The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 31: Tracy DiNunzio (Part 2), Founder of Tradesy, on Rapid Growth and Rapid Learning

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Starting point is 00:00:47 That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time.

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Starting point is 00:02:45 This episode is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss Book Club. Check it out on Audible. These are books that have had a huge impact on my life. Audible.com forward slash Tim's Books. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part conversation with Tracy DiNunzio, founder and CEO of TradeZ. She talks about hustle. She talks about lessons learned. She talks about hustle. She talks about lessons learned.

Starting point is 00:03:06 She talks about big mistakes made. And above all, she talks about perhaps learning to fly after jumping off of the cliff. She's very impressive. If you didn't catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in. But if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. The questions bounce all over the place, so chances are you could get value out of this, even if you don't listen to part one. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Tracy DiNanzio. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would you see an appropriate time. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Why did you choose an accelerator as opposed to going directly to venture capitalists? And the reason I ask is, I don't know how Launchpad is formatted, but typically with these accelerators, and maybe this is public. If it is, then please talk about it. But they will give you 50 grand or maybe in some cases less for say five to 10% of the company.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Is that how Launchpad works? Yes. At the time it was 50 grand for 6%. I think it's a little bit different now. I think it's actually a hundred grand for new companies and it was the best 50 grand I ever got and the best 6% I ever spent. So, you know, I think it would be easy to look back and at our current valuation say, Oh goodness, I gave away 6% of the company for $50,000 and it wasn't that long ago. But I don't feel that way at all. The tools that I kind of learned while in Launchpad and the exposure that I got to such a wide variety of investors and mentors, I couldn't have

Starting point is 00:04:58 continued on the journey without that. As for why I chose to go that route, again, I really wish that I had a more impressive answer. It was in my Facebook newsfeed. Somebody posted something that said, Launchpad now offering $50,000 to all incoming companies. And I, at the time that day, had decided that I needed $50,000 to launch TradeZ, which was wrong. It was dead wrong. I needed way, way more than that. But at the time, that was what I thought. I thought, you know, a new platform, some new technology, I could handle the rest. And so I saw that number and just blind applied. In retrospect, I could definitely invent a good answer for why one might go the accelerator route.

Starting point is 00:05:41 I do think it's extremely valuable because for me, it's one reason only. So there's mentorship and there's learning and there's community and all that can be valuable, but I'm like a little bit of a weirdo introvert in certain ways. And I like to learn on my own by reading stuff. So while all that was valuable, I think the most important thing was that for four months, I sat in a shared office space with the other Launchpad companies, and every day, three to five investors came there. And if I had had to reach out to those investors or try to plow my network for introductions, that would have literally taken that whole four months. And you're kind of pre-vetted once you're in an incubator, so the investors are more likely to

Starting point is 00:06:23 give you more time and see your prospects as better. So for that alone, if you're like I was, and you're kind of getting started, you see a big opportunity, but you're not hyper-connected to this network of investors, that alone makes it more than worth the trade-off. What are the skills that you alluded to just a moment ago that you acquired or developed while at the incubator, aside from the obvious access to investors, which I do think at least in some cases is one of the benefits of an accelerator, but what were the, what were the skills that you developed that ended up being crucial over that period of time? So there were two. One was pitching, which I was miserable at. Pitching investors.

Starting point is 00:07:07 Pitching investors. So it ties into the investor thing, but it's a sales skill that you need for a number of different things. It helps with doing press. It helps with selling candidates on joining your company at a certain point when you're ready for that kind of a thing. But the art of pitching investors, there are a lot of different aspects to it. But the one that was most valuable to me that I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggling with is that it's very hard to tell your own story succinctly and in a way that people can digest easily. When you're in it, when you're on the inside, you've got all this data and all these numbers and all these ideas. And forming that whole kind of like buckets full of stuff into a coherent, clear story that's inspiring and exciting is probably one of the biggest challenges. Sorry, I had a little background noise there. It's probably one of the biggest challenges. It's okay. It was a very tech-appropriate noise.

Starting point is 00:08:02 It's okay. Yes, exactly. So that was what I spent a lot of time learning at Launchpad and failing at miserably. So if anybody listening is going to go out and pitch investors, my advice is to make your first 10 meetings with investors that you don't really want funding from because you're probably going to suck in the beginning. I sucked for a really long time. And the other thing that I learned there was forecasting and financial modeling. I started Launchpad in January 2012, and I had never used Excel. And the investors who ended up leading our seed round, Rincon Venture Partners, there was a guy named Jim Andelman, who's now on our board and led our first round, who was involved in Launchpad. And he would come

Starting point is 00:08:45 in every week, meet with me and say, well, you know, you need a financial model. And I'd put something together and he'd show me what I did wrong. And I'd go back and try again and try to act cool. Like I didn't stay up all night trying to make all those numbers fit together. And so two things happened there. I learned how to forecast and how to use Excel, which was a really necessary skill. But more importantly, I saw how thoughtful investor approaches an entrepreneur at the early stages when so much is uncertain. And so I look back on that and I see that to have a really quality investor come in and really be your partner, you kind of do have to build a relationship that progresses. So it's always good to start that relationship early and to go back to every meeting with them, having made some progress on the very specific things that you talked about last time. So I learned how to model and also I learned how to prove myself to investors through that process.

Starting point is 00:09:39 And in the pitch itself, the Tradesy pitch, or the presentation, depending on how we look at it, what were your biggest mistakes that you made? And I agree definitely with the fact, and I think it is fact, that pitches fail from too much information, not too little information. And that's true for writing and teaching also. But aside from just concision, if that's the right word, conciseness, I have no idea. I'm no writer or anything. One of those. Yeah, one of those. I don't know either.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Brevity. There we go. I'll pull a porky pig substitute. Aside from that, just really tightening the valves and making it more concise. Aside from that, what were the biggest mistakes that you made in your pitches before all the practice? So that brevity thing is number one. I won't, I won't belabor the point, but it reminds me of a quote that's often misattributed to Mark Twain. I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time, which just alludes to the amount of laboring it takes to take your very big, wonderful, long idea and shorten it down into something digestible. I think, you know, the other big mistake that I made was, well, two things. One, I obsessed over metrics that are impossible to derive. So I probably spent three weeks trying to figure out the size of our target market. Realistically, it's just, and I see, it sounds so simple, but I see entrepreneurs doing this all the time because you get really stuck on

Starting point is 00:11:02 that on certain very big numbers that seem very far away. And I just had this idea that like I, everything in my deck had to be so defensible that I would fall down rabbit holes and waste time researching things that didn't really matter. So I think, you know, don't make that mistake rather keep the focus on telling the story because the story is really what, you know, if you, if you overestimated your size of market by 20%, nobody else knows how to find that number anyway. So it doesn't matter. You could just as well say it's huge as long as it is and everyone understands. So that's like a small thing. And then in the actual pitches, I just had no confidence. It was early. It was all new. I was just getting my feet wet. And I was really eager to share a lot, but I didn't know how to play it cool and surface the headlines

Starting point is 00:11:54 and sit back and wait for the investor to demonstrate interest in certain areas so I could expound. I would just kind of dive in and try to tell them everything I knew about every little point because I wanted to prove that I was knowledgeable. And if you've gotten the meeting, you're probably knowledgeable enough. It's better to go in with a baseline expectation that everybody assumes everybody else is qualified to be here and not overdo it, which I think does reveal a lack of confidence. Which, by the way, for people listening is also true, and I hate this term, but we'll use it for lack of a better substitute, in any type of in-person networking. And I'll just call it socializing that might become professional. The eagerness, and not to stereotype, but guys usually have trouble with this more than women. Not always

Starting point is 00:12:45 is this desire to prove that they are the smartest person in the room by just brain vomiting information at people. It is not endearing and it does not help. Yeah. And by the way, it's also true in dating. The same dynamics apply. Like you, the, the eagerness, like, I think that's relatable for a lot of people. Cause a lot of people who might've like kind of figured out how to deal with dating, but haven't figured out how to deal with entrepreneurship. You know, you wouldn't go on a first date and run up to someone and be like, listen, I have all these great qualities and I'm going to be a great dad. And you know, so if you, you know, if you wouldn't do that, the same applies

Starting point is 00:13:21 to an investor. They're, they're a human being. They want to feel like there's other interests out there. Like, you know, like you're not falling all over yourself. You're not desperate because if you have a quality business, you'll feel desperate at times, but you shouldn't, you don't know the show. How to date a venture capitalist. That's a headline that somebody could use. Uh, terrible, but also click, incredible clickbait. You mentioned the importance of story, telling the story. What are some of the aspects of your story that resonated most with investors? And you can give me the exact verbiage if it helps. I mean, I might be a little past that point in your development, but what are the pieces of the story that

Starting point is 00:14:05 really struck people and got attention? Sure. I think, you know, I think that I thought of story, everyone told me that I needed to focus on the story. And so I thought of it as something linear and I would start my pitches by telling people where I started and how this all started. Dr. Evil style. So you was just sort of chronological, right? Exactly. And that was a misinterpretation on my part of what story really means. And I had a big Like Dr. Evil style. So you're just chronological, right? instantly access the resale value of anything they own via their phone or their desktop or whatever other devices we're using, how might that change our concept of ownership and the way that we interact with commerce and the durable goods and products that we consume in a capitalist society? And when you start a pitch like that with a kind of clear vision of the future, even if it's a question, I always pose it as a question because I don't know the answer. I just think it would be really exciting to find out.

Starting point is 00:15:13 But that really tends to capture everybody's attention because if there's one thing that VCs love, it's the potential for something huge and transformative in society, in culture, in commerce. And so leading with that vision, all the other pieces of the story kind of fell into place because then I could walk the investors through, well, how do we get from here to there? And the whole thing kind of took shape. So just like SEO won't be everybody's golden ticket and lots of other things that I did aren't the exact things that will work for everybody. But I think that in many cases, if there is an underlying vision that feels transformative, that can be really exciting to lead with. Definitely.

Starting point is 00:15:57 And a couple of very closely related thoughts. The first is to learn how to pitch a startup is the same as learning how to pitch anything. And at the end of the day, pitching a startup is persuading. You are persuading someone to do something, whatever that next action is. And that could be talk to me after the presentation. That could be click my headline to read an article. I think Seth Godin is one of the preeminent masters of short form content and his headlines. It's unbelievable. I mean, everything he puts out gets a few hundred shares on every platform. It's incredible. And you can learn a lot about headlines, opening slides in a deck or questions by looking at what Seth writes.

Starting point is 00:16:45 Another way to do that, and this is going to get a couple of laughs, I'm sure, but look at a homepage like Yahoo. I actually look at the homepage of Yahoo.com almost every day just to see how they're testing headlines because I find it so fascinating. And then lastly, I would say, watch TED Talks that have amassed more than three to five million views. Why three to five million? Because there are a lot of people out there who recognize that a good TED Talk could be the meal ticket to a book deal or whatever, so they can manufacture one million views, even if they have to pay for it, which is disgusting,

Starting point is 00:17:24 but it's true. So look at people who've had 3 to 5 million. That outstrips most people's budgets. And what you'll notice is that they're selling an idea. It's not a company, but they're selling an idea. And the process is the same. So those would be just a few thoughts on that. Now, you get this funding, then what? What happens? And what are the most important decisions in retrospect that you made with that money? So this is now going back again to July 2012 with the 1.5 million appearing in the bank account. And, um, and at that time I had already brought on my first co-founder, our chief technology officer, John Hall. How did you find John? Craigslist. on my first co-founder, our chief technology officer, John Hall.

Starting point is 00:18:06 How did you find John? Craigslist. Really? No joke. Wait a second. Did you just click on Los Angeles and then do looking for a job and boom, there it was? I posted a listing seeking CTO. That was the headline, seeking CTO?

Starting point is 00:18:25 Something along those lines, Yeah, it was a, it was a creatively written listing and he responded. And of all the people who responded, he was virtually the only qualified one. How did, how did you know that he was qualified? What did he, what did he put in that response that made you know he was qualified? So he was at the time, the West coast director of Technology for cars.com. And before that, he had been a Director of Technology at Shopzilla. So just based on his resume and the fact that both of those companies are marketplaces of sorts, I knew that he had kind of the chops. I was not qualified to interview a CTO because I didn't understand enough about backend technology at the time to even really vet his skills. So I did something

Starting point is 00:19:11 kind of funny. I was still using my outsourced dev shop here in LA to do all of our technology work. And I just brought him in to meet the guys that had been helping me with Recycled Bride for a few years. And they helped me vet him. But I hired him in the first meeting, really. The vetting came after. And more than anything, I got incredibly lucky because I really didn't know how to go through a proper hiring process. But it's worked out beautifully and we're happily ever after. So that was the first very important thing. But that did happen kind of pre-funding because a lot of the investors that I was meeting with, and even Launchpad at the time, they were concerned that I didn't have a tech team and that I didn't have a... I can understand the concern. And so I had made an agreement with Sam Teller, the director of Launchpad, when I signed on. It was actually a funny story because initially after our first meeting, I could tell that he had some doubts and finding one as soon as I was into Launchpad and how the Launchpad kind of credentials would help me attract a better partner. That's genius.

Starting point is 00:20:34 I love it. Yeah, it was good. Glad I did that. Yeah, good move on your part. It was a night well spent. So bringing him on was the first key that helped to actually get the money in the door. And then once we raised, we were operating out of my living room. And I would say the most important decisions, it's all about people.

Starting point is 00:20:51 And so those first five or six hires who are all still with us and make up kind of the core heart and soul of TradeZ, they all came on between July 2012 and our launch in late October 2012. And those were all the most important decisions by far. But I think a few other strategic decisions that we made when we saw how much competition there was in the market were also important. For example, we have the lowest commission of any of the resale marketplaces. And we did that for two reasons. We wanted to be competitive, but I also had a bunch of data from Recycled Bride that suggested that a higher commission led to sellers engaging in two negative behaviors. They would either try to transact off platform to avoid the fee, or they would inflate their pricing, which destroys the kind of beautiful fair market

Starting point is 00:21:42 value integrity of a marketplace in order to compensate for those platform fees. So we made some radical decisions around our business model in the early days that were all based on how we saw the market shaping up. And those ended up becoming our key factors in our positioning. So you were talking about positioning before. And I think that we made positioning decisions in those early days, very aggressively that really worked for us. And a few follow-up questions, no big surprise coming from me. The first is, you mentioned your Craigslist post for your technical co-founder was creatively written. Could you please elaborate and give perhaps an example?

Starting point is 00:22:27 Gosh, I wish I remember more, but it was something along the lines of like, do you have a taste for adventure and an appetite for risk? Come on a crazy journey with a Launchpad LA backed company. You'll be the second person on the team and we'll take it all the way. Cool. I dig it. That's very, I think it's Shackleton who is recruiting for his, God, I'm going to mangle this, but Antarctica expedition and the classified ad was something like, you know, return uncertain, glory guaranteed, seeking rough men, you know, ready for danger and higher risk. You know, that's actually, I just was reading something about how the army is now doing much better at recruiting, or maybe it's, maybe it's firefighters. Gosh, I don't remember. But

Starting point is 00:23:17 one of those two has been doing really well at recruiting people because they've changed their positioning and their ads are now all about how hard it is and how noble it is and it's like can you handle this that's awesome yeah it seems to be really working and they're you know their rates of application are going up and well not only that but they're going to get more qualified people right they're going to have to do less vetting after the fact uh which is a huge savings. Yeah, I can't let the cat out of the bag yet, but I'll be launching something soon that'll have all sorts of Shackleton-like caveats for people to sign up for, which I'm kind of excited about. The suspense.

Starting point is 00:23:59 The suspense. So looking at it, you take this money, you start building. Now, as a side note, do you think that as far as accelerators go, I'm sure it goes without saying that not all accelerators are created equal. That's for sure. You have very hot debate at the moment, at least among technologists, Peter Thiel being certainly one of the extremes on one end, about the value of a college education. And I think this applies strongly to many people with developed computer science abilities or a predisposition in that direction.

Starting point is 00:24:32 But a lot of people would argue that college is worth it. Other people would argue that college is not worth it. And then there's a contingent that would argue it's not worth going to college unless you can go to, say, the top 20 or 35, because they give you a certain mark of credibility that gives you a hall pass, which is kind of ridiculous, but it is what it is, where everyone assumes that you're smart based on this association. Do you think that also holds true for accelerators, where if you can't get into the top three or five accelerators, that you should not go to an accelerator? I don't know. So I think that on the college thing, I'm absolutely on the radical side, where, you know, at least in this sector, I think that the college education has become virtually obsolete, even if it's a top 20 school. The day you graduate, everything you learned is already obsolete. So things move so quickly. However, I think with

Starting point is 00:25:31 accelerators that can be, I don't know. I don't know if that's true with accelerators because the number one thing that I would look for to get out of an accelerator would be the connections to early stage investors. And I've noticed that even though not all of the accelerators here in LA are ranked high, they don't make the top 10 list, et cetera, Launchpad does, but some of the others don't. The people running those incubators still have great connections and the VCs who come to town still stop in. I also know that when you're as early stage as companies that are applying to accelerators, the accelerators have a really hard time figuring out who's going to be

Starting point is 00:26:10 successful. So you might have a great thing and not get into one of the top tier accelerators. And I don't think that necessarily means that you should just scrap the whole idea because everything's just one foot in front of the other. So something's better than nothing. And as long as the deal you're getting feels fair and you think it's going to be a stepping stone, why not? What are the most, and this is difficult perhaps in some cases to objectively assess, but what would Launchpad consider their most successful companies to date that have come out of their classes?

Starting point is 00:26:44 And you don't have to speak for them. You could say, what do you expect someone at Launchpad might say about their most successful companies today? Oh, well, I hope I don't butcher this. I know that we're one of them now, which is nice. And there was a company in our class called Chromatic that's doing quite well. And there was another company in our class called Big Frame that recently had a healthy acquisition and another called Chow Now that's really thriving. So that was just in my class. I can't remember some of the better companies that came before us in the two classes before, but I know that there were a few and Sam Teller will, will be sad that I don't remember all the names

Starting point is 00:27:25 of them. He can leave some, he can leave some intelligent yet angry comments on my, on my blog post that relates to this. You know, I just noticed I'm looking at the website that one of the companies was Listen, L-I-S-T-N in the spring 2013 class. And I love that company that was actually started by a, well, in this case, female founder who read the four hour work week. So I've had a lot of interaction with her. And on that note, you know, I just have to let's let's just kind of slay the pink elephant in the room, because I want to get it out of the way. Since a lot of people will be wondering, this relates to the what is it like to be a female founder question. And I just have to vent for a second about this because I've supported a number of

Starting point is 00:28:14 female founders. And I've been told on multiple occasions, it's really good that you support female founders. And that rankles me and it pisses me off because I really could not give less of a fuck about the genitalia that someone has. I only invest in people who are good founders, period. And I have nonprofit activities, but investing in startups is not one of them. I don't do charity investing. So I'd love to, and you can expound on this in any way that you'd like, but what are your thoughts on being a female founder of a tech company? Yeah, it's funny.

Starting point is 00:28:56 We're like the mystical unicorns of the tech world. And everybody always asks me, my first response is, I have no idea because I've never been a male CEO. So I just don't have any, I don't have any data. Like I don't have a basis for comparison. I can't say whether I've had a harder time fundraising because I'm a woman, because I would have had to go and do the same pitch with a penis in order to really know, you know, if the negative responses and there were plenty of them, if they were at all related

Starting point is 00:29:23 to, you know, the fact that I'm a woman, I will say my views on this have softened a lot. So the whole women in tech conversation is, you know, it's always a headline. It's always, it's good clickbait and people are interested. And for a long time, I kind of said it's irrelevant, you know, like, because in my experience, it has felt irrelevant. But at this point, I've met enough female founders, and also women who are working on the technical side of startups and the rest who have experienced things that while nobody can ever say definitively that it wouldn't have happened if they were a man, you kind of get the impression that there's something going on. So I don't want to, you know, disparage or belittle my sisters in arms by saying like, hey, it's no big deal.

Starting point is 00:30:10 Although if I'm being honest about my experience, I can't say that I've encountered anything that's felt improprietous or negative. And in some ways there are benefits too because you know you're certainly along the journey i got some invites to some dinners last minute where i knew that it was just because they looked at the guest list and went holy shit there's no there are no women coming let's get who's who do we know that's that's female and i got to go to some cool events because of that so i think there's an effort i guess that the one thing i would say is that I think that there's a real difference between overt sexism, which I don't believe exists that much in the tech sector, and subtle, like behavioral, lightly discriminatory stuff, which I do think does exist, even if it doesn't exist in my world. And it's a difficult beast

Starting point is 00:31:05 to battle because it's non-obvious and it's not always clear. And so I'm kind of on the fence about the whole thing. And I guess one other thing I can say is that until recently, our team was actually very guy heavy. It was like we have a female CEO, two other women and all men on the team for a little while. Now it's much more balanced. I think that as a female led company, we attract really evolved men, both as investors and as team members. And so I have to say that for the men that are in my world. And maybe I've never been called evolved before. I'm very, I'm very excited about this. I think you're evolved. And I mean, it's amazing. Like with the more I talk to our various investors, many of them have daughters, many of them have wives who are powerhouses in their own right. Our team, most of the guys who are, you know, who have families, they, they seem to have

Starting point is 00:32:02 a very healthy respect for the women in their lives. We get a lot of guys going home and asking their girlfriends and their wives for feedback about what we're building and taking their opinions very seriously. And our world is good for women. The trade Z world is a good place for a woman to be. And I hope that the rest of the tech sector evolves to a place where that's the way all women feel about their workplace. I should point out also that Stephanie Telenius was the one who introduced us. And she's, of course, involved with Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, one of the more notable Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms. Also, she's on the board of Coach, if I'm not mistaken.

Starting point is 00:32:42 So she's just a killer in her own right. Yeah, she's awesome. And I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I think it's worth exploring a little bit. So the composition of your team, for instance, you said was guy heavy. How much of that, if any, do you think is attributable to the fact that a lot, at least,

Starting point is 00:33:03 let's just say for the last 15 years, and this could change, but it seems to me when I talk to guys who are extremely adept in computer science, that they were socially awkward in high school, spent a lot of time alone. And as guys, they were less physically developed than females, less emotionally developed than females, generally speaking. Yeah. And either decided they wanted to create video games because they spent a lot of time alone playing video games or Dungeons and Dragons, which I hate to say, but that was my choice. And it seems to be the wrong path. It's hard to monetize the 20-sided die throwing ability, it turns out. But it seems to be a kind of supply chain issue on some level

Starting point is 00:33:47 when you're looking for technical hires. And I'm wondering how you think that's going to change and how important is it that it changes? I know that's a touchy way to phrase it, but I worry that sometimes people are either asking the wrong questions or two, getting so emotionally loaded that they take positions that they don't reason themselves into. And if they take positions that they don't reason themselves into, it's impossible to reason them out of those positions. So that's a bit of a long-ass self-indulgent question. But I get what you're getting at.

Starting point is 00:34:26 But I just, because I imagine you've had more conversations about this than I have. How do you think about these things? You know, how do you feel about these things? So I think, so when we were 18 people and we're 50 now, it was myself and two other women who were both in junior positions and the rest of the team was all guys. And that is 100% directly attributable to a pipeline issue. Meaning that at that time we were hiring a lot of developers, a lot of product people, and the applicants for those positions were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively male. And we were a fast growing startup, super time crunched. And so,

Starting point is 00:35:07 and really, I shouldn't even say that we, we have always hired the best person for the position and we always will, regardless of gender. I think that that is the best way to approach this whole issue in general, because nobody wants to be a quote unquote charity hire. And it's, it does a disservice to women too, if you hire women just to be able to publish your diversity numbers. The pipeline issue goes all the way back to how do little girls perceive their abilities and their interests? And is it nature or nurture that drives more women into creative fields and more men into

Starting point is 00:35:43 technical and engineering type fields? And I don't know the answer. Nobody knows the answer definitively, but I can speak to, I mean, I'm 36, so I'm old now. I don't know that my growing up even applies to old-ish, older than I was yesterday. And I know that as a young woman, I reached a certain point where I, because I was a terrible studier, but I was good in school anyway. But I reached a point where I felt like being a woman and being smart, it was kind of like being a neurosurgeon in a marathon. Like it's nice to have, but it's not really applicable to what you're supposed to be doing. And that may also speak to where I grew up and et cetera. But I definitely got messages that being like a, a super smart woman was not the

Starting point is 00:36:29 best thing you could do with your womanhood. That being like attractive and cool might be You mean for a, for mating purposes or if that sounds weird, but for, for finding a mate or for professional purposes or both. Even before finding a mate was like a thing on my radar, just as a young girl, just for life purposes, it didn't feel like, I see it with kids today too a little bit, like you just tend to look at a young girl and say, oh, she's so cute and praise a boy for being tough or smart.

Starting point is 00:37:00 And that's just definitely something we do. That's because little boys are not cute. They're not. They stink. But yeah, I think that the pipeline problem definitely has to do with some societal and cultural influences on young women as they're developing their interests. And you can just imagine if you're an 11-year-old girl and you like to sit in front of your computer and hack away all day young ladies to be incredibly technical and Renaissance women. And I think we'll continue to do that and move in the right direction. If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to 4hourblog.com. F-O-U-R-A-T-O-U-R-B-L-O-G.com, where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video

Starting point is 00:38:11 interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com slash tferriss, that's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 31: Tracy DiNunzio (Part 2), Founder of Tradesy, on Rapid Growth and Rapid Learning

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The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 31: Tracy DiNunzio (Part 2), Founder of Tradesy, on Rapid Growth and Rapid Learning

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.