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- [00:02]
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- [00:35]
Mike Hoffman
Hi, I'm Mike Hoffman, editor in chief of Inc. And welcome to your next move produced by Inc. And Capital One Business. At Inc. We know that entrepreneurs are always looking for smart ways to set themselves and their companies apart. And today we're hearing from two founders, two innovators who've done just that. For Sheila Leirio, Marcelo and Luan Cox, innovation is job one. Sheila Luan, welcome.
- [00:59]
Sheila Leirio
Thanks for having us, Mike.
- [01:00]
Luan Cox
Thank you, Mike.
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Mike Hoffman
Luan, tell us what finmarket does.
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Luan Cox
We provide point of sale technology to banks, credit unions, non bank lenders who want to enter point of sale financing specifically in home improvement and healthcare. And then we also provide all the tools for the home improvement and healthcare companies to use who want to embed lending and all the technology from front end to back end to be able to manage their business.
- [01:21]
Mike Hoffman
So if you want to remodel your kitchen or your bathroom, this is a place to go and you can get financing as well as the sort of contractor.
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Luan Cox
Exactly. But our client we are empowering your home improvement company to be able to provide you with the best rates and the best experience.
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Mike Hoffman
Terrific. Sheila, tell us what Ohi AI does.
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Sheila Leirio
Ohi AI is actually an AI virtual personal assistant and it's also the operating system for your family. So we solve problems with calendaring conflicts, email messaging, all of that. And we take pictures of different kinds of events and just solving conflicts of every day. The mission of the company is, is to allow us to take care of our families, to be able to sit down for meals, take care of their nutrition and just free up our minds from this cognitive overload that we have in life. And so it's really using the power of AI for self actualization and the reason we made up. Mike, People ask me all the time, Ohai, it's human assistant, human in the loop, but it's humanity within AI.
- [02:20]
Mike Hoffman
And so what's a typical question that someone would ask? Oh, your assistant, oh, send me a.
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Sheila Leirio
Reminder when to take my medicine. There's a conflict between my husband and I with a 3 or 4 o'clock pickup. Who's, you know, could you make sure you assign it to Ron, my husband so often describe that it does make people laugh that hey, you can actually use O and in also co parenting you can use O to actually delegate an assigned task and it gets done.
- [02:45]
Mike Hoffman
That's amazing. So now for each of your companies, what sort of your next move? Luanne, let's start with you.
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Luan Cox
Well, we are in the process of disrupting ourselves, so we are going to release a product very soon that will make our product obsolete. Perfect.
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Sheila Leirio
We're launching a lot of innovative things. We're launching an avatar so you can actually have a personality behind o First it's going to be really cool, but then you can also personalize it down the road. There's a lot of different things because we want for it to come to life and really help you and really take care of you. And then we're getting ready for our A round, which is really an interesting time for a startup.
- [03:23]
Mike Hoffman
So Luan, this is the company you're running now. Finmarket is also like, you know, not your first company. And I'm curious, your previous company was quote.com, which was sort of huge innovator in the fintech space. How do you think differently about setting up this company versus quote.com in terms of thinking about innovation?
- [03:43]
Luan Cox
Wow. Yes. So this is actually my fourth company. So quote.com was back in web 1.0 and we, a bunch of other crazy 20 year olds, thought it'd be a wild idea to bring stock quotes onto the Internet and bring Wall street quality information to the masses using this new thing called the Internet. And everyone thought we were insane. And back then, as Sheila knows, you know, the Internet, nobody even knew what the Internet really was. Right. So built two more companies in that same vein, aggregating lots of financial market data, bringing it to the masses so that they could be armed with same information that Wall street was. And so taking sort of that thinking into this new world of 2.3.0, wherever we are, right. In FinMarket 1, I believe that you should always leverage your past when you're starting a new company. I don't think that really going into the fashion industry when you only know finance, that's tough. So I think what my co founder and I took from our past companies is all right, what do we know about data? What do we know about the web and finance? And then what do we want to disrupt today? And when we looked at today's market, we looked at companies like Lending Club and Kickstarter and just this whole social movement of raising capital, loaning money online. And that was what was happening back in the 90s, like we were about to trade on our own without calling a stockbroker. And now we're going to invest in private companies. Or lend money to each other peer to peer. So that was sort of the first idea for the company was let's be the data provider for this new world of crowdfunded equity and fixed income. So in terms of innovation, then we need to figure out like, well, what do we do that no one else is doing where our skills will be useful? And we realized no one with our backgrounds are in this new fintech world. Right. It's younger people just trying to. So we, yeah, so we built finmarket and very successfully. And I think we, you know, we brought the DNA of being able to build enterprise quality technology for banks, brokerage firms and multi global multimedia companies and kind of brought adulthood into a new fintech space. Right. And so I think that's what sets us apart too. And you know, I think for entrepreneurs that have some experience, which I know a lot of the audience does, I think, you know, that's a big deal. Play it, you know, leverage that. And I think to Sheila's point too though, always be a learner. Always, always, always. Because we entered this new world, we knew nothing about it. And every day, even today, we're doing things that no one's ever done before, right? So. And it's changing every day, especially in fintech, right? Every day something is changing in the world. So we're just always trying to keep our ears open, learn, and then try to find the little spots where we can take our skill set and make a change for the better, for the consumer and for the businesses in our space.
- [06:39]
Mike Hoffman
There's an interesting theme with both of your stories, right, which is that people think of innovation as like a new idea that, you know, something that's never been done before. And of course it is. But in both cases you were able to leverage your experience, your expertise, your knowledge, and apply it to a kind of a problem that's been around forever but in a new way. Can you sort of talk about how that works?
- [07:00]
Sheila Leirio
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm so inspired the way you were just describing it. So previous experience and insight, because, you know, I actually just wrote, wrote a piece on women over 50 for fast company. And part of the reason for that was I just felt that for ageism we get judged automatically, especially in this new day and age of AI. But the reality is that previous experience and insight that we have in identifying the problems is also not just knowing the problem, but it's also leadership in an area where you want to be innovating. And if we decided to step off and we didn't build off of our previous knowledge of experience either in finance or in the care industry. Right. Then it's hard to kind of innovate from that thing that we're trying to disrupt ourselves. So in some sense disrupting ourselves from previous. Right. Requires letting go of the ego, being the learner. Right. But it's also a sense of confidence that you've led in a space and you're now evolving yourself into a new space and that's totally okay. And then you've got to let that ego go and say, I'm ready for this next challenge. I'm open, but I can still stay really confident in my skills and my knowledge. And so so much of this is like this inner sense, right?
- [08:14]
Luan Cox
Yeah, yeah. And I think be ready to be wrong, but have the confidence that you will get it right as long as you're always listening and willing to let go of your ego. Let go of an idea. When we first started the company, like, you know, I said we had this big idea that we started this data provider for crowdfunded securities and the peer to peer lending space and we had all these partnerships with great to take our data but nobody would pay us. We can, you know, and so that is a hobby. Right. That's not a business. If you've got partnerships with the best companies out there, but they're not going to actually give you any money, it's.
- [08:47]
Mike Hoffman
Hard to make your number if nobody's paying.
- [08:49]
Luan Cox
Exactly. So we have this great technology. So I went to my co founder and I said this is we got to change. And so we, you know, but we built this great thing. How do we take this, evolve it and figure out a place, you know, a space where we can actually get paid. And we did that. And you know, today have biggest banks and credit unions paying us big SaaS fees and was profitable and you know, it was just. But we let go. If we stayed any longer, we would have died, you know, holding onto this idea that we thought was useful.
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Sheila Leirio
Can I build on that too? It's this testing and being bold and open. It kind of feels a little odd to kind of, you know, I use a phrase I say when I mentor people of authentic boldness because authenticity means you're open and vulnerable and bold means you're risk taking and confident. And so there are these kind of opposing forces that happen. But the reality is an entrepreneur or any intrapreneur that's trying to innovate, you got to have bold ideas and put it out there, but be authentic enough to realize that you got to Go test and evolve. If that first thesis isn't right. And that's really the key to innovation is getting the data, getting the feedback. But you got to put it out there, be bold enough, test it and then evolve.
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Mike Hoffman
And it's interesting, right? The thesis can be right as in the idea can be a good one. But who's going to pay you? Right? Yes. And where's the check? Who's writing the check? And I'd love to hear for both of your companies, your current companies, who is sort of the first big customer you were able to land and how were you able to do that?
- [10:23]
Luan Cox
Our first biggest customer was one of the top five largest credit unions in the United States. And you know, with billions of dollars under, under management and what we provide is technology that allows financial institutions to enter point of sale financing. And so it's where you're applying for a loan, signing a loan application or documents in less than three minutes, everything's done, you've got the loan and then you can get your home improvement done. Right. And all from your phone, right. No swipe, no hardware, no nothing. So going to big financial institutions. So one, you know, first it was the big credit union. Second was a top 10 national bank. So these are very conservative, slow moving companies. And back in web 1.0 there was a concept of buy versus build in the financial services industry. That's all gone now. Now it's just buy. Right. So but it's still hard to get and to get those kinds of clients.
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Sheila Leirio
And your experience mattered Absolutely. To get. Yeah, yeah.
- [11:21]
Luan Cox
I mean they knew that I've, we'd already already worked with companies like them in our past lives. We are, and you know, they could smell it, they could feel it, they could, you know, maybe see a gray hair or two. That never hurts. But yes. So you know, and then once you get that validation from these large clients that then also pay you, then you know, you've got, you can't get lazy. But you've the, you know, a lane opens for you and you need to keep executing but also you always constantly need to be ahead. And for me, I'm a paranoid entrepreneur. Not paranoid in a sense where I think, you know, somebody comes back, but paranoid that someone's always nipping, you know, and it's easy to put up a website, I call them imposters. It's easy to put up a website and copy OHI or copy finmarket. You know, there's a lot of them out there and it's confusing the market. So you always have to be three or four steps ahead of these imposters, as I call them, or copycatters, so that when you pop up with your next big innovation and you've evolved your business, they're still trying to figure out how to build what you built three years ago. Right. And the only way to do that is to have a company where you built trust and you've got credibility with these big, at least in financial services, big brand names. And that opens a lot of doors. And that's the difference between a company like ours, with our experience and these companies who try to copy you can look at their resumes. They, you know, so it's a long answer to your question, but people, people plus also people credibility plus sort of innovating in terms of being three or four steps ahead with the wind. With the wind of these big companies behind you.
- [13:02]
Mike Hoffman
Sure. And so, Sheila, for you first customer and how long was the sales cycle until you got your first?
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Sheila Leirio
Well, I was sharing that, you know, we came up with the idea and we were inspired. February 2020, 2023, we interviewed the 200 families, we launched a fake website, the demand was there, we got all really excited about it and we just started building. So we launched the alpha in August of 2023 really fast because it's now the AI world, generative AI. And we immediately got customers coming in. We had 500 families and it allowed us to really test via SMS, conversational AI quickly. Now, we then had a decision to make. We were looking at some other companies starting to nip at the bud of this concept, but they decided to be stealth. We decided to go out into the market, talk about bold. And we put a beta up on it and we launched January 2024 and we went fast. But what ended up happening, Mike, is we got thousands of families coming and signing up, gave us data quickly to innovate on the product. And so in terms of a first partner and experience, we then went to Instacart and they were developing an AI tool and they believed in us and we were this tiny little itty bitty startup. But the experience helped because of care.com, and we said, look, we know what it means to integrate. So we then integrated Instacart with an ohi so you can do just two clicks of a button. And now we have large average order values that the entire household purchases on Ohio to get their regular grocery delivery. And so Instacart got really excited about that and now we're partnering and we'll announce soon other companies and we're just a startup, but the concept though is that it's data driven. We provide the data, we innovate based on what customers are telling us and to move rapidly and fast and to actually share with the community. And the reason, part of the reason we did it too and to go instead of being stealth is we're all experimenting with AI so we actually tell our customers, beat it up, beat it up, give us feedback because we want to build for you because this is about helping families and everyday life coordination so that we can be better humans, we can have meals with our families, focus on nutrition and it's just this mission driven thing that we do. But again, we're so open to let people give us feedback and build together.
- [15:20]
Mike Hoffman
So one of the challenges for any company, any entrepreneur who's bringing in innovation to market is figuring out what that market is, you know, who the customers are, who's willing to pay for this. Luan, can you tell us about your experience figuring that out? What's the business model for finmarket?
- [15:35]
Luan Cox
Sure, sure. Well, when we came up with the idea for finmarket, the idea was let's create a multi lender point of sale platform that would benefit the consumer in better interest rates. Higher approvals also benefit companies that use.
- [15:48]
Mike Hoffman
Financing like a marketplace.
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Luan Cox
A marketplace, right. A two sided marketpl marketplace where we'd still get paid fees and you know, but two sided marketplace, very difficult. So first we went to the lender side, the banks and we said we're building a marketplace, come, this is going to be great for the consumer and for your customers, the enterprises. And we were literally told by every single one of them, you are not necessary, it is not required, we do not need a platform in our industry, you know, pound sand. And we realized, wait, but what we're doing is good, this is a good thing for the consumer. And so we just realized we were talking to the wrong people. Right. In a two sided marketplace especially you need a gorilla to start the marketplace going. So we realized let's flip over to the companies that actually benefit. Right. And so we found we were fortunate to find a very large. One of the largest home improvement companies in the United States had just happened to be putting out an RFP for exactly our idea that no one had thought of before because the other side of the marketplace said wasn't needed.
- [16:51]
Sheila Leirio
Plus it was your years of experience.
- [16:52]
Luan Cox
Exactly right. And we just, but we knew this was good. So fortunately we won that RFP and have. How long did that take? From beginning to three years.
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Sheila Leirio
Oh wow.
- [17:04]
Luan Cox
Three Years. We built the technology, we had conversations. By the time from first conversation to launch with this client, three years. So it's about tenacity, patience. But you know, to your point, at the same, you know, you know, we talked about not hanging on to ideas, don't hang on to who your customer might be either. Right. And realize that, you know, others will benefit. But I'll tell you, once we sign this humongous client that all these lenders wanted to work with, next thing you know, everybody's coming to us. Can we be on your platform? Can we be on your platform? We'll pay you to be on the platform. How quickly the conversation, oh, my goodness, like in days. Completely different.
- [17:48]
Mike Hoffman
And what about with Ohi AI?
- [17:50]
Sheila Leirio
Yeah, you know, it's similar that Luan is talking about. It's data driven. As I mentioned, we came up with the idea of February 2023 and then we interviewed 200 families. We then launch a fake website. The demand was very clear to us and again, given our experience@care.com, i was like, wow, the traffic that's coming in is really interested in this with the keywords that we used. And so August 2023, we decided to just go for it. We launched an Alpha 500 closed Alpha, but allowed us to get 500 families to give us feedback. Because this is conversational AI. We decided to launch SMS first and then we did something bold. Mike. We decided that some companies were kind of nipping at the idea. They were staying stealth, they were funded by Y Combinator and we had been observing them. It wasn't exactly, precisely the idea, but we then decided, you know what, we're going to go for it. We're going to call this beta. We're going to go national in January. And the reason we did that is because AI was still so new. We had two thesis. One, we needed to, given our background@care.com, we need to get to statistical significance to really understand what do consumers want. And so you need volume to be using the conversational AI so that we can actually improve the product and understand the features that we need to build and what are the things that they're asking for. We got a regular report that when the O apologies the name of the assistant's name O and she hallucinates, we can see what kinds of things the users are asking for that she says, I'm sorry, I don't provide that yet. So imagine that data is so invaluable in terms of product innovation to kind of get the early feedback it's like qa. It's absolutely. And it's beautiful. And then the second thing that also, I just really felt that the market was so new with amazing early adopters, that our positioning to everyone is help us build this product. And given our background@care.com, we're building for families, we're building for you, and we're trying to free up your time and it feels good so that you can have meals with your family, we can take care of all the mundane tasks. So Ojai can deliver for you. And then the second client for us, which was really important. And this is the background of just having scaled and having the experience, taking a company public, all of that, that we approach Instacart shortly after we launched. And Instacart was building AI features and they had integrated a media company, a diet company, and us. And those two were actually really massive companies. And for us, we were like this little itty bitty startup. But they felt that we were willing to share our data. We were very innovative. We have the entire household when they sign up for OHI AI. So instead of mom just going to the grocery store by herself, you can have the whole family during the week, put products, and then we click two buttons and order the groceries and get it delivered by Instacart. It was such a novel concept. And our average order values were much higher than any other platform that they'd seen that they said, oh, my God, that's amazing. So just like you, now we have other companies coming saying, we want to go do this. We want to do this. Because OHI is an operating system for families. So we're not building a grocery delivery company. We're not building card delivery for birthdays. So we're not, you know, a food delivery for fast food. We're not. We're integrating and really learning from that. So partnerships and first clients are really important, but the experience mattered a lot.
- [21:08]
Mike Hoffman
What you're describing is interesting because, like, a part of innovation, right, Is figuring out what your minimum viable product, your MVP is. And at the same time, in both cases, your companies grew because of partnerships and partners. Big corporate partners often want things to be perfect. And so how do you balance the sort of push and pull between launching fast and launching in a way that a partner will be comfortable with?
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Luan Cox
So in. In our world, and, you know, we are very focused on B2B SaaS model, right? And, and. And our mantra has always been in our past lives, customization, right? Especially think about what, you know, financial market data. It's very commoditized, a stock quote. But you know, a brokerage firm may want that stock quote too and that chart to look different than the other brokerage firm. Right. So how, how we approach things was let's build a platform. Let's always build platform. A platform that is easily customizable. I call it sort of scalable customization. Build in a platform that's durable from its foundation. Right. Strong from its foundation, but and then allow for customizations. And what customizations really are is client led product development. Right. Instead of like trying to guess what everybody wants, just know that what's the common denominator? And that's kind of what an MVP is anyway. But if you also, if you're in technology, if you build it so that it's highly customizable, then your clients will get you to mvp. Right.
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Mike Hoffman
That's so smart.
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Luan Cox
Yeah.
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Sheila Leirio
And so for us it's very similar. We had to build a modular system on the back end because the innovation and LLMs were going so quickly between OpenAI and Anthropic and Yama and Gemini. And if you're a little itty bitty startup and these big new LLMs come out and they're faster than the previous one and you've built it against just one. How do you innovate fast? So we decided that our architecture had to be modular to begin with and new companies started to come out. They're called routers. And so you integrate routers and they're the ones who own the relationships and you can iterate fast. So understanding how to evolve very quickly and build fast and how you architect the system. So what's interesting for us, we don't really customize for the enterprise client because we're a direct to consumer product. But in some sense we do customize for the consumer. Right. Because they're giving us all this feedback in conversational AI. So how do you make your product team move quickly? Gather all that data. The other thing is, look, look. We've launched now a year and a half, right? Reporting and data. Honestly, whether you're in a big company or a small company, build the systems that get you to the data fast, innovate quickly, have your team train. I did this@cure.com to learn from the data quickly, evolve quickly, visit it on a regular basis, don't get attached to your ideas and really run a business with objective data. So you constantly iterating, iterating and building, building fast. That's super important. Any kind of approach to innovation.
- [24:07]
Mike Hoffman
So how do you as leaders sort of handle data. Like, do you get reports on a daily basis, on a weekly basis? What kinds of reports? Like, how does, how do you filter data and then make leadership decisions based on it?
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Sheila Leirio
Maybe for me to start on a consumer business, I also did this@care.com you can create visualization dashboards, but when you're so young, it costs money to kind of do that and integrate those. So you want to move fast. So at Care, we called it the four pings report. And four times a day it tested production for me. And that's really all I need as a CEO is like, is there something broken operationally? Is the website down? Is there something wrong? And then part of the reason I actually did that is the management team has a feeling or anyone who's on the project has a feeling, is there something wrong with the numbers? Because having a feel for where your business should be should just be at the tips of your fingers, especially if you're doing a consumer based company. And so that was really important for me. So I didn't need to wait as a CEO for the summary. At the end of the week I had a feeling for where is the business at what's going on? Because operations and scaling is really important. The second piece we did is really put in not just the database and the data warehouse, again, the infrastructure. But soon I started to put out what I call error reports. And this is when O is hallucinating and really dig into that is the reason she's hallucinating because the LLM is hallucinating and our own algorithm is problematic and the latency problems to kind of put it out. Or is it hallucinating because we don't have the features right. So you start to have your team trained to look at the data to be really embedded in the product and have a feel for that. So it's a feel for the market and a feel for the product.
- [25:41]
Luan Cox
Yeah, yeah. And because my and my co founder Sri Ghoti's background is data. Right. It's not a report. We, you know, the first thing we did was build a dashboard that has everything that's happening in our. How many loan applications are going, the approval rates, the interest, you know, you know, click rates, I mean, all that stuff. And every employee that we hired, starting with employee number one, it was like, okay, this is what you look at all day long. Like, you know, don't stare at it, but check in. Because if you are not to Sheila's point, you're not integrated in interacting with our. This is Our business happening in real time. You can see it. Right. So that's from kind of what's happening in terms of the business, but then from the other side of data. For us, of course, even though we're not B2C, we are sort of B2B2C because we have consumers. On the other side is what do our UXs look like, how long is it taking people to get through different parts of it? Right. And that's something we always have to be paying attention to because time is money, all right? And luckily we have a great product team and technology team, and that's all they're looking at, is how long does it take to get from point A.
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Sheila Leirio
To B to C to D. So you guys probably have multivariate testing and all the different permutations on a page. And understanding the funnel and all of that is really important to grow the business and the revenue and being very attuned to that. Yeah, yeah.
- [27:07]
Mike Hoffman
Now, one thing that's really interesting about innovation, right, is that if you succeed in bringing innovation to market, the rewards are enormous. However, innovation is expensive and time consuming. And so how do you think about within your organization, staff resources, budget resources, how do you allocate by percentage for new feature development and R and D and new product development versus marketing and sort of telling the world what your innovation does and other functions?
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Sheila Leirio
Yeah, maybe to start with us at Ojai, like you said, use the phrase mvp, a minimum viable product and having a certain focus and having milestones to create proof points that we need to actually earn the right to get to the next one. I'm always telling my team, you know what if we want to increase the team and get to the next level of the budget or the A round or the B round. I did this@care.com too. We have to earn the right to get to that next one. So very clear around milestones. What are the metrics for the mvp? The other thing that I typically do, founders, but it's also really important, even if you're an entrepreneur, is that know the next milestone, whether that's internal budget of the expectation where you're trying to request a budget. But in the VC world, I'm already taught, I'm like getting ready for my A round, but in my A round, I know what my B round investors are interested in. So know the milestones that you have to constantly get to to improve the budget for your teams. And then in prioritization, we're very clear those are the milestones and constantly repeat as we look at any project that we put up there that we're all going to debate about. How is that achieving a milestone, what is our focus area? And just constantly beat it up, beat it up. But at the same time, you have to have lots of ideas. So you want the openness, you want all the posts that's up on the wall, you've got a huge document of pinning all these different ideas and you come back to it. So, you know, those aren't bad ideas. It's just we've got to focus on the milestones we've got to achieve through the gates and we've got to earn the right to get to the next gate.
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Mike Hoffman
Lan, what about you?
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Luan Cox
So, you know, we're similar and very different, right? I'm not a process, kind of. My process is no process, in a sense, right. So my team is so busy all the time executing on multiple things, like in parallel. Because I, I believe that you can have a lot of priorities. I don't even use that word, prioritized. It's not allowed in a company because everything is a priority and everything can be done equally and with quality. So then that leaves just a couple people, me and others, a couple others that are thinking about what's next, right? And really it's about going back to listening and learning and actually being critical of your own product. Like I'm, you know, I'm constantly like, what's wrong with this? What could be better about it? And somebody must be thinking about. And then that's when we go, wait, hold on. You know, we gotta, we gotta redo this and not redo it, but evolve, you know, and I don't even use the word pivot even ever, right? Because really you're evolving because you still have a base. So, yeah, in terms of innovation, we have our, you know, an R and D budget, but it's around sort of AI and technology, you know, sort of outer technologies. But we're always focused on revenue. We're always focused on building stuff that the clients actually want because we can't afford to be wrong. So we'll mock things up, we'll go pre sell something before it's built, knowing how long it's going to take us to build, how much it's going to cost, and when we have feedback that says, yeah, we'll take that, then we're like, okay, we're done. That's where we're going. Because the client told us, not models or data. I mean, it's really balancing all that, actually.
- [30:55]
Sheila Leirio
It's just triggering for me, even in a B2C, is that in the product life cycle? So we test concepts. Anybody in the team come up with a concept, they pitch us that idea, mock it up similar, and then we test it against the milestones. We say, hey, is this achievable? Like I said, on the metric that we're trying to achieve and assuming that the concept gets the blessing, even though we're a tiny little company of only 3, 30 people and it gets the blessing of the management team, we then do a proof of concept within the technology in a sandbox and then we actually go to our power users and start to test it. That's what we're doing. The iOS app has been approved now for over a year with ohi. The reason we haven't launched it is that we have power users being it up and then we add more to more users and get statistical significance. By the time we get out, we have a sense of how the product is working. Exactly what you were doing and saying, hey, we're getting consumer feedback, we're ready to go.
- [31:49]
Mike Hoffman
What was the most surprising bit of consumer feedback you had so far?
- [31:52]
Sheila Leirio
Features that they wanted, we thought to try and get to parity. Because we have such a small team, we thought, hey, the web experiences could go ahead and then we could just drive them to the web. And in the app they were like, nope. Users wanted all the features that they were seeing on the web in app when they launched. Not all, but a lot of the different features that they love. And we didn't want to create a consumer confusion that like, oh, that feature is available here and not available there. So you're constantly doing those kinds of trade offs. But it was really eye opening for them to give us the feedback because most companies are like, let's just launch the app. Apple finally approved it. Right. But you know what, your reviews matter. Your NPS matters and you want NET promoter score. Yes. You want people to really love it.
- [32:31]
Luan Cox
One chance to make a first impression, right?
- [32:33]
Sheila Leirio
Exactly.
- [32:34]
Mike Hoffman
You're describing in some ways the innovator's dilemma. And I know Clayton Christensen was a professor of yours at Harvard, but I'm sort of curious. The innovator's dilemma, classically was about how big companies can disrupt themselves or be disrupted by their competitors. It's interesting to me that you talk about serial entreprene almost as your new idea is meant to disrupt your previous ideas. Can you talk about why that might be sort of a more fun and enjoyable path as an entrepreneur than trying to keep a current company? Like, up to date.
- [33:04]
Sheila Leirio
Well, it feels so fresh, right? You go back and back then, how many servers and legacy systems we didn't have, cloud, we didn't have. Like, building back then was so expensive that anything that you built took forever to actually iterate. And now we're talking about modular, we're talking about flexibility and different systems. So that, by the way, for building as a technologist and you're building, it's like amazing. So to have gone from that kind of infrastructure world to this new day and age and how AI, my God, is like building things so quickly. So for me, not having that sort of, you know, like, I feel a little imprisoned with the situation of having launched something and especially we took it public. Care.com In 2014, I think I was like the seventh woman who had ever taken a company public. Which is really sad in the statistics. No, but I just recall having being like, we couldn't innovate fast enough as a public company. Like, we were stuck there. Right.
- [34:07]
Mike Hoffman
And where were you stuck? What was the thing that was stuck?
- [34:09]
Sheila Leirio
Oh, gosh. We went out January 2014, December that year, the previous month, before iOS took off. And our web experience was solid. We did all the testing. They were converting, the funnels were great. Suddenly they all wanted the phone. And we did not have a phone. We didn't have a phone app. And I remember Facebook went out and Cheryl and I and I went to ask her for advice. Cause she was also struggling with that because we went public around the same time. They also didn't have a mobile strategy. Now, granted, they had thousands of people to build for them. And I'm looking around like, oh my God, we just went public. We better go build this fast. And so you're hampered by that. So building the infrastructure and flexibility, I cannot emphasize that more, whether you're in an existing company or whether we're disrupting ourselves and moving to others. But the freedom to be able to do that and not be beholden to the legacy systems is probably the best thing.
- [35:02]
Mike Hoffman
How do you think about disrupting the work that you did with your previous companies?
- [35:05]
Luan Cox
With Finmarket, it's about being a builder versus a, a grower. Right. And I'm a builder. And a lot of the people that I surround myself with at our company are builders. And I've always been a builder. So it's just a natural thing to always be innovating, always be always. You need to always. And I said earlier, always be two or three steps ahead. Always. Because if you're in an industry where you don't need to be two or three steps ahead, get out. Or if you're in a space because there's no competition, it's not a thing. Right. And so if you're gonna be there and you're gonna be a first, because we are, we've been the first in everything I've ever done. I always wanna be the first. Right. So yeah, it's just about that. It's a mindset, I think, and what makes. And it's fun. You know, we were talking in the green room about, you know, corporate America versus and you know, I know for me personally I've always, I wanna create stuff so I don't have to work in corporate America.
- [36:10]
Sheila Leirio
Cause it's more fun and really know yourself. Right. I mean, if you think about it, founder, then growth, then public company has sort of been my, you know, journey@care.com and then I had an opportunity at NEA and I was a venture partner and did I want to pursue that as a career. And I suddenly realized my calling was building. My calling was innovating. I could have chosen different paths. Right. Have I proven myself as a grower? Yes, but I really love innovating. And so it called me back and people always saying, wait, you exited care.com? why are you building a new startup? Again, it's so hard. And I keep saying people, I don't consider it hard because I love what I do. I'm innovating and solving problems for people and I want to help people. And so this is just, I think it's that inner knowing of what your.
- [37:00]
Luan Cox
Draw is that's a unique characteristic.
- [37:02]
Mike Hoffman
I'm curious, is it more difficult to sell through a truly innovative idea to funders, venture capitalists, you know, folks who fund companies, or to end users? Customers. Consumers. And how is that sort of articulation?
- [37:16]
Luan Cox
Different question. I'm going to say it's easier to sell to customers than it is to investors, especially, you know, being females and minorities. You know, less than 3% of venture capital goes to women still to this day. And so it's always been easier for us, I think, to find partners and potential clients to help us so that we can then go into a pitch meeting with that backing because we need it, quite frankly.
- [37:50]
Sheila Leirio
Look, assuming you have the experience, the credentials, the idea, some of the fundamentals, to me, mine is really timing is the market. It all depends. If the VC community's completely down and they're not doing direct to consumer anymore, they don't want to do marketplaces, they don't you know, it's hard to raise.
- [38:09]
Mike Hoffman
They don't want to see you.
- [38:10]
Sheila Leirio
Yeah, they don't want to see you. I mean, so much of it is timing, but again, assuming the baseline is there of experience, it's a great idea. You've got the right team. Timing is really everything. And it's the same for consumer markets. I always said to people, I couldn't have built care.com if monster.com didn't happen.
- [38:26]
Mike Hoffman
I know.
- [38:26]
Sheila Leirio
We're dating ourselves, you know, because back then it was like, oh, my God, finding people online to hire. God forbid, no way. Then match.com happened. Finding love online, Are you kidding me? So if those two didn't happen and then care.com came along, it's like, oh, finding people to find loved ones for your dependents and your kids and your parents. If we had done that 10 years before, the timing could have been off. So I would answer your question and say that would have been really difficult. Right. So it really depends. And this is why for us, when we were starting to build in AI, it was not only the technology was ready, the consumers were ready, the investors were ready. The entire stakeholder market, as I'm looking at it was like, this is here and now we gotta go for it.
- [39:10]
Mike Hoffman
So you're both immigrant entrepreneurs. And do you think that there's something about being an immigrant entrepreneur that is an asset as you think about bringing.
- [39:18]
Luan Cox
Innovation to market 100%? Because we are an innovation. Just our. Just our existence in this country. And as is an innovation in of itself, there's not a day. I mean, I was born in 1970 in Vietnam. Right.
- [39:33]
Mike Hoffman
Complicated time. Yes.
- [39:35]
Luan Cox
And didn't come here until 1973 thanks to my father. So thanks to my mother and father. Every day that I'm alive is an innovation. Right. And so I've always just, I think, you know, been thankful and humble and also believed in myself from day one. And. And I want, you know, also being Asian, you want to take care of your family. Right. So I think the immigrant part of it, yes, happy to be here. But also my culture is also drives. Drives me to succeed. Not want to, but to succeed. So, yeah, failure is not an option. For real.
- [40:17]
Sheila Leirio
So 1970s as well. We're around.
- [40:20]
Luan Cox
Born in November.
- [40:21]
Sheila Leirio
In November. And I was raised in the Philippines, right next door to Vietnam. And interesting thing about being raised overseas in a culture where the Philippines is the narrowest gender gap and so we have so many female leaders. I didn't grow up worrying about being a female leader. And My dad was the nurturer and my mom was the go getter. And so for me, I didn't feel anything held me back in terms of stereotypes. And I grew up with four brothers and so I'm comfortable around being a leader and leading men and that was huge. Now having raised in the Philippines and then I went to an international school before coming here. So I have this sense of being a global citizen, being open to all, open, diverse ideas impacting my leadership. But really it's also removing all the stereotypes and having to worry about that, that I could be bold, just be me.
- [41:09]
Mike Hoffman
Right? Sheila Luan, thank you so much for being here on your next move.
- [41:12]
Sheila Leirio
Thank you.
- [41:13]
Luan Cox
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [41:14]
Sheila Leirio
Thank you.
- [41:21]
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- [42:03]
Mike Hoffman
All right, now let's welcome back to your next move, Karen Bonner, VP of Brand and Acquisitions Marketing, a Capital One business. Thanks for joining us today, Karen.
- [42:11]
Karen Bonner
Thanks for having me, Mike.
- [42:13]
Mike Hoffman
Now, as you know, businesses need to be creative, to come up with new ideas and to solve challenges and to compete. But once a company is established, how can it find new ways to foster creativity and avoid getting stuck in a rut?
- [42:24]
Karen Bonner
Yes, cultivating a culture of creativity always starts with leadership. Think about setting an example in your own work and routines. You can be a model of adaptability and innovation for your team. Regularly review and question processes and your own ways of working. Just because things have always been done a certain way doesn't mean it's the best way. Embed that creativity and innovation into your business mission, vision and values as well. That way, as a leader, it ensures you're going to be speaking about that to your team often.
- [42:57]
Mike Hoffman
And are there approaches to help employees think more creatively across all levels, not just specific teams or specific departments?
- [43:04]
Karen Bonner
Yes, absolutely. Encouraging openness to new ideas and knowledge sharing is that key to sparking innovation anywhere in your organization? So think about support structures for cross collaboration across departments. Exposing employees to other parts of the company can help them understand the full picture and really spark those ideas. Also create dedicated avenues for employees to pitch and develop new ideas. It's just so important to recognize that creativity is critically important and it's a skill to nurture in all employees, whether they're working in a traditionally creative function or not. Implementing practices that support that learning and inspiration ongoing can help foster creativity in all parts of your organization.
- [43:48]
Mike Hoffman
What about tools? What kinds of tools can you use to help boost creativity in your organization?
- [43:53]
Karen Bonner
You can boost workplace creativity through a number of different tools, so there are idea management platforms out there designed to promote brainstorming and allow teams to capture those ideas as they go. You can even offer user friendly graphic design or prototyping tools that allow any employee, regardless of their design skill, to bring their ideas to life visually.
- [44:16]
Mike Hoffman
And how can small and mid sized businesses sustain a culture of creativity over the long term?
- [44:22]
Karen Bonner
Again, leaders play just as big a role in maintaining a creative culture as they do in establishing it in the first place. Think about giving those employees credit and really recognizing them when their creative ideas pay off. Even more importantly, don't punish or criticize in any way when their ideas fail. You have to treat failure as a learning experience rather than an opportunity for criticism. Employees then will be less afraid to take risks and that leads to more creative innovation and growth.
- [44:53]
Mike Hoffman
Thanks so much Karen for being with us today and sharing these insights about creating a culture of creativity.
- [44:59]
Karen Bonner
Thanks Mike. It was my pleasure.
- [45:00]
Mike Hoffman
Next up, our own Sarah lynch is going to explain why embracing change can benefit your company in the long run.
- [45:07]
Sarah Lynch
Thanks, Mike. It's late 2022 and Google is sitting comfortably at the top of the tech world, dominating search so thoroughly that people use Googling as a verb. But then OpenAI releases ChatGPT, an AI tool that's fast, easy to use, and could do everything from help you draft emails to planning trips. It can even roleplay Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, and users start turning to ChatGPT for questions they normally ask Google. Suddenly, Google begins to realize its business is under threat. When you're at the top, it's easy to focus on what's working. But innovation doesn't wait. How do you stay ahead when the next big disruption is always just around the corner? It's a story as old as time. Cars replaced horses, electricity overtook gas, lamps and smartphones replaced, well, nearly everything. Entire industries must adapt or risk extinction. It's tempting to double down on what is working and what's making money. But that mindset can leave you vulnerable to a constantly changing world. A problem author Clayton Christensen Famously dubbed the innovator's dilemma. Despite pioneering digital photography, Kodak hesitated to fully embrace it, worried companies would cannibalize its film business. Competitors took advantage of the shift, leaving Kodak scrambling and ultimately leading to its decline. In contrast, Amazon prioritized long term growth over short term profits. It might be hard to remember, but Amazon started off just selling books. But unlike Kodak, Amazon kept its eye on the future, investing heavily in infrastructure and new business lines like Amazon Web Services and Prime. It was a gamble, but it paid off, making Amazon not just an online retailer, but a tech giant. So how can you make sure you don't get disrupted? Lesson number one Pay attention to trends and anticipate market shifts. Like software giant Adobe. As boxed software became obsolete, it didn't wait to be left behind. The company transitioned to a subscription based model with creative cloud, ensuring its relevance in a digital first world. The takeaway? Successful companies don't just react to change, they anticipate it. Keep a pulse on emerging trends and shifting consumer needs so you can act before the market forces your hand. Lesson number two Keep an eye on changing customer needs. Innovation isn't always about groundbreaking ideas. Sometimes it's about recognizing a need. Take Uber. What began as a ride sharing service quickly expanded into food delivery. With Uber Eats, the company capitalized on consumer demand. It saw a need in the market and diversified its offerings to meet that need. Lesson number three don't rest on success. When Netflix launched as a DVD rental by mail service, it beat out Blockbuster with its first industry disruption. But it was willing to cannibalize its own successful model to grow. Even though Internet speeds were barely ready, Netflix bet on the future. The company launched its streaming service in 2007 and set the stage for the company's massive transformation. By 2010, Netflix began shifting its core focus entirely to streaming and began to create its own content as well. Companies like Amazon, HBO and NBC with Peacock scrambled to keep up. They all followed Netflix's blueprint, pushing streaming into the future and leaving traditional cable in the past. So remember, always look for a customer need that's not being filled. Keep searching for better ways to solve customer problems or improve their experience. And of course, stay curious. Experiment, and don't be afraid to adapt to meet changing needs. Innovation isn't optional, it's survival. While none of us have a crystal ball, one thing is clear. Disruption is no longer a question of if, but when. So if you're wondering whether AI is a threat, just ask Google. Their answer is an AI generated overview. Some things speak for Themselves. Back to you, Mike.
- [49:43]
Mike Hoffman
Thanks, Sarah. Now, this season we want to give our audience access to founders. So for our guests, these are some viewer questions. So the hottest conversation in innovation today is around embracing AI and how companies can do that. So we asked Ink readers and viewers for their top AI questions, and I have those for you now. So our first audience question is, what's one AI tool that every business owner or entrepreneur should have in their toolbox right now? Let's start with you.
- [50:10]
Luan Cox
Well, I mean, obviously other than, oh, hi.
- [50:14]
Mike Hoffman
Right, yeah, accepting. Except accepting your own. Your own companies. Right.
- [50:20]
Luan Cox
That's great. ChatGPT. Obviously you need to know what to do, but, you know, we are big fans of a little company called Scale. AI allows you to create prospecting emails using your own voice. It goes out and scrapes LinkedIn and other places to find information about your prospect and then, and then create some highly customized prospecting emails. So those types of tools, especially for a company like us in the B2B space, are important prospecting.
- [50:48]
Mike Hoffman
So important prospecting.
- [50:49]
Luan Cox
Yes.
- [50:49]
Sheila Leirio
Well, of course. Okay, so there's no way I can not plug OHI because most majority of people don't have personal assistants. You know, you've got the C suite, but VP and below don't. And so it actually gets everything done for you so that you can really have productivity at work. So of course. So then perplexity is something I love because it actually shows you the different sources and it's incredible web search. So I will typically take a New York Times article or I can take an INC article and I can go put it into perplexity and say, give me all the different kinds of perspectives on this specific topic. It saves me time and it summarizes it, but also allows me as a CEO to be in the know and having different perspectives.
- [51:32]
Mike Hoffman
That's great. I think similar to prospecting, using AI tools for collections is also great. Like to write a very polite collections letter so you don't have to feel bad as you send that out. But like, hey, you're beyond 30 days. How about we pay? So AI is everywhere. You talked about how OI AI was created to have a human touch. How can you ensure that as you're using AI, you're maintaining that human touch to your business.
- [51:57]
Sheila Leirio
Yeah. So part of the reason we really named it OHAI is human assistance. And again, humanity within AI is we have humans in the loop. We actually have teams. So 97% of the tasks completed by the AI. But we want to deliver an exceptional user experience. So we have Humans in the background. And they also data label the algorithm that we're building. So that helps because AI is actually training from humans. And so you don't ever want to remove what we call humans in the loop to deliver an exceptional user experience for families.
- [52:29]
Mike Hoffman
So our third reader question is, how can you use AI to increase your productivity in a smart way?
- [52:34]
Luan Cox
Luan we view AI as a way to make humans more efficient, right? So we use AI in customer support, for example. So things that are repetitive, things that don't need a whole lot of deep thinking, but are going to make our humans be 10 times more productive is what we're looking at, is what we do. So that's around content creation. We use a lot of AI in content, content creation, blog posts, that kind of thing. Of course. But in our customer support, we do real time customer support. We handle a lot of complicated things. A human needs to be there. We're dealing with financial information, private information of people. So yeah, that's where we're kind of focused on is how do we get rid of the repetitive things, make ourselves better at the harder things.
- [53:20]
Sheila Leirio
And what we focus on is really freeing up the mind on what we call the daily dump. This kind of sounds really funny, but you collect the daily dump. Get, get rid of this cognitive overload and allow us to actually delegate these everyday things, mundane things that you don't need to be worrying about because you want to really be more of a human to create and have the time, spend time with your family, have the connections, be able to draw, do those different things by solving the cognitive overload.
- [53:48]
Mike Hoffman
Great. And our last question from your next move, viewers. How do you use data to make decisions that help your business grow?
- [53:55]
Luan Cox
So we're using data and credit underwriting models, which is obviously a big trend these days, which obviously helps with approval rates. Helps look at a human being's credit in a different way than just A, B, C, D. And that's obviously very heavily data driven and then also analytics. We're using AI to help us get through some of the easier analytical parts so that we can get to the higher, more complex problems where we'll, we'll need humans to come and look at the data and make some decisions.
- [54:26]
Sheila Leirio
So the data, I look at it in two ways, certainly efficiency and operations. Look at, as I mentioned, we do these ping reports. You can go look at the data as a CEO and I don't have to bother people. I can also look at visualization dashboards and reports like that, make sure that it's streamlined But I want to make sure we don't forget, because it's the question you just asked previously. We interview our customers, real humans, every day, day in, day out, everybody in product. You collect the data, you talk to users regularly. And that's how really use the data, not only with the system, but in actuality, because we're building these products for real human beings.
- [55:01]
Mike Hoffman
Great. Thanks for joining us for this great conversation. And we hope today's conversation arms you with the tools you need to bring an innovation mindset to your business. Tune in next time for more industry leaders, breakthrough businesses, and the strategies you need to make your next move. And join us next time when we'll dig into another hot topic for business owners hire pairing. I'm Mike Hoffman. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next.