Episode 4: Jessica Lessin of The Information

Come on into The Room. The Room is a series that lets you get a view into the room where it happened. I'm Claudia Laurie.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, your co-hosts.

In Silicon Valley, whenever there is a breaking story, The source that founders, funders, and technologists turn to to get inside the room of where it happened is not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Forbes, but instead it's The Information, founded by journalist Jessica Lessin in 2013. Over the past 7 years, The Information has become known as the most influential Silicon Valley publication, having broken industry-changing stories on sexual harassment in venture capital, inside scoops on acquisitions and IPOs, as well as deep insights into the future of what's next. In a world of rapidly growing and crowded media outlets, Jessica has been able to charge $399 a year for access to the information, and the tech industry can't get enough of it. Jessica didn't start her career thinking she would become a founder. After graduating Harvard and covering faculty news at the Crimson, Jessica went on to cut her teeth at institutional news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, covering the tech beat. 3 years later, Jessica realized that no one was paying attention to something huge: the fact that the world was being changed in a colossal way by tech. The biggest story of the moment needed a new platform. Jessica has managed to change how one of the world's fastest-growing industries consumes news, as well as how the industry is reported on. Having achieved profitability in 2016 with no outside funding while raising 2 kids, Jessica, to say the least, is an inspiration to anyone who wants to do it all. In today's episode, we will explore insights and themes such as knowing what's valuable and not giving it away, sustainable growth, and dealing with the hard stuff like controversy. Let's open the door.

Thank you so much for sitting down with us today. It's really a treat. Jessica, you are the founder of The Information, the tech industry's favorite publication, who has been really at the forefront of cutting-edge tech journalism. Personally, having worked at Uber, I can say that your stories have been Many the topic of discussion for meetings and hallway chats. Suffice to say, the company you have built has really changed the way news circulates in the Valley and beyond. So before we dive into the founding story of The Information, would love to rewind a little bit and to give our listeners a bit more context into the early days of your career. You grew up in Connecticut where you worked on your high school's newspaper and then went on to Harvard where you worked at The Crimson. It appears that you always knew you wanted to be in journalism. However, did you always know you wanted to be a founder?

Absolutely not. Oh no. I would've thought until 8 years ago that I was gonna spend my career inside a traditional mainstream newspaper, whatever that meant. I love journalism.

I picked it as a career because it felt like not picking a career.

You got to learn about anything anytime and call someone up and and ask them questions. And so I think it wasn't until I was in this strange position of reporting on tech disrupting everything while being at a traditional news organization being disrupted that the light bulb went off and I made the leap to start The Information.

What was the first business that you built? Was there anything that you did before The Information that sort of pointed to entrepreneurial tendencies? I think for me it was a lemonade stand.

It's funny, I remember a shell museum where I was charging my parents admission way back when with my brother. I think there were a few things like that, but my pivot to founder has been pretty stark. Even recall as a reporter kind of questioning why there were so many founders and why can't people just work it and make existing companies better? So I'll be the first to acknowledge that I've kind of swung into the other direction on that.

And so you mentioned that you worked in some of the institutions of journalism, specifically the Wall Street Journal. We know that you worked, um, writing for the tech beat there. Can you tell us a little bit more about what initially attracted you to that topic space?

[Speaker] So I lucked into or fell into being a tech reporter because I was young. I was right outta Harvard. I graduated and started work 3 days later at the Journal. And I think all news organizations were thirsting for reporters with experience using technology. And I remember the person who hired me saying, you know, "Do you have a MySpace account?" my golden ticket was probably the fact I did. I don't recall using it that much, but I, but I think I did. And so really, even if you go back to 2005 when I graduated from college, it was the era where companies like Facebook, even Google to some degree— well, Google was more established, but there, there was this whole new wave happening. Google had just bought YouTube, online video was exploding, e-commerce was taking off in strange new ways. And I think there was this collective sense that the old ways of covering business, how reporters sort of oriented themselves, weren't sufficient. I kind of hopped onto that train and rode it as far as I could.

Did you cover tech when you were at Harvard or even in high school? Was that a conception that you had at those newspapers?

I didn't.

You know, at Harvard I covered the faculty, which is sort of like covering Congress because the faculty vote on everything and adjudicate everything. And so a felt like a congressional reporter, which is just a great beat, right? Because you have all these outspoken individuals sometimes fighting, sometimes collaborating. Went on to the Boston Globe to have an internship there where I was also covering politics out of the DC bureau, and then was— had an internship at the AP before that and a variety of things. So no, I didn't think of myself as a tech or particularly business reporter, but when I got an internship at the Journal, it was Before I stayed on as a tech reporter, that first summer it was in the econ bureau, and I had taken precisely one class in economics. That apparently qualified me, so I kept my textbook close that summer. What I soon realized is business reporting is, is really just reporting on power and influence and companies that have extraordinary influence over consumers. And so I think seeing it that way got me very excited about it. And then And this feeds into why I started the information, but then seeing as the most important part of business transformation, really technology and what it's doing to every industry. So it, it didn't really feel like I was a tech reporter. It felt like I was just covering what's next across so many subjects. And that was very exciting to me.

And a lot happened in those 8 years that you spent at the Wall Street Journal. You kind of mentioned on the cusp of it was this Google acquisition from YouTube, which is One of the most interesting acquisitions, I think, of our time. And then a lot else. They had the '08 recession and the birth of companies like Uber and Airbnb. I'm sure you have just infinite stories from that time, but maybe could you share one where you had a hunch about a story or a lead on it, more information, and you went after it?

I think, you know, I'm glad you mentioned these kind of generation of companies, because I was just thinking about, you know, we're, we're preparing for Airbnb's IPO before the end of the year. And, It seems like a really significant moment in part, and I was trying to put my finger on why, and it's not just for this company, but there was a whole era of companies that kind of, I'd say they post Facebook, Google, and consumer, not just consumer, but Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, and these companies got so big so fast, had their bumps along the road, but have become extraordinary businesses and have created huge huge impact on consumers, created a lot of wealth in Silicon Valley. You know, by any metric, right, they're sort of very consequential. And I think the most fun for me is, you know, I, I knew these entrepreneurs right as they were launching their businesses. I sometimes laugh in my contacts. I think if I look up like Drew Houston, it says like met at South by in '05, right? So something that just a throwaway, right? And obviously he's the, the CEO of Dropbox and pretty much across the board, they're, they're kind of those notes. And I think that that's just extraordinarily valuable as a reporter because you understand the company from ground zero. As I was starting The Information in, in 2013, one of my reasons for it was I felt that major publications or larger publications weren't taking younger tech companies seriously. They'd write about them, they'd put the founders on the COVID and say they're worth a gazillion dollars, look at that. But they weren't trying to understand the businesses. And I always felt that these are the next Googles, these are the next Microsofts. I was just interested earlier. I was interested in Dropbox's business model. I was interested in the economics of ridesharing and if that was a two-market or a three-market or a five-market or a five-player kind of market. I think across our team, you know, we're full of reporters who've taken that path and it's been, it's just, I think served us very well from a reporting standpoint. And sometimes I say that and people assume that we're just cheerleaders for these companies, right? And I think anyone who's read the information would not say that. I think it's more just having an interest, understanding, and relationships that have allowed us, I think, to ask some of the tougher questions about these companies earlier. And that's very much part of our DNA.

And I think that innate curiosity that you had had kind of from day one, which made you a great reporter at the Wall Street Journal, it sounds like is what pushed you forward towards this founding journey that you never thought you'd find yourself on. And that's what great entrepreneurs do. They identify a need in the market and they say, "Hey, is, is anyone else gonna do this?" Raising your hand.

And then you realize, "Oh wait, no one else is. I guess it's me." So talk us through kind of that moment where you said, "Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quit this really great job at WSJ and go do something else that no one's ever done." Yeah.

Well, one of the, I think, important things to say is that hindsight is very different than when you're looking ahead. And as my husband likes to remind me, I don't think I've looked back once, but in the moment, he tells a story of me feeling like I had food poisoning, but I was just so nervous about leaving, right? So I think it's important for people who find themselves at crossroads to recognize that the view isn't always crystal clear, but when you're on the other side of it, things feel awesome, even in the toughest days. It wasn't— I'm told that it was not as easy as I made it out to seem, or as I feel like it was now, but I think I think it was a couple of things. It was a recognition that as tech was disrupting everything, news organizations were trying to play the online advertising game that was propelling Google and Facebook and Yahoo and Twitter and all these other companies. And I felt it as a reporter being told, you know, to do more live blogs of events to drive more clicks. That was so at odds with pursuing the stories I wanted to, writing for the audience I wanted to, that it felt like a huge disconnect. And so the light bulb was really— media has always had a subscription model.

It is part of it.

It's had advertising too, but it's had subscriptions. We shouldn't just give that up because now we're online. I felt the reason there weren't more digitally native subscription news publications wasn't because consumers didn't want it, but because no one was delivering a product worth paying for. And I became really excited to do that. The second piece was also just the type of coverage, right? Looking at news organizations that treated what happened in Silicon Valley as sort of what those weirdos out there write about, or look at all those founders, there's no way they're worth that. And I just saw a huge open playing field, business stories and opportunity. Yeah, that's what I rushed into.

You're quoted in saying that from the beginning, you can't give away what you expect readers to find valuable. I think that that extrapolates to many other parts of the tech industry where there's freemium models and companies have built businesses on free. And as my mom likes to say, there's no free lunch, right? And so you took that, I think, from day one and built The Information as this subscription news media source. How did you think about creating content that was worth paying for in a world where so much is free?

Yep. I mean, not only how did we think about it, but that was all we thought about, right? I mean, that, that was the goal and It wasn't just to build our bank accounts. It was because with all the competition for consumers' attention, if your journalism isn't really differentiated, no one's going to read it. No one's going to choose to click on it instead of scrolling through Instagram all day long, right? So for media brands in this era, the level of differentiation just has to be extraordinarily high. The model aligned to that, right, is the subscription model. But Mission one is sort of doing that. And so for us, it came down to reporting is about who you talk to and your sources and the questions you ask. And so building a team of reporters who can gain the trust of insiders and other people with authority and knowledge and talk to them and learn things first and be ahead of major trends, whether it is back when we were the first to really write about WhatsApp and the rise of messaging and things now we just take for granted as these massive consumer internet businesses, but were— was far from clear 7 years ago or something in that vein. And we were the first to saw trends in China around bike sharing, right? And we're writing about that space probably 4 years before we saw major acquisitions here in the US as well as a variety of other stories. So for us, it comes down to keeping the journalism very differentiated. And part of that is what we don't do. I was also kind of frustrated that I was being asked to write the 19th version of a story that had already been written. I felt very strongly that, that— so we're getting our best talent and we're telling them to do very commoditized things. So I think thankfully some of the news industry has shifted in this direction, but circa 8 years ago, you know, we were very much on a limb. You know, we still— some days we publish, you know, maybe 2 original stories, but plus a bunch of newsletters and other things. It's very, very small volume, but very, very sort of high intel. That was a key part of our thesis that I think strike— struck people and might still as, as kind of odd. I think it's just so satisfying to our journalists too, to have your work make a difference and have real utility. And that's also true, not just when it comes to corporate reporting, but when it comes to shedding light on a lot of real challenges in the industry and beyond. We've been, we're really out ahead in covering the topic of sexual harassment in the venture capital industry. This was kind of right as a precursor to the MeToo movement and what we saw in the media industry, a series of stories about a bunch of different investors we pushed very, very hard on and I think had real impact. And so being able to say to our journalists, do that stuff, don't worry about the other stuff, is a really important part to our approach.

So it's clear that content has been, you know, the number one driver of the information success and your diligence there. But I'm curious because it is fundamentally a tech platform, how you've thought about more traditional growth strategies, because when you probably were getting started, organic growth was still kind of a sticky concept that, you know, people were just starting to pay for ads on Instagram if there were even ads. And how we think about companies from a subscription standpoint growing today is this fear. And we talk about this in my job at, at Defy, fear of getting into a paid acquisition game that you never can get out of. Right. And we see this as the demise of companies like Blue Apron who built a great business, a take-home food and chef business, but then they just overspent on gathering customers that way. So all that to be said, have you thought about growth at The Information?

Yeah.

And I'm glad you brought up the tech side, because I think we've done—

and just very proud of our team and the approach we took from the beginning there. So just as an example, we built our own CMS, our own CRM, and did that because at the time, things like WordPress were very ad-focused. And so we knew that having a sort of tech stack that aligned to our subscription business and really tying our, our subscribers are also commenters, so they're publishing and how you think about that. And so just very proud of the team that's built that and continues to kind of innovate on that. On the growth side, you know, it's so funny, we run a little accelerator where every year a couple of companies that are building subscription businesses in news, we used to have them to the office and we do some knowledge sharing. To kind of be helpful. When I go through what I wish I knew now and the mistakes we made sort of early on, I like, oh please do this better.

But for years, and email has been our most important channel, just organic.

And I think for us, we deliver our articles via email for people who want them that way. And our readers let us into their inbox because they think there's a super high likelihood it's it's going to be something they want to read. And that's flowed very nicely into potential subscribers giving us their emails to read articles and then following up with further articles and getting them to convert. So a sort of organic email strategy has always been our pillar.

Early on, I didn't understand the value of getting the email of potential readers and didn't focus enough on that.

And it was one of those moments where you just see the curve and the slope really shift. Anyone launching a business today. I'm like, just get those emails and use those emails and never give up those emails. And I think that's essential. We've had good success too with paid, paid social and other formats as well. We just continue to learn there. And I think to your point, Madison, I don't want to ever become super dependent on that. So we place very strict limits on payback periods, CPAs, and we've got spreadsheets up the wazoo. We're an aggressive but very comfortable standpoint there. And one of the things I wonder is, it seemed like when the pandemic hit, you saw a lot of brands that had just been kind of overspending very unprofitably on social pull back.

I don't know, I see CPAs going up again in certain categories.

So I'm wondering if they're back in market now as budgets are a little looser, kind of doing the same thing. And these were companies that when they stopped doing it, they were like, oh, this is so good. We finally learned some discipline. This is going to get us ready for our IPO down the line. And now I think they're back in the same game.

So I'm, I am very leery of that.

But the beauty of our model is we charge our core subscriptions $399 a year. We also have a $199 young professionals plan that gives us a lot of margin to play with when it comes to paid. We're experimenting a lot. We hired just this year a new VP of marketing, Yeom, from Instacart and Netflix. We recently ran our first direct mail campaign. So the beauty of it is we can just be very, very, very analytical, a lot of spreadsheets and try a lot of channels.

I love that you said you don't want to be dependent on anything because I think that really plays into your funding strategy for The Information. I believe you famously have bootstrapped The Information and as far as I can tell are still the sole owner. Is that correct?

That is correct. So I invested some money up front and was fortunate to be able to do that. After about 2 and a half years, we were cash flow positive, and I've just kind of continued to run the business around breakeven so that we're investing and making big bets and— but also have high expectations for the payouts of those on a year to 2-year kind of timeframes. I think my approach, which is very different from what you see in a traditional startup, is really dictated by how I think you run a great business over the long term.

And we've seen so many examples of where people make very bad decisions, like plowing money into money-losing customers through paid advertising, just because, you know, they—

there's capital available, right?

And, and I've—

I think it's a harder road but a much more successful road to really have high expectations of the business and kind of your own sustainability. And so I think we've also been fortunate. We've just, we've had very strong growth. So, so there's been meaningful capital to invest in growing our newsroom, you know, now more than a dozen reporters, as well as bringing on senior leaders across a variety of business functions. Yeah, I feel very, very good about our approach and I'm open to other funding models for us in the future. But I think this just works incredibly well and really allows us to focus on serving our customer and not the interests of a particular investor.

So you mentioned you reached profitability in 2016, which is a huge milestone for any entrepreneur, specifically in media. Especially walk us through sort of what the early team looked like and what it really took to get to that moment where you could start reinvesting in your company and continuing to grow into a much larger team.

It all feels so step by step, right? I think it, you know, there was never a moment that felt like the winds had changed. And if anything, you know, the challenges, they just keep growing. I remember reaching— I don't care, remember who it was, but I reached out to some entrepreneur and it was just sort of like, when does this phase end? You know, this phase feels whatever, when do I get the next phase? And they were sort of like, the fires get bigger, but you sort of get more firefighters, or some metaphor. So like, the problems get bigger, but you're sort of more equipped to tackle them.

And you take a year like this year where all the playbooks have been thrown out.

And in particular, I think for managers figuring out how to manage teams well, and just feels like this constant acquisition of skills to tackle bigger challenges and higher stakes challenges. And so from a team perspective, our first big cohort of hires was just reporters because without them we wouldn't have a product. We had nothing to, to give our customers. Brought on select kind of engineers to help build up the other piece. I think only in recent years have I really been fortunate to bring on sort of best-in-class business talent across— I mentioned Guillaume. We recently hired VP of brand sales from Time and Forbes with just, you know, tremendous amount of experience in working with brands and sponsorships. And Marinovich, I work side by side someone on our team, Peter Schultz, who leads product engineering and finance.

So those kinds of leadership roles, I think, have come sort of more slowly over time.

And I do often wonder, like, we're fortunate to work work with such incredible people, you wish you had hired them earlier. And there's always that sweet spot of when the business is big enough and interesting enough to attract that kind of talent, something that I think is going to be a major tailwind for us in the years ahead. I've always taken a very sort of opportunistic and gradual approach rather than saying, you know, we're going to be this size at this date. Probably drives some people on my team a little batty who would like a little more planning, but I think it's It's allowed us to really just work with the best and to be opportunistic, and I'm gonna stick with it.

One reason we were really excited to have you on The Room is because you've been able to be inside so many different conversations across tech disruption, the good and the bad. Would love to just double-click into what it's like to be in the room with some of these household names and how you've managed steering these important conversations.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, gets back to just being a reporter in my DNA. I'm curious and I'm skeptical. And I think whether it's people you know personally or professional relationships, right, just being able to ask questions and learn a lot, I think.

And it really, I mean, I, that's what I see journalism as.

And in this moment, I think there are a lot of people who see journalism as something different, is more punditry or advocating for something. And there's a place for all of that, but I don't believe, you know, that's journalism. And so I think that's been my approach, right, to build relationships and always maintain, you know, what's personal, what's professional, but then to use the opportunities to learn and ask a bunch of questions. And I think that served us well. I mean, there are many corners we've looked around, right, just because we've— across our team, you know, been studying something longer. And I think, yeah, that's how I approach it. And I ask a lot of questions.

Talking about sort of covering these household names and incredibly formidable people. Your reporters have also in many ways become household names, and that's in part due to the fact that you've covered some of these really controversial stories in the industry. And tell us more what it was like to cover these stories. And is there a specific one that really jumps out as a tough time and a moment where there were a lot of learnings?

Yeah, I mean, I mentioned our reporting on sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, and there was a particular story around a venture capitalist, Justin Kulbeck, which was super challenging because it was a time when, sadly, there was still an attitude that women feeling uncomfortable by— in situations with men with power over them wasn't necessarily newsworthy, right? And there was an attitude that, oh, was it really that bad that he put his hand there, or that he made her feel that way? But maybe, you know, what's the evidence? And one of our reporters at the time, Reed Albergotti, was was starting to build sort of evidence of this behavior. And there were a lot of moments where Reed and I and Martin were really figuring out, "Where's the line? Where's the line for a story?" I think we all felt strongly that this was newsworthy. Even sources or other people we talked to, we wouldn't go into the specifics, but over the course of doing the story, it was clear that we were kind of going out a little bit on a limb by calling out this behavior, or by talking to women on the record who— were calling out this behavior. But, you know, I decided that the women being on the record, so it wasn't all sort of anonymous innuendo, sort of got it over the edge. And I remember the story publishing. I was traveling back from a conference in Europe, and the button— sort of press the button on the story, gates closed, Wi-Fi about to go off, and I get a text saying the subject is threatening to sue us. And then I had, you know, was out of communication for 7 hours, 8 hours, 9 hours, whatever it is. And I remember just watching a lot of videos on that, a lot of movies on that flight to try and calm down. But I mean, I knew what we were sort of up against. We had vetted the story, you know, I felt sort of good about it. But yeah, there are— I mean, I think as much as a founder, you know, I'm an editor, was something I had more experience with than being a founder. And I take that responsibility very, very seriously around what we cover and how we cover it. And I think that experience It was very hard. I mean, there was just a lot of back and forth in how we wrote about the topic, in how we sort of presented it. We got criticized on one side for not being sensational about it. We wrote that story in sort of, "Here are the facts," kind of way. And some people felt we should have been more outraged in the story. Other people felt it wasn't a story. So, these are the things that I think have been moments where I've learned a lot. Learned to really trust judgment, and also our approach, and those kind of rigors of our approach. It will always be controversial to some degree if it's important.

And what's your attempt tactical advice on sort of managing criticism and hard-to-hear sort of responses or feedback?

I don't know that I'm particularly good at it, but what I do is I think, you know, how would someone else respond? Like my husband, who, for example, seems to take criticism differently than I do, as in he seems not to get upset by it. So I find it helpful to think of myself in someone else's shoes, not to ignore the criticism, but to realize that the feelings are subjective, right, based on it, and that there are different ways to kind of react to it.

Everyone says founders need thick skins. I mean, you need like thick coats of armor, to be honest.

It's brutal.

You're constantly trying to please not only your customers but your team, balancing sort of marching in the direction you want to go with how do you get them there, how do you not let them down. It's very challenging. And I think the occasional moments— we also don't get a lot of pats on the back, to be honest. People aren't really out there just telling you you're doing a great job all day. That's fine. I think you just have to kind of go by your compass and recognize, again, the criticism, listen to it, and try and move on. Because if you get caught in it, you're just taking time away from other things I could be doing. You know, I think a lot about if I'm stewing over something, am I letting someone on the team down by not making progress on something else? So it's an important topic. I got to say, as a reporter, I'm constantly concerned by the reticence of female leaders in the industry to do interviews and talk and tell stories. And I, I understand it because their heads are often bitten off when they do talk. I'm not saying by the press, I don't think the press is out to get female founders, but I think that female leaders are perceived differently. And so it's led to a situation where we're trying to show and spotlight credible female leaders in an industry and they're saying my time is better spent elsewhere. And I think that's a problem.

It sounds like you yourself have an incredible support system, uh, outside of work that allows you to have this coat of armor and potentially an army of people who are there to love you no matter what and support you. Guessing it has also been a difficult year in the midst—

2020—

having to have both the information be busier than ever with so many different aspects of the news cycle, as well as, uh, you and your husband's two boys, Lion and Maverick, What's you and your partner's strategy for co-parenting well with these two demanding full-time careers while still being a support to one another?

Man, I don't know. I mean, I, I think it's every family's going through this. I think if anything, I've just tried to enjoy all the moments, right? So the moments where I've had to sort of rearrange a lot of my meetings because of my childcare situation, right? Which is something that has had an impact on my team. And I feel bad every time I kind of have to do, every time I'm sort of stressing out about that or the lack of sleep I'm getting because my 1-year-old is teething, which is currently a situation. You see that I am spending more time with them. And it's a phase where I look back on 2020, at the beginning of the year, I was looking at my calendar and it was just packed with work travel.

And I was gonna, as we've been expanding and have subscribers more around the country, I was not going to be home very much.

And so ironically, then exactly the opposite. Yeah, I don't know. And I just also feel I'm, I'm very fortunate and I think there's nothing kind easy about this, stopping for many, many others. And so feeling grateful for the situation we've been in. And I guess I also hope maybe on the margin, like, my kids are slightly more knowledgeable about what I do.

My eldest son always asks if he can write articles about airplanes because airplanes are his favorite.

So we're kind of in that zone. But, but I don't know. And I do absolutely feel like this situation, though, is setting back professional women in so many ways. I chair the board of a news publication called The 19th. And it's a nonprofit started by my friend Emily Ramshaw to cover politics and policy from the perspective of gender. And so they've been— were really one of the first to call that this was the great first great female recession, the impact that has. So we need to start thinking and acting around that now and not kind of waiting because study after study is really bad. So I've tried to channel some energy that I have left into that as well.

That's incredible.

We can't thank you enough for taking the time to chat with us amidst all of these responsibilities personally and professionally.

We'd love to ask, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you?

It can be your mom, but we ask that maybe it's a bit not your mom, more of a professional mentor.

So it would absolutely be my mom, but I will answer, I will answer with someone else. Oh man, there are a lot of them. And it's funny, the mentors, because people just kind of, they don't even, you know, really realize what they're kind of doing. You know, I have to go back back to like my 7th grade English teacher, honestly, because this post was responsible for the sort of my school's newsletter. I was in her English class and she probably needed help setting up the printer or something, and I still remember that as a moment that was very consequential.

Thank you so much, Jessica, for sharing all of your wisdom and tidbits around founding the Information and your story today.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please like and subscribe. Stay tuned for next week's inspiring guest airing Tuesdays at 7 AM Pacific. See you soon.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.