Stacey Ferreira | Founder of Forge

Awesome. How's everyone doing tonight? Cool. I'm excited to be here with you. So today I'm gonna tell all of you a little bit about a story of how I started my journey in entrepreneurship. Back up, give a little backstory. So I grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona. Woo! Yeah. And growing up, I was always fascinated in technology. My dad worked at IBM and one day brought home a computer for my brother and I and said, "Here's a computer. We're going to put this over here in the computer room. You can use the computer for 30 minutes a day." And the older I got, those 30 minutes turned into an hour a day, and then turned into a few hours on the weekend, and I became obsessed with that computer. More specifically, I became obsessed with what I could do inside of that computer. I was really interested in all the video games that my brother was playing. And then I said, "Why don't we go and create our own video game?" So my brother, who's 2 years older than me, we would sit down on the weekend and we would learn how to code. And we would just go to Google and— I don't know if any of you remember w3schools.com, but it taught us how to— it taught us what HTML was, what CSS was, what was JavaScript. We started just teaching ourselves little by little. Once I graduated from high school, my brother and I went to our parents and we said, "Hey, you know, we've been learning a lot about technology and we think that this whole coding thing is really, really cool. We want to take the summer in between my high school and first college year to go and start our own business." My dad came back and my dad, again, being a very traditional guy who climbed the corporate ladder, said, "If you kids want to go start a business, you need to move out of the house and learn how to be financially independent." So me, at 18 years old, was like, "Alright, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I've got savings saved up from birthdays and from chores and all this other stuff." And my brother said, "I've also got savings saved up from birthdays and chores and all this other stuff growing up." So we decided to pool our resources, which was about $3,000, and decided to move to South Central Los Angeles when I was 18 and he was 20 years old. We rented out an apartment that was a 2-bedroom apartment. We realized that if we had rented out one of the other bedrooms, it went from $900 a month to $450 for the 2 of us, and that if we split that, it was $225 apiece, and we could do that for 3 months in between high school and college. So we were going to try and make this work. So we said, "All right, parents, we're going to do this." Packed up our bags and moved to South Central. When we got there, we started our first company, and we had this crazy idea. We wanted to allow people to store all their usernames and passwords on one site. And log into everything with just one username and password. That's what we wanted to build that summer. We called it My Social Cloud. And that summer we were working away, building the first prototype, coding day in and day out, living off of Doritos and ramen. And finally, one day, I logged into Twitter and saw a tweet. And the tweet said, "Come meet me in Miami for intimate cocktails. Donate $2,000 to charity." And the tweet was from Richard Branson. Richard Branson, for all of you who don't know, started the Virgin Group. So I immediately took that email address that he gave right after the "donate $2,000" and I said, "Hello, my name is Stacey Ferrera. I am 18 years old, so I am not legally old enough to drink cocktails, but I would love to come to Miami and meet you with my brother. We're two young aspiring entrepreneurs." "and we would love to learn from you about how you started your businesses." We stayed up all night and got an email back from his secretary. She said, "Yeah, if you two can donate $4,000 and be in Miami in 48 hours, then you can meet him." And I was sitting at my small little desk in the one-bedroom that I had, and I was like, "Great! Here's an opportunity." Too bad I don't have $4,000. But did the only thing that I could think of to do at the time, knowing that it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I called my dad. And I said, "Hey, Dad, I know that you don't know what Twitter is, and I also know that $4,000 is a lot of money, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go meet Richard Branson. Can I please borrow $4,000 from you?" My dad at this point probably thinks I'm crazy, but he came back on the other end of the phone and he said, "Stacy, here's the deal. Write up a proposal for me. Why do you need the money? Where is this money going? And most importantly, what's your payment plan? How are you going to pay me back?" So I write up this proposal for my dad and send it off over email. And I get a call back from him. And he says, "Alright, here's the plan. This is a lesson in money management. You can either take a $4,000 loan from me with the stipulation that you have to pay me back in 3 months before you step on college campus. You have to pay me back. Or you don't take the loan." And again, kind of running through the list of things in my brain of, you know, what are all the things that I can sell If something doesn't come out of this, you know, how am I going to pay this back? But I said, "Alright, this is again a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I just, I have to do this." So borrowed the $4,000, got on a plane, and flew to Miami to meet Branson. Over the course of the next 2 nights, we got to spend a lot of time with Branson. Most importantly, the first night was a room of 18 people who had responded to the tweet. and all of us got to go around, talk about our business and what we were working on. Right after that, I went up to Branson and asked him if he could write down his personal email address on a piece of paper. And he did. He wrote down an email address and handed it to myself and my brother. My brother immediately took it from me and looked at it and kind of inspected it, and then he went over to Branson's secretary and said, I was like, "Is this really his email address?" And she was like, "Yeah, that is, so keep it close." From there, my brother and I flew back to South Central LA. We finished up the prototype for My Social Cloud and then sent an email to Branson and said, "Here's what we've built so far. We'd love your advice on how you think we should take this to market." We got an email back from him shortly thereafter, and he said, "This is great." I don't do a ton in technology. This was back in 2011. So he said, "You should meet my friend, Jerry Murdock, who runs Insight Venture Partners." A week later, Jerry got on a plane and flew out to LA to meet with my brother and I, and drilled us on our business, asked us hundreds of questions. What was the business model? How did we plan to monetize? How had we built the platform so far? What was the product roadmap? How did we plan to keep building it? What were we going to do about school? We were so young. We answered all of these questions. And after answering them, we went out to dinner that night, and Jerry said that he, Branson, and another investor, Alex Welch, would all invest $1.2 million in our business. That's really what kickstarted my own entrepreneurial journey. Taking a risk, not being afraid of what could happen, and asking the question, "What do I lose if I don't do it?" That lesson has followed me all throughout my journey. We went on then to build mySocialCloud over the course of 2 years. We sold it in 2013 to reputation.com, just here in the Bay Area. After that, I went on to publish a book called "2 Billion Under 20" before starting my next company, Forge. The lesson that I want to leave all of you with today is it only takes one thing. Emailing one person who you might say, "Why would this person ever respond?" Or even just looking at your Twitter feed. Or sometimes asking the big question, "Can I please loan money from you?" "Can I please borrow this?" Saying yes, as opposed to saying no, has made all the difference in my life. So take those risks and say yes. Thanks.