Early Startup Lessons from Admitsee Part 1 | Lydia Fayal

Rafael, thank you for that great intro. It saves me a few minutes. I'm just gonna jump right in here. One of the things that he didn't mention is that I'm a big competitive sailor on the side. And growing up, one of the things my dad always told me was, in sailing, the winner is always the person who makes the fewest mistakes. I think this is especially relevant to startups. You are going to make mistakes. You need to minimize them. You don't have a lot of bandwidth, and you can't get burnt out. So how do you do this? The best way that I've learned is by talking to other founders, learning about the obstacles they overcame. In this sense, I'm going to share my journey and sort of the bumps along the road so you can learn from that and hopefully minimize mistakes you'll make and also be huge successes, because I think you all have that opportunity. There's a lot that goes into startups. It always annoys me when people reference that Field of Dreams quote, you know, if you build it, they will come. You'll probably hear that quite a bit. Yeah, maybe they'll come. But how do you know what to build? And how do you get money for rent and ramen while you're doing that? You have to come up with a product, find co-founders who believe in you, you know, get other people to believe in you, get traction, find investors. Oh, and then you have to keep growing at a ridiculously fast rate. Press helps with that. We'll talk about that at the end because we've actually been able to do a pretty good job of that. So quick company overview. Thank you. So this is Admitsee's homepage. We are a college-oriented social network and advice marketplace. The way it works is college students upload their application details onto the site into LinkedIn-style profiles. They share their essays, their test scores, their extracurriculars, their advice about going through the process, all the schools they were accepted to, where else they didn't get into. They also answer users' questions through the mentorship platform. We have over 60,000 college profiles on the site for students to browse. Because we have millions of data points that we've collected because of all these application files. Our mission is to bring transparency to higher ed and also destress the process. We want to help students find people similar to themselves and make better decisions about where to apply and how to communicate their personal stories. We have been working on this for 4 years now. We first started working on the company in the fall of 2012. We moved out to San Francisco for an accelerator in the fall of 2014. We have raised approximately $2 million to date, and we have 12 full-time employees. So, like a lot of founders, I built something to solve a problem that I experienced firsthand. That's me when I was 16 years old. I graduated from high school when I was 16 and moved down to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University. When I was applying to college, I found it to be an incredibly frustrating experience. All I had to go with was, you know, a book about colleges, some very early online anonymous forums where people ranted and there were a lot of trolls knocking each other down, and I had one guidance counselor at my local public high school who spent most of our time talking about her love for UConn Huskies. I grew up on the Connecticut-Rhode Island border, which is very Very, very small town, middle of nowhere. Anyway, applying to college was one of the most depressing, frustrating years in my life. And I've worked in corporate law, so that says a lot. When I got to Johns Hopkins, I started working as an SAT prep tutor and college consultant part-time. Just as a way to make some extra money. You know, hey, it was good money on the side. This is 2003. It was very early. People wanted to hire personal tutors. What I kept getting asked again and again by clients is, hey, do you know anyone who got into this university and how do I compare? That was the genesis for Admitsee, over 10 years ago. It's been percolating for a while. So what did I do after college? Did I go into startups? Nope. I decided I was gonna go and work in Hollywood. I worked at one of the big entertainment agencies, ICM, in the motion pictures department. This is a scene from Entourage, if any of you have seen it. There were a lot— yeah, there are a lot of Ari Golds. I was basically Lloyd. So just imagine you're just constantly getting yelled at. You can't do anything right. I did this for 4 years. But working in Hollywood was huge in terms of my professional development. There was a recent article by a Daily Beast exec saying that Hollywood was the most effective and efficient way to learn how to work under constant pressure. pressure. You are gonna need to know how to work under constant pressure at a startup. For me, Hollywood was the way I learned. There are plenty of other ways. Working in another startup is one of them. But get ready for it. It's gonna be a ride. So what did I do, you know, while I was at the entertainment industry? I was optioning book rights to be developed into films. I was putting together movies, packaging them with them, learning how to negotiate, learning how to network. OK. This was interesting. But around the same time, I started working on a few friends' ventures. This is kind of a cliché slide, but it's really important to show that, you know, what your career path is and what you expect it to be are very different things. People kind of, like, look in hindsight and they see, oh, this person had a very linear path to success. That's usually not the case. There are gonna be a lot of twists and turns. While I was working at the entertainment industry, I was also helping friends with their startups. I was writing copy for them. I was building their social media campaigns. I thought, hey, this is pretty cool. I wanna do this. But how the heck do I get in a startup? Maybe if Draper University had existed back then, I would have been here, but it didn't. So I thought, okay, well, I'll look into JD/MBA programs. That way I can have 3, 4 years to make a career change and either go into startups or startup law. I started applying to the programs and again went through the same frustrations. The frustration of where to apply. You know, the burnout from writing so many applications and essays. The fear of rejection. That was huge. I looked for something like Admitsee, but still nothing existed. I ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There I met my co-founder, Stephanie Hsu. That's us. That's me. in the service. Stephanie's great because she balances me in terms of experience and skills. Stephanie had previously founded an educational nonprofit in China, so she knew the international market and was passionate about the educational field. She'd also worked at a financial news startup, so knew a little bit more about navigating startups. I got talking with Stephanie at a Wharton entrepreneurship meeting in the fall of 2012. And I pitched the idea of Admitsy to her. She jumped on the data angle and the international angle. She was the first person to really see a billion-dollar idea. I think finding a co-founder is hugely important. There was a recent First Round Capital study that said, you know, teams with at least 2 co-founders outperform solo co-founders by 163%. It will give you a huge advantage and it will make money, you raising money a lot easier if you have a co-founder. That being said, choose your co-founders wisely. Because other studies have pointed to 62% of companies failing based on founder conflicts. You need somebody you can work with long-term. Somebody who you're going to want to come into work every day and actually face. I mean, our desks are set up where we're facing each other. Ask yourself, when you're raising money, Are you willing to sleep on a blow-up mattress with your co-founder? Because we certainly had to do that. You have to be tight with them, and they have to have a thick skin. If I had a dollar for every time Stephanie or I used the F-word or told each other to go to hell, we would not have to raise money. I mean, we had very thick skins. But we work well together, and we always challenge each other to come up with the best product possible. We've been working on this now for 4 years. closer to her and hate her every day a little bit more. Anyway, so where were we? We're in our second year of law school. We had just finished working as summer associates at big-name law firms in New York. You know, really sort of excited about that since very few people had that after their first year of law school. We got together, had this idea, started bootstrapping. We pooled together $50,000 from our personal savings and loans from our family. members that, you know, convincing them, hey, this is what we're gonna need to get off the ground. We used that to, you know, put together all the legal documents, get incorporated, and hire developers. To do this, again, we went out to our personal network. We reached out to other founders in the New York area and said, hey, who's the smartest person you know? Can you make an introduction to them? That's how we met Jerry Hu. He's our developer. He's been with us since the beginning. He has 16 years full-stack experience. Just an amazing guy. He had previously built dating sites, so he got how to sort of build a social network. He also just thinks like a founder. This is really important for early tech hires. You want people who are willing to work nights and weekends on your project. You want to get their shower time, their brainstorming time, so they're really thinking about what to do. We started working with Jerry, you know, doing wireframes, all that fun stuff. Spent our summers again as lawyers. I was at Mayer Brown. She was at Orrick, which is a big startup law firm that you'll probably hear a few times in this space. Anyway, we did that again to keep bootstrapping the company. We were taking our earnings and putting them back into the startup to really grow and grow our users.