The Forming of FEM inc | Rachel Payne & Natasha Mohanty

Natasha and I formed FemInc a couple years ago. And before we launch into what we're doing, I would like to know a little bit more about what you're doing. So first of all, if you identify with any of these statements, raise your hand. This is my first startup. This— I'm working on my second startup. Third startup. Fourth startup. Fifth startup. All right. So this is my fifth startup. And—

Thank you.

So ladies and gentlemen, I am a serial entrepreneur. However, my experience has ranged in quite a different maybe set of experiences than what is traditionally expected for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. One of my startups was leading global operations in emerging markets, and I was running Google's expansion in Africa, which I call my extreme startup, though I don't count that as one of my 5. And it was basically helping set up business operations, infrastructure, partner ecosystems in places like East, West, and Southern Africa. Another startup experience I had was on the founding team of Google.org. Where I was the first hire brought in by Sheryl Sandberg to lead what was at that point a billion-dollar commitment to global change and looking at large-scale, systemic, intractable issues that required sort of the resources, vision, and capabilities of a company like Google. And that was a tremendous experience, but also a startup, but as an intrapreneur versus as an entrepreneur. Another startup company, IndiePlay, I co-founded and was president. And it was the world's first cloud-based rights management system. We sold to Discovery in about a year and a half. So pretty big range. One of my favorites was working at Hotwire, which was a phenomenal experience. One of the best startup teams I've ever been involved in. Now, it was early days. I wasn't a co-founder. But truly learned a lot about what it means to create a great company culture right from the outset from that incredible team. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to Natasha to give a little bit of an introduction about her.

This is like— unlike Rachel, this is my very first startup. I'm an engineer. I like building things. And to be honest, I had never really seen myself as an entrepreneur. So when I met Rachel and our third co-founder Meghana, we were talking about building something with really high impact and very cool technology. And when I met the two of them, I actually fell in love with both of them. So I was like, well, I have— I was an engineer at Google and had been there for 8 years or so doing a lot of different things like search.

Leading team on 4 products.

Plus, you know, a bunch of different things. But when I met them, I was like, you know, they sound freaking awesome. So I'm gonna quit my job and go work with them and build something crazy cool. So yeah, that's how I got into it.

And I think that's sort of the through line in everything we're doing, which is that there has to be something that you're really passionate about. to drive you. Because when you're an entrepreneur, passion is everything. So what we've done is we're basically bridging the worlds of technology and impact. And when we think about impact, we think about it maybe in a slightly different way. So what we have here is what we're doing, which is building the next-generation video discovery platform. But we're also combining that with ways in which we can deepen User engagement. And the very specific way that we're doing it is by bringing the right video to the right viewer at the right moment in a seamless way that's intuitive, without friction, and without work. But at this point, I'd like to go back to you. How many people here are focused on ventures and ideas for ventures that have technology right at the core? OK. And how many of you are thinking about ventures that are considering, let's say, making the world a better place. Is that why they call you heroes? Well, you know, at FemInc we'd call you sheroes. So, but you're basically it. That is exactly how we're thinking about it too. It's how do you bridge innovation and technology solutions with this more fundamental and deeper impact that you'd like to see in the world. And when we thought about impact, we really wanted to be empowering for end users, whatever we might build. We also want to be able to measure it and really think about how does one measure, particularly when you are looking at systemic change, large-scale, longer-term change, and what indicators might help you track your progress along the way. And we are thinking about every aspect of company formation, starting with company culture and the DNA that you create early on that can help then enable all of these other things. So this is who we are. And Megan, actually, I should talk about her a little bit since she's not here today. And it really is the 3 of us. There's— it's the 3-legged stool. I mean, we all need each other and we complement and balance each other out in a lot of ways.

I prefer trifecta to the stool. Like, I do not like to hear that.

Yeah, actually, we do use the word trifecta all the time. You are correct. So Meghana is a neuroscientist behavioral economist. She got her PhD from Caltech, and she did a lot of pioneering research in understanding how do people respond to entertainment content, and also how might we think differently about the way in which content resonates with people. And this actually became very fundamental to the technology that we built, and I'll explain why in a minute.

Actually, I also wanna give some context on that. I've been building a lot of, you know, I was working on core search and then on news. I've been working for a long time on recommendation systems, like what kind of content should we put in front of what audience, how should we personalize content for a different user. And one of the missing pieces for me always was the metric of measurement of success was click-based, right? Do people click on something, then we know it's successful. There was no further work being done on understanding, okay, and then how does that drive retention? How does this tie into longer-term impact versus the immediate impact? I think one of the most exciting things for me is when I met Meghana, was I actually did not realize from my background that longer-term things are measurable in increments or that it's even quantifiable. But coming from her neuroscience and psychology background, she could really translate that into a framework that we could measure and have an impact in the digital space. I think for me that was the most exciting thing. I mean, also working with a neuroeconomist and a person who's seen all types of media tech was a great draw. But I think the core technology we were building was also a big reason for me to be like, this is where I want to be.

Yeah. And well, one actually to that point, we get asked all the time why are we called Fem Inc. And if you look at who we are, you know, it is kind of rare to have an all-female tech founding team, which it shouldn't be rare. actually. But it is. And so we own it and we claim it because we need to get the word out there. And every person in this room should help get the word out there that technology is not limited to the few as innovators and creators. And that some of the best work historically and in the current paradigm is being done by female innovators. We just aren't represented that often.

Thank you.