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Perfect Pitch with Alex Shamir: Owning Your Expertise
13 Plays1 year ago
Every entrepreneur is trying to solve a problem with their startup. To prove you're the person for the job, how do you become an expert yourself? We're talking with an entrepreneur who has accomplished just that. Join us in today's conversation with Alex Shamir, Co-Founder at Yofi, and investor Tanner Potter of Kickstart (a VC firm for startups in Utah, Colorado, and the Mountain West) as we bring you both sides of a Perfect Pitch. In this episode, we'll talk about:
How Alex's experience at Nike and Apple drove her interest in tackling data integrity and policy abuse in e-commerce
The difference between understanding the problem your startup is solving and being obsessed with it
Why entrepreneurs should trust their gut, iterate quickly, and make hard decisions, like firing when necessary, to drive success
If investors consider the age of an entrepreneur when investing
Kickstart is the Mountain West’s most experienced and active early-stage venture capital fund. Kickstart provides pre-seed & seed funding to ambitious tech founders across Utah & Colorado with a focus on AI, B2B SaaS, and frontier tech.See Kickstart’s full investment portfolio here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Perfect Pitch Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to Perfect Pitch, a podcast by Kickstart, where we reveal the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
00:00:21
Speaker
I'm your host, Karen Zelnick, and today we have Alex Shamir, co-founder of Yofi and Tanner Potter, an investor at Kickstart.
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome both of you.
00:00:29
Speaker
So glad to have you on the show.
00:00:31
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:32
Speaker
Thank you.
Alex Shamir's Career Journey
00:00:34
Speaker
Alex, let's tell our listeners a little bit about you.
00:00:37
Speaker
So you were a senior product manager at Nike before you transitioned into a technical project manager role at Apple.
00:00:44
Speaker
You became obsessed with bots.
00:00:46
Speaker
Is obsessed a fair word to say?
00:00:49
Speaker
I think I would say caveat it in the past as yes.
00:00:52
Speaker
Now bad actors and policy abusers in general.
00:00:55
Speaker
Like I am wearing a sweatshirt that says bot mitigation is my passion.
00:00:59
Speaker
It's my Yofi swag.
00:01:01
Speaker
And so I think it's a fair assessment.
00:01:02
Speaker
Okay, great.
00:01:03
Speaker
I love it.
00:01:04
Speaker
And that led to the founding of Yofi.
00:01:06
Speaker
You were recognized recently as Forbes 30 under 30 watch list, which is amazing and well-deserved.
00:01:11
Speaker
What else should we know about you?
00:01:14
Speaker
That's a hard one.
00:01:17
Speaker
I love raccoons.
00:01:18
Speaker
So that's part of our Yofi mascot and logo.
00:01:21
Speaker
I was a chemistry nerd.
00:01:22
Speaker
I started working in a chem lab.
00:01:24
Speaker
Shout out to Dr. Laren Tobert and EA Weeks at Georgia Tech at 15 years old.
00:01:29
Speaker
Had a lot of fun.
00:01:30
Speaker
Well, at 15?
00:01:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:33
Speaker
All right.
00:01:33
Speaker
Just had to make sure we all heard that.
00:01:35
Speaker
I think most of the world love organic chemistry.
00:01:40
Speaker
It's, you know, the most fun hobby.
00:01:43
Speaker
And then, you know, for fun, I love being with my dog, being outside.
00:01:47
Speaker
So skiing, snowboarding.
00:01:49
Speaker
I went to college.
00:01:50
Speaker
I'll call Utah, Montana home.
00:01:52
Speaker
So anything that gets me outside of the mountains, kind of like that.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, I love that.
00:01:58
Speaker
What about raccoons?
00:01:59
Speaker
I have to ask before we move on.
00:02:01
Speaker
Okay, so people tell me my personality is kind of like a raccoon with access to broadband drinking a Red Bull, which I think is pretty fair when you get to know me.
00:02:11
Speaker
They're just the cutest little animal you've ever seen.
00:02:13
Speaker
And they're like digging for trash and they find golden trash.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I just love that about them.
00:02:18
Speaker
That's so great.
00:02:19
Speaker
Okay, Tanner.
00:02:20
Speaker
How do you follow that?
00:02:23
Speaker
How do you?
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, how do you follow that?
00:02:24
Speaker
What's your favorite animal?
00:02:28
Speaker
I would go...
00:02:31
Speaker
I like gorillas.
00:02:33
Speaker
Nice.
00:02:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:02:35
Speaker
I like it.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:37
Speaker
I've seen gorillas in person in the wild.
00:02:39
Speaker
That was one of the cool things I've done in my life.
00:02:42
Speaker
And so now ever since I like saw them, actually, I liked it before that, but when saw them in Rwanda, that was that sealed the deal for me on baby
Tanner Potter's Interests and Experiences
00:02:50
Speaker
gorillas.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:52
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:02:52
Speaker
We should put some photos from your trip there in the show notes because I would love to see them.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:57
Speaker
That's so cool.
00:02:58
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:02:59
Speaker
We'll have a link to your bio.
00:03:00
Speaker
It's great to have you back on the show.
00:03:02
Speaker
I mean, we just learned your favorite animals.
00:03:03
Speaker
Is there anything else the audience should know about you that they don't yet know about you?
00:03:07
Speaker
No, I would say Alex actually spurred the she's skiing and snowboarding this year.
00:03:12
Speaker
I've gone back and forth on my life skiing and snowboarding, but this year I've been doing both skiing and snowboarding.
00:03:18
Speaker
I like trying new things.
00:03:19
Speaker
So that, that was this year.
00:03:21
Speaker
I'm not that good at either, but it's fun to go back and forth and get some powder while snowboarding and then skiing's, you know, moguls and just going straight down is a little bit better.
00:03:32
Speaker
It's hard to be ambidextrous with skiing and snowboarding.
00:03:35
Speaker
It's very hard to go between them both, just saying.
00:03:39
Speaker
You put your weight differently, right?
00:03:41
Speaker
I even found it really hard to go from water skiing to snow skiing because in water skiing, all the weight's in your heels, but snow skiing, it's all in your toes.
00:03:48
Speaker
I just...
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:49
Speaker
Anyway.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, it is.
00:03:52
Speaker
It's funny because then you start to see different things you like about it.
00:03:54
Speaker
Snowboarding is closer to the ground and through powder you float and you get a little more floating sensation.
00:04:01
Speaker
But then the transitions between everything kind of sucks.
00:04:03
Speaker
Taking off your bindings, getting off the lift, and skiing is just a little more smooth that way.
00:04:07
Speaker
So they got their positive and negative stuff.
00:04:11
Speaker
Alex, before we move on a little bit, I do want to ask you, where did the name Yofi come from?
00:04:15
Speaker
We'll talk more about the company later, but the name, where did the name come from?
00:04:18
Speaker
So our original name was Botnot.
00:04:20
Speaker
And we pivoted away from only dealing with bots.
00:04:23
Speaker
So we're thinking about a name and we're a customer intentionality platform.
00:04:27
Speaker
So we're thinking, okay, good customer, bad customer.
00:04:30
Speaker
And I kept saying my dog's name and my dog's name is Yofi.
00:04:33
Speaker
And I was like, oh, Yofi always means great.
00:04:35
Speaker
I'm a big pun person.
00:04:36
Speaker
So he's always a great boy.
From Chemistry to Tech: Alex's Transition
00:04:39
Speaker
Awesome.
00:04:39
Speaker
Okay, let's dive into the discussion a little bit.
00:04:44
Speaker
Alex, you, back in 2017, the beginning of your career, you were a PhD student actually studying chemistry.
00:04:51
Speaker
We know that's a passion for you.
00:04:54
Speaker
What changed?
00:04:55
Speaker
You're not a chemist.
00:04:56
Speaker
You're not doing like what, what happened?
00:04:59
Speaker
I think chemistry just gives you a good baseline skill.
00:05:02
Speaker
So it makes you extremely analytical, gives you a lot of grit.
00:05:05
Speaker
It makes you fail a lot, right?
00:05:07
Speaker
Because chemistry, you're always testing a hypothesis.
00:05:09
Speaker
And you're in a lab, something environmentally could go wrong in a lab, something could be contaminated, and it just goes wrong.
00:05:17
Speaker
And I was working harder than I ever did in my life.
00:05:23
Speaker
in a chemistry lab and doing physical chemistry.
00:05:25
Speaker
So computational chemistry.
00:05:27
Speaker
And I just realized, as long as I've been doing that, at that point, I've been doing chemistry for almost 10 years.
00:05:33
Speaker
It wasn't for me.
00:05:34
Speaker
I wasn't loving it.
00:05:35
Speaker
I wasn't passionate about it.
00:05:37
Speaker
Waking up in the morning became very arduous because my heart wasn't there.
00:05:40
Speaker
And it's not just the failing aspect.
00:05:42
Speaker
It was do I want to be in a lab every day doing the same monotonous labor constantly?
00:05:48
Speaker
And the answer was no, it didn't allow me to be creative.
00:05:51
Speaker
I love that.
00:05:52
Speaker
Like I love, I recently read a book called The Dip.
00:05:54
Speaker
It's really short.
00:05:55
Speaker
I think it takes like an hour to read, but it's talk, it kind of, I love the concept of like, is this just a dip or is this actually not the life I want to choose?
00:06:02
Speaker
And then, so I, there's a lot of power and the most successful people learn the right things to quit.
00:06:07
Speaker
You have to quit the right things.
00:06:08
Speaker
But Tanner, I love your thoughts on that.
00:06:12
Speaker
I don't know how to word this exactly, but like, was that a red flag for you?
00:06:15
Speaker
Was like changing course and doing something different after having done something for 10 years?
00:06:19
Speaker
Like how do investors think about pivots in life courses?
00:06:24
Speaker
No, it's, in fact, they're usually positives.
00:06:27
Speaker
Maybe it's because there's so many stories of
00:06:31
Speaker
Steve jobs and Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, all these people, they drew, they dropped out.
00:06:36
Speaker
So within every founder, there's a bit of a rebel.
00:06:39
Speaker
There's a bit of like a falling and unorthodox path.
00:06:43
Speaker
And so when we saw that with Alex,
00:06:47
Speaker
It checks the box.
00:06:47
Speaker
You know that she's smart.
00:06:48
Speaker
Like I said, you
Trusting Intuition in Career Decisions
00:06:49
Speaker
know that she's gritty.
00:06:49
Speaker
If she's in there, she can be detailed.
00:06:53
Speaker
But also, she is not going to follow the traditional path.
00:06:56
Speaker
And so when we think about investing in founders, that's by definition what they are.
00:07:01
Speaker
People who are going to go after something without resources to try to solve a problem.
00:07:05
Speaker
So now I think for us, it was like, okay, this is really interesting.
00:07:10
Speaker
And she's following her path.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:13
Speaker
And Alex, what advice would you give to a listening entrepreneur who started something, whether it's a company or a degree, and now they're having sort of second thoughts?
00:07:22
Speaker
Like, how do you decide if quitting is the right choice?
00:07:26
Speaker
It's going to be the most cliche advice, but the advice I love it.
00:07:30
Speaker
We love it.
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:31
Speaker
Always listen to your gut.
00:07:32
Speaker
Your intuition will always be right.
00:07:35
Speaker
You need to like, there's wake up calls.
00:07:37
Speaker
There's always going to be red flags.
00:07:38
Speaker
The more you ignore it, the harder it's going to be.
00:07:41
Speaker
Life, in my opinion, needs to be organic.
00:07:43
Speaker
The more inorganic it is, the more you force, the harder it's going to be.
00:07:47
Speaker
The second you feel that way, it's time to hop off that boat and you'll find the right path.
00:07:52
Speaker
It's really, really cringe.
00:07:54
Speaker
And I'm sorry, but it's the truth.
00:07:56
Speaker
I don't think it's cringey.
00:07:57
Speaker
I don't think it's cringey.
00:07:59
Speaker
Like it's cliches or cliches for a reason, I think.
00:08:04
Speaker
No, I think that checks out for me.
00:08:07
Speaker
Especially when you've... I think you've developed intuition in your gut.
00:08:11
Speaker
Over time, you've been doing it for 10 years.
00:08:14
Speaker
You don't need any more data.
00:08:16
Speaker
If you think of your intuition as some mix of your natural proclivities and the data that you've acquired through life experience...
00:08:22
Speaker
10 years in, you're going to know, okay, this is not right for me.
00:08:27
Speaker
And so you can really trust your intuition.
00:08:29
Speaker
You obviously have to give things a fair shake before you can make those decisions at times.
00:08:34
Speaker
And that's the testing hypothesis period.
00:08:37
Speaker
Often we see our founders go through and whether that's on a business front, whether they want to be a founder or not.
00:08:42
Speaker
I think there's different things you can do to help you start to build some intuition.
00:08:46
Speaker
But yeah, then I agree with Alex.
00:08:47
Speaker
It's like, what...
00:08:49
Speaker
It's the cliche, you know, what Phil, what Phil's right here and go with that rather than, and oftentimes that leads you to do things that like, isn't what everybody else would tell you to do.
00:08:58
Speaker
And that's, that's when you usually find like the unique idea, you find alpha, you find cool opportunities is when you don't just do what everyone else is doing.
00:09:06
Speaker
Did you find that to be the case, Alex?
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, I remember starting at Nike and getting into the bot space.
00:09:14
Speaker
And then I moved to Apple.
00:09:15
Speaker
And by the way, Apple was my dream company.
00:09:17
Speaker
I was like, perfect.
00:09:18
Speaker
I'm going to stay at Apple.
00:09:19
Speaker
I'm so excited to be here.
00:09:21
Speaker
Love the product.
00:09:22
Speaker
But it was an itching feeling of like, this is what I should be doing.
00:09:26
Speaker
And then going into Apple being like, hey, I don't feel like this is the right place for me.
00:09:30
Speaker
I don't feel like I'm doing the right thing.
00:09:32
Speaker
I don't feel like I'm on the right path.
00:09:34
Speaker
It was that pivot that one opened my new chapter in my life.
00:09:38
Speaker
But if I ignored that, I don't think I would have been as successful and as happy as I am now.
00:09:43
Speaker
Tanner, you mentioned there are things people can do to sort of learn to like to hone their intuition.
00:09:47
Speaker
Do you have any examples?
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like a chicken and egg thing where you you need experience, get experience.
00:09:55
Speaker
And how do you get how do you get the first experience?
00:09:57
Speaker
I just think there's
00:09:59
Speaker
I remember when I was deciding whether I wanted to, in undergrad, whether I wanted, my mom was like, oh, you're smart and you got good grades, so why don't you be a doctor?
00:10:07
Speaker
We have a lawyer in the family, we have an academic, why don't you go do this route?
00:10:11
Speaker
I remember I went and shadowed my uncle who was a podiatrist.
00:10:15
Speaker
And I shadowed a family friend who was a family doctor.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I started taking some of the classes.
00:10:19
Speaker
And I gave myself some experience to try and figure that out.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, that's not the right fit for me.
00:10:26
Speaker
So I think on the startup front, you see that where sometimes people... For example, they're thinking about a startup...
Founding and Focus of Yofi
00:10:33
Speaker
You know, they start advising, they start working on the side, they do it.
00:10:35
Speaker
And then like, oh, yeah, this actually fits my, you know, this resonates with the way that I operate.
00:10:42
Speaker
And so like, I think it's just starting just starting with running little test experiments.
00:10:46
Speaker
And then ultimately, you know, you don't really know until like you take the full jump on on something until you burn the ships.
00:10:53
Speaker
And and so it comes down to that.
00:10:55
Speaker
But then I think your intuition can guide you a little bit there.
00:10:59
Speaker
So Alex, your intuition has guided you to leave chemistry.
00:11:02
Speaker
You're at Apple, your dream company.
00:11:05
Speaker
What led you to start Yofi?
00:11:07
Speaker
How did the idea come about?
00:11:09
Speaker
Walk us through the story.
00:11:10
Speaker
Okay, one, I don't know if people have contacts of how Tanner and I met.
00:11:15
Speaker
Give us the context.
00:11:17
Speaker
No.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:18
Speaker
Give us the context.
00:11:19
Speaker
Tanner and I were both graduate interns at Nike together one summer.
00:11:24
Speaker
And I have a personality where I'll talk to practically anyone.
00:11:28
Speaker
And we're sitting at a table.
00:11:30
Speaker
And at that table, they asked us a question of where do you see your life in the future?
00:11:34
Speaker
Where's your next 10 years going to be at Nike?
00:11:36
Speaker
And I remember raising my hand and I said, I'm going to be on a ranch with my dogs after selling a tech company.
00:11:41
Speaker
Tanner looked at me.
00:11:42
Speaker
I looked at Tanner and I was like, we're going to be friends and who can do more pushups right now, me or you?
00:11:48
Speaker
Literally what happened.
00:11:49
Speaker
I don't know if Tanner remembers this, but I remember this.
00:11:53
Speaker
So how Yofi more or less started is I was on a growth team at Nike and they gave me...
00:12:02
Speaker
a project to work on.
00:12:04
Speaker
And the project was figure out the bot mitigation strategy for Nike China.
00:12:08
Speaker
Great.
00:12:09
Speaker
So I started looking at data.
00:12:11
Speaker
And I created a deck that was called 2am thoughts.
00:12:15
Speaker
And I was looking at data that people were like, Oh, great, our growth numbers are growing up going up.
00:12:19
Speaker
But why is our AOV falling?
00:12:21
Speaker
Why is our new coupon rate falling down or going up?
00:12:25
Speaker
And I started asking these questions on like, what are our legitimate users?
00:12:29
Speaker
Why are these accounts fluctuating month over month?
00:12:33
Speaker
And just diving in that data made me fall in love with this field.
00:12:38
Speaker
Going over to Apple, I can't talk about what I did, saw a similar pattern.
00:12:43
Speaker
And I'm like, all these retail companies and the largest retail companies in the world, including the ones that my co-founders worked at, are seeing the same issues.
00:12:51
Speaker
Why aren't people questioning their legitimacy of their data and their customer intentionality?
00:12:56
Speaker
That's our core data that we're making for everyday decisions, whether that's machine learning, procurement, or more.
00:13:02
Speaker
If that's faulty, you can't build anything correctly.
00:13:07
Speaker
So why aren't they questioning it?
00:13:09
Speaker
Data and data integrity is a hard topic.
00:13:12
Speaker
Understanding the difference and the nuances of customer intentionality is a hard problem to solve.
00:13:18
Speaker
Policy abuse isn't simple, right?
00:13:20
Speaker
Because you have to think about how is this customer interacting?
00:13:24
Speaker
Are they masking as a bot?
00:13:25
Speaker
Are they masking as a return abuser?
00:13:28
Speaker
It's a lot of questions and it's a lot of orgs in a big company having to talk to each other.
00:13:32
Speaker
And the bigger the company you are, you realize the less and less that people talk to each other.
00:13:37
Speaker
So it's really understanding how to stitch the data and also where can we be the most useful or be the most utilized.
00:13:47
Speaker
So this passion for solving this problem led to Yofi.
00:13:52
Speaker
You connected with your co-founders.
00:13:53
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about that founding story.
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:56
Speaker
So Andrea and I helped build the bond mitigation strategy together at Nike.
00:14:02
Speaker
We couldn't stop thinking about it.
00:14:05
Speaker
Andrew went to a bunch of different retail companies.
00:14:08
Speaker
And we would just be pinging each other on WeChat like, Hey, did you see this?
00:14:12
Speaker
Hey, did you see that?
00:14:13
Speaker
I was actually driving because I did policy abuse myself on a mattress.
00:14:17
Speaker
And I was like, Why aren't people thinking about this?
00:14:20
Speaker
Why aren't they solving it?
00:14:21
Speaker
I called my brother who ended up being one of our co-founders as well.
00:14:25
Speaker
because Jordan scaled companies from like zero to 300 million at IBM.
00:14:30
Speaker
He's insanely smart and like the best product person I know.
00:14:33
Speaker
And I was like, Hey, I just want to talk this through with you.
00:14:36
Speaker
People will talk about fraud.
00:14:38
Speaker
They'll talk about friendly fraud.
00:14:39
Speaker
They'll talk about bots from like a laugh and network layer, but no one talks about policy abuse.
00:14:44
Speaker
And like to say policy abuse and fraud are very similar is like, they're very nuanced.
00:14:50
Speaker
It's extremely different.
00:14:51
Speaker
So like,
00:14:52
Speaker
I'm going to go back and go on a little tangent.
00:14:54
Speaker
I was listening to a podcast of George Kurtz, who's the CEO of CrowdStrike.
00:14:58
Speaker
It's a $65 billion company.
00:15:00
Speaker
And it's like he's talking and having to correct people what the difference is
Challenges in E-commerce and Policy Abuse
00:15:04
Speaker
between malware and breaches.
00:15:06
Speaker
It's the same thing with us, where it's like,
00:15:08
Speaker
going back and tying this together.
00:15:11
Speaker
No one's ever thinking about this.
00:15:13
Speaker
In 2020, it was all about growth of a company.
00:15:16
Speaker
Let's build a direct-to-consumer business.
00:15:19
Speaker
No one thought about the data play and how much it's eating their actual bottom line.
00:15:24
Speaker
Tanner, and so she brings this idea to you.
00:15:26
Speaker
What are your thoughts?
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:29
Speaker
So when I was at Nike, the sneakerhead culture, this obsession with getting...
00:15:37
Speaker
Air Jordan, one of them, or specific brands was just on the cusp of just becoming mainstream.
00:15:44
Speaker
And then with 2020 COVID, we saw this just insane mainstreaming of sneakers and all these secondary marketplaces where you could buy them
00:15:55
Speaker
and this demand happening.
00:15:56
Speaker
And so it started to become obvious that there were hype sneakers or sneakerheads.
00:16:03
Speaker
This was happening where bots were coming in and buying up a bunch and then reselling them and people were paying exorbitant amounts.
00:16:09
Speaker
And I can actually remember when Alex talked to me first about it, the example she gave is that it wasn't just arbitrage that was happening there.
00:16:16
Speaker
People were finding a 20% coupon and buying Air Monarch 87s, which
00:16:22
Speaker
if you don't know, are really cool shoes.
00:16:25
Speaker
The biggest dad shoe in the world.
00:16:27
Speaker
Yeah, they're like, they're dad shoes for like 60 year olds and plus that you only see in Florida, you know.
00:16:33
Speaker
But people were buying up a bunch of these, getting them for 20% off, reselling them.
00:16:37
Speaker
And then for the ones they didn't resell within a 30 day period, they were sending back to Nike.
00:16:41
Speaker
And so you were seeing huge bullet effects on the supply chain.
00:16:45
Speaker
It costs $14 plus to just return and backstock those shoes.
00:16:49
Speaker
And so
00:16:50
Speaker
For me, when Alex and Jordan and the team first came and talked to us about it, it was like, there's no doubt there's a there there.
00:16:58
Speaker
There's an issue going on.
00:17:00
Speaker
And just as if you think about physical retail, there's so many...
00:17:05
Speaker
there's actually physical guards they have to put in place.
00:17:07
Speaker
They have currency checks on dollars, like people, there's leakage where people are stealing things.
00:17:12
Speaker
Like there's all sorts of things that are happening in the physical sphere that we don't think about, but like that, that there's institutions and guardrails and things that have been put in place.
00:17:21
Speaker
Whereas online, like it's still a little bit of the wild west.
00:17:24
Speaker
And so when you think about e-commerce brands,
00:17:27
Speaker
How do they deal with a bot or some bad actor that's buying up 10% of the stock of something that's scarce and then reselling it?
00:17:35
Speaker
Is that what you want?
00:17:35
Speaker
Is that what the customer experience is?
00:17:37
Speaker
So there's all sorts of ramifications.
00:17:39
Speaker
And I think that was just the beginning of understanding that was the tip of the iceberg.
00:17:43
Speaker
Well, now, the hottest topic is returns abuse.
00:17:47
Speaker
We've been doing that for 2 years at this point.
00:17:50
Speaker
It's been a thing for the last 11 years on e-com.
00:17:53
Speaker
So it's people who are wardrobing, I'm wearing this hoodie, I'm going to return it, I'm going to send back the package for a product that is equal weight in a package, even though it's not a real product, or I'm going to send back a counterfeit.
00:18:05
Speaker
It's hitting every econ business.
00:18:07
Speaker
So it's like, how do we detect it?
00:18:09
Speaker
How do we find these bad actors?
00:18:11
Speaker
Because it's technically not fraud.
00:18:12
Speaker
It's policy abuse, which is a completely different area.
00:18:15
Speaker
And it's something that they have to come and think about where, like Tanner said, great, there was bots, hype product, but now it's hitting almost every line of business within a company's org.
00:18:27
Speaker
You can't recapture that product.
00:18:29
Speaker
It's a zero sale.
00:18:31
Speaker
Like this is fascinating to me, like stuff that I don't think about as a consumer, but then impacts me too.
00:18:37
Speaker
Now you have to pay a reshipping fee, right?
00:18:39
Speaker
Like I'm getting impacted.
00:18:41
Speaker
Like 1% of what we've seen from our customers is 1% of bad actors contribute to about 15% of returns.
00:18:48
Speaker
That's a huge number.
Entrepreneurial Insights and Dedication
00:18:49
Speaker
So when H&M or Zara calls, not our customers yet, but... Yet, yet, yet.
00:18:55
Speaker
Can't say that, but you get the point.
00:18:59
Speaker
They're charging people $4.99 for returns and shipping because of these bad actors.
00:19:05
Speaker
We shouldn't be impacted.
00:19:06
Speaker
We didn't do anything to harm their policy.
00:19:09
Speaker
It's the 1% who are really impacting and taking advantage.
00:19:13
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:15
Speaker
Now I'm just like, before the episode, we asked Tanner if there was one thing that he would want entrepreneurs to learn from you, what would that be?
00:19:23
Speaker
And he said to know more about the problem than anyone else in the world.
00:19:27
Speaker
And it's very clear from just our short conversation already that that is you.
00:19:32
Speaker
You know more about this problem than anyone else in the world.
00:19:35
Speaker
How did you come to that?
00:19:36
Speaker
How do you have the time to research that?
00:19:37
Speaker
How do you do that?
00:19:39
Speaker
They're an ever evolving problem.
00:19:40
Speaker
How do you stay up to date with something that is constantly changing?
00:19:44
Speaker
When you're equated to a raccoon with broadband, you've been on the internet for a long time.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:51
Speaker
With the Red Bull.
00:19:51
Speaker
You forgot.
00:19:52
Speaker
With the Red Bull.
00:19:52
Speaker
With the Red Bull.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:55
Speaker
I'm on the internet.
00:19:56
Speaker
I'm constantly doing threat intelligence.
00:19:58
Speaker
My background was a botter.
00:19:59
Speaker
I was a reseller at some point.
00:20:01
Speaker
I won't age myself, but I was doing this for Justin Bieber tickets.
00:20:05
Speaker
How do we write a Selenium script?
00:20:07
Speaker
How do we do this before it was a nice GUI package and I paid $200 subscription for a bot, which is wild to me when it's like a few lines of code.
00:20:15
Speaker
I came from this world.
00:20:16
Speaker
It was a passion project of me.
00:20:19
Speaker
So then transitioning to the threat intelligence side was I'm chronically on the internet.
00:20:25
Speaker
I love solving this problem.
00:20:26
Speaker
I wake up and the only thing I want to do is like do big data and do data engineering for this.
00:20:32
Speaker
it makes me so happy and finding the clues and puzzles.
00:20:35
Speaker
I'm a big puzzle and Lego person.
00:20:37
Speaker
It's essentially what I do every single day.
00:20:40
Speaker
And so once you're staring at data, and you've been doing it for as long as I have, it becomes a mystery game of how do I get smarter?
00:20:47
Speaker
How do I outsmart the policy abusers?
00:20:50
Speaker
Do you ever get to a dip?
00:20:51
Speaker
Or does it ever become mundane?
00:20:53
Speaker
Or you're just like, this is my problem.
00:20:56
Speaker
And I'm passionate about it.
00:20:58
Speaker
I'm not going to lie.
00:20:59
Speaker
Staring at a CSV file or a BigQuery table at times is not the most fun and sexy.
00:21:07
Speaker
What?
00:21:08
Speaker
I was shocked here.
00:21:11
Speaker
Shogging.
00:21:12
Speaker
And when I do, that's when you take breaks.
00:21:14
Speaker
You go outside, you clear your mind.
00:21:17
Speaker
I mean, I'm luckily at a position where it's not my only thing that I do on a day to day.
00:21:23
Speaker
Like I get to talk with clients and get to involve clients and threat intelligence and make them knowledgeable to the problems.
00:21:31
Speaker
But it's also so... It's not a mundane area because bad actors are quick.
00:21:36
Speaker
So you patch a loophole, it's a constant cat and mouse game.
00:21:40
Speaker
You're never going to catch 99%.
00:21:41
Speaker
You're never going to catch 100%.
00:21:44
Speaker
Anyone who tells you that it's a lie, but it's how do we catch 80, 75%, 60% and how do we stay up to date with our techniques makes it non mundane.
00:21:56
Speaker
I love that.
00:21:57
Speaker
Tanner, two questions for you.
00:21:59
Speaker
The first one.
00:22:00
Speaker
So how do you stay energized at your job?
00:22:02
Speaker
I'd love to know your approach to that as well.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think as VCs, in some ways, we have the inverse problem, which is we are involved in so many different things that you don't ever get to deep work on it.
00:22:16
Speaker
You feel it's shallow.
00:22:18
Speaker
It can feel shallower because you have 10 minutes of context and then you jump to the FinTech and then you jump to an internet company and then you jump to a SaaS company.
00:22:27
Speaker
So for me, I think it's just...
00:22:31
Speaker
I feel lucky that I'm like, I get to learn for me.
00:22:34
Speaker
Like, I think one of my core values is just being a curious person.
00:22:37
Speaker
And so when I think about it, it's like, Alex is the expert on bots.
00:22:41
Speaker
So who better to learn from and, and get knowledge from and try to help than somebody who cares about solving a problem and who is an expert on something that, you know,
00:22:52
Speaker
not that many people really understand.
00:22:54
Speaker
So for me, it's like remembering that entrepreneurs, you know, they're, they're like the, they're the main stars of the show.
00:22:59
Speaker
And you're like, how can I be a supporting actor in a bunch of different shows that I can support them and whatever it is they're doing.
00:23:05
Speaker
I think that that helps.
00:23:06
Speaker
And then, yeah, it's like life balance stuff.
00:23:07
Speaker
There's certainly ebbs and flows when you've,
00:23:10
Speaker
I was joking with some people here internally and my wife that during February, March in Utah, it can get tough when it's been cloudy for a week straight and you've been on Zoom calls all day.
00:23:22
Speaker
So I think there's just good life balance stuff, getting outside, snowboarding or skiing, stuff like that.
00:23:29
Speaker
Or both.
00:23:29
Speaker
Hard life out in Utah.
00:23:31
Speaker
Hard life.
00:23:32
Speaker
Really, really tough.
00:23:34
Speaker
And Tanner, why is it so important for entrepreneurs to know more about the problem than anyone else in the world?
00:23:39
Speaker
Why was this the takeaway you want listeners to walk away with?
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think when we think about what kills most startups, it's, Gavin has said this a few times, it's apathy.
00:23:51
Speaker
It's like people just don't care.
00:23:55
Speaker
And oftentimes people, because people are just busy on whatever it is they're busy on.
00:23:59
Speaker
And so one, I love it when like an entrepreneur's problem obsessed because the solution often changes and evolves over time.
00:24:07
Speaker
Like what Alex thought she was solving two or three years ago is very different than what she's solving today.
00:24:13
Speaker
But if, you know,
00:24:14
Speaker
As a product person, what we always talk about is you're solving for the job to be done.
00:24:19
Speaker
People don't want a screwdriver, they want a screw in the wall.
00:24:22
Speaker
And so if you remember that, then you always have a North Star.
00:24:26
Speaker
You keep yourself in business by solving a real problem.
00:24:30
Speaker
And that's where product and ultimately companies are fun when you actually solve a problem for somebody.
00:24:35
Speaker
It's not about the microphone here.
00:24:36
Speaker
It's about the audio quality that then leads to a cool conversation that somebody wants to hear.
00:24:41
Speaker
And so I think that's the right framing.
00:24:43
Speaker
We've seen people that come forward with technology-first solutions where they're like, hey, I see this technology and they try to find a solution.
00:24:51
Speaker
And that can work.
00:24:51
Speaker
It doesn't mean it's the wrong way, but I feel like the more tried and true way is you really know that problem and you can then go figure out how to solve it with whatever tools you can find.
00:25:03
Speaker
And Alex, you're a young entrepreneur.
00:25:05
Speaker
I mean, you're on the 30 under 30 list.
00:25:07
Speaker
We're not going to ask you for your exact age.
00:25:09
Speaker
We know.
00:25:10
Speaker
Well, but have you ever felt, I'm just going to point, I just want to, I'm curious, have you ever felt underestimated because of your age?
00:25:17
Speaker
Like you were doing organic chemistry at 15.
00:25:20
Speaker
You are so knowledgeable about, you know, everything that you're solving, but have you ever felt underestimated?
00:25:27
Speaker
So I'll caveat this with I'm a Capricorn.
00:25:31
Speaker
And so I'm on a mission in life.
00:25:33
Speaker
I've never really used age to underestimate myself.
00:25:38
Speaker
Like, I know what I know.
00:25:40
Speaker
If you're going to use my age to question me, it's your perspective.
00:25:44
Speaker
And I think it's hard being a young entrepreneur where people will use your age against you.
00:25:49
Speaker
But it's hard to get domain expertise.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:52
Speaker
the fact that I do have domain expertise at a younger age is to my benefit.
00:25:57
Speaker
It allows me to grow where this policy abuse grows.
00:26:00
Speaker
It allows me to be cool enough to hang out in Discord and Telegram and still understand how to use those products.
00:26:08
Speaker
So I mean, my advice there is if you feel like you're too young to start a company, like I'm not Mark Zuckerberg's age by any means, but I'm not going to let it use against me.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah, Tanner, any thoughts on that?
00:26:23
Speaker
Or do you have any hesitations investing in young entrepreneurs who are doing it for the first time?
00:26:30
Speaker
Yes.
00:26:30
Speaker
I mean, there's trade-offs for whatever stage of career you're at.
00:26:34
Speaker
I saw somebody, an entrepreneur talking about this.
00:26:37
Speaker
When you're young, theoretically, you have more energy, you have more time, you potentially have less people dependents.
00:26:45
Speaker
And so there's benefits.
00:26:46
Speaker
Whereas when you're potentially more seasoned, you have more experience, you might have more domain expertise.
00:26:51
Speaker
So I think there's age benefits that...
00:26:55
Speaker
that Alex showed that occur with this business.
00:26:57
Speaker
Like it's hard for somebody that's not internet native, that doesn't understand sneakerhead culture, that doesn't understand discord, that doesn't understand who bots are like bots.
00:27:04
Speaker
I mean, demographically are typically young.
00:27:06
Speaker
Like, so there's times when that, that makes a lot of sense versus if Alex was,
00:27:11
Speaker
you know, the age she was and she was developing those, those shoes for 60 year old plus dads and air monarchs.
00:27:17
Speaker
Like she may have, there may be less natural like reasons why, why that's a good fit.
00:27:21
Speaker
So there's, there's things that we think about from like an age perspective, there's types of industries that might play well, but ultimately it is like way down the list from just like ambition, uh, intelligence, uh,
00:27:33
Speaker
ethics, integrity, like all of those things.
00:27:36
Speaker
And so when, you know, when we thought about Alex and you're like, Hey, she's an expert here.
00:27:40
Speaker
She's been at Nike.
00:27:40
Speaker
She's been an Apple.
00:27:41
Speaker
She's seen it.
00:27:42
Speaker
She was, you know, doing AI at the university of Utah.
00:27:46
Speaker
Like that's, you know, when we think about like you have domain experience, she had, you know, she had that in really interesting ways.
00:27:53
Speaker
And so, you know, that like ages is, wasn't really something we, I don't, we didn't think about.
Product Release and Employee Management
00:28:00
Speaker
Alex, what do you know now that you didn't at the beginning of your founder journey that you would counsel, you know, first time or young entrepreneurs on?
00:28:10
Speaker
Your product doesn't have to be perfect.
00:28:13
Speaker
I'm a very perfect product person.
00:28:15
Speaker
I will coddle my product until I think it's perfect.
00:28:19
Speaker
There's some times where it's like, just get the MVP out there, iterate quickly.
00:28:23
Speaker
The quicker you iterate, the quicker feedback you get.
00:28:27
Speaker
We hit our stride in the last 8 months, I would say.
00:28:31
Speaker
We started doing... Jordan and I both come from a product background.
00:28:35
Speaker
Mine is data product.
00:28:36
Speaker
Jordan is software and cloud-based product.
00:28:41
Speaker
And both of us were like...
00:28:42
Speaker
The product's not ready yet.
00:28:43
Speaker
And that really held us back.
00:28:45
Speaker
If I were to tell myself a year and a half ago, just put it out there, ship it, we'll iterate quickly.
00:28:51
Speaker
Let's do that.
00:28:51
Speaker
But we kind of built... When you're in the space of policy abuse, you have to build stuff like graph databases, you have to build gold plumbing.
00:29:01
Speaker
And by skipping those steps, it's really hard to do.
00:29:03
Speaker
But at the same time, it definitely hindered us a bit.
00:29:07
Speaker
Not detrimentally, but...
00:29:09
Speaker
We wanted to have the right foundation and a perfect product.
00:29:12
Speaker
And sometimes shipping a little bit sooner can be okay.
00:29:16
Speaker
And then second piece of advice is never feel bad firing quick.
00:29:20
Speaker
I tend to be a nice person.
00:29:22
Speaker
And times you get emotional, especially like, Oh, this was our first engineering hire.
00:29:27
Speaker
Even though the perfect isn't person isn't right.
00:29:31
Speaker
You always feel emotional letting go the first person.
00:29:33
Speaker
I don't think any person that we decided to let go was ever a regret.
00:29:38
Speaker
It's a constant theme through entrepreneurship where it's like focus on building.
00:29:42
Speaker
If they're not the right person, always be grateful to that person and what they contribute.
00:29:47
Speaker
Just don't think about it.
00:29:49
Speaker
How did you know it was time to fire?
00:29:51
Speaker
So a lot of advice we give often is, you know, hire slowly, fire quickly.
00:29:57
Speaker
But what's the moment when you kind of know?
00:29:59
Speaker
I don't know, Tanner, if you've got any thoughts on that too.
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:03
Speaker
You know, the, this is one of those, there's certain startup and VC truisms that like have only become more true in my experience is in that if you think that somebody is not a fit, I've never seen somebody think they fired too fast.
00:30:17
Speaker
And I continue to see other examples of that.
00:30:19
Speaker
And so moving quickly on that, uh, just in my experience, nobody, I have not seen a founder that has regretted that.
00:30:29
Speaker
It's also mutually beneficial, right?
00:30:32
Speaker
At some point, the other person's happier.
00:30:34
Speaker
They're not getting demand.
00:30:36
Speaker
They're not feeling stressed about being in a situation that they want to be in as well.
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:41
Speaker
And then that's like back to that intuition.
00:30:43
Speaker
Like a lot of times you just know, you just know, and it sits there and it's a hard decision.
00:30:48
Speaker
It's a really hard decision to make.
00:30:50
Speaker
And so, and it has to be done in the right, the right way.
00:30:53
Speaker
But once, once you know, it's like, Hey, it's, this is, yeah, I think that's the right way to perceive it as what's best for both of us or all of us.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's great insight.
00:31:05
Speaker
Um, my, so I have two, I have two final questions for us.
00:31:08
Speaker
I was debating which one to do first, but I do need to know who can do more pushups.
00:31:12
Speaker
Like you can never answer that.
00:31:13
Speaker
You just threw that out there and now we've just been left hanging the whole time.
00:31:17
Speaker
So I'm going to, I'm going to have to say Tanner, but maybe that summer at Nike.
00:31:24
Speaker
questionable.
00:31:24
Speaker
We'll never know.
00:31:26
Speaker
We'll never know.
00:31:27
Speaker
I, Alex, somehow don't remember.
00:31:29
Speaker
I remember sitting in that room.
00:31:30
Speaker
We went on the ground.
00:31:36
Speaker
I must have blocked this out of my memory.
00:31:38
Speaker
I remember the other stuff.
00:31:39
Speaker
I actually went on the ground and did push-ups.
00:31:43
Speaker
We literally went on the ground and did push-ups.
00:31:45
Speaker
And I don't even remember which conference, which banquet hall we were at, but it was the grad section, underground section.
00:31:54
Speaker
And I was like, push-ups?
00:31:56
Speaker
Now.
00:31:56
Speaker
Fun fact, I can't really do a push-up.
00:31:59
Speaker
So, anywho, who was I to antagonize Tanner?
00:32:03
Speaker
It used to be so fun.
00:32:04
Speaker
What happened?
Personal Activities and Perspectives
00:32:06
Speaker
I know.
00:32:07
Speaker
So fun.
00:32:07
Speaker
Never forget Thursdays.
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:10
Speaker
Amazing.
00:32:13
Speaker
So good.
00:32:14
Speaker
And the final question I do have and something Alex that we ask everybody, and that is what's an effective practice that you've implemented in your work or personal life that you think has had a great impact on your success?
00:32:27
Speaker
It's something that we brought into the company.
00:32:29
Speaker
And it's one thing that you will prioritize over work itself, over anything that you need to do.
00:32:35
Speaker
So it's for me, it's always walking my dog, I could have a call, I'll always walk my dog, I'll always be walking Yofi while talking about Yofi, I will always prioritize that because it's good for my health, good for my mental space, and it allows me to breathe and catch up.
00:32:49
Speaker
For example, Jordan saying is always watching a Manchester United game.
00:32:53
Speaker
So granted, good thing we're in the US because they happen to be early in the morning.
00:32:57
Speaker
So he can wake up at 4am and watch Man U and that's his prioritization.
00:33:01
Speaker
So always prioritize one thing above work, whatever you need.
00:33:05
Speaker
some of our other club teammates.
00:33:07
Speaker
It's cooking, it's baking, but for me, it's walking.
00:33:11
Speaker
And if I was still in Utah, I would be hiking up in I Street.
00:33:15
Speaker
I miss I Street and the bike jump.
00:33:17
Speaker
I Street, like in the avenues?
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:19
Speaker
18th Ave and I Street.
00:33:20
Speaker
So good.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:22
Speaker
So good.
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:23
Speaker
I love it.
00:33:23
Speaker
I love it up here.
00:33:24
Speaker
You're always welcome back, Alex.
00:33:26
Speaker
Yep.
00:33:27
Speaker
Anytime.
00:33:28
Speaker
Tanner, what were your thoughts on that?
00:33:30
Speaker
It's a good question.
00:33:31
Speaker
I think something that I was thinking about earlier is I like... We've talked about this a lot.
00:33:38
Speaker
Listening to books and podcasts and getting other information.
00:33:41
Speaker
For me, what I've been thinking about, I like history a lot.
00:33:43
Speaker
And so history, when I read history, it just helps me put things in perspective.
00:33:48
Speaker
Helps me think about...
00:33:51
Speaker
big patterns and changes and macro cycles, you know, as I, like right now I'm thinking about, I've been reading about the Silk Roads and the rise and fall of all these empires.
00:33:59
Speaker
And there's just all these like challenges that, that the empires face, whether it's like bundling or unbundling who they ally with, who's who, like how they, how they run succession within their kingdom, uh, how they use technology, like, you know, what they're, whether they assimilate with another culture or whether they like, whether they move that culture out.
00:34:19
Speaker
So for me,
00:34:21
Speaker
It's really keeping what helps me then is to have something that's like not directly connected, like history that then like spurs my thoughts on, on what I do at my job.
00:34:30
Speaker
So that like, that allows me to geek out a little bit.
00:34:33
Speaker
And Alex, like I'm a, how many, how many times a week do you think about the Roman empire?
00:34:40
Speaker
No.
00:34:43
Speaker
How many times?
00:34:45
Speaker
A few.
00:34:47
Speaker
But I'm going a lot of empires right now.
00:34:49
Speaker
I'm adding.
00:34:49
Speaker
I'm adding.
00:34:50
Speaker
Do you have a favorite empire, like empiric period?
00:34:55
Speaker
Right now it's the Ottomans.
00:34:57
Speaker
Fair.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:59
Speaker
What they did in Turkey.
00:35:01
Speaker
I love the style.
00:35:02
Speaker
They have these really cool.
00:35:04
Speaker
They kind of used nightlife.
00:35:06
Speaker
And they did a lot of cool things.
00:35:08
Speaker
And some bad things like all empires.
00:35:10
Speaker
I was going to say, they also did some.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:13
Speaker
The story of all empires.
00:35:14
Speaker
All empires.
00:35:15
Speaker
Some good things and a lot of bad things.
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:35:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:17
Speaker
Story of life.
00:35:18
Speaker
Well, thank you both so much for being on the show today.
00:35:20
Speaker
It's been an amazing discussion.
00:35:22
Speaker
Alex, really grateful for your insights.
00:35:24
Speaker
So excited about all you're working on and all the work you're doing to help all of us who don't even know all that's going on in the background.
00:35:29
Speaker
So thank you for saving the world for us.
00:35:32
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me.