REAL TALK, REAL FOUNDERS: PHIA 2/2

Q6: Sophia, you've said the bottleneck used to be execution but now it's idea generation. How do you each actually train that muscle? What does your personal system for collecting and connecting ideas look like day to day?

Sophia: A lot of our ideas now come through data analysis. The overarching principle is that ultimately everything comes down to goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Is it increasing the number of users, the retention of those users, the revenue your company can generate? When you acknowledge, "I have these overarching goals" or "we have OKRs for the company," you then need to step one layer back and look at the data. How are things performing right now? What are the levers driving that performance? Then the idea generation naturally comes in the form of: what can we build, and what can we improve to influence one of those levers in a way that will show progress toward our goal?

In that way, it's also really interesting because AI has really lowered the barrier to entry to test and validate ideas. You can say, "here's my goal, here's what's working right now," and then "here's something I think will make it work even better," and then you can very quickly test and validate that in a way that wasn't possible before. For us, we just go through that exercise very regularly as a team. With the two of us, with our executive team, with our entire team, we look at the core levers of the company, our goals, and the features that drive those goals. That's been a really big learning for us, and AI has made it so much easier.

I still remember when we were at Stanford, even building a very basic version of something to get in front of people took a long time. Now you can Claude Code or vibe code something very basic, put it in front of people, and get initial feedback before you even have to do anything.

Or even better, something we do all the time: we'll prompt Claude with "here's the goal of what we're trying to build, here's some design inspiration" and ask it to output what this should look like. That's why I do think that training the muscle of creativity by focusing on what problems exist and what solutions you can build is something that's going to become increasingly valuable.

Q7: What's a piece of conventional startup wisdom that you've actually found to be useful and true?

Sophia: Build fast, fail fast.

Phoebe: Or, the team is the company that you actually build. Another one is Sam Altman's quote about how for an early-stage startup, the number one thing that matters is: how can you deal with just bad stuff that happens to you over and over again? And it's not even necessarily actually "bad" things. For example, when users told us they were never going to use a desktop product, we could have just thrown in the towel and given up, but we didn't. It's about leveraging feedback and then adapting. A lot of being a founder is taking rejections and actually leveraging them to try something else. Most of being a founder is just not throwing in the towel and not giving up, frankly.

Q8: Founding a company comes with hard days. What rituals, mindsets, or practices keep you grounded and moving forward?

Phoebe: Melatonin. Seriously, there's nothing that 8 hours of sleep can't fix. If Sophia and I can't agree on something, we both go home, get sleep, and then oftentimes the next day we're like, "what were we even talking about?" That really actually matters. Sleep is really, really critical and important.

Sophia: Yeah, I definitely agree. Just generally taking care of yourself. It's crazy what sleep, good food, and having a good attitude can do in making you feel better and more motivated. I would also say, change your mindset about how things will always be hard. There is always going to be something that is hard. Something was hard at the pre-seed stage. It's hard at the seed stage. There are its own challenges at the Series A stage. You need to like doing hard things. What I've realized is that instead of spending every day waiting for the time when it becomes less hard, you need to actually train yourself to enjoy working on difficult problems. When something blows up and something's not working, my initial reaction now is: "Great! There is a problem I can solve. That is so fun. That is amazing. How lucky am I to get to work on challenging, stimulating issues every single day?" Having that mentality will make you embrace challenges instead of actively trying to avoid them.

Q9: How can someone train themselves to enjoy challenges? Do you think it's possible, or is that something someone has to be born with?

Sophia: I definitely think it's possible to train yourself. I used to hate doing hard things. And I started to realize that everything is no pain, no gain. The moments in my life where I endured hardship or extreme mental anguish, while obviously not awesome in the moment, allowed me to have so much personal and professional growth. So when I have moments where I'm dealing with a lot, I know that on the other side of it, I'm going to have so much personal growth. I know that I'll learn, and I'll be able to look back and be really grateful that I was in a challenging situation that allowed me to have a much higher slope. I definitely did not think like this before. I was much less excited about daily challenges, and now I feel way different about it, because I think it is a privilege to get to work on hard things.

Q10: What makes your profile or work discoverable and interesting on LinkedIn to prospective investors, and what would you tell a young person trying to build a presence in the space?

Sophia: We should think of this in a more general sense. Personal branding is increasingly important for everyone because if someone can land on your profile and instantly understand who you are, what you're doing, and what your skill set is, it makes it a lot easier to get relevant opportunities. If I can go on someone's LinkedIn and see a nice photo of them, the school they go to, their work experience, and a clear action item, that's social proof and professional proof. It lowers any friction associated with making a decision if you're being considered for a job.

For us, since we're doing a lot of hiring right now, the easiest way to get a signal on someone is by looking at their LinkedIn. Just look at your own LinkedIn and pretend you were a stranger, and consider what questions someone would be asking. There's a lot that people can do to really simplify their LinkedIn in a way that makes it easy for someone to evaluate you as a prospective team member.

Q11: What's something you've learned about building strong investor relationships that you'd want earlier-stage founders to know?

Sophia: Investors want to understand how your business works, how it makes money, how it is going to scale, and the market size. It's important to share information with your investors that relates to your core company hygiene and the core metrics you're using internally to understand and measure company success. Have a templated way to regularly keep in touch with your investors to give them an understanding of how the business is progressing, how the team is growing, and so on. The method we use is a regular email that we send out.

Phoebe: Yes, and if during board meetings the people from the company are talking for the entirety of it, that's not good. A company should send all pre-materials beforehand, and board meetings should be used for really important discussions. Ideally, your investors are not only giving you a capital infusion but giving you knowledge. Investors see things many, many times that founders see only once. For example, when wanting to build up a really strong marketing team, questions like how to staff it, what roles are necessary, and how to set comp bars are questions that many companies they invest in have had. So they have a framework for how you should do performance reviews and how to set the right incentives for the people you're bringing onto the team. Make sure you leverage their expertise, particularly in board meetings, because they're seeing many of the same things, multiple times, that you will be encountering for the first time as a founder.

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