Rebecca Leibman "If We Wait Until We're Ready, We'll Be Waiting Forever"

Hello. I've been to Inbound the last three years and this is the best bold stage I have ever seen. This is amazing. I'm so glad this is the year I'm talking. So I had the pleasure of hearing the first two talks, which were amazing. And because of that, I can feel all of, I can feel what all of you are feeling in the audience right now. And so I'm going to do a little exercise to have you stretch because I want you to get the most out of what I'm going to tell you. So if you can put down your phones and computers for two seconds, this will be very fast. Okay. I would love to have all of you put your hands in the air and cross your arms. Put your hands in the air. Cross your arms. Put your hands in the air. Cross your arms. Now this time, look at which arm is on top. Okay? Okay. Remember that. Put your hands in the air. Now this time when you cross your arms, put the opposite arm on top. Does it feel weird for other people? Feels weird, right? Because after we do something so many times for so long, it's really difficult, it's really difficult to change that behavior unless we're making a very cognizant decision. And so today I'm gonna tell you about a couple behaviors that I changed to be able to run a high growth tech startup and in an industry that hasn't changed in decades, run by people three times my age. So I'll get started with a little story. When I was eight years old, I was doing an arts and crafts project and we're in a group and we're all given the same materials, but I ended up creating a craft that was different than everyone else. And because of that, the teacher yelled at me. Today, I'm still given the same materials as everyone else, but. But I seem to somehow always end up with a different outcome. I just don't get yelled at as much anymore. My name's Rebecca Liebman and I'm the co founder and CEO of a company called Learnlux. We help people in their 20s and 30s make their first big financial decisions and help them make decisions out of education instead of fear. So I'm going to tell you how I went from growing up hating math, hate hating finance, choosing to go to a liberal arts school so I wouldn't have to take a math class to now spending all of my time running a finance company. Okay, so this should be fun. You might not believe me, but my entire life I've been a planner. I always knew what my trajectory would look like. And so if you would have asked me before I started college what my path would look like, I would have told you I'm going to go to school for environmental science. I'm going to go to grad school for environmental policy, and then I'm going to work in Washington D.C. and change environmental policy. And so my path looks somewhat like this straight line. What ended up happening is more like this. I started a company before I could legally drink and go into a bar in an industry that hasn't been changed in decades, run by people triple my age. And I ran into obstacles at every decision I had to make. Here's the backstory. I went to school, I study environmental science. That part checks out. After my first year, I became interested in Kenya. And so I ended up moving to Kenya in 2012. And I was living in a rural village with no running water and no electricity. And I helped start a company with other community members there in the education space. I was there for a couple months and had to go back to school. So I came back to the States and was really enthralled with this idea of the informal economy, how everyone in Kenya ran a business selling chickens or eggs or vegetables in the market, but none of it was included in the gdp. And so I ended up starting to work for startups in Boston and just see how you could start a company in the States. And I fell in love with it. I was so enthralled with the startup community, which was bad because that meant that I was bored sitting at a desk in a classroom. But I'd only been in school for two years, so I decided I wanted to drop out of school. My junior year leave of absence, we can call it nice student sabbatical. And I got a job working at a lab at mit. And when I was working at the lab, my colleagues were PhDs and post docs and MBAs. And one day at lunch, they were all telling me how they couldn't figure out how to open a retirement account. And I thought it was the funniest thing, that the smartest people I knew couldn't figure out how to open a retirement account. And so that day was the beginning of the company I run now, helping people make better financial decisions. Long story short, I go back to school for my senior year, I'm running the company. But when you're in school, everyone thinks it's a cute project. And so everyone said you should probably apply for a real job. So I applied for a real job. As you can imagine, I can Sit in an interview and fold my hands. So I got a job in finance. It was pretty cushy and at the last minute I just couldn't take it. I could not imagine sitting in a cubicle and so I turned it down. I vividly remember telling people I turned it down in their responses. But slowly I just started working on the company after graduation and six months after graduating we were in Forbes 30 under 30 as one of the youngest companies, the youngest teams. And that was the first time people were like, okay, this is a high growth tech startup. And so that's kind of been my last couple years. There are five behaviors that I've had to change to be able to run this company. And that's what I'm gonna share with you today. The first is being okay with failure. Our entire lives were told that failing is bad, that we can't do it and we're never rewarded for failing. Just last week I was speaking at a university in Boston and I asked the students to raise their hands if they had ever failed a test and no one raised their hand. I asked the students to raise their hand if they ever failed a class. No one raised their hand. I asked them to raise their hand if they would even admit to have ever failing at anything. And still no one raised their hand. And that scares me because these huge challenges in the world are going to be solved by people who are not afraid of failing to the larger the challenge, the more frequently and the more often you're going to fail and have to bounce back. And so we need to start rewarding failure and learning from our experiences. And that was the first thing I had to learn. Second, value your own perspective. When I started a company in financial technology, which is one of the most conservative, white dominated male industries, I was so self conscious that I was too young or too female and that people wouldn't value my opinion. So I'd pretend to be older. And here's what happened. The industry has been running the same way for so long and because I'm a different type of person than most people in finance, I had a different perspective. So let's just say finance is pretty much made for one type of person. It's typically a 45 year old white man who has money. Almost every product in finance and the language that people use are for that Persona and I don't fit that Persona. But I realize that there are hundreds of millions of other people who also don't fit that Persona and they thought they were bad at finance, but only because it's not made for them. And so what I do is I look at how people make financial decisions and the language they use and the decisions they make and start to look at how we can create the products of the future that fit other markets and, and the language we can talk to people in. So it's not always about beating the market in this very competitive masculine language. And so valuing your own perspective can be really beneficial. And what I thought was my biggest vulnerability ended up being my biggest advantage. 3. You define your own success. All throughout school. You go to class, on the first day, you're given a syllabus, you, and they tell you this is how you get an A. If you miss two classes, you're going to get a B. That's how it goes. But in life, you create your own syllabus for success and that looks different for everyone at different times in their life. And it's really easy even in startups to look over at the person next to you and compare yourself to them and say, oh, this person just raised $5 million, I need to go raise $8 million or $12 million. But that's not success for you. Four, worrying what you worry about isn't what happens and what happens isn't what you worried about. So think about the last couple years, the things that you've been, things that you've been worrying about. Usually that's not what happens. You can predict the big things in my day to day, I can predict. You can think about competitors, people entering the market, someone taking your idea, which doesn't happen. Those are things that you can prepare for. But the actual things that happen are the little deterrents on a day to day basis that just set you back every day a little bit. Those are the things you're not worrying about and not planning for. And five, being ready again, starting this company. I had never worked in finance, I had no experience. I was in school, I had no time, I was already taking classes and I had no money. I was actually in debt from going to a university. And everyone warned me, you should have more time, more experience, more money before you do this. And I'm so glad I didn't listen to people because I could have made those same excuses every year, every month. You can always tell yourself that next year you'll have more time, more money, more experience. You'll do it. Then you can put those deterrents in your way forever. What I'll tell you my best piece of advice that I think about every day in every aspect of my life. If you wait until you're ready. You'll be waiting for the rest of your life. Thank you.