From Stitch Fix to AI Search with Daydream Founder Julie Bornstein | Inside Summit 2025 [LIVE]

I'm searching for a revenge dress for a wedding in Paris with a Saltburn vibe. The reality is that it was very hard to get people to think about search in a different way. And then once ChatGPT launched, it was like instantly retraining everyone. And so that was the moment where I was like, okay, we're not going to do what I thought we were at Pinterest. And then search was like becoming so interesting now. And then the straw that broke the camel's back becoming a founder again was my husband saying, someone's going to build this. And if it's not you, it's really going to Welcome back to Season 13 of The Room Podcast.

Claudia, can you believe we've been doing this this long?

No, it's been 5 years. So many episodes, so many incredible conversations telling the stories of some of the world's most iconic founders and funders. And whether our listeners are new for the first time today or have been with us from Season 1, we're so grateful for the community we've built.

Completely. We've had the mission to open the door to the room where it happens for those entire 5 years. And have been able to do so over 120 episodes with hard-earned lessons from some of the top technology and consumer founders of our time.

And we've been through a lot personally as well.

We have indeed.

I built, scaled, sold my startup Priv. You were our first investor, so you've been there through the entire journey. And you've also recently graduated from HBS. You're now building at Vercel. And through it all, we've brought the funder and founder perspective.

Yeah, it's really been an incredible journey, and I'm thrilled that I'm back full-time in San Francisco, and we're probably here to stay. Uh, that means that there's more for us in terms of growth, both inside and outside of the physical room. But what's important to have really out there is these stories. And we've been able to do so over incredible guests from the CEO and founders of Flexport, Perplexity, Particle, Zapier, Zillow, Vanta. I could go on. These guests and their enterprises have generated over $100 billion enterprise value and really, frankly, moved the markets.

And growing, especially in 2025 with everything that's going on in AI. So I'm so excited to share Season 13 stories that are maybe a little bit more AI-focused than past seasons.

Absolutely.

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On the last episode of 2025 for The Room podcast, we close out with our final session of Inside Summit. Claudia and I had the pleasure of welcoming Julie Bornstein back into the room, this time with Daydream. Daydream is building the intent layer of fashion commerce sitting between consumers and retailers to reduce overwhelm and improve decision-making when shopping. Julie has spent over two decades building the digital commerce experiences that have become industry standards. Often years before the rest of the industry caught up. She helped launch Nordstrom.com back in 2000, went on to redefine loyalty, mobile, and social shopping as Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Sephora, and later scaled Stitch Fix past $1 billion in revenue as COO. She pioneered the blend of human taste and algorithms before AI was even a buzzword. In 2018, Julie stepped into the founder seat herself, launching the Yes a personalized fashion discovery platform acquired by Pinterest in 2022. You could hear about this company and her early career story on that episode of The Room Podcast from Season 6. However, at this year's INSIDE Summit, we dove into the decision-making process of getting back into the founder arena with Daydream. Along the way, Julie has served on the boards of household consumer brands such as Weight Watchers and Sweetgreen. She invests and advises a wide range of consumer and technology startups and naturally holds a BA and MBA from Harvard. Key insights and themes in this episode include how consumer search has shifted from retrieval to interpretation, abundance, not access, being the modern bottleneck of the web, and ultimately how to build for AI-native commerce. Let's open the door.

First of all, thank you so much for joining us here today in the room.

My pleasure.

We have a classic opening question. And so where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in Syracuse, New York. Really?

Let's go! Shout out!

So I've never had a— I've never had a like—

That's mine for Syracuse.

Woo! Yeah, exactly. Cold and boring is how I would summarize it. And pre-internet because I'm old. And I spent literally from like 8 to 12, I spent every Saturday at the roller rink. Which, by the way, was a great way to spend my childhood. And my daughter who lives in New York just told me that there's a roller rink in Brooklyn that has amazing themed sort of roller—

Yeah.

So we're going to do that at some point. After I turned 12, I spent the rest of my free time in the mall. I was doing search before I realized what search was. I would get my Seventeen magazine. I would try and go find the Liz Claiborne purse that I couldn't wait to buy. And it wasn't there. And I would have to wait many months. But I would say that it was definitely a very middle America place to live. And the mall was very much the place to be. That amongst a few other things very much shaped me.

Amazing.

Yeah.

We're gonna touch on the mall again, especially the digital one. But before we go down that path, today you are a founder, you're a twice-over founder. Did you always think you were gonna become one?

Yes.

When I was little, I wanted to be Gloria Vanderbilt.

Nice.

The biggest dilemma I had, first of all, my Gloria Vanderbilts were like, I laid 'em out. I literally remember for the first day of 5th grade. I always had lots of ideas, as many, I think, female entrepreneurs did, like made and sold stuff when I was a kid. In those days, it was like these ribbon barrettes. I think I didn't know entrepreneurialism as it exists today did not exist anywhere near the— even when I grad— I graduated from college in '92 and there were no capital markets for young founders. It wasn't 'cause I was a woman, it was, it just didn't exist. Like no one, the first company that I had heard of was CNET. And it was like '93, 94, one of my friends moved out to San Francisco to go work there and we were all like, what? Where are you going? And then email became a thing and then the world changed.

The world changed right as you were moving to Seattle in the late '90s, early 2000s, and you found yourself working at Nordstrom, which began your career in retail all the way through to before starting the Yes with Stitch Fix. So you've really seen digital e-commerce at its inception. Talk us through a little bit about how some of those insights have shaped what you're doing today or what your learnings were from that period of career?

I remember when Amazon went live in 1996 and like where I was sitting and I was like, this is going to be it.

Same. Yeah.

And I have to do this with fashion. It took me a few years to get there. Books are great. Love to read. But I sort of felt like this is now going to unleash a whole new world where we do everything and buy everything. And so the opportunity just was so exciting to me. And then I moved to Seattle because my husband actually was working for Amazon. I basically spent about 6 months trying to convince Dan Nordstrom to hire me. So he was trying to start Nordstrom.com, didn't really know what he needed. Took a little while, but eventually, yeah, I got there. And what I would say is having spent since 1999 focused on e-commerce, there were so many things in the early days that we wanted to do that we couldn't. And so everybody was seeing the exact same thing and it was really hard to build anything. It just took a long time. Like the tech was just hard and we had to do a lot of things very manually. And so it's been really fun to be a part of this sort of journey because I feel like I'm chasing technology. Like as soon as a new thing emerges and we can do it, then I'm like, okay, how do we apply it to shopping and fashion or at Sephora and beauty? And so it's been really fun, especially being out in the Bay Area where all the tech comes first and you hear about it. It's funny, the Harvard Business School faculty, a group came out to San Francisco recently and they were like, we just feel so out of it in Boston. Like, how do we— you guys just know so much more. You're so dialed in. And it's true. It's like just in any conversation you have, people are thinking about this and you're hearing about it. And so it's been, I would say, a great place to be to get access to technology early.

Your curiosity and passion for shopping e-commerce retail has been a through line in your career, but it's manifested in different ways. With Stitch Fix, it was styling and algorithms. With The Yes, it was social discovery. And now with Daydream, which we'll dig into a little bit more shortly, you're looking at pure AI intent of fashion and what people should be buying. There's been clearly a philosophical evolution across the three companies. Tell us a little bit more about that journey and ultimately why you are so excited about Daydream.

Well, I've always been actually most obsessed with search because myself as a shopper, like a very focused shopper, I have an intent, whether it's like I have this event that I need something for, or like I need a navy blue cardigan and I want to find the best version. And search is a really hard problem to solve. Search also didn't feel robust enough until ChatGPT launched, and suddenly this idea of being able to ask anything that you want, as opposed to, like, needing to know what the name of something was to be able to find it, basically, or how it was categorized on a site. Stitch Fix was super interesting because a guy named Eric Colson, who had built the algorithms for Netflix, was our chief data scientist, and spending time with him and learning about the data science side of building algorithms around fashion was really interesting, and I loved that. And there were so many great things about Stitch Fix, but at the end of the day, Stitch Fix actually works best for people who aren't particularly fashion lovers. It's actually really good for a customer who doesn't want to go out and necessarily shop for herself. And it was that customer that's more of the fashion enthusiast is much harder to send 5 items to and get it right. And so what I found there was that there was a lot of law of averages in the way that we were like building our algorithms. And also when you own the inventory yourself, which is the model that Stitch Fix is, it's just much more limiting. But it gave me a lot of the ideas around building The Yes, my next company, which basically was more of a fashion recommendation engine built off of other people's product, but for fashion enthusiasts. I can't even remember the question. I'm like now talking, I'm like, I have no idea if I just answered the question.

Yeah. They go, you absolutely did. And it's been incredible to hear your thesis and clearly the passion behind it. Let's dig into the yes a little bit. As Madison mentioned in your intro, it was acquired by Pinterest, an incredible place to shop and discover. Tell us a little bit more about your decision to get back into the founder arena and start Daydream.

It's very tied to the story that happened with the acquisition with Pinterest. So we were acquired when Ben Silberman, who's the founder of Pinterest, was the CEO, and he had wanted to make Pinterest more commerce-enabled and had been trying a number of things for many years. And he and I had met many times, and so he was following along the Yes Journey and basically reached out to us and said, "Super interested in what you've built. It's clearly built with so much love and like understanding of the consumer." He really liked the app and we started talking and we ended up doing this deal. And the idea was to go in and build basically this new business unit that was e-commerce really at Pinterest. And then he stepped down and a new CEO came in and that CEO had just had a different vision and really felt like he wanted to double down on the ads business. And while he was interested in shopping, he was much more interested in the ads model to sort of drive shopping. And so it really changed the direction of the company, you know, of what we were planning to do. And so after sticking with the commitment to helping Pinterest, the whole team went over. So we found the right roles for everyone and we spent some time building and then unwinding. And as these crazy M&A things can go, and then ChatGPT launched. So I was like, wait, First of all, it's amazing. But also, one of the things that I was really interested in with the Yes that we couldn't get customers to do was to think about search more broadly. And rather than doing red dress, to actually, like, be able to give a whole prompt, like, I am searching for a revenge dress for a wedding in Paris, which is my favorite prompt that someone searched. Oh, God.

Yeah.

And it was actually, I'm searching for a revenge dress for a wedding in Paris with a Saltburn vibe. Oh, so great.

Google could never handle.

And so the reality is that it was very hard to get people to think about search in a different way. And then once ChatGPT launched, it was like instantly retraining everyone. And so that was the moment where I was like, okay, we're not going to do what I thought we were at Pinterest. And then search was like becoming so interesting now. And then the straw that broke the camel's back becoming a founder again was my husband saying, someone's going to build this. And if it's not you, it's really going to bother you. And I was like, yes, So true. Also, my youngest went to college and suddenly I found myself with more time than I had ever had, which depending on where you are in your not yet having children, having children, or having your children, you know, leave, very different things. But I really had so much energy and enthusiasm and I clearly am obsessed with this subject matter. And so, yeah, I'm very glad I decided to do it, but it has been— I thought the second time would be easier and it's been harder.

Interesting. Daydream is really a layer between consumers and retailers, solving a ton of really important problems for consumers. But I'd love to peel back the onion a little bit more around the product and then also the dynamic between working with retailers and consumers. How do you navigate that dynamic without getting squeezed out?

The product itself is really focused on understanding the context of your request. So what we found is that most people have 2 or 3 different components to a prompt. The example I gave you is like, it's asking for a vibe, it's asking for a dress, and then it's asking for a location. Oftentimes people will say like, what should I wear to this kind of thing? We're still in beta and we have a new product releasing in a few weeks and it's sort of understanding and getting a really good answer back with product results. That are not just relevant to the query, but also relevant to the user because we have so many brands, like we have Uniqlo and we have Gucci. And so when you have over a million styles, it's very overwhelming. And I've always said to my team, like, if you're going to do personalization, you need a huge assortment. But if you're going to have a huge assortment, you better do personalization well because it's just overwhelming otherwise. And overwhelm is the problem on the web in general. That's why people are so excited that they don't have to go search through Google for all these articles. They can just now go to ChatGPT and get the article summarized. Just the content is insane. And same with e-commerce, like in the early days and when I was starting Nordstrom, it was like trying to convince brands to sell online. And now it's like, how many brands are there? There are like, I don't know, 50,000 fashion brands, probably more, 100,000 fashion brands. That problem of overwhelm is a hard one to solve. And the product that we're building is anchored around being able to understand you, the user, and also understand the product catalog of the world. And being able to match those really well. And then we have so many ideas of how to extend the product once we get the search working really well. I would say on the brand side and the relationship with brands and retailers is interesting because the retailers are so overexposed to Google and Facebook and, or Meta, in terms of their ad spend. And they're all looking for new customers. They're fairly big, mature businesses at this point. And so they're looking for additional sources of growth. They're also looking to learn and they're interested in what GenAI is gonna do for them. How search is going to change. And so they benefit from having an additional source of new customers that are, as opposed to most standard affiliates that are focused on discounts and that kind of thing, we're actually just focused on getting you the right product. And we're not an ads business. We only make money if you end up buying something. It's a commission-based business. And so we are incented to show the customer the best products for them. And that sort of serves the retailers and brands well too. And for the most part, they know us, they trust us, and They're learning alongside us.

You mentioned this problem today of being overwhelmed by how much is out there. And I think that's a little bit different than the Stitch Fix problem where regardless of where you are on loving fashion and spending a lot of time with it versus not really knowing what to wear, the problem of being overwhelmed runs across the spectrum. Tell us a little bit more about who your core customer is.

Ultimately, we will have a very broad customer base. When you're doing a startup, you need to pick a core customer and you need to focus on that customer and the customer that we're focused on is a millennial who is interested in fashion and engaged in the category and a woman. We have women's and men's, and the reason we chose that as our sort of target customer is because young people aspire up and older people aspire down. Men trust women when it comes to fashion. And so if it works for her, then, you know, we see it ultimately working for everyone.

I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into your fundraising journey for Daydream. You've raised over $50 million from incredible funds, whether it's Forerunner, Index, Google Ventures, True, the list goes on. Tell us a little bit more about who was the first to say yes to your vision of Daydream.

Kirsten Green at Forerunner. She was an investor, but to give John Callahan some credit, the truth is that I just happened to talk to Kirsten first. But when I talked to John, he was like, great, you know? So they were both investors in my first company. We had pretty well-formed relationship, and I think they were both interested in the problem space. A lot because of what we saw at The Yes and what they learned through that. And also, obviously, they trusted me because we had worked together before. It's really great to have preexisting relationships. And then Google Ventures and Index were new relationships.

The theme of the long-term relationship has very much been a consistent thread throughout today's conversations. And sometimes your long-term relationships are what get you through tricky times as a founder. And we know that the path is not always a straight line. Tell us a little bit more about something that was unexpected or challenging that has happened in the early Daydream journey and how you overcame that?

There are a lot. I'm trying to think of which one I should choose. I think the most important part of building a business is your team and having the right people on the team. And Alyssa, my chief recruiter, someone who wears many other hats and who I've worked with in many companies, is here. But I feel like the stat is something like 50% of people you hire work out. I don't know if it's probably better than that, but the truth is that if you hire people that you know and you've worked with before, then you're in good shape, which is Alyssa. But when you're hiring new people or you're working with new people, it's just really hard to know. And hopefully AI can figure out how to solve this problem for us and like really do that interview that works and proves itself out. I'm super excited for that, to be honest. But just getting the right team is everything. And I would say I didn't get the right team up front and it really slowed us down and it's painful. It's painful to not get where you want to go with the product and it's painful to have to part ways with early co-founders and other employees who, you know, bet on you and agreed to come on and stuff. So I would say the like people side of things is the hardest.

Claudia and I got very lucky. This is the first time we officially worked together in starting the podcast and it has worked out. I also got the chance to invest in her company and that also worked out. But we got really lucky. And I think what I've learned being on the inside of this partnership is that it would've been really tough if we had gotten this wrong.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

I'm glad we're on the right side of the 50%.

I know we text like every day.

You talk every day.

So that super resonates. I guess as we look towards the future of Daydream, as you're in the early innings of building in this broader space that's rapidly changing under your feet, the prosumer model has been one that was not really appreciated for a number of years because honestly, people weren't willing to pay for individual productivity apps or other consumer experiences. But I feel that's really shifted in terms of AI end-user willingness to pay. So I'm curious how that's informed your decisions around Daydream's business model.

My feeling is that we'll have to see what our business model is ultimately. Definitely think that there's going to be an opportunity potentially to charge some kind of subscription because of what it takes to build. But I feel like in the early days, we just want users and we want to learn. We set up this sort of commission structure where we get paid when we drive a sale.

That makes a ton of sense. I guess we talked a little bit about retailers, which are a key stakeholder in your ecosystem, and you alluded to this, but they've been so indexed on Google's crawler. Retailers and traditional SEO as the ability to drive their business. But of course, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Daydream are shifting this away from actually that being where you find these insights. If AI-powered shopping tools are the future, should retailers be thinking differently about their site architecture?

For sure. But I don't think we know exactly what they should be doing yet. You can just search on ChatGPT and say, like, how do I make my site most indexable for ChatGPT? And it'll tell you. And I think that there are are a lot of structural things that are going to help, but I think it's not totally clear. Like, they're now starting to be a couple companies pitching themselves as being able to help retailers show up better. But yeah, I think we're just in the early innings and I don't think people know how to do it yet.

No, I think it's a really evolving question. It's definitely something at Vercel we're thinking a lot about. We were a part of the server-side rendering revolution and how that shifted the way that retailers support their front-end loading. And we have seen that that's already shifting with AI and we believe it will continue to shift. And so I guess if you had any advice that you've learned maybe from asking ChatGPT or in building your product? How can you make anything you're building today more search engine friendly in the LLM world?

Go ask that question to ChatGPT. Great.

Perfect. We'll do that.

And answer as well as they can.

That's totally fine. They know a lot, those models. So I guess maybe a bit of a futurist question for us. If every retailer has perfectly optimized their websites to be readable by AI shopping tools, does that hurt Daydream? Or where does our value shift in terms of shoppers?

It definitely doesn't hurt Daydream. One of the things that you need to do is not just be able to access a site, but then you need to basically augment the information that the site has about the product. So we're really focused on product enrichment. So we get whatever the text details and the image details are of the site, but that's not enough. And so, you know, we're using LLMs to basically enrich our understanding of the product and understand how to translate our understanding of a product to the way a user talks and describes and asks for things. So we have kind of this model where we think about what we're seeing users ask for, the words that they use and how they describe things. And then we need to basically make that map to product. So our focus is not just about getting access to the content, it's about what you do with it. And so we're just spending all this time going super deep on this vertical so that we truly understand, like, is that dress good for speaking engagement? Is it good for winter or summer or fall? Is it good for someone who these kind of silhouette. There's just so much nuance to it that I think the level of detail— it's interesting, I was with a bunch of Google people last night and they were telling me Google's never going to go to this level of detail on building because they have so many other billion-dollar businesses that they're focused on and it's just not their focus. And it was actually a company that's spinning out, that spun out recently of Google because it's sort of another startup that's using AI. It's actually really interesting. It's called Owl and they're building AI referees who can make calls on plays in sports. They'll be there to augment the real referee, but it'll make a call so that it's less debatable. And so, that is something that was Google technology that was built inside of Google. They decided they weren't going to do something with it, so they spun it out, and now it's a startup. And so, I think that there are lots of capabilities that these huge tech companies could theoretically do, but the question of if they decide to do it and if they put the focus to it, I think is a different question.

Absolutely.

And speaking of that, there's all these model providers now, including Google having one too. I guess for you guys, have you hitched your wagon of Daydream to a specific LLM, or how have you thought about interoperability in regards to them changing so quickly amongst the LLMs?

So—

Absolutely not. We have basically a model where we're constantly testing new models.

I was gonna say.

Pretty much anyone who's like, uh, their business is an application layer on top of these LLMs realizes you need to use multiple models. And the truth is, even we have like this ensemble of mini models that understands things like like color and fabric. And we get really specific. And even for each of those models, we test them against like multiple Gemini models and ChatGPT models and constantly testing with new models. And we use multiple models.

I'm really excited for that. I did not realize this dress was jersey material when I got it, and I was a little bit disappointed. That's not the vibe I actually wanted for today, but here we are. I didn't have— although it's so cute, but it's one of those things where like it's hard to tell online. If I had known that it wasn't, maybe I wouldn't have bought it. So it's just super helpful to have. This is a bit of my like hot take question, but you're working with so many different players in the ecosystem. And of course, like a cloud provider is another key partner of yours. Have you seen or do you feel short any of the cloud providers as it relates to this e-commerce experience? I know, for example, when I was at Gap, we would never have worked with AWS. There was this fear of them and like being the conglomerate. We were an Azure shop, but like, oh, that had its problems. So just how have you been thinking about that for retailers?

I think Amazon is phenomenal. Andy Jassy is a friend from business school.

Wow.

Okay.

And he's nice.

Deep cut.

Always incredibly generous with offering whatever services they need. Need. But I do think that if you're a retailer, being on another cloud provider is understandable. And we've had a lot of success working with Google, but in part because we have ex-Googlers on our team who know how to take advantage of it, make the most of it. And Google Ventures is one of our investors. We have a lot of reason to be working with Google in that case.

Yeah. Yeah. It's nice to have a buffet.

They all do what you need to do. And so the question is really each company that's making a decision about who to work with has different factors that they're making that decision around.

And back to your early point about team, like hiring people who perhaps have preferences, know how to fine-tune to a particular cloud's advantages could be something that's something to think about in the room.

Would you consider Daydream AI-native?

And if so or if not, what does that mean to you?

I would. And the reason that I do is because we started post-LLM and our whole business is based on on leveraging AI. And so it's interesting because I was talking to another portfolio company of True Ventures— I'm pointing to True Ventures, yes, Caroline— and it was Amy from Madison McIlwain. It's a consumer product, it's not a tech product, but still. And then we recently also got together with a bunch of other founders, and I think that any company that was built pre-maybe 2023, even when I think about The Yes, we— the way we built The Yes was completely different from how we built Daydream. And there's a lot of similarities in the businesses. They're different fundamental models, but totally different tech stack. Always the case with technology, like the newest player has the advantage of building on the latest tech, and that allows you to move faster and be more nimble. The sort of challenge that I gave the team is like, how do we build in a way that in 5 years we're not the old, out-of-date? And I do think that's a huge challenge for anyone building tech. But the questions that the teams were asking about how to leverage AI in the way they work aren't even things we think about.

The past couple of years have been big years in terms of just how AI has evolved pretty much everything. And so I'd love to look forward a little bit now. Let's say everything went right with Daydream, which it will, of course. Where would we be as consumers in, call it, 5, 10 years? Are we still shopping shoppable grids? Has the paradigm completely shifted? Is there gonna be a stepwise function change in consuming retail?

I'll tell you my little vision, but what I would say is I know it's not going far enough, and if I truly knew where it was going, I'd be worth a lot more, let's just say. But what I envision is we think about the capabilities that we're building as really a stylist in your pocket. So I'm assuming you still have a phone. I know OpenAI is working on a new device, but I think that if you're replenishing your Lucky Charms, I don't know why I said that. I do love Lucky Charms, but you don't necessarily need to see a picture of it. But if you're doing something that's more aesthetic, you wanna see a photo. So a little device that doesn't have that, and I'm super bearish on virtual reality. I should just say that, like, I do not think in 5 years we're gonna be walking around with glasses that's doing everything for us. Partially, I hate that thought. It makes me really upset. And so I like to believe what I want to happen. But I do think it'll be— you pull out your phone, you say, I have a speaking engagement in 2 weeks, give me a couple of ideas what to wear. And literally up will pop a couple of different outfit ideas. You're wearing them all, right? So the virtual model piece, I think, will become universal and you get to flip through and see what it is and say, great, send me that. And that's it. You don't have to go through checkout. You don't have to look through a million things because you have basically built a relationship with Daydream where we have now understood enough about you where we understand what you're gonna like and what you're not and know how to push you a little bit and make you look a little bit better than you might do if you were just on your own. And I also think there could be a notification that says, "Hey, you have this event that's coming up. Do you have something to wear? Do you want some ideas?" "Yes, I have some ideas. Send them to me." You can like flip through and then you can say, "Yeah, that one, send it to me." to me.

It's incredible even to hear in your answer how the fundamentals of how e-commerce infrastructure have evolved over the past few years, whether it's payments to notifications, laddering up to this new world. Let's shift gears a little bit. We have a ton of builders, founders under 35. What advice do you have for them?

If you're young and a first-time, one of the things that is very helpful when running a business, and I've seen this go well and not well, is having had experience working for a company before you're actually starting your own company. So when people want start companies outta college. Some have done so very successfully. I just feel like it's very hard to grow with your business because you actually have no model that you're basing it off of. And it's very, very hard to replace experience. You can ask people for advice all you want and you should. And that's, I think my second piece of advice is find some people who are expert in the space that you're working in and engage with them and convince them to be advisors to you. Because that is so hugely valuable. There's huge value in getting experience working for other people. I think seeing what good and what bad looks like in managers and leadership is helpful. I think bad is stuff, you know, not to do, right? You're like, oh shit, my boss sucked at that. I am never gonna do that. I remember I had a boss who literally was like, I would like you to show up every week in our one-on-one with a binder. I want everything three-hole punched. Arranged so I can put the things that you want to give me in my binder. It was like this crazy organization system. Eventually the guy left and I was like, thank God. And he was a very nice guy, but not the way I felt being managed was getting the best out of me. And I also worked for someone who was a single mom who adopted a baby while I was working for her and who wrote my recommendation to Harvard Business School. And she was such a good role model on so many levels. And so I just think there's so much value in getting experience, both seeing how companies are run and learning about different ways of managing and leading people. So, I would say soak up as much experience as you can before you go to start your own thing. And then once you do start your own thing, find some people who are really inspiring to help be advisors to you.

Sometimes you have to see excellence to be excellent. We're gonna ask the last question, hero question of the pod. You're probably familiar with this one. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on your career, maybe in the last 10 I would say Katrina, who I worked for at Stitch Fix.

First, I was on her board, and then I went and worked for her. And I would say it's a combination of things that I thought were great and things that I thought were really great learning opportunities. She was very young when she started Stitch Fix. She was very bold and she had strong conviction, and she was able to stay really focused on what mattered to make that business work in the early days. And it was really fun to watch and really fun to be a part of. And I learned a lot by being a part of that company, which she built, and I learned a lot of things from watching her too.

Wow.

Yeah.

Incredible. Julie, thank you so much for joining us in the room, physical room today. It's been a pleasure having you.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast.

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Grants.

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