Gotham Gal

Sara Sutton Fell, FlexJobs, Woman Entrepreneur

Sara is quite the success story.  She started her first company at 21 that sold for $30M.  Then she started another company in the same space when she was pregnant with her first child.  She started her second company, FlexJobs, because she herself was looking for a professional job that she could do from home that had flexibility which included telecommuting, part-time work etc.  Tell me that this would not spark anyones interest. 

Sara grew up in Pittsburgh.  Her parents were divorced when she was young.  Her mother got remarieed and stayed at home with the kids. Her step-father ran his own production company making corporate marketing videos. Her Dad moved to Los Angeles and was in the movie industry.  He spent a few years in NYC too.  Sara worked for as long as she can remember.  In college she worked even worked the front desk of a hotel.  She always made money. 

Sara really wanted to go to boarding school for high school.  She went to Taft located in Connecticut where there are about 500 kids that attend.  She says that Taft gave her world awareness, kept her academically focused and helped her think about balancing herself.  At high school graduation her parents asked her what she wanted for a celebration gift and the answer was a plane ticket for everywhere.  She had never been abroad before.  It was 1992.  She traveled to Russia and even Siberia.  That experience made her think about being in international relations.

She chose something completely different for college, UC Berkeley.  Sara majored in interdisciplinary society technology and the environment.  She did not start until January so she began mid-year. It was at Berkeley where she learned how to get through red tape and bureaucracies after all the school is huge.  The summer of her junior year Sara spent her summer on the east coast doing an internship with the Center for Living Democracy doing data base management.  

She was living with one of her best friends that summer.  Her friends father was an entrepreneur.  They would talk about what they wanted to do after graduation and he would prod them saying you do not have to go work in a job with a suit but you could do something on your own.  That got both and her friends juices flowing.  They kept talking about what could they do?  Should they open a store?  They kept coming back to how hard it was to get a summer internship.  Back then the college offices were just loads of files in folders.  It was 1995.  They came up the idea of an online data base of college internships and entry level jobs post college.  By the end of the summer they had both convinced their parents to let them take some time off from school and build this company.  They called it Job Direct.  It was a great time to start an Internet company and very few women were doing it.

They put together a business plan and started to raise money.  Neither of them were computer science people.  Her partner wanted to be a special education teacher.   Their first round of capital came from friends and family.  They both understood the student market best but they had to decide which they should build first.  They decided the first thing was a resume data base.  They marketed it to students with college reps who each got money for every student they got to enter their information. 

This was the time of serious guerrilla marketing.  They rented an RV with a table of computers and networks partnering with an email service company.  They drove from college to college down the east coast.  They had started with about 1000 resumes and after the first tour they had 25,000.  The next semester they did the east and west coast.  At that point they had a sales force and were working with several colleges. 

The first year was amazing.  Sara found herself running the web development team.  She spent so much time on the computer that she convinced her team to let her move back to San Francisco, open the west coast office while heading up the web development team and finish Berkeley.  Going back and finishing Berkeley while working really made her appreciate how great it was learning just to learn. 

The company eventually got to 125 people.  It was 2000.  Sara left a few months before the sale.  They sold to Korn Ferry, a recruiting company.  It was not the best fit and eventually Korn Ferry sold Job Direct to Monster.com. 

Sara was 25 years old with a nice exit in her pocket.  She decided to take a job with Ancestory.com.  She was so young when she started Job Direct that she felt she wanted to work for people she could learn from.  She liked their mission.  The company was not that big when she began.  The founder understood Sara's entrepreneurial spirit and hired her with no title.  She started to dig in and tackle different problems.  Eventually she became the director of Communications and Marketing. 

In 2001 everything in the Bay Area imploded so both her and her boyfriend (now husband) decided to move to Boulder, CO.  They made a list of pro and cons to figure out where they should go.  They wanted a place where they could afford to buy a house, they wanted access to the outdoors, they wanted to be near a major airport and they wanted the same type of vibe and culture as the Bay Area.  Boulder was top of that list.  They visited and fell in love. 

They got to Boulder, Sara was 27.  She got a puppy.  She took time off to really think about what she wanted to do next.  She wanted to do something totally different.  She got a job in a cooking school doing some marketing and running some home cooking classes.  It was her first 9-5 job.  Within 3 years they asked her to run the school.  She had actually been looking around for the next challenge.  She had been offered to be the Head of Operations for a UK cosmetic company that wanted to launch in the US.  An internet company.  She decided to take that job instead of the cooking school opportunity.  Two months into the job she realized that culturally she was not the right fit.  The good news is she realized she was pregnant.  Eight months into the job they layed her off and gave their son her job who consequently ran the business into the ground.  It was eye opening and she decided to just let it be.  The place was so negative and it was time to take some time off. 

Sara had started to look into doing some freelance jobs before she was laid off.  The company she was working for kept saying how difficult it was to find good flexible virtual employees.  Once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur.  Sara started to think is there an opportunity here to start a business around this need.  She came up with the idea of FlexJobs and raised some money right before her son was born.

It was 2007.  Starting a family and a company at the same time is a little crazy but she took the plunge.  The guy she was freelancing for told her to go for it, backed her with money and took a seat on her board.  He believed in her.  That was six years ago.  It has been an amazing process.  She first build a platform for job seekers.  The concept was to get employers to pay to post their jobs and job seekers could use the platform for free.  That was not sustainable.  Nine months in they flip-flopped the model  They got job seekers to pay a low cost subscription model that will be fully refunded from an employer once they get a job.  They want people to walk away happy with a job.  The employer side has been harder particularly during the recession so the sales process is not that easy even though it is free for an employer to post.  Also, during the recession they got 3X's the amount of unqualified resumes. 

Currently the company has 27 employees.  There are successful hires every single day.  Sara now has two kids who are 4 and 6.  She'd like to spend more time in the entprenreurial community in Boulder but there is only so much time in the day.  She says there are alot of professional part-time jobs out there. She is a woman with serious energy.  This is company number two.  I am watching Sara.  There is no doubt company number 3 in her future. 

 

 

Nelly Yusupova, TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs, Woman Entrepreneur

Nelly first contacted me about getting a press pass for the Womens Entrepreneur Festival in 2012.  She was interested in a media sponsorship for Webgrrls.  We were not doing any sponsorships at that point but we gave Nelly a ticket to attend. Soon after Nelly attended an intimate dinner that I went to and it was there that I really got a better insight into Nellys smarts.  Fast forward to the Womens Entrepreneur Festival of 2013 where we quickly caught up on her latest venture, TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs.  A two day intensive boot camp designed to help educate non-tech entrepreneurs on how they communicate and manage their tech teams. Great idea.

Nellys story has a lot to do with her drive and chutzpah.  Nelly grew up in Thadjikistan.  A town in Southeast Asia that was part of the former Soviet Union that bordered Afghanistan and China.  I first thought it must be really cold there but actually the climate is like living in Arizona.  Her father had a shoe making business as buying shoes off the rack were ridiculously expensive.  Her mother was a nurse that had stopped working when her twin brothers were born. 

When Nelly was 13, during the Afghganistan/Soviet war they left.  The USSR was protecting the border from the Taliban coming into the region because it was mostly muslim.  Nellys family were Jews living in a muslim community.  The family had relatives in both Israel and the US both working on getting them VISAS.  The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse and they realized that war was going to break out.  The decision where they would end up was completely based on which ever VISA came through first.  The US came first and off they went. 

They family was able to buy plane tickets to get to the US through a Jewish organization as the ruble had completely collapsed and their net worth was now zero.  They came with 15 other people that included her extended family members of uncles, aunts etc.  They ended up in Forest HIlls living with an aunt where there is a large Russian Jewish community.  Of the 15 of them only 2 spoke English.

The whole family went to work.  Her parents worked in any job they could from delivery person, dishwasher, working the register at a food store, etc.  Nelly worked too.  Eventually her father saved up enough money to open a shoe repair shop in Long Island and her mother learned English and took all the exams to become a registered nurse.  Yet their number one priority was getting an education for their children.

After graduating high school in Forest Hills, Nelly had to decide what to do for college.  It was 1996 and She was 17.  She decided that she should do something in computers because that was the future.  Education in Russia is very different from the US, Nelly said the math and sciences there were more advanced and that is why she easily moved towards computer science.  She had zero idea what it meant to be a programmer and they did not even have a computer in their home but she just knew it was the way to go.  She took a class at Queens College and found she was the only person in the class without a job in computers.  She said she felt as lost that first day of college as she did when she landed in the US for the first time.

The lab was where she got on a computer for the first time in her life.  She sat down to this guy who was typing super fast and she thought he must be so smart.  Once she started to learn how to write code she realized that all that guy was doing was changing directions in DOS.  At first it just seemed to amazing but she quickly realized it was not as hard as she thought.  Nelly worked really hard to get an A in that class.  She says as an immigrant, failure is just not an option.  Once she understood the power of being a techie she fell in love and finished the program in 3 years.

During her time in school she always had a full time job.  In every job she had she would start out on the floor (shoe store and bagel store) and soon find herself getting more responisibility to become a manager.  About a year and a half into college during these type of jobs she decided she should get a professional job.  She put out feelers everywhere and Webgrrls was the first company that responded.  They gave her an internship with a promise that within two months they would hire her to work in the tech area.  At first she was just answering phones and doing community development but was more interesting is that she started to meet entrepreneurs. That was what really excited her.

Nelly moved into the area where there were 20 people sitting in a room working on a program called Town Hall with message boards and chats.  She was hired to manage that.  She was doing the work and blown away at how Internet companies work the same time.  Soon she was put in the tech department with two other guys.  Sooner than later she learned how to run the tech department, the two guys left and she found herself in charge.  It was 1999 and she was graduating at the same time.

Like many others, Nelly was offered a job at Paine Webber and took it.  She thought well this is the dream working for a big company.  She got a wonderful card from all the people at Webgrrls saying she would be back.  They knew what she did not know.  Paine Webber was a corporate environment and there was zero excitement.  It was the total opposite of what she loved about Webgrrls.  She loved the working in a small company wearing a million hats where you get to do everything. 

A few months into the job she CEO of Webgrrls asked her if she was happy at Paine Webber.  She said she was not but felt she should stay a year because it was important to stay in a job for at least a year.  The CEO asked why.  If you quit I'd hire you to become the CTO of Webgrrls.  Nelly was 21.  She looks back now and is shocked that they gave her that opportunity.  She knew she had drive and could figure it out as she went along and so she took the job.  Nelly really does believe that she was a very mature 21 year old because she was really forced to grow up very quickly when she came to the US.

Nelly has been the CTO of Webgrrls since 2001.  They have given her a platform to work on the projects she loves while being a CTO.  In 2004 she became the New York chapter leader of Webgrrls.  Webgrrls gives Nelly a lot of flexibility to be entrepreneurial because she is capable of managing her clients, getting the work done and helping other people how to leverage their businesses on the side.  It is an incredible cultural environment that has allowed her to spread her wings.  At Webgrrls she started something called Digital Women where she would speak on the behalf of Webgrrls to help mostly women entrepreneurs understand their businesses.  Working in an environment where you get to learn the 360 degrees of the business from biz dev, tech, sales and talking to investors has given her a unique perspective and she believes that a CTO should understand all those parts.  Through Digital Women Nelly would be hired by businesses as an entrepreneurial consultant looking at businesses from top down. 

The more she worked with companies the more she realized that one of the biggest issues is that non-tech company leaders and entrepreneurs would go down the wrong path technically spending money where they did not need to.  I have seen happen countless times.  Developers promise one thing and then the entrepreneurs who hired them did not get the product that they want.  There is a disconnect.  Nelly realized it wasn't only the developer fault but is also the entrepreneurs fault because they do not know how to communicate or understand the process of developing something and because of that they make the wrong choices that are laid out for them from the developer.  She started asking questions to entrepreneurs and she began to see the red flags that the entrepreneurs can not see with their developers.  That is why she decided to launch TechSpeak.

Nelly set up processes in Webgrrls that allow her to grow TechSpeak.  She has a road map that she is following and she is teaching other entrepreneurs to use that map to leverage technology in their own businesses.  TechSpeak puts on two day seminars across the country.  Not surprising Nelly knows exactly how many people she needs at each class in order to make TechSpeak a profitable business.  Nelly has created something that many first time entrepreneurs should consider taking.  It can save one a lot of money and frustration down the line.  Keep in mind that Nelly has built this business while maintaining the tech infrastructure for 100 Webgrrls chapters across the country and world.  She understands how to run an efficient tech infrastructure after all she can built a business at the same time.  Impressive woman and techie that has taken her knowledge and figured out how to give back by training others to do what she does so well.  Most of the people she has touched are women.  

I am looking forward to watching what Nelly does next.  An impressive woman.  Really glad she crossed my path. BTW, for anyone who is game, here is a 15% discount off the two-day class.

 

Caryn Siedman, Clearme, Woman Entrepreneur

Caryn should have been on my radar way before I talked to her.  Someone who works for Caryn contacted me.  She said that Caryn was an amazing woman entrepreneur and I should speak with her.  I love the whole concept of Clearme and said yes.  Clearme is transforming the transportation industry by pre-screening people that become members to get the Clearme card so one can bypass long security lines and take the angst out of travel.  Caryn and I begin to talk and then I put 2 + 2 together.  Her business partner happens to be one of my best friends brother.  But there is more.

Caryn grew up in Potomac, MD.  So did I.  We are a decade apart so we did not know each other.  Her father was an economist for the Department of Transportation and her mother was a real estate agent before becoming a budget analyst for the Government.  Caryn graduated from the same high school as I did.  She also went to the same camp as I did growing up, Camp Ramblewood.  She also had a variety of jobs in high school and in essence always felt like a tough chick.  It was hilarious talking to Caryn because she had lived some of the same experiences as I did but only 10 years later. 

Caryn went to University of Michigan for college.  She wanted to go to a school that was heavy into sports because she wanted to be a sports journalist.  Caryn spent her second semester junior year abroad in Madrid where had to take all the classes in Spanish.  Needless to say she spoke fluent Spanish very quickly.  Her summer jobs were back at home working for the Don and Mike early morning drive show on 105.1 fm radio and an internship at NBC working and writing for a few major talk shows including Jim Vance.  Her last summer before graduating she worked for a CBS affiliate in Toledo Ohio covering the Mud Hens reporting from behind and in front of the camera.  She realized that the job was not as glamorous as you think.  She made a conscious decision to not go into the world of sports journalist.  That is the best thing about doing internships and jobs in college.  It teaches you what you want to do and what you don't want to do. What she did love was doing research.  She would read about proxies about companies like they were magazines which is why she decided finance was the way to go.

Caryn graduated from college with a job at Deloitte and Touche in Chicago paying her $29K a year.  She turned it down because she wanted to be in NYC.  Her mother thought she was crazy.  She came to NYC as many do without a job and began to pound the pavement.  She knocked on the door of every finance company she could find.  Eventually she landed a job in risk arbitrage at Arnhold and Bleichroder.  She was a slave to running numbers on spread sheets.  She had graduated in May and was there by June.  She was the lowest paid person in the company and her desk sat looking at a brick wall.  It was an incredible opportunity.  If you were there early enough and stayed late enough they would pay for breakfast, lunch and dinner so even though she was only making $24k a year with a rent of $1200 a month she could survive because she had no expenses. 

It was 1994 and there was a lot going on in mergers and acquisitions.  She learned a ton.  She worked for one guy for about a year and a half who mentored her to become an analyst.  The company bought a hedge fund and she became an analyst in that department.  She got to meet management teams and act like she knew what she was talking about.  Her strategy was fake it until you make it.  She had nothing to lose so why not.  That strategy paid off.

She stayed at that company for about 3 years until a few of the higher-up people left to start Iridian Asset Management and asked Caryn to come with them.  They became an 8 billion dollar asset management company.  She stayed four years rising among the ranks.  Their strategy would be to take a 5% ownership in companies and help them grow.  She began to build great relationships and learn how to invest. 

In 2001 Caryn left because she wanted to own her own company and culture.  MSB Capital gave her the opportunity to do that with them but after a short 8 weeks she knew it was not the right fit.  She left on good terms to join Glenview, a hedge fund, to be their number two.  Ultimately the number one told her that he would back her in her own hedge fund business. 

At 29, pregnant with her first child, she started her own hedge fund and called it Ariance, part art part science.  She had $50 million under management and began to raise more funds.  She went to raise money from one guy and he actually said to her "how do you know if you will come back after having the baby"?  Her response was "are you crazy".  Between 2002-2008 she grew the business from $50M to $1.5 billion.  It was stressful, daunting, frustrating, exciting, horrible and awesome.  Through all that she had 3 kids.

In 2008 the financial world imploded.  Caryn began to think "is this what I want to do with the rest of my life"?  She felt like she wanted more control of her destiny.  So both her and her partner decided to give all the money they had under management back.  It was unheard of but she felt it was the right thing to do while they thought about what is next.  If we can not invest with confidence then we should walk away.  They made sure everyone who worked for them got a job and they closed shop.

She went to Paris for four days with her daughter, Mom and niece.  It was literally the first time she had taken off with any responsibilities to work.  She spent the next two months doing the Mom thing and quickly realized that it was not for her.  She loves working.  She loves using her brain in a business environment.  So her partner from before started a company called All Good Holdings to invest in good stuff.  First they took $1m and gave it away through their foundation.  They wanted to invest in homeland security, defense and aerospace.  It was through this desire to invest in these verticals that they stumbled upon Clear.  They took their own capital and some mentors and investors that they had met along the way and bought the company.

Over the past two years they have rebuilt the company and changed the name to Clearme.  Clearme is a fast pass through the airport that you can acquire by enrolling and having your biometrics taken for clearance.  It is the ATM of identity by matching your fingers prints and iris.  They are hoping that the data analytic will also change the physical screening of people so you don't have to deal with shoes, coats and liquids in your bag.  It will be a data base of millions of identities and that pass can be used at airports that have integrated Clearme into their system and that could include buildings, hospitals etc.  It is only $179 year to joint and you can add your partner/spouse for $50 and kids under 18 go free.  They are currently in SFO, Orlando, Denver, Dallas and Westchester airports.  They are hoping to get into more soon.

Caryn believes that transportation is one of the few places that has not moved forward with technology.  They are leveraging technology as this is a huge opportunity with high barriers to entry. It has been a tough road dealing with bureaucratic challenges but they are getting there.  After talking with Caryn there is absolutely no doubt she will get there.  She is sharp as a whip and is driven to success.  We sent each other are Camp Ramblewood photographs of each other and got a good chuckle.  I can hardly wait to see Clearme get into the airports that I frequent most often.  For the consumer, Clearme is a no-brainer. 

 

Kim Walls, Episencial, Woman Entrepreneur

There are different investors for different verticals.  I really like being in a few different spaces because it gives me the opportunity to meet an entirely different group of investors and learn a different philosophy around investment models.  Through the consumer products market I have met quite a handful of interesting people who have in turn introduced me to interesting entrepreneurs.  That is how I got to meet Kim Walls.  Since I am investor in Willa Skincare, I was intrigued by Kim's business, Episencial, that is an all natural safe skin product line made for babies.  I see these type of lines and I know that this is where the consumer product market is heading.  What is not so surprising is that many of these new natural lines are being developed by women.  Once again filling a void in their own lives that they build products for. 

Kim grew up in two places because her parents were divorced.  Her mother lives in Idaho thirty-eight miles from the Canadian border on a 38 acre horse ranch.  Her Mom taught horse back riding and put on horse back riding events.  Kim went through the public school system in Idaho.  Her father lived in Hollywood, California.  He had a construction company that specialized in a certain coating so he worked on the Olympics, for Disneyland and other counties building out public pools.  When Kim was five her father got a skin disease and with the money he made in construction he funded a new skin line called Epicuren that he had developed.  Both parents are entrepreneurs so not surprising that Kim is too.

Epicuren is quite a large consumer brand at this point.  It took 20 years to get there and is totally self-funded.  Kim grew up putting labels on the products, making up words about the products that made her think about branding and marketing.  Essentially she grew up learning how to build a consumer product company from scratch. 

After graduating high school Kim went to work at Club Med for a year teaching horse back riding.  It gave her a gap year before starting college and the ability to put a fair amount of cash in her pocket.  Then she went to University of Oregon which is located in Eugene.  It was there that she was indoctrinated into the hippy culture.  She grew up growing their own food living an organic life but it was in Eugene that she realized that the life she led was a burgeoning life style movement.  Kim realized how important it was to be an advocate for that life. 

After one year she transferred to UCSB (University California Santa Barbara) where she majored in cultural anthropology.  Kim had always been interested in technology and it was just the beginning of the technology revolution.  She wanted to understand how humans and technology integrate.  Hence the anthropology of new media.  During her time at UCSB she had always worked but it was a marketing job that really made her think about natural products.  At school she took her Moms advice to education which is do what you want to do and if you don't love it, don't do it.  Great advice.  So Kim ended up taking all these random courses and by her junior year the school said you need to declare your major.  They told her based on what she had taken she had only two options; anthropology or marketing.  At this point she opted for marketing but had never worked in marketing before.  Committed to figuring it out she got out the yellow pages and looked up market research.  She called this company and said she would like to come in and talk to them about marketing.  She interviewed the guy who owned and ran the company and when the interview ended he asked her "aren't you going to ask for a job"?  She said sure and started the next day. 

What Kim did not realize is this particular firm was run by a man who had worked for years in big marketing companies and had semi-retired to the Santa Barbara area so through his connections he would do really interesting jobs for Fortune 100 companies.  That is where she learned what she did not want to do in business.  Figuring out how to pair up french fries with movies to manipulate people was not for her.  She left Santa Barbara with a boy (I have heard this so many times) and they moved to San Francisco.  She tried to get a job in marketing continuing with psychodermic profiling but realized that because the guy she worked for was semi-retired he not only cherry picked his jobs but Kim was doing way more than most people at her level.  Instead she started a rep group to sell her fathers products.  They needed to bring the product north so it made total sense.

Fast forward she broke up with the boy and decided to move back to Los Angeles.  She sold the rep firm to the Southern California rep firm that was also selling Epicuren so they could expand.  It was the perfect solution.  In Los Angeles she went to work for Natural Healthlink a start-up company that was trying to move healthcare professionals into alternative healthcare.  This was a time when patients would not tell their doctors about alternative treatments they were trying.  Kim was there skin care guru and content manager.  This is where her anthropology courses came in handy.  She had to create and market medical content that was interesting to doctors.  When Epicuren was founded by her father dermatologists did not understand that selling their clients the right skincare would increase their businesses.  She understood how to bridge that landscape overseeing the writers to create content that was accessible and approachable. The job lasted about a year and a half before the business started to wane as they were competing with WebMd. 

Kim got married, got pregnant and then everything changed.  She went shopping for baby skincare products and was horrified by what she saw.  Every product had paraffin in it and she knew from her fathers business over the last 15 years that it was not ok.  The healthcare bridge piece was that the industry at large did not acknowledge skincare as a healthcare and it should.  We are told to avoid toxins but not how to optimize immunity through skincare.  Even in India there were studies being done on massage therapy for preemie babies that was making huge inroads.  Simply put what goes on the skin goes into the body.  She called her Dad and said there is nothing on the skincare market for babies and we have to change that.  He said ok and Episenical was off to the races.

The first limitations that Kim found is that the spa market which was the first marketplace that began to sell natural skincare products was not the place to sell baby skincare products.  So Kims knowledge of how to sell and market skincare products made no sense. It took year and lots of money to get it right.  Since her father had completely boot strapped her business Kim never thought of raising money until a  woman VC sat her down and explained to her the virtues of raising money.

Kim started on this journey almost nine years ago.  She launched her first product Q1 of 2010.  She recently got into Whole Foods and finally figured out how to market the products.  It just finally clicked.  Of course as all businesses grow there is always a little tweaking to do but they are now moving forward at a good speed.  She now has two boys who are 10 and 7, seven people working for her and they are starting to sell and distribute on line too.  Kim is a big believer that the future is a hybrid of tech ecommerce and consumer products.  You have to talk directly to your consumer and you can do that through your own site. 

Talk about connecting the dots.  Kim has been working on skin products since she was 5 years old.  I love what she has created.  Her passion is evident.  I look at the Episencial products and there is not even a question that if I was having babies that these are the products that I would want to be using. There is a green revolution taking place with all consumer products and Episencial is leading that race for baby skin products.

 

Lauren Zander, Beth Weissenberg, The Handel Group, Women Entrepreneurs and sisters

I was introduced to a woman that worked for both Lauren and Beth through a very good friend of mine.  She thought that her voice would be an interesting addition to the Womens Entrepreneur Festival.  I met her and she said to me that I must meet the women who started the company she works for.  The company is the Handel Group and the women behind it are Beth Weissenberg and Lauren Zander.  What they have built is a life coach, corporate coach, personal coach method to living your life to the fullest and that means being the best at whatever you do.  I am a huge fan of coaching particularly for entrepreneurs who start a company with an idea and before they know it have 50 people working for them and are just overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of managment while building the vision and maintaining some resemblence of a personal life.  A great coach can be the key to success.

Both Lauren and Beth grew up in a modern orthodox family in Long Island.  Beth is the older of the two by more than a decade.  Their are other siblings that are actually involved in their business too.  Their father is a lawyer and has been a managing partner since he was 30.  Their Mom, who they refer to as Super Mom, stayed home and raised the four kids.  None of the kids are orthodox as adults but practice Judaism in their own way with their own personal rituals. 

Beth started her college years at University of Michigan.  She stayed a year and a half and returned to NYU because she was set on being an actress.  She came back, majored in theater and graduated in 3 years.  Her first job, obviously she need to eat, was working for an education company where she would lead seminars.  No doubt she was effective on stage after spending the last years training to be an actress.  The actress part of her life was not happening and Beth took another job as a stockbroker at Drexel.  It was not for her and she found herself back in education at a company that had a bit of a cult thing going on as she stayed for 15 years leading personal education seminars around the world.

At one point Beth got married and moved to Laguna Beach with a young daughter in tow to take a job in a managing consultant company that worked with public companies on their growth challenges.  She was miserable.  She had a desire to transform the world but not working for someone elses company.   It was a call one night from Lauren that changed her direction.

Lauren went to University of Denver.  She wanted to be in Colorado after skiing several times and just loved it.  She did not realize how slow it would be from the fast pace of NY.  She stuck it out two years before transferring to George Washington University.  She was originally a philosophy major but moved into environmental studies with a minor in philosophy.  After graduating college she went to work for the UN at the Global Environmental facility.  She had spent her summers working for environmental companies.  At 22 she was working at the UN and had the realization that I will die if I continue doing this for a living.  She thought if I could work saving people instead of trees I will be a lot better off.  She decided to follow in her sisters footsteps in the education company she had worked for.  She stayed seven years.

When Beth left the company they treated her terribly.  Lauren was aghast and decided she should leave too.  She knew that she did not want to become an old lady going from Motel 6 to Motel 6 all over the country teaching personal seminars.  It was 1998/99.  Lauren was already doing private coaching but was almost too young to understand exactly what she was creating.  In the education company she was running this large volunteer program where she got people to volunteer to help their own lives.  She would say to these people I will help you stop smoking or lose weight or whatever if you volunteer.   She was doing on the side what the company was doing internally because she cared. 

When she walked out on her job she was scared to death.  She thought if I charge $125 an hour to all the people I am coaching, how many people would I need to replace my salary?  It ended up that it wasn't that much and she did not realize how big her following was.  She was 28 years old and she just wanted to help people.  In six months she went from quitting her job to making $200K a year coaching people.  It happened over night because Lauren is real.  She has an incredible amount of energy and insight into people that is pretty amazing.  It is just part of her DNA.

So back to Beth.  Beth is out in CA being flown around the country fixing businesses.  She is literally tripling revenues of businesses through coaching.  Lauren and Beth speak one night for about 20 minutes.  Beth loves the corporate angle and Lauren loves the people.  Lauren gives Beth some homework on thinking about her life.  Lauren has a way of pushing you to see what should be so obvious but isn't.  Beth then decides to return to NYC, get rid of the husband and start a new life.  In the meantime she hooks Lauren up with one of her favorite clients who is interested in building an empire around the world of personal coaching. 

Six weeks into the new partnership, Lauren and the favorite client, the favorite client says I do not want to build and empire.  Her friends say you should build your empire with Beth.  She calls Beth and in 24 hours Beth says "I'm in" and the Handel Group is formed.

They are now building on a vision that Beth had years ago but it was fear that kept her from doing it.  The Handel Group is 8 years old.  They have 60 people that work for them. They work for corporations, start-ups, universities (MIT for one) and individuals.  Beth does mostly corporate and Lauren does the rest.  They have a method and it works.  They believe they can take anyones dreams and bring them to fruition.  They understand how to build businesses but businesses with a soft side which make for a better environment which in turn creates a happier workplace and higher revenues.  There is definitely more for this company down the line.  They are honestly repackaging and remarketing peoples souls.

I plan on meeting with Lauren a few times to see what she can do for my fears and insecurities.  Maybe figure out a way we can work together with the companies I am invested with.  We will see.  I know one thing that when I left that meeting with both Beth and Lauren, I wanted to talk more. 

Lauren Gropper, Repurpose Compostables, Woman Entrepreneur

I was introduced to Lauren through a mutual friend.  She sent me her products and I wrote about the company because I think it is very smart what she has built.  Fast forward we speak again and we speak again and I am working on investing in Laurens company.  Consumer products are tough but to me, this is the future, renewable products made from plants that compose in an industrial composite in 90 days. 

Lauren grew up in Vancouver, Canada.  Two entrepreneurial parents.  Her father is an orthopedic surgeon and her mother is a comedienne who did TV, radio, etc.  She graduated from high school and stayed in Canada going to McGill in Montreal.  During her time junior year Lauren spent a semester in Jerusalem.  That is when she was bit by the travel bug. 

After graduating college she applied to a program that was like an Internet Peacecorps.  It was 1999 and the Y2K era was in place.  This group was working with a variety of Governments around the world to bring internet technology to areas that did not have access.  She knew how to built HTML products and through this program she was deployed around the world.  The program was really strict.  You were there to work and live with a family.  Although she was 22 they treated the group like they were 14.  She lived with a family, 3 kids and a rooster.  After eight months the program ended and then she went off traveling on her own for two months.

Lauren came back to Vancouver and got a job doing IT as a webmaster in a Government agency.  The pay was great but the work was boring.  She decided to save money, live at home, apply to graduate school and defer it if she got in and travel first for a year.  The story almost went according to plan.  She spent time in India, Nepal and Thailand.  The next stop was going to be in the East.  Wearing no helmet and driving a motorcycle Lauren has a head on collision with a bus while she was in Thailand.  She broke her jaw, lost all her teeth and broke ribs.  This happened six months into her trip.

The idea was when her traveling was over she was going to go to the London School of Economics.  Her parents brought her home from Thailand and prepared Lauren that she was going to go through about 2 1/2 years of surgery including bone graft from her hip.  Her parents were adamant that she stayed in North America.  I don't blame them.  Lauren wanted to move on her with life in between surgeries so she applied to Pratt thinking that if she got in there she would be in North America and perhaps if she played her cards right they would give her a full scholarship.  She got in, she got the full ride and she went. She majored in urban and environmental design.  It was a two year program. 

Lauren spent the second year working with a variety of organizations around green.  She learned the tax incentives for buildings and how to build a green building so after graduating she was hired by a consulting group to work on these unique projects.  She loved being in NYC and after a few years she wasn't sure she wanted to stay and starting to think about moving back to Cananda.  A friend sent her a tree hugging poster from the television company in Toronto who was looking for an expert in the green space to be on a show about green communities.  She applied for the job and became the host and producer of a show on HGTV.  The show was super cheesy.  They would go out to womens shelters, schools and other places and turn them into green spaces.  Although she transformed these peoples places the production quality was terrible.  While doing the show she continued to work as a consultant in the green space.  The entire time Lauren is thinking what is next, where does this go.

She has been working with Adrien Grenier volunteering at an organization that was helping apartment buildings get greener.  He got a call from Los Angeles to do a channel called Planet Green through the Discovery Channel.  Since Lauren had been in TV, he asked her to come along.  The channel launched in 2008.  It is hard to do green content so even in Los Angeles she continued to work as a consultant with architecture firms around green. 

She began to see friends start businesses and thought I want to do that.  She started to take some business classes and begun to look into recomposable products.  She started to dig into the marketplace and realized that there was an opportunity.  She met a guy who runs a manufacturing group in Taiwan where they only make plant based products.  Taiwan is a global leader in this area.  He helped her import the products and with that she created a brand and began to sell the product. 

The ball began to start rolling and Lauren put the consulting hat away.  Her second year she began to build out the team.  She realized that there might be a few others in the wholesale area selling these products but nobody was bringing these products directly to the consumer.  The key was getting the price point down to the place where it is competitive with other products that are not green.

Repurpose Compostables is still at the early stage but they are currently in Bed, Bath and Beyond and a few regional grocery stores.  Things are just starting to take off and she is talks with many different chains.  Lauren just got married and is about to have a baby too.  I am pretty sure when she went to McGrill she did not think she would be living in Los Angeles with a consumer products company but she followed an interesting path as most entrepreneurs do. 

Women Entrepreneur of the Week

I started writing about women entrepreneurs every Monday a few months before the first Womens Entrepreneur Festival.  I figured if we were going to put on a festival celebrating women entrepreneurs than I should celebrate them every single week.  That celebration has been going on for almost 3 years. 

Tuesday is the kick-off of the third Womens Entrepreneur Festival.  This year it is being Live Streamed and I am very excited about that.  Huffington Post is our generous sponsor and that is how we are able to live stream the event. 

Over the last 5 years I have really tried to be conscious of investing in women.  There are a few investments in the pipeline and when I close on them 70% of the investments in the Gotham Gal portfolio will be women led or a women who is one of the co-founders. I am pretty sure that nobody else can hang their hat on that.

People ask me all the time, which one is your favorite investment or which one do you think is going to do the best.  The answer is I love them all and I firmly believe that all of them will have some kind of positive outcome.  I am probably wearing some serious rose colored glasses on that one but I can't help myself. 

Since today is usually the post I write about a woman entrepreneur, I am going to write about how lucky I am to meet and invest in these women (men too but this post is about the women)  They are the women that are changing the world one business at a time.  They are the women that have entrepreneur in their blood.  They are the women who never give up.  They are the women who ask for advice, listen to feedback, call on me frequently, cry on my shoulder and make tough decisions daily.  I am honored to be part of their businesses.  Like an entrepreneur I think about all of them all the time.  It is my nature. 

I am looking forward to the week ahead and another year of Women Entrepreneur of the Week posts. 

Shira Sue Carmi, Launch Collective, Woman Entrepreneur

What I really like about the business that Shira has built is that she is helping give entrepreneurs in the fashion industry the tools they need to build a business.  The fashion business is one of the most difficult industries to build a brand. Even if you have built a brand that doesn't mean that you will be profitable.  Every season you have to reinvent the wheel.  Lauch Collective hand picks the companies they incubate and puts some skin into their businesses. In essence Launch Collective is the angels of the fashion business.

Shira grew up in the southern area of Israel.  Her parents were divorced when she was twelve.  Both her parents are entreprenreurs in their own right.  Her father was always running around the world from building cattle ranches, getting involved in a diamond mine and eventually settling down in Florida where he built a nursery business before retiring and moving back to Israel.  Her mother was a doctor and built her own practice and then became the dean of a medical school eventually became the President of Ben Gurion University. 

Shira graduated high school and headed directly into the Israeli army. She was selected to one of the few women to go work in the Army radio station.  It is one of the leading stations in Israel so it was interesting and fun.  Many of the people who had worked there went on to build and lead some of the largest of communication companies in Israel and around the globe. 

After the commitment to the army ended Shira had the opportunity to come to the US and get her green card through her father.  She figured why not, I could go and work in the arts.  She got a the plane and made a list; get a job, an apartment and some friends.  She got an apartment through the Village Voice.  She walked the streets of Soho stopping in gallery after gallery until she found a receptionist who was leaving and she took her job.  The gallery was Jack Tilton.  She stayed for a year and decided to go to college.

Shira got into NYU and figured out how to complete her studies on visual culture in three years while working at another gallery, the Dietsch Project.  Once she graduated she realized that she did not want to do sales in a gallery which is the logical next step before owning a gallery so she moved on.  She landed a great job in the marketing department of the Banana Republic.  She she had found her calling in the fashion industry.  At the Banana Republic she learned how to spend money, aka marketing but she did not learn how to make it.  Shira decided she should get her MBA and figure out the other side of the business. She wanted to stay in NYC so she applied to Columbia and got in.

During her two years at Columbia Shira began to work on projects with a variety of designers.  After graduating she had a really good offer to go work at Abercrombie and Fitch in Ohio but she just couldn't do it.  Instead she just kept being referred to people to do freelance job after freelance job.  It wasn't enough.  She wanted to do something besides just run numbers for fashion businesses.

Shira met Dan Otero who had built a line that ended up being a flash in the pan and he began to do projects with small designers from branding, marketing, fashion shows etc. The other person was Rob Spira who was overseeing merchandising, design and manfacturing for Ralph Lauren knits.  Together they made a great team.  All three brought a different element to the table and the one constant is that they were all entrepreneurial.  It was 2005 and Launch Collective was born.

They decided to incubate a few young designers to start.  They would help them with marketing, branding, ecommerce and operations.  They would commit to four seasons to begin.  Shira said what they began to see (although it is always a crap shoot) which entrepreneurs had the tenacity, drive and creative obsession that will allow those individuals to compete in the industry.  As a group they were able to help those entrepreneurs understand operational production and how to build a company. In essence they were building a management agency for the fashion industry.

Launch Collectives strategy is around equity and ownership.  They structure their deals with the designers three ways; salary, bonus and equity.  They have learned how to build a brand with the right talent.  That is their value.  Remember many of these companies will never realize equity so the deal must be structured right.  Their expertise is significant to these young designers as they grow.  They understand how to build the right sales and distribution platform and they are helping creative people understand the importance of those skills to build a real business.

The investment side of the startup in the fashion business is not as present as it is in the tech industry.  Launch Collective helps their companies get to the $2m annual sales with the hope that at that number they can break even.  Then there is some interest for people to put money in.  The next level is really to get to $10m annually.  The growth curve from $2-10M is capital intensive.  $0-2 is about building the brand, $2-10 is about really making an impact and over $10 is the point where other people can begin to worry about the businesses they have helped built.  It is then time for those companies to move out of Launch Collective.

I have never seen anything like this in the fashion world.  It is really smart.  The risk is high but like anything the more they work with creative designers the better they get at picking the right ones that they get behind.  Creative people tend to be the most disorganized people in the world and if you are planning on building a fashion line being disorganized is not going to fly.  Launch Collective helps the designer grow a company around their talents.  Super smart model. 

 

 

Rachel Miller, Haven Entertainment, Woman Entrepreneur

As a long time reader of this blog, Rachel contacted me about getting together and asking for some advice about her management/production company. Her email intrigued me.  She had built a company merged with another and was in the process of moving forward yet had nothing on her website.  We got together this past December and talked.

Rachel is an entrepreneur in every bone of her body.  Good news for her is she realized that desire very early on and jumped on it without even knowing what she was getting herself into.  Sometimes just jumping in with two feet without giving it much thought is the best way to go.  No reason to overthink things.  

Rachel grew up in an orthodox household in Los Angeles.  Her father is an accountant and her mother is in PR and marketing.  She was certainly the rebel in the family.  Rachel went to high school at the Yeshiva in Los Angeles.  She grew up a big reader because there was no TV on Saturday.  At age 12 she thought there were five books that she thought would be great movies.  At 15 she read that one of them was actually getting made into a movie.  At 16 she took her bat mitzvah money and optioned a book for $500 because she figured she knew just as much as everyone else about what would make a good flick.  She put the option together and figured out to get meetings with a bunch of big producers.  In the end, her book was not made into a movie but her family was pleased that she was entrepreneurial as long as she wasn't going into the film business.  

Before heading off to college, she went to NYU for a summer program.  28 kids attending the program and they spent the entire time reading books and watching movies. Once again bucking the family Rachel was determined to go NYU.  She ended up being the first kid not go to go University of Pennsylvania and become an accountant. She graduated high school and off to NYU she went.  Her father did not even realize she was a film major until a few days before graduating.  She spent 2 1/2 years at NYU and 1/2 semester in London graduating in 3 years.  She was in heaven in New York.  

During her time in college she interned for Joan Scott who was one the first female agents.  Great learning experience.  After graduating college Rachel went to work for the New York public school system.  It was through a division of Teach for America.  In the school that Rachel was working the 4th grade teacher left half way through the semester and it took the school several months to find a replacement so Rachel became the interim teacher.  4th grade school in Manhattan was not like 4th grade at the Yeshiva in Los Angeles.  She tried really hard to find something that she could teach everyone. She turned to Harry Potter. She realized that the power of reading is a game changer because the story created conversation and nobody knew more than anyone else.  It was a lesson on what reading can do and the importance of content.

After the school job ended she went to work for the Endeavor agency which is now part of the William Morris Agency.  She was 20 years old.  At the agency she was working for French directors and covered Sundance, Toronto film festival and the screening of sales.  Great experience looking at the top down of the film industry.  She left after a year going to work at Benny Medina Agency in talent and then went on to work at Red Wagon where they produced Memoirs of a Geisha and Bewitched.  At this point Rachel was 23 and decided that she should start her own management company.  She called her best friend, Jesse Hara who was 29 and said said we are going to start own our management company, we will take out some debt and we will be just fine.  Rachael moved back to Los Angeles and the company Tom Sawyers Entertainment was born.  

They made it up as they went along.  They both knew that they had great taste in material.  They had zero financing but a credit card and a small bank loan.  Six months in the writer strike hit.  It was the worst year.  They had zero income and they were repping writers who could not work.  They had $200 in their bank account and decided they needed to make a change quick.  They went out to NYC and met with every person they could.  They stayed in a friends apartment and hit the streets.  They energies turned to the book industry.  Fast forward they have now sold 13 books to publishers doing TV, film and documentaries. As Rachel puts it, because it was their company they could pretty much do whatever they want to.  They became one of the few companies to develop books in house to go on different verticals of production. 

They began to get approached by other companies that were interested in buying them.  Authority does not does not bode well for Rachel.  Then there was a group, Picture Machine, that an alum from NYU suggested Jesse and her meet with.  The two companies together created a value add situation.  Picture Machine  was always looking for content and Tom Sawyer Entertainment was always looking for producers.  It was the perfect merger.  They split the company up 50/50 and started over.  They are all entrepreneurs.  Each of their respective companies were roughly 8 years old. They were all scrappy people starting their own company again.  It was a great fit.

Now the company is called Haven Entertainment.  The future of their business is changing because the delivery methods have changed and content consumption is changing exponentially.  People in India and China are looking to absorb great content.  How can you deliver that content to people all over the world in new delivery methods.  You have to figure out how to adapt and change while being agile and nimble.  

I love Rachels energy. I also agree with the road that Haven is taking.  Do we have to wait and see a movie when it comes out on the big screen?  Aren't there niche audiences who want to see clever films that will pay to see it in their living room?  Aren't there people out there who are writing great books but aren't able to get into the door of a publishing house?  There are many of the questions that Rachel is trying to solve and when she does she plans on turning those opportunities into a success.  

Kara Goldin, Hint, Woman Entrepreneur

Kara's story is classic.  Growing up in a family where consumer food products were part of her family dinner conversations yet her father was never rewarded for what he built.  Hint is built out of the desire to create something she knew was a void in the marketplace.  Not knowing the realities of the competition in the marketplace has probably been the key to Kara's success.  Her perseverance and tenacious attitude prevailed against everything...and a little creativity didn't hurt.  

Kara grew up in Arizona continuing through college at Arizona State where she majored in communications.  Her father worked for the Healthy Choice division of ConAgra.  He had started his career in advertising at the Armor food company which was acquired by ConAgra in the 70's.  When her mother went back to work after staying home with the five kids for awhile, her father started to bake terrible TV dinners for the family.  He found the meals disgusting and reached out to Julia Child to develop a healthier alternative for food choices.  Hence Healthy Choice was born.  Kara watched him from a young age working so hard for ConAgra making not a lot of money yet he had obviously made the company billions.  The company would acknowledge him every year at a big holiday lunch but in his early 60's the company decided that everyone should have a MBA at his level and since he didn't they told him it was time to retire. Incredulous. Not surprising that Kira developed a distrust for large companies early on.  

When Kara graduated she had absolutely no idea what she wanted to do.  She put herself through school working at a local Mexican restaurant that has been in the area for decades, an institution. Out of towners would frequent there and many of them told Kara that they would happily help her connect with the right people to find the right job.  One particular patron who worked for Anheiser Busch used to come to the restaurant all the time.  He really wanted to help Kara find a job but she kept thinking I do not want to sell beer. When he told her about some of the opportunities like putting products in movie sets that sparked her interest.  He said talk to as many people as she could. At each juncture ask the person you are speaking to if there is someone else she should be talking to.   People would say when you are in Boston come see me, when you are in Chicago come see me.  So Kara talked to a travel agency and booked a trip to go from city to city to meet all these people.  The flight cost $472.  She had never been out of Arizona before.  Once she made the rounds she had 60 jobs offers.  Nobody told her it was going to be hard to get a job in 1989, she just went for it.  

Kara decided NYC was the place to be.  She took a job at Time Inc as an assitant to a woman who ran circulation for all the airline businesses.  It was an amazing job because the airline circulation is bulk so the publishers loved it because they knew they could easily sell advertising around the circulation.  Kara had access to the publishers and ad directors underneath the Time umbrella.  She is sitll in contact with the woman she worked with there.  She stayed for about three years until she got a call from CNN.

CNN was launching an airport channel and wanted to put television monitors into aiports.  She was hired away for a nice chunk of change.  A month into her job they put the project on hold because of the Gulf War. They needed people to jump into ad sales.  They put Kara through a training program and she came a sales person at CNN.  Right before that she had met her husband who was in law school in NYC.  It was 1993/94.  CNN at that time was not a big company.  She stayed for two years, got engaged and her husband wanted to go out to SF to do Internet law because that sector was not really booming in NYC yet.  Can you imagine?

Kara moved to SF and took a job with a small spin off from Apple that was doing CDrom shopping.  This was the way they were going to get women on the services that were male oriented.  Kara really had no idea what was going on at Apple and that they had zero money.  AOL ended up coming in and saving her company and so she stayed for awhile in business development.  They were offering catalog companies free space on the CDroms.  Kara thought it was a really bad business model. Eventually they were fully acquired by AOL and they gave Kara the opportunity to run shopping on AOL.  Her husband was at Netscape doing intellectual property and Kara was working on the beginings of ecommerce.  They were both in the Internet world.  At that time when you purchased something on line it could take up to a month to show up at your door.  It was a bit of the wild west.  It was between 1995-2001.

In 2001 Kara had her second child.  AOL acquired Netscape and both her and husband were part of the transition team.  When they merged with Time Warner it was like all her history came into one company.  She really had no desire to stick around with her husband in the same company so they both checked out in 2001 and built a house.  She was then pregnant with their third child.  This was the point when Kara was trying to figure out what to do with her life.  Oh yes, I have certainly been there.  For awhile she interviewed with non-profits and profits but nothing sparked her interest.  One day she was in her kitchen looking in her refrigerator and thinking there is nothing in this house I want to eat or drink.  I certainly don't want my kids to eat or drink any of this stuff.  She started reading the labels.  At this time she had been reading more about hormones in milk and thought what is wrong with this world, we are ruining our food supply chain.  Vitamin water is full of sugar and I do not want my kids to be addicted to sugar and this junk.  Always skeptical having a father in large food companies she remembered what her father used to say that if something isn't growing mold you should wonder about how long it will take to break down in your system.  She was very aware of the sweetners in the marketplace that were not good for you too. 

She was addicted to diet coke at this point.  Kara decided to clean up the house and make everyone aware of what they were eating.  It was tough but two weeks later nobody had the desire to eat the junk that was in their system anymore.  They began to change their eating habits.  She was hardcore about it.  They found the food items that satisifed their desires but drinking plain water was boring so she started putting fruit in the water and all of a sudden everyone started drinking more water.  

Parents started calling Kara and asking her what fruit water were they drinking in her house?  One of them wanted to know how much sugar she put in it.  She told them it is purely fruit in water.  The parents said wow, maybe you can make some up for me.  Now she laughs because it was not that difficult but it became obvious to her that this was so basic but nobody had put it on the market.  It was 2003.

In 2004 Kara that I am going to create this product and bring it to market.  She took $50K and started creating essences with bottles she bought.  Her husband asked her what do you know about beverages.  She said nothing but she was curious and she decided she could figure it out.   At this point her husband had just sold a company and was looking for something to do too.  She told him to come with her to Chicago and meet with a company and they would figure it out together.  She was pregnant with their fourth child.  

The beverage industry is all based on chemicals and Kara was energzied to do something.  She got the first product out with three months shelf life which is nothing in the beverage world.  There were lots of issues at the beginning.  Labels would fall off, the product would not be turned on the shelf, etc.  Originally the name was WAWA and that was because she was going to do a kids line.  There was a chain called WAWA and her attorney husband said it would not be a good idea to use that name. Everytime they would descirbe the drink she would say it had a hint of flavor.  Hint.  The name stuck and they got the trademark for it, "drink water not sugar".

In 2005 her son was born in May and at the last minute Kara went to the Fancy Food Show in NYC and got a bad space in a corner behind a pole.  She engaged some old friends from AOL help her man the booth.  She had zero idea what she was doing.  Before she knew it people started stopping by the booth and loved what she had created.  The story gets more complicated as Pepsi and Coke are not big fans of new products from tiny companies but she kept on growing.

Gourmet Garage was their first order and they have been growing every since. They grew 90% between 2011 and 2012.   Dealing with distributors and category captains of chains is not easy.  She has been very clever by doing business directly with companies such as Google where they provide drinks for the company.  She realized to beat the big guys you have to be creative.  She is beginning to think like the Zappos model.  Go directly to the consumer.

Trust me, after speaking with Kara, there is no doubt that she will figure out how to grow this company to be as big as it can be.  She is a take no prisoners kind of girl with a carrot just dangling in front of her nose.  Her tenacity comes straight at you.  Building a consumer brand is probably one of the most difficult companies to grow, IMHO.  I am seriously impressed with what Kara has built and of course with the four kids in tow...