Season 2 Episode 1: Amy Chang of Accompany

¡Hola! 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. A Texas native and now California transplant who came to Stanford for Electrical Engineering in 1996, Amy Chang is full of charisma and charmed us with the stories of her journey to founder. Chang started her career in hardware at Intel, AMD, and Motorola before joining McKinsey and eventually eBay, where she led product for paid search and affiliate channels. At Google, she created what became Google Analytics and grew the product to over 86% of the web. Deciding the marginal growth from 86% of analytical domination to 90% wasn't terribly exciting, Chang left Google to build A Company. Think, would you accompany me for a walk? A Company was a relationship intelligence platform for professionals who served Fortune 500 financial and professional services clients on their people and company data needs. Originally backed by Cowboy Ventures, CRV, and Ignition Partners, Amy raised a total of $40 million in venture funding. In May of 2018, A Company was bought by Cisco. For $277 million.

Not bad.

Amy previously had served on the board of Cisco, Splunk, and Informatica, which encompasses over a half a trillion dollars in total market cap. Today, she sits on the board of Procter Gamble. As a first-time founder and longtime product guru, Amy eloquently shared the ups and downs of transitioning from big tech to build— to being your own boss. In today's episode, we explore themes and insights such as the power of early career decisions, Battling anxiety and uncertainty in building a company. And what are the right reasons to sell your company? Let's open the door.

We actually love to start our podcasts kind of at the beginning where you, you grew up and, and what brought you into the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And so with you, you grew up in Austin, Texas and then came out to California for school at Stanford where you studied electrical engineering. Did you ever think that you'd become a founder?

No, I, I, that was not something that kind of was in the cards at that point. I mean, it was, you know, when you're that age, you kind of just think, "Oh, what am I gonna do next year or even next month?" Not really, you know, years from then. And I didn't, growing up in Austin, it wasn't like being a founder was this known thing that you did, right? So not at that time. Now it might be.

After McKinsey, you went to lead product for paid search and affiliate channels at eBay. And then became global head of product for Google Ads Measurement for 7 years, growing Google Analytics to serve over 86% of the entire web, which is crazy. Tell us what it was like being at eBay during this incredibly high growth period and then switching immediately over to Google during 7 of its heyday years.

Well, eBay, it's funny because eBay was so community-driven at the time, and that's what was so sexy about it was they were doing such a good job pulling in buyers and sellers and creating that initial kind of community feel. I mean, they were pioneers for that and it was fabulous, it really was. But the thing I realized, so there was this quarter when eBay hit a point when our German growth kind of slowed and Germany was always a bellwether for how the US was gonna look a quarter to two quarters later, right? And I was managing the paid search and affiliates channels. So I'm watching this leveling off and it warranted deeper study, right? I'll put it that way. As I was looking at it, it became very clear that I should be on the supply side of this equation, not the demand side. So paid search, I mean, if you looked at eBay and all e-commerce players' dependence on paid search, right, at that point in time, it was just starting to hit that point when it was going to break wide open and it was already a very well-known channel, but the dependence that was going to come to be wasn't fully present yet, right? And I just, in studying these patterns, it just became really clear I should go to Google or Yahoo. So I interviewed at both, I got offers at both, and Yahoo was really like, they knew how to roll out the red carpet. Jeff Weiner was still running Yahoo Search then, and he is very persuasive. And it was really hard to decide between Yahoo and Google. I just decided I'm gonna go sit on campus. For 2 hours on each campus. Nobody can kick you off the outside. They cannot let you in the building, but they can't keep you from going and sitting on the campus. So I went and I sat there and I was kind of watching people's facial expressions 'cause I was just looking to see how it felt to be there, right? And I kind of wanted a gut instinct call on how I thought it would feel, what the energy of the place was like. And people at Google were talking to each other almost as if it was a college campus. Like they were, you know, in heated debate but laughing and they were animated. An energy to the place. It felt really like a college campus, right? And you could tell ideas were being explored. It was, it was alive. And then I went to the Yahoo campus and I sat outside and it was just a lot more subdued. It felt corporate, right? And I decided, okay, I, I'm just gonna go to Google and roll the dice and we'll see how it goes. And that's how I ended up at Google.

You took that leap of faith and can you tell us what year that was when you picked between Yahoo and Google?

That was '05.

Google had gone public by then, but the writing wasn't on the wall that Yahoo wasn't gonna make it.

It was unclear that Google was gonna pull away the way it had, right? Yahoo was number 2, Google was number 1, but it was, it was a fight still then. It was very much still in contention.

How did you view your role then once you did get landed on a team at Google and then made that decision? Um, you know, you spent 7 years there, which in Silicon Valley is no small amount of time. What did you get to do?

Well, I didn't get landed on a team. I actually, I spent my first few days just trying to get acclimated, right? And then I had a one-on-one with my boss who was one of the very, very early Googlers who was running product management. And he had this idea that there should be a ratings and review kind of extensible system that applied to any reviewable object in the world that should exist at Google and that we should build. And I kind of went, "Oh, okay. Well, what team is working on this that I should work with?" And he's like, "Oh no, you're the team. You go figure this out." But I don't, there's not a team. I mean, I don't know. You can find people who want to work with you on this. Go figure it out. And that was our entire one-on-one. And it was like a 2-minute one-on-one and he was really busy. So he just, he knew this needed to exist and he was like, "I'll hand it off to this new person and see what she can do with it. Okay, bye." So I call my husband after that one-on-one and I'm like, "Get ready for me to be fired my second week in the job." And my husband's like, "You're not gonna be fired. I'm sure it's not that bad." And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no, it is that bad. I have no freaking clue how to do this, right? I've never done this before. I don't know anybody here. I don't even know where to start. Like, I know like 5 people at this company. How am I supposed to recruit people to work on this with me? How do I even do that? Am I even allowed to do that?" "Like who's working on this already?" And there were 1,000 questions, right? He basically said, "Okay, just calm down. Just, you know, maybe start with your team. Go ask people if they know if an effort like this has happened before and we'll start there, but you're not gonna get fired, it's gonna be fine." And meanwhile I'm thinking, "Okay, well don't quit your job at McKinsey," because that's where we met, because one of us needs to be able to pay the rent. So I went and just started hunting down who would know something about this. And I will tell you, there were 4 or 5 teams that had come and gone and died. Trying to do this because, okay, the long story short is you cannot build a fully extensible ratings review system when you don't know what you're rating 'cause it's a crappy user experience if it's generalized in that way. Okay, so that's the gist of it, but didn't know that a priori. So anyway, started searching for people who would work on this with me. And I think I asked, I don't know, like 20 people and they were all saying, "Oh, I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole. Like we've seen these dead bodies come and go. Like I don't want any part of that." So now I'm thinking, great, I've been left with this dead body project that nobody wants, nobody wants to work on and is basically radioactive. And then finally I came upon a resource at Google that was a very kind of sexy resource, but hard to get. And it was the staff engineers. They're self-allocating. So they are some of the most expert talent in the world at whatever their field of study is, okay? And Google basically pulls these PhDs in because They're the best in their field and we want their brains there, but they're self-allocating. So they get to decide whatever the hell they want to work on, that's what they work on. And that's a beautiful thing. So I found this one guy and later he would become my CTO and co-founder for our startup. But I found this one guy who had launched ratings and reviews on movies and movie showtimes and stuff by himself as a one-man band onto Google Search. And it was a really great product and already really widely used. And he just did this in his spare time as kind of a pet project, right? And I'm thinking, that's the guy. So I write him this long, like, angstily crafted email where, you know, every single word I've thought about, and it took me hours to write this email, and it's paragraphs long, and I send it to him. And he writes back, "Sure, we can meet." And that's it. That's the entirety of his response. And we would later become best friends. Like, he is one of my dearest, dearest friends in the world. We got along and within a year we launched ratings and reviews for our products-based search and purchasing, right? Google Checkout was what we launched it for. And we, like, those are the patents that we still hold together today. Then the same boss I had came and said, "Okay, great. Now that that's launched, there's something else that we would love for you to do. We've bought this little company called Urchin and we need to integrate it into Google infrastructure." "Like, it just needs to be part of the whole Google ecosystem." So I was like, "Oh, okay, what is it?" And he said, "Oh, it's analytics on websites." And I was like, "Oh, that sounds kind of dry." 'Cause you have to imagine, I mean, we do product search, we do YouTube, we do Maps, like we do super sexy stuff at Google, right? And I'm like, "Analytics, like measurement, that does not sound that sexy." I got to interview a couple of the customers and here's what I realized. The only solutions that were in the marketplace then were Omniture, CoreMetrics, and really expensive solutions. So we had this opportunity to take this technology, consumerize it, and really democratize data and make it free. And that was the thing is this was something that only the upper echelons could afford 'cause it was hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy one of these systems. But we could come and make it completely available to every SMB, every website owner, every publisher, every advertiser, right, on earth. And it could be free. So that kind of lit up my imagination. And so that was the beginning of Google Analytics and it was like 4 core engineers and myself as the only product person when we started.

It's always so interesting hearing the early days of these products and institutions that are just so obviously, no, but it's Google Analytics, of course it's huge. But to hear that, yeah, that's the definition of high growth right there.

Going from 4 team members to hundreds in a matter of years internally inside an already public company.

We had our own everything. We had our own designers, we had our own copywriters, we had our own translators, we had our own set of everything. And it was like being a very well-funded startup with phenomenal distribution inside of a large company with margins where you basically printed money in the back. It was beautiful. But at some point you start to wonder to yourself, "Could I do this outside of Google? Could I do this without the mothership backing me up?" That's what drove you to start eventually a company.

And we've actually had this, a theme that we've talked a little bit about. You mentioned quit while you're at the top, right? You're at the top of Google or at the high of your career. Why would anyone leave? You did, and it's, it's kind of that itch you just described that you're trying to scratch. Dive in a little bit more into that thought process of going to your husband and saying, hey, I know Google is doing incredible, but I think I'm gonna quit and start something else.

That was the hardest decision I ever made because I So I have these wonderful parents who are immigrants, right, from Taiwan. And they, the thing when you come in completely new to the country, when you don't have any backup, is you're looking for financial security for your family and for yourself. And when you find that security, it's very, very hard to give up, to go take a complete risk where something is unknown and not alive, not an entity yet. So my poor mother, I almost gave her a heart attack when I told her, "Ma." I'm gonna leave Google and I'm gonna start my own company. She was like, what? So, uh, yeah, my poor Chinese mom completely just flipped out and she was like, oh, that's— no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's so risky. It's, it's terrible risk. I, I don't think you should do that. You know, people would give their right arm for the position that you have at Google, and I see you two nodding here, right?

Yeah.

My poor mom is like, who's gonna fund you? Who's gonna follow you? What are you even gonna do? Do you even know if it's gonna make money? Like, how could you give up all this money on the table. What are you thinking? I wrestled with it because she was right. I mean, it was a great position. I loved the team. I'd put together most of the team and had deep affection for this team. But at the end of the day, I'm thinking, well, what's the difference between 86% and 92% market share? I mean, really, what's the difference? Is this it? Am I gonna be here for 10, 20, 30 years? Am I at Leifer here? And it just didn't sit well with me. But I think to your point, Madison, the 20th time I woke my poor husband up at night at like 3:00 AM, you know, thinking, "Honey, should I? Should I quit? Do you think it's okay if I quit? I don't know." And I'm struggling with it. And he's like, "Oh my gosh, okay. I love you. We're never gonna go hungry. You've already decided. Let's not wake up at 3:00 AM anymore. You should go in tomorrow and you should resign and it'll be okay." Right? And I'm like, "No, no, no, they may never forgive me for this. Like the team depends on me." He's like, It'll be okay. You just go in tomorrow. You have this letter written. You've had it for like 2 months, right? Just go in with it. It'll be okay. It didn't go exactly the way I had planned, but I did end up starting the company a few months later when Matthias, my co-founder, was ready to leave too, 'cause he actually got his green card and citizenship while he was at Google. He was very lucky to do that. And then we were ready to start, but it was fantastic.

Tell us a little bit more about sort of the early process of you and Mattias sort of discussing a company and building that relationship with your co-founder to go out and build what became—

We, at that point, we were already best friends. So we were very lucky because Ratings and Reviews had been us together 12 to 15 hours a day for a year and a half. So we knew each other in the foxhole, like under duress. And he was very good friends with my husband too, because the three of us were co-founders together. And it was because, you know, for me, I was product sales, go-to-market, all of that. Matthias was CTO and Ryan was CFO. You know, I get a lot of questions from founders around, okay, well, how do I find a co-founder? And I will tell you, I don't know how you find someone you trust to that degree if you haven't seen them under duress and you haven't worked with them closely. I don't even know how to go about doing that.

It's a theme we're trying to tease out on the podcast because most of our guests have been co-founders and they have built their businesses with people they have trust alongside them. And it's It seems to be an integral part of the experience to have a team around you. And I, I think today there is this whole culture of co-founder dating and going and trying to find someone and these meetups and non-COVID times. And yeah, I think the most genuine stories have been like yours where you've worked alongside in the foxhole with these individuals and know they're gonna be able to work through it with you.

You just need to know what they look like when the stuff hits the fan.

Right?

Because then you really know somebody. What they look like under duress is them unvarnished.

You've taken this leap of faith, it sounds like, with, uh, Matthias and with your husband as well, which I don't think I knew that part of the story. And you said, all right, we're gonna get some venture backing for this. And spoiler for our listeners, you know, you eventually did go on to raise $40 million from incredible venture capitalists such as Cowboy Ventures and CRV. There's usually more to that pitch book story. So talk to us about the first check you got.

Well, the first check we got was a seed round for $5.6 million.

Sorry, $5.6 million for your seed round?

For our seed. And we got really lucky. You know, the, the thing while I was on sabbatical that I figured out was I wanted to understand what was happening outside of Google much more deeply. 'Cause there was, you were in a bubble. So I started meeting so many people, which led to more introductions, which led to more introductions. And I met, a couple VCs probably at almost every major firm. And the 1 or 2 that I gravitated to, I cultivated those relationships because they were interesting people I enjoyed being with. And so by the time it was time to fundraise, we already knew exactly which 4 or 5 people we wanted to enter that race. We knew each other well. Like, I had done the homework on them to know that they were decent humans under duress. And when companies failed, they didn't completely disappear and abandon the founders, which happens. One of them in particular, Devdutt, was very definitive with the term sheet, and he basically went, bam, like, here it is. Here's, you know, $5.6 million at a really generous valuation, and, you know, no weird preferences, no weird anything on the term sheet. Clean as a whistle. Here it is, right? And we took it. We took it and we ran with it.

When it came to building the Accompany product, after you had raised the funding, you were at it for a couple of years. What were some unexpected moments during the early product cycle?

Every week was an unexpected moment. The earliest instantiation of the product, what we wanted to do, 'cause we had felt this pain so acutely when we were trying to sell the enterprise version of Google Analytics, where we went into some meetings with customers, we weren't prepared. Like, we didn't know the people and their context well enough. We didn't know the company's context well enough, and we screwed things up pretty badly. I mean, I don't know if you've ever felt the blood rush from your neck up to your scalp in embarrassment. You're just like, dear Lord, please let the ground open up and swallow me, because I am so mortified right now. Please, could I just not be here anymore, right? So moment 6 of that, and I'm, I'm thinking to myself, my gosh, you know, my calendar is there. Is there no intelligence service that can take my calendar and create a daily digest and kind of update me. Like, can I not get notifications when one of my core customers goes through a massive reorg? Because it's not that hard to discern they're going through a massive reorg. It's like on the front page of the Times. You'd think that could get to me somehow. But there wasn't anything like that that existed. So that's what we built, right? That's the first instantiation of what we built. And then it became clear that we needed to build an entire data platform underneath that And we ended up with 300 million people, 20 million companies that we understood as entities. And we were always every nanosecond crawling for information on, and then we would update you on. And so it became an enterprise-grade product because it needed to be.

It's probably really easy to get lost in those daily things that you need to get done in building the product, where I think a lot of founders can get disheartened or impatient about the process of actually building out their vision. Do you have tactical advice to future founders or first-time founders on how to manage that process of executing against a broader strategy and vision while juggling so many hats on a day-to-day basis?

I do, I do. I actually think the thing, and there are several things, but one of the things I found most helpful was to pull up, right? So what I did was, and you have to put this in your calendar, the biggest mistake people make is they just keep saying, oh, I need to do this, I need to do this, and it stays at the bottom of the to-do list. 'Cause if you take this very simple 2x2, of urgency on one side and importance on the other side. The things that are urgent, whether they're important or not, are the ones that get done on a daily basis. The things that are non-urgent but crazy important, like your mid to long-term distribution strategy, for example, they're hairy topics to think about. Like you need a chunk of 4 to 6 hours to really get in there, immerse. But we actually booked these days once a month where I would either take, you know, our CTO or another person like our chief product officer or whomever, and we would go away for a day, an entire day, and we would devote the whole day to that topic. And every single month we had one where it was a deep dive, right? And materials would be prepped ahead of time, but if there was no one else I needed to deep dive with, it was a thinking day for me. And I think you have to just at any given time have a rolling 12 months blocked out once a month, a day, small blocks, and you never have thinking time. And that thinking time is how you don't miss the forest for the trees. Because otherwise you're just concentrating and moving and moving and reacting all the time instead of thinking. For me, that was always weirdly and counterintuitively the days I was gone on my public company board work were the days when I was immersed in someone else's business that was so far beyond our scale that would force me to think about, okay, well, when we get here, what will that have looked like? Do we have the right leadership in place? Does the leadership we have in place—

can you talk us through how you sort of thought about bringing advisors on formally or informally. Tell us more about who was in the room with you as you were building out this company and strategy.

I wanted people to call on who I, I just felt like would have more pattern matching, were further along the learning curve than I was in terms of having seen this situation repeatedly before, that I could benefit from their experience. And I specifically wanted people for where I was weak or where I didn't already know and have experience. And I had a few advisors like Godfrey Sullivan or Hillary Copeland McAdams who were so instrumental in helping me navigate those first few 7-figure deals because I'd never sold any before. We didn't even have any salespeople at the time. It was me selling those first few enterprise deals. And we'd hit up against somebody in procurement who just, was kind of a pain in the ass, right? And was just pedantic about, "Oh, are you following these rules or those rules?" And I remember going to one of our advisors and describing this person. She was just like, "Oh, you just do the bear hug. Here's what the bear hug is." And she just described everything I needed to do. So I went and I followed, you know, a lot of her prescriptive kind of wisdom and it totally worked. Looking for advisors who can supplement and augment you or help you along in your decision-making who've just seen it before, right? In all its different instantiations. So invaluable.

So you don't have to be the expert in everything to be a founder is what I'm picking up from you.

To be the expert in everything. There are not enough hours in the day.

And even when you are most efficiently scaling and you have these advisors and a team who has your back, sometimes you just wake up at 3:00 AM in a panicked cold sweat, which is exactly a quote you gave in TechCrunch a couple years ago and something you just alluded to a little bit earlier in our conversation and Honestly, when Claudia and I were doing our research and we read that, we really related.

It made me feel a lot better that I was not the only crazy one with similar habits.

Yeah. We love to touch on the behind the scenes moments in our podcast about how you manage anxiety and nerves while building a company and having both financial investors and teammates and team members who you were supporting through this journey.

You've just hit on what I think is sometimes the single hardest part, is managing your own psychology. When I finally learned to lean into the fear and stop letting it kind of clench me up and paralyze me, that was a turning point for me. Because when I, when I started to figure out I could use the fear to my advantage instead of having it be something that just drained energy away from me, that was the point. That was the turning point. And I think One of the things that is such a miss, right, for founders is we don't share. And during, when you're going through the whole thing, you can't really share because everybody's watching your facial expression when you walk into the office, right? To gauge, is this going well? Is it not going well? Because the team subconsciously or consciously is looking to you to see how things are progressing and whether everything's going okay and whether they should be fearful. So it is a burden on you to keep your emotions in check and to keep them contained. But the thing that I think most founders don't realize is how common it is to have that anxiety late at night when you're by yourself. And then what do you do with it? So for me, I let it basically, in those days when I'm on my own, that one day a month, I write down every single fear I have for the company and for the team and all the things that are making me anxious. And I get them all out and I sort through them. And sometimes I'll do it with a CEO coach because I think it's really, really helpful at some points in the company's development, in your own development, to have a CEO coach. It's basically like therapy for work, right? It's all work-related therapy, but it's really healthy to get it all out there because then that coach, if they've worked with a lot of CEOs and founders before, can tell you, "That's typical." Okay, that's new, that's specific to you, right? And you should deal with that. Or things that are, okay, that's, 80% of founders go through this. Like I see this over and over again. Here's what I would suggest.

Normalizing fear and using that as a growth lever is a really interesting idea and one that I'm gonna take to heart and try to switch my mentality on these 3:00 AM panic moments.

Likewise.

Um, keep a notebook by your bed. Get up, write it down. You're scared of this. Okay, that's okay. Now you've written it down. Now you can keep it for the next time you have your day of thinking and decide what you wanna do with it.

This is very tactical, practical, real-time advice, Amy. So thank you. And it's exciting because we actually know the end story to this, right? Where, uh, you work through these moments and eventually got to what is most founders' dreams, which is a successful exit by anyone's standards, selling to Cisco for $277 million back in 2018. So, Congratulations. That's incredible. Could you just share a touch on what it felt like getting to that moment?

Well, it was, it kind of was unexpected because so I was sitting on the board of Cisco, which is a weird thing, and Chuck texted me one morning and said, can we talk? And Chuck Robbins is the CEO of Cisco. And I kind of went, oh, okay. So I was on the M&A committee and I figured, oh, okay, he wants to talk about an acquisition that we wanna do at Cisco. Great, I'll call him back. So I text back and I say, "Oh sure, when should I call?" And he's like, "This is more an in-person kind of meeting." And I went, "Oh, must be something really big that he wants to buy. And you know, he wants to meet with us in person to hear any concerns we have. Great." So then we actually sat down together and he explained the idea he had and why he had it. And he wanted to buy our company, you know, bring it in as an AI/ML layer on top of our collaboration software, which was already a multi-billion-dollar business, right? And he wanted me to lead the whole group. And it was already, you know, over 5,000 people at the time. And I kind of went, "Oh my God, right? Can I even do that? Am I qualified to do that? I don't know. Like, this is an enterprise software. Like, can I?" So, all these questions, right? So, I said, "Okay, well, let me talk it over with Ryan and Matthias, and I will get back to you quickly." Right? So we went and we sat together for, I think, 7 hours that night. Because after these drinks, we went and we stayed up till, I don't even know, the wee hours in the morning debating whether or not we wanted to sell. And it wasn't an easy or clear-cut answer because we were getting these 7-figure contracts. We were really starting to get very good traction in 4 or 5 different verticals. And there was a part of us that wanted to see how far we could take this thing. And we debated it and we debated it. And finally, it came down to, You know, what does every good engineer and product person really want in their heart of hearts? They want their stuff to be used by tens of millions of people. And if it could be hundreds of millions, that's even better. And we were thinking, okay, so we could go this alone and it would be, you know, we would build, we would build, we would build. If we sold to Cisco, our stuff could be seen by 200 million people within a year and it could actually be useful to them. It could actually help them on a daily basis. And that part was really, really seductive and hard to get away from. We know what to expect from this team. We know what the culture of Cisco is like. This is gonna be a good fit with our culture 'cause our number one tenet is no assholes, right? And that doesn't fit everywhere. And so, it just, it made a lot of sense. And we ended up after a lot of deliberation saying yes.

You mentioned having been on the board of Cisco. Which is a really interesting M&A, uh, strategy for you, Amy. And it, it's interesting to look at your career on boards because it's not just Cisco, it's also been Splunk and Informatica, and of course your own company, A Company. And we're exploring this theme of what it means to be on a board and what does it mean to be a good board member.

At the end of the day, it depends whether it's private or public boards, right, that you're talking about. And it depends whether it's nonprofit boards or or corporate boards. So those are all different balls of wax. On the public company corporate side, right, I will say you really are there to represent the stakeholders. And the number one job of the board is to pick the right CEO, right? And then to support that CEO by asking questions and by making certain that you're helping the CEO as much as you can see around corners and govern the company very cleanly. And you have a fiduciary responsibility as part of that board to really make certain that from a stakeholder perspective, things stay cleanly governed, right? And the, the company's in compliance with SEC rules.

One question for you that I have on private boards actually is, for first-time founders, what does that process look like of standing up a board? How do you think about selecting the right people to be on that board. When is it really appropriate in a startup's lifecycle for that to happen?

Most of your board is comprised of investors, right? As a startup board, because every time you take a round of funding, either you're taking on a new board member or you're taking on most likely, you know, a board observer and maybe a board member, like that's depending on how large a round of funding it is. So while you're picking your investors, you're also picking your board members.

This is a core part of our ethos with The Room and and you're kind of alluding to the idea that the people that are in the room with you when everything is happening are some of the most important people.

Uh, and the board is, is typically a, a group of individuals who is legally obligated to be in the room with you, but hopefully it's also friends and advisors.

It, it has been a really unusual year and has allowed space for a lot of individuals to reevaluate their priorities. We'd love to know What's next for you, Amy? And would you ever consider founding another company?

I would, but I've made a conscious choice. Okay, so this is, this is one of those things where every person has to figure this out for themselves. So I have a son and he is 13. He's this amazing being who I want to spend time with. And I've spent, you know, 20 years of my career working 14-hour days. This poor kid who he has been so patient with me, right? And He's phenomenal and he has his own life now. And so it's, it's now or never. Like either I make time for whenever he has time or, you know, when do I get to see him? And so I'll still be in my 40s when he decides to go off to college. So I got plenty of time and I got plenty of juice, but I'm gonna spend the next 5 years really helping other founders and CEOs as much as I can.

As early in our careers as us, it's easy to forget how long careers actually are and how many twists and turns there are. So wanted to ask the last question of this podcast, which is our hero question that we ask all of our guests, which is in the perspective of the career context, who has been an influential woman that you really looked up to and has really helped you along the way?

I can, I can tell you that without any hesitation. My very, very dearest friend in the entire world is named Lori Norrington, and she is a powerhouse. So this woman is on the boards of Colgate and Autodesk and HubSpot and Eventbrite and Asana and all these others. But more than that, she is one of the best human beings I have ever met. And she has, you know, I never expected to form such a close friendship in adulthood. I mean, usually that happens in college, right? Or before college. And those are the people who really know you growing up and you have such shared and common history and trust there. But I remember we were at this director's conference together. Stanford Law School puts it on every year, and I was sitting next to her and she asked a phenomenal question. And it was a very kind of brave question to ask in a really large auditorium. And I was just so curious about this woman. And then we ended up washing our hands next to each other in the ladies' room. And I turned to her and I said, "I so enjoyed your question." We started a whole conversation and it was lunchtime. So we ended up sitting next to each other at lunch. It was like coming home to an old friend. Do you know what that feels like? When you meet somebody, but it's like you've known each other forever. You two have that. And we just hit it off. And from there on, we will fly around the world to get to see each other. We will, you know, make time for each other. We will have slumber parties together when we can. Like, I, you know, when she has board meetings for Colgate in New York, I'll try to line up my visits visits to New York because I have customer visits, but if I can make it a week later or a week earlier, I'll line it up so that we can, you know, get to spend time together. And we may end our meetings at 9 PM, right, because we have various dinners, but then, you know, we have 9 to midnight together. And it's one of those where I would do anything for her, and it's mutual.

Thank you so much for, for sharing that story. And it's, yeah, it's just always so wonderful to hear how strong female relationships can be in the career setting in adulthood.

So Amy, thank you so much for being here with us.

Uh, it's been wonderful.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please like, follow, subscribe, talk to us in Clubhouse, or share with your friends. Get excited for next week's episode, just in time for Valentine's Day, with founder of Urban Stems, Ajay Kauri, airing Tuesday at 10:00 AM Eastern.

Eastern, 7 AM Pacific.

See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia and Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5AC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.