill and we found her blog and we found a sweater that she wanted. So we bought her the sweater and we made a cup and we printed her Polyvore set on it and we sent it to her. And you know, she was really touched. Her whole family sent us like a handwritten card. Like little things like that, those little touches, the little human touches make a lot of difference.

Yeah, we, at a board meeting, the last board meeting we had, Jess showed us a video of the community members. They flew to New York and I think all of us were brought to tears. You underestimate the impact of empowerment on people when they're given a voice where they didn't have a voice and a way to self express. It shapes who they are. It's in the mass of the hierarchy of needs. You're at the very tip of the pyramid. They all had just such love for Polyvore and they were saying thank you. And like if you're an investor, you say, well, these are the people creating the content. Not only do we not pay them, they're madly in love with the company and yet they're building the company. So it's part of, I think, the future of a lot of products in tapping into that creative power, harnessing it, but making it. And we see the same thing at Yelp. Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me. The Wikipedians, it's been. I talked to Jimmy Wales at the beginning 2002, 2003 to try and invest in Wikipedia. And he laughed at me. He's like, last time we tried to invest in Wikipedia, we killed it because they financed it as a company and then they quit because it didn't work. And then the community took over and then it became Wikipedia. And there are people that were spending hundreds of of hours a month curating for no other value than the sense of connectedness and greater good that it brought to you. So a great product experience is in touch with that, and I think it's one of the really powerful things that you've had going at Polyvore. The last question I want to ask before shifting gears and getting questions from the audience. I'm on your board and this is a little awkward to ask this question, but how do you think about us, the board, the venture investors? And you can say what you want and where as the CEO, you sort of sit in between a lot of different concentric circles and integrating them. How do you think about us and then maybe describe the relationship for the audience? I think it'd be pretty.