26:15Selina Tobaccowala at the Female Founders Conference 2016
From Y Combinator · Published Jul 22, 2016 · Watch on YouTube
TL;DR
Selina Tobaccowala, former CTO/president of SurveyMonkey and cofounder of Evite, shares lessons on scaling, cofounder alignment, and culture. She emphasizes the importance of planning for internationalization from the start, embedding A/B testing into the company’s culture, and adding independent board members early.
Key insights
- Aligning with a cofounder on exit goals, values, and financial expectations early prevents conflict during high-pressure moments.
- Fundraising too much can lead to loss of control; at Evite, $37M was taken for online invitations, which in hindsight was unnecessary and distracted from driving revenue.
- Internationalization should be designed into the engineering stack and UX from the beginning because retrofitting is much harder; consider flexible layouts for language expansion and the dominance of
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