After a failed Y Combinator application in 2017, Pat Walls decided to bootstrap his next business. Hustling around his full-time job as a software developer, he built up Starter Story as a “solopreneur.”
Daniel Kane was a 19-year-old student at UC Santa Barbara when he launched the skinny wallet company, The Ridge.
Have you ever wanted to create your own podcast? How about one that brings in $100k a year while helping small businesses grow?
Jilliene Helman is all about the Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT. She is the 32-year-old CEO of RealtyMogul, an LA-based commercial real estate investing platform with over $2B in assets.
In 2009, long before the “resale market” had picked up steam, thredUP incorporated. Now, 10 years later, they’ve raised over $300m in funding, including a new $175m round announced in August. They also introduced a new platform powering apparel resale for retailers and brands.
Her last job was technically for Walmart. Catharine Dockery, the founder of VC fund that specializes in vice, was chief of staff for Bonobos founder Andy Dunn. After Bonobos was bought by Walmart, she worked several months for the company that cared so much about maintaing a squeaky clean image it didn’t sell music with explicit lyrics in the 1990s.
Pinterest hired Sahil Lavingia to build its iPhone app in 2010. He was 19, a college dropout and a self-taught coder. His stock options would end up being valued around $40m.
CONTENT
It’s a little strange that I’m here purporting to be a kind of business expert because I’m still a complete freshman in the business world. I think half the people in the audience probably could teach me more than I could teach them about how to function in that world. I definitely have as much to learn as anyone here. Ten years ago, the last thing that I would imagine myself doing was founding a business…because I had essentially no interest in business. My only interest in food was, you know, just eating it. When I wasn’t eating it, I was just not that interested in it.
TAKEAWAYS