#314: Vivian Chen, Founder and CEO of Rise, on Building the Next Generation Professional Social Network by Crafting Authentic Connections

Welcome to Just Go Grind. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital. On today's episode, we have Vivian Chen, founder and CEO of Rise, which you can find at joinrise.co, a professional social network that enables companies to proactively build relationships with people. Prior to starting Rise, Vivian was an operator who built brands and products for the likes of Fortune 500 companies, high-growth startups, As well as leading VCs, private equity firms, and global institutions. Let's dive in. Vivian, welcome to the show.

Thanks. So excited to be here.

Yes. And for people not familiar with Rise, tell me more about what this company is doing today.

Yeah. So Rise is a next-generation social, professional social network that enables companies to proactively build relationships with people. We believe that with COVID and everything, there ushers in a new era for how people work. We believe that people want to have a more 3D representation of who they are. And we're enabling people to do that.

Love it.

So, it's getting harder and harder for companies to attract talent. There's a whole conversation around the great resignation. So, our way of combating that is to enable people to be their true selves. Enable people to connect more authentically before they're even looking for a job, build relationships that way. And then maybe it'll turn into something meaningful for everyone involved.

There are a lot of aspects of this I want to dive into, but first, what is the origin story? How did this company get started in the first place?

Yeah, it's funny when you think about how startups are started, it's like it's never exactly— what you end up with is never exactly where you started. And I would say definitely true for us. So the first iteration of Rise happened a little over 2 years ago. So pre-COVID, actually, what year are we in? 2011? Yeah, 2019. So 2021. So yeah, 2 years ago when I left my previous job knowing that I wanted to do something entrepreneurial and I didn't know what initially, I thought I was going to do something in the consumer goods space, spend some time exploring that. that area and very quickly realized how expensive it was to manufacturing physical goods.

Yep.

So I picked up consulting on the side and I started freelancing. And a lot more people are freelancing today, which I am so pumped about. But back in the day, when you start freelancing, it was kind of an anomaly. And for me, I come from a background in both B2B as well as B2C. So I was able to flex into multiple industries. I consulted for marketing, sales, product, and I worked hand in hand with mostly C-level executives from high-growth startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies. And I like to think that because of that experience, I leapfrogged my career. So, you know, when I previously left my job, I was, you know, a manager level. But within a period of a few months, I was able to level up to, you know, a VP or above level simply because I put myself out there. And it's, you know, all about what it is that you can do instead of what your bosses think that you can do. So that's why we're called Rise, is because I fundamentally believe that within each one of us, there is that extraordinary talent waiting to be uncovered. And so I made it my life's mission to do that. And initially pre-COVID, the way of doing that I thought was to enable people to do more freelancing work. And we had a lot of success with that. I actually attempted to fundraise February, 3rd week of February 2020. I went out to San Francisco.

Oh, no.

Yes. Yeah. You know where this is going. Went out to SF and then came back first week of March to New York and basically Haven't left yet. And I think COVID was this interesting moment where all these things were happening. All the things that we sort of predicted as people are going to work when they want, where they want, how they want became true overnight. On the one hand, I was exhilarated because this vision that I had of how the world was going to work became a reality overnight. On the other hand, what used to be our unique value proposition became table stakes because every single company is now remote, distributed, and enables people to work in a much more flexible way. So we actually made a pivot at the beginning of 2021. We decided to open it up to enable people to work not just in freelancing type of roles, but all sorts of roles, given that many more employers are open to a variety of different ways of partnering with people. And we also heard from a lot of the professionals that we work with that the reason that I went into freelancing was because I wanted the freedom, but I really miss health insurance. And I would love to be able to work with a company that has that flexible culture, but still be able to provide me with benefits. So we listened and that's how we decided to build Rise, what I call 2.0.

Take me through that in terms of the product itself. What does it look like for people joining? What can they expect? All those things. I'm kind of curious about that side of it.

Yeah. So today, if you're a professional, you go through an onboarding experience with us and we dive deep into who you are, what it is that you're looking for. And from there, you're able to access Rise, the platform, where you'll be able to create a profile, interact with a feed, connect with others, and companies actually make the first move to follow you. So it's kind of like, sit back, relax, and wait for other people to come court you. And you just do you, companies will come and court you. So how we enable people, how we enable companies to court people, this is where I think it's really interesting, is we allow professionals to share more about themselves. So tell us about a project you're working on. Do you have a recent case study or portfolio that you want to show off? What's a quick win that you've had recently? And, you know, whenever you first jump on an interview question, it's like the first 15 minutes is always the same. It's like, tell me about yourself, tell me about your strengths, your weaknesses, even that whole line of questioning.

Yeah.

We actually decided to have companies ask what's called icebreaker questions, and you can answer them at your leisure. Right. And these answers will be as part of your profile. So it's like you can skip that first 15 minutes of just, you know, feel like you've said the same thing over and over again. And also removing the pressure of feeling like you have to have the perfect response when in a high-pressure environment, it's like, I wish I had said X, Y, and Z, but, you know, I kind of went— my brain went blank and I don't even know what I said. So giving people just, you know, a much more relaxed and authentic environment for them to What is the business model then behind that?

So is it the companies that are paying a fee for that? Like, okay.

Exactly. So companies, similarly, they also go through an onboarding process, sharing more about their culture, their vision, the values, perks, and benefits that they have. And they similarly have a profile. Companies are able to post these icebreakers, have surveys, host events, workshops, and also connect with people.

How are you going about getting companies on board? And what is that pitch like for them? Because I know there's so many companies now, obviously the war for talent is crazy and they're trying to hire, they're trying to get people into their company. So what is that pitch for you and how does that work on that side of things?

Yeah. So I think for us, when we tell, companies get it that the smartest employers are already building relationships proactively. And For a lot of them, it's like they want to get out of that reactive scramble. It's like, you know, you have a hiring manager who comes to you and say, hey, I'm looking to hire 5 engineers. And you open up your, you know, your email and it's like, I have nothing. And every single time someone comes to you with that, like, hey, I need to hire someone, you basically start from zero. And our idea is instead of starting from zero, you start from a small curated list of people that you've already built authentic relationships with. Yeah. So, you know, like I gave the example of Google, Citadel, Amazon, Zappos. You know, they all have departments within their companies where their job is to just go out there and create experiences and meet with people authentically. I like to tell the story of one of my mentors previously. She used to work at BuzzFeed and then Google was trying to hire her and she's like, no, no, I'm not interested in talking to recruiters. And they tried many, many times, you know, through LinkedIn, through email, through Twitter. You know, and she's like, I'm not going to respond to you. And finally, they reached out to her and they said, we would love to invite you to a panel that we have speaking on social justice. And here are the speakers that are coming. And it's a very small, exclusive group of people. Would you be interested? And she's like, now that, that I'm interested. I'm going to go. I'm going to go do that. And of course, when she got there at the table, there were the recruiters who then were able to, you know, have a conversation with her. But it's about crafting experiences and getting Getting in front of people, even when they're passive on topics and areas in which they have deep passions about. That's how we make friends in life. That's how we build connections with people. Why don't we do that for the world of work?

What does that look like on the backend in terms of— so if I'm an employee, for instance, and want these opportunities to come to me, I know it's going to be different for each person depending on interest and all that sort of thing, but are they getting 2 employers to come to them, like 200 employers, I can imagine could be overwhelming if there's too many. Like, how does that kind of matching process go?

Yeah, you also get to determine who— whether, uh, whether you even want to hear from them. Um, so for the professionals, it's like if you don't want to talk to a certain large tech company because you think their practices are questionable, you can decline the invitation and you don't have to hear from them. I think that's the beauty, is that we want to filter out the signal from the noise. And with traditional social networks, there's just so much noise. And for us, it's all about parsing out the signal.

Okay, in the beginning, you're matching both of these, you want obviously employers, as well as employees. How'd you go about building this in the beginning? I know you mentioned in COVID, different model, kind of version 2.0. Now, how have you gone about getting the word out about it, finding people for the platform?

Like, take me through more of that.

Yeah.

So I love sharing just like sort of the dirty behind the scenes parts of building a business. So happy to dive into this a little bit. And we also recently raised a round and happy to share a little bit more about our fundraising process too. But version 1.0 of the product, I built it out myself using WordPress. I love that.

I love that so much.

Yeah. And it would break like almost daily. It was so, it worked. And for a product that's built on WordPress, I was incredibly proud of it. But for anyone who's worked with that platform knows that it's just incredibly not scalable and not stable. So I spent many, many 3 AMs fixing the site, getting on calls with folks, whoever can help me in the middle of the night, trying to get the site back up and having 20 different versions of the site saved in various places. So, That was the first version of the site, which was built pretty scrappily with a few thousand dollars with a platform that is already existing. We actually have so many plugins on the site that I remember asking an engineer to help me fix some problem. He's like, I've never seen a site with so many plugins. He's like, I think it's time for you to move on to something else.

Amazing. Yeah.

But initially it was all about word of mouth. We made connections with people one-on-one. I remember I used to go to events and—

Going to events?

Going to events. I know, right? Mind blown. And then they'll be like, does anyone have a question or does he want to say anything? And I would just shamelessly stand up and talk about the company and be like, I'm also passing out cards at the end and literally just hand it to anyone who will listen. So that's kind of how we build up the community in the early days. And then definitely benefited from COVID March until July of 2020, I had $0, zero revenue coming in because no one was hiring regardless if it was part-time, freelance, full-time. It was that really dark period when just no one knows what was going on. But one thing that kind of was a silver lining was that there were tons of people were looking for alternative ways of looking for work. So we had this massive amount of people who joined the platform and became interested in the community that we're building because of this new way of work that we were envisioning.

So with that too, you mentioned building it yourself, WordPress initially. I mean, it kept breaking eventually, but at what point, what'd you do? Did you shift to a different platform? Did you hire developers? Take me through that side of things.

So, the end of 2020, we decided to— end of 2020, beginning of 2021, decided to slowly pivot the business model. And this is when I told you that instead of focusing purely on one type of employment employers, we decided to open up to full-time opportunities as well. And I think we also kind of benefited from the fact that Towards the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, companies were feeling comfortable to hire again. So there was a huge moment where companies were— it was like the great rehiring. So from that, we were able to sign on some amazing customers, like the well-known tech Silicon Valley type of companies. And we used— initially, we were kind of manually doing the work for them, building out the profile, posting their jobs, connecting them with talent. And using the revenue that we generated from that first batch of customers, we built out our current version of the product. And yes, we hired developers, but it was really just however much revenue we were bringing in, that's how much we were putting into the product.

With that too, I know you mentioned it kind of grew through word of mouth, but getting these bigger tech companies on board too, With that, as time has gone on, like how has that evolved in the last year or so? Because we're recording this in December right now of 2021. That was a shift you said, you know, end of 2020-ish, you know, early 2021, maybe that shift in that in terms of how you went about that. I'm curious as getting more of these tech companies and stuff on board because especially big tech companies, I mean, they're hiring a ton for sure, but there's other established platforms in different ways going about it. Like tell me more of that. I'm curious on how getting them, getting them on board.

Yeah, for sure. I think it was, you know, at the beginning of the year, there was that wave, like I said, of the great rehiring. So companies were just much more willing to try out different platforms. And we were one of the platforms that people were very interested in. I think now, because, you know, companies are getting bombarded by so many messages all the time, it's all about what are you doing differently. And I think so many of the offerings out there is kind of the same same. It boils down to like, I have X number of diverse candidates, and I can get you this many people into your pipeline by this date. And it's like people just become a number at that point, right? And it's like just because you get people into the pipeline or you have X number of people within your network doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be the best quality of people. Who do you actually want? So what we do now is actually practice the philosophy that we have built out ourselves with the Rise platform, which is to build authentic relationships with people who are true champions of Of talent and of rising professionals. So, reaching out to HR leaders and saying, this is our philosophy. This is how we think the world of recruiting should be evolving. What do you think? And so many people believe in what we do. So, it's actually been sort of our unique advantage telling the story that we use to build the product to actually use as our sales channel.

You mentioned the fundraise and You went from no revenue in that dark period of COVID to now just raising a round. Take me through raising this latest round, what that's gonna allow you to do. I'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. If you told me about like how we raised money like a year ago, I would've been like, nah, you're like, you're like, that's not, that's not us. That's not possible. So I think I had a little bit of PTSD from the first time I tried to fundraise because with COVID and everything, it was just such a— I don't want to say outlier experience because I think so many startups had a similar experience, but it's literally like every single VC fund just stopped talking to you and they're like, actually, we're going to concentrate on our portfolio. So all the relationships that I had by going out west basically just Died. And so the second time around, I actually didn't initiate the fundraise at all. It was crazy. I was, because I couldn't meet people IRL, I decided to join this founder program. And I just wanted to connect with other founders and potentially even meet investors and just learn from others. So I joined this program called Day One. If anyone is out there as well.

Oh, I know the founder of that, I think. Yeah.

Andrew and Rahul. Yeah.

Yeah.

They're awesome. So, I was one of the earlier cohorts and I was like, I love what they're doing. Let me join day one. So, first practice, it's a program that's very structured and part of it is you get to pitch investors. So, the first pitch practice, that they had. I was in a group with like 5 other founders. And the first founder comes on and they had a PowerPoint and they were really, you know, like buttoned up. And then the second person goes and it was alphabetical by first name. So I was the last person. And I was like, thank God I'm the last person because I did not know that we were doing like a real pitch. I thought we were just practicing here and I can test out some of my messages. And so that competitive side of me came out. So while like, you know, the third and the fourth founder pitching, I quickly wrote out my short 3-minute pitch. And I think because I was so short on time, it actually made the message very crystal clear. And I didn't have to overthink it at all. So then I did my pitch and the VC in the room was really blown away. Nothing came out of the VC in the end, but one of the other founders in the practice session with me, DM'd me right after and was like, hey, I'm an accredited investor. I would love to invest. And I know it was, mind you, at this point, like, fundraising was nowhere near my mind. I was still just practicing my pitch. And I was like, sure, sounds good. So then immediately started Googling, how do I do a SAFE? You know, like, what do I need to do to take in investor money and And that basically kicked off my fundraising process. And in my process of researching, how do I actually collect checks and what do I need to know by taking in investor money? I went to another one of my founder friends and I said, hey, someone just offered to put money into the company. Like, what do I need to do? Like, what do I need to know? And he was like, congratulations. I'm so excited for you. You worked really hard. I'm into, count me in for X dollar amount as well. And I actually got, I think, like 3 or 4 checks like this of people just saying, like, count me in, count me in. And I still had no deck. And that was kind of how we got our first sort of tranche of investor money. And then, yeah, so that's the beginning. And then in total, I counted, we've met with about 50 just under 50 investors. And most recently, we closed a bigger fund. And the process there, I think, was quite interesting too. I'll pause to see if you have any questions before sharing that story.

Yeah, I'm just curious with that fundraise, I mean, how long did that take for you? How long has it taken so far? How'd you go about it in terms of obviously getting some interest inbound on you in some ways, but then also you pursuing who you wanted potentially on your cap table? How has that gone as well? Because there's a lot of founders I've talked to who, depending on the stage you're at, if they started a company before, some understand more of it, the value add, some small checks can be really valuable depending on what they do. There's angel groups like we have Vitalize Angels, for instance, at Vitalize where we invested pre-seed future of work companies. And so there's that, there's like Hustle Fund has an angel group, but how do you think about that side of things too?

Yeah. So because we're such a lean team, I never stopped building the company because typically speaking, it's like the founder stops building the company and you go fundraise full-time. I never did that, which I know is kind of like counterintuitive. And, you know, some of the best practices out there is like focus just on fundraising. I think fundraising is different for everyone and, you know, what's worked for me might not work for someone else. So for us, it just happens that we didn't have the capacity to stop working and to just fundraise full-time. The other aspect, and you kind of mentioned and hinted on this, is that finding investors that truly believed in your vision, which is why I only met with, I think, 49 investors, angels, institutions, syndicates all included. And I think there is like, I remember I was in this fundraising course, right? It was like one of those webinars and it's like, think about how many spots you have on your cap table, multiply that number by like, I don't know, 10 or something. And that's how many meetings you need to have. We didn't do that. And for me, it's been about, do they believe in our vision and do they believe in us as the team to build it? And the type of questions that they ask you are very different. So the investors that came in basically made up the majority of our round. They asked me, it was a really great conversation and the type of questions they asked me was very different than what the investors that didn't believe asked me. So I'll just give you an example. They asked me, tell me about your childhood. Who is your best friend? And it sounds like you could do just about anything else, anything in the world. Why this? And I've never had these questions asked of me in an investor setting. And it kind of took me But it also gave me an opportunity to share more about my life experiences and my life story, which I think made the investors feel like, understand why I am so passionate about this. And they're able to see a side that you don't typically get to know if you just ask me, what is your traction? What is your revenue? How many customers? All these numbers, especially For a company that's so early stage, having those true believers who see the founder for who they are, or who you are, has been incredibly valuable for us.

Yeah, it is something to think about with talking to founders and a lot now at Vitalize and just how, yeah, if you're looking at the fund, for instance, we're going to invest like $500K per investment out of the fund. Out of the angel community, minimum check size per angel is $1,000, but collectively we'll invest $50,000 plus. But Investing that much money, especially out of the fund, it's like you want to know who this person is, what drives them. Are they going to stick around with this for the next decade potentially? Like, why are they going to do that? And so those types of questions that are, you know, could be more surprising. It's like, well, we just want to know, like, who is Vivian?

Like, who are you?

Because there's so much, so much depth we never get to with just the, like, what's your go-to-market strategy? What's whatever? Like, that's great, but also what else? There is a whole team behind it that's making this company work. And I'm glad you mentioned those questions as well and kind of a little bit more about your experience because there's so much for that for founders to know. It's a two-way street. Founders need to have the right people on their team in terms of investors as well.

Absolutely. And especially in this more remote Zoom-filled world, right? It's so easy to feel like you're just a number, whether you are just talking to the next investor to get to a no so that you can move on to the next one, right? Or you feel like you're just another meeting on the VC's calendar. And for there to be that moment where you feel like, oh, I actually get to share a little bit more about myself beyond just the typical range of questions, was actually really moving for me as well.

With that fundraise, so what does that mean for you in terms of the next— we always say one round to the next is like 12 to 18 months depending on the timing of that. What does that next kind of time period, year and a half or so, look like for you in terms of where you're going? Yeah.

So we're super excited. We have been really lean and bootstrapped up to this point. I think I mentioned a little bit there. One of my biggest goals is to build out our team. Most of us have been part-time up until now.

Yeah.

So even getting the people who's been so instrumental in our journey so far on as full-time employees and bring in more talent to build out the necessary functions for us to be taken more seriously as a company. I think I'm super excited about that and to be able to provide the experiences that we have always envisioned for our professional users as well as for our company users. Those are the things that I want to focus on for the next 12 months.

I know we're out of time here. So Vivian, where's the best place for people to learn more about Rise and also connect with you if they'd like to?

Yeah. So you should check out Rise at joinrise.co. That's J-O-I-N-R-I-S-E dot C-O.

Perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was fun.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Just Go Grind. If you want to follow along on the socials for all things Just Go Grind and with me as well, you can find Just Go Grind on Instagram and Twitter at Just Go Grind. You can find me on Twitter at Justin Gordon 212. Find me on Instagram Justin Gordon 8. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.