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Blog > Author: Brian Jones

Author: Brian Jones

How did she do it? A Q&A with Jen Saxton, Founder and CEO of Tot Squad

Posted on by Brian Jones
Jen Saxton, Founder and CEO of Tot Squad

This entrepreneur’s business school competition led to a thriving startup that aims to help busy parents achieve work-life balance.

Jen Saxton, Founder and CEO of Tot Squad, attended Duke University and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Early in her career, while working as a management consultant, she noticed a lack of work-life balance, particularly among millennial parents trying to manage a busy career and a growing family. To address this need, Jen created Tot Squad. New moms like Jen struggle to find quality providers that will help them keep their baby safe and ease their mind and body’s adjustment into parenthood. Tot Squad optimizes delivery of perinatal health, wellness and safety services through its omnichannel marketplace of virtual and in-person service pros.

Golden Seeds’ Lisa Favaro discussed with Jen how the company she founded has become a marketplace for baby services.

LF: Tell us about the origins of your company.

LF: What market need are you solving?

Initially, our business plan was around franchising a mobile pop-up service doing baby gear safety checks and cleaning. While participating in the Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program, I realized Tot Squad could be like the Geek Squad for the baby industry. We now have service centers open inside buybuy Baby stores in 10 markets. Once we started selling our services online with Amazon, we realized we had built a marketplace and could expand into other service categories beyond baby gear to cross sell to the same parents.

LF: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

The thing my team says about me is that I’m “relentlessly optimistic,” which is such an important trait for an entrepreneur. When you’re an entrepreneur, so many things can go wrong so often. You must be incredibly resilient because it’s such a challenging career path. You also have to be resourceful and know how to stretch a dollar better than the next guy. You’ve got to know your strengths and be self-aware enough to build a team to complement you.

LF: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

We just launched on Amazon Home Services a few weeks ago. So with Geek Squad or with Amazon Home Services, it’s bundling a service with a product. That’s what we’re doing in the baby industry. When you buy a car seat at buybuy Baby or on Amazon, we can connect with you with more than 500 car seat techs that we’ve recruited all over the country. We’re matching consumers to a service professional in their community.

We realized very quickly this could evolve into a marketplace for all baby services. If you’re buying a baby gate, you can buy the baby-proofing at the same time. If you buy a nursing bra, we can connect you with a lactation consultant. If you’re buying a baby carrier, we can match you with a baby-wearing specialist. There are so many opportunities to connect moms with vetted service professionals, whether online or in person, as part of the retail purchase. We’re in the early stages of deciding how we’re going to build and grow our marketplace, but we’ve already tackled the hardest part: securing retail distribution up front.

LF: What advice do you have for early-stage founders about raising money, growing a team, fostering company culture or other issues you’ve had to address?

When it comes to company culture, we often say that we take our work really seriously but we don’t take ourselves very seriously.

LF: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

The other way that Golden Seeds has been so helpful in our success is that, Lisa, having you as a board member has been incredible in helping me navigate resources. My deal with Amazon ultimately came through an introduction from one of my Golden Seeds investors, Lynn Baine. The network is remarkable. The best investors bring far more than dollars to the table; they bring energy, ideas, connections, guidance and perspective. Golden Seeds has delivered on all of those dimensions and continues to support us as we grow.

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How did she do it? A Q&A with Kristala Jones Prather, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Kalion

Posted on by Brian Jones
Kristala Jones Prather, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Kalion

She wanted to work with science that was not just stimulating, but also had real-world applications. So, while running her own research lab and teaching at MIT, she set her sights on taking a molecule used for industrial purposes to the next level.

Golden Seeds’ Joan Zief discussed with Kristala how her company created a more biologically-friendly, cost-effective way to produce a compound that now has even greater potential than ever imagined.

JZ: Tell us about the origins of your company.

KJP: In my “day job,” I’m a professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT. Previously, I was with Merck Research Labs. While there, I was considering my next move and realized I wanted to work with science that was both intellectually challenging and had commercial applications. So, I started my own research lab focused on biological production of chemical compounds, operating out of MIT.

Soon after, I filed some initial patents. There’s a deadline for converting these to full-fledged patents, and when the clock starts ticking, MIT will ask inventors if there is any interest in commercialization. I discussed this with a former peer from Merck with deep experience in scale-up of fermentation-based products, Neal Connors, and with my husband, Darcy Prather, an experience entrepreneur.

We all agreed there was great potential, so we co-founded  in 2011. Darcy also now serves as President of the company.

JZ: What market need are you solving, and how is your approach different from the way others have addressed this need?

KJP: We’re an industrial biotech company producing a compound called glucaric acid. From pharmaceutical use as a counterion to replacing phosphates in wastewater treatment — whether a manufacturer produces detergents, paints, diapers or fiber products — the possibilities for how biofriendly, high-purity glucaric acid can be used seem endless.

Still, there are steep challenges to commercializing new molecules. The cost of traditional development methods for many of these can be so high they just aren’t feasible. Often, they can be cultivated in a greener manner, one that’s also more cost-efficient and offers greater benefits than oil-based molecules.

Think about fermentation. The context most are familiar with involves micro-organisms like yeast or bacteria that take sugars and convert them into ethanol for use in alcoholic beverages. It’s very efficient and that’s why many have worked for years to try and engineer those organisms to produce compounds that are useful in other ways.

Our process utilizes biological organisms, which generate less waste during production and performs better in products like polymers because the molecules can be produced with higher purity. We did have two major competitors — neither are in operation any longer. The reason is that they were using chemical processes as opposed to fermentation-based, biological ones. They weren’t able to produce a pure enough material because they lacked sufficient control over the reactions to avoid generating byproducts that found their way into the final product.

We have that control — the quality is superior and the production process is reliable. We can ensure access to a renewable “feedstock,” so manufacturers know it’s always going to be available. We also developed methods downstream to isolate and purify the compound in many different forms, ensuring a wider variety of end-uses.

To the best of our knowledge, there’s no competitor that can produce glucaric acid more economically. As a result, we’re uniquely positioned to provide a volume of glucaric acid capable of meeting market demands.

JZ: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

KJP: Other than perfecting the fermentation process to create glucaric acid at a commercial scale, the biggest challenge we faced was investor perception of the addressable market. The only related experience they had was with biofuels. So, we had to spend a lot of time educating investors on how glucaric acid can be used not only in pharmaceuticals and energy drinks, which are the current markets, but also for other products due to its varied enhancement properties from improving corrosion destruction, fabric strength, and coating adherence properties just to name a few.

We had to quantify not only the different applications and but also the potential of target market size. We needed to convince them of the value of what we were producing, the economics of production, and how we had a unique ability to meet a volume that would make this viable.

There were technology challenges, but really, the greatest hurdle was to make sure we weren’t being lumped into the same category as biofuels and those companies who ended up disappointing investors.

JZ: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

KJP: We just finished another round of financing, which Golden Seeds has again participated in. We also already have a primary customer who has expressed interest in buying as much glucaric acid as we can produce.

That said, talks are underway with toll manufacturers, which essentially have facilities to produce our product for a fee. This will allow us to scale cost-effectively and quickly. We’re working on finalizing the details for a technology transfer and expect to be selling product in very large volumes by the end of this year.

JZ: What advice do you have for early-stage founders about raising money, growing a team, fostering company culture or other issues you’ve had to address?

KJP: MIT is filled with young people who often want to start a company. They’re graduating, it seems more exciting to be an entrepreneur than going to work at an existing company, and they see a lot of people raising money and think, “How hard can this really be?”

The truth is, it’s very difficult. My advice is to be thoughtful. Know what problem you are trying to solve, what market you want to enter, what opportunity you’re going to create. Consider the value you have to add and what you can contribute. You need to first have a well thought-out plan based on sound analysis, not just wishful thinking.

Further, build healthy, trusting relationships with investors. Something I’m proud of is that our investors consider us very responsible stewards. Be open and as forthright as possible, share bad news as readily as you do good. Become partners with your investors so they can enjoy not just your accomplishments, but also work alongside you as a team in the immediate and long term to address challenges as they arise.

JZ: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

KJP: My favorite Golden Seeds story was early on, when we were in the due diligence phase and having various meetings. Understand, I’m a scientist at heart. But during that time, I began to realize not everyone wanted to drill down on the science as much as I did. There were other areas they wanted to discuss.

Then, when we sat down with Golden Seeds, in walked a team member with one of my papers. She had a background in biology, had researched the science and was excited to learn more. That’s my experience with Golden Seeds — they’re interested. It’s not just about throwing money over a wall and waiting for money to come back.

Then, frankly, I love the annual Golden Seeds Summit. When I travel to scientific events, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll be more than a few women on the program. Seeing all of these women every January who are so amazing is refreshing and inspiring.

Interested in learning more about how women entrepreneurs are achieving success? .

The Era of the Woman Entrepreneur: Recap of 11th Annual Golden Seeds Summit

Posted on by Brian Jones

Golden Seeds recently hosted our 11th Annual Golden Seeds Summit in New York City, celebrating 14 years of investing in women-led businesses. The highest-attended event in our history, members and entrepreneurs came from across the U.S. to focus on trends in early stage companies, and get updates from many of our companies.

The theme of this year’s Summit was “Enduring Leadership,” reflecting Golden Seeds’ role in focusing early and intensely on the potential of women-led companies. Attendees experienced the energy and power that comes from a group of mission-driven people. We look forward to this energy continuing throughout the year and leading us into our 15th anniversary year.

A highlight of the Summit was a keynote talk by Phyllis Newhouse, CEO of Xtreme Solutions, a leading cybersecurity company and one of the 50 fastest growing women-owned companies in the U.S.

The Era of the Woman Entrepreneur

We celebrate that Golden Seeds is a living expression of this quote. The last 10 years have seen an explosion of women-led companies, and we are proud of our role in recognizing their potential. Golden Seeds was the first company to fund women-led organizations at scale. To date we have invested over $115M in more than 150 companies. Investing is an endurance sport and we’re continually working to go the distance.

The growth in just 10 years is nothing short of remarkable and it is not slowing down. In 2018 alone, an average of 1,800 women-owned companies launched each day. Since 2007, women-owned businesses have surged 58 percent, which is well above the rate of all businesses, which grew at a much more modest 12 percent. Women-owned businesses made up 40 percent of all U.S. companies in 2017 compared to just 29 percent in 2007. [American Express’ State of Women-Owned Business Report, 2018]

This outstanding growth demonstrates that now really is the era of the women entrepreneur, and we’re proud to have been joined by many other investors and organizations who recognize the merits of investing in women-led and diverse teams.

Celebrating Our Entrepreneurs

Since our launch in 2005, we have had the honor of working with more than 150 companies — hundreds of smart, motivated women entrepreneurs. And watching these companies grow and gain recognition is extremely gratifying.

Last year, three Golden Seeds company leaders were named to Inc.’s “Female Founders 100.” This is a prestigious list of the top “100 Women Making Money, Creating Jobs and Changing the World.” It’s incredible to see these executives’ visions for healthcare, technology and consumer markets become a reality.

Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Cadenza Innovation, appeared in Inc.’s Serial Entrepreneurs category, one that specifically focused on women who “are building their second (or third or fourth) company, and it likely won’t be their last.” The company is backed by more than $14 million in Series A funding led by Golden Seeds, along with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the states of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Surbhi Sarna, founder and president of nVision, appeared in the Problem Solvers category. As Inc. explains: “Some entrepreneurs divine the future, while others recognize the massive opportunity to fix what’s right in front of them.” For Sarna, the quest to detect ovarian cancer started with a health scare she had as a teenager. nVision developed a device that could extract cells from the fallopian tube, considered the origin of ovarian cancer. Four years later, it won FDA approval. Sarna’s work attracted initial investments from angel groups, individual investors and venture capital firms, including Golden Seeds, followed by a larger round of funding in which we further participated. Recently, she sold the company for $125 million to Boston Scientific, with the potential to reach $275 on earn-out.

Fran Dunaway, co-founder and CEO of TomboyX, is in the Movement Makers category and with good reason. It includes strategically brilliant entrepreneurs who have motivated people to rally around a cause that is bigger than their brand — and that’s what TomboyX is all about. Diversity and inclusion has been its hallmark, punctuated by messaging such as “comfortable underwear made for unapologetic people of all sizes and genders.”

2018 also brought with it the merger of Crimson Hexagon and BrandWatch. Crimson Hexagon is one of the many companies we have backed and it was gratifying to watch these two leaders in the social intelligence space merge. The combined company is the industry’s unquestioned leader in consumer insight analytics.

With all of this momentum in 2018, we look forward to what 2019 holds.

Driving Growth with Local Chapters

Golden Seeds is committed to finding the best women-led companies across the United States. This has led to our national footprint of six chapters: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, New York, and Silicon Valley. During this year’s Summit, we celebrated our growing membership that consists of women and men across 20 different states and Puerto Rico. Our nationwide membership is dedicated to evaluating, funding and helping companies with at least one woman in a management role.

Members and entrepreneurs left our annual Summit with new knowledge and resources, and arrived back to their local chapters eager to share all they learned and continue the great work of investing in promising women-led companies.

To learn more about Golden Seeds membership, visit http://www.goldenseeds.local/angel-network/interested-in-joining.

How did she do it? A Q&A with Miriam Huntley, Ph.D., CTO and co-founder of Day Zero Diagnostics

Posted on by Brian Jones
Miriam Huntley, Ph.D., CTO and co-founder of Day Zero Diagnostics

She followed a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT with a doctorate in applied math from Harvard. Yet, even as she was still studying methods for analyzing biological systems and large genomic datasets, she was wondering what her next challenge would be. She wanted to be involved in something technical that would have real-world impact — and she created that opportunity.

Golden Seeds’ Laura Davis discussed with Miriam how the company she co-founded will shape the treatment of infectious diseases with a technology that promises to speed-up diagnosis, reduce patient suffering and prevent deaths.

LD: Tell us about the origins of your company.

MH: In 2015, I was finishing up my doctorate and wondering about my next step. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into — technical work that would impact society. I had like-minded friends and we began discussing possibilities related to healthcare. In this group was Doug Kwon, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, who also oversees a laboratory at the . Doug would become a co-founder of  (DZD).

Antibiotic resistance is creating a public health crisis and Doug brought up how it takes too long to diagnose bacterial infections. Hospitals use traditional culture technology that requires growing bacteria to identify the species and resistance profile of an infection. The problem is, it takes two to five days to get results and a patient can suffer while awaiting treatment. With a severe infection, like sepsis, the chance of death increases eight percent every hour a patient doesn’t get the right drugs. Doug wondered if applying genomics might speed up the process.

A small group of us decided to create . The trick was using genome sequencing, data analysis and machine learning — which was a good use of my skills. By the time I finished my doctorate in May 2016, we had officially started DZD, raised funding, and I jumped into it full-time.

LD: What market need are you solving, and how is your approach different from how others have addressed this need?

MH: Other groups that are trying to close that time gap take two different approaches. One is to automate and miniaturize the current culture-based technology, but this still involves growing bacteria. So, while the results are good, the time saved is incremental. The other approach involves molecular probes and can be fast, sometimes returning data in under an hour, but its focus is narrow. A physician has to have a strong hypothesis of what the infectious agent is from the outset because the process can only detect a handful of bacterial species.

We don’t want that trade off: comprehensive but slow, or narrow but fast. We want speed and breadth. So, we developed a diagnostic that identifies the species and antibiotic resistance profile of a bacterial infection within hours. Crucially, our approach does not wait for the bacteria to grow, but instead reads the whole genome sequence of the pathogen. We then use a machine learning algorithm, trained on a proprietary genomic database, in order to rapidly determine resistance.

LD: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

MH: There have been lots of technical challenges. For instance, even if a patient is very sick, there are only minuscule amounts of bacterial DNA in a blood sample. If you just tried to sequence the patient’s blood directly, you would almost entirely be sequencing the human DNA because the bacterial representation is so small. To overcome this, we created a technology that gets rid of the human DNA, enabling us to access and focus on the bacterial genomes.

This is just the start of a list of hurdles. What I love about our team is that when we hit a wall, we all get into a room, mentally deconstruct and rebuild the solution with the issue in mind, identifying flaws and making improvements.

This is enabling us to develop an in vitro diagnostic that will fit into a hospital microbiology lab. It will perform everything from extracting the DNA to sequencing to applying algorithms. In the meantime, we’ve also built a lab service for diagnosis that allows us to work with customers and gain valuable data and experience.

LD: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

MH: We’re just coming off a successful series A round of funding. Golden Seeds — who led our initial seed round — followed on with additional investment. For the next two years, we’ll be further developing prototypes of our diagnostic. We expect to officially launch the device in 2022. In the meantime, we’re introducing DZD Lab Services, a suite of high value infectious disease applications using next generation sequencing. We are big believers in customer feedback driven development and Lab Services allows us to push our R&D by working directly with customers in high impact situations.

LD: What advice do you have for early-stage founders about raising money, growing a team, fostering company culture or other issues you’ve had to address?

MH: When creating a team, hire people who aren’t just like you. That’s a hard thing to do — it’s easy for me to gauge the talent of folks that have a similar background to me, but it’s more difficult figuring out how capable a person is if their skill set is in a different area — but it’s also absolutely crucial. Other advice: build a diverse team, engender a culture of respect, and make people feel that their feedback is heard. The clichés are true; be kind, transparent and communicate well.

LD: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

MH: We were working out of the Harvard Innovation Labs where you had office hours, Laura. We signed up to meet and I was thrilled to find you have a Ph.D. in cell biology. You were able to speak technically with us and offer in-depth strategic guidance. Golden Seeds ended up leading our Seed Round, and has played a significant role in our company since then.

You became a member of our board, as did Golden Seeds’ Deb Kemper, as an observer, who was a major help in financial areas. Since then Golden Seeds has advanced our startup and helped us grow, providing business and scientific insight, and drawing on the group’s large network to connect us with other founders in related fields along the way, particularly women leaders. And of course, Golden Seeds joined our Series A and continues to provide guidance and connect us to new opportunities.

It’s been a great partnership. If a startup is looking for investors and direction — particularly if they have strong female representation — they should talk to Golden Seeds.

Interested in learning more about how women entrepreneurs are achieving success? .

How did she do it? A Q&A with Debjani Deb, CEO and Founder of ZineOne

Posted on by Brian Jones
Debjani Deb, CEO and Founder of ZineOne

Debjani Deb’s first company was bootstrapped and enjoyed a successful exit. Yet, knowing her second venture would take years to build a product with a million dollar plus price tag made for some anxious moments. Recently, the CEO hired a chief revenue officer. Finally, she was able to step back, take in the big picture, draw a deep breath and smile.

Golden Seeds’ Lilia Shirman and Tracey Riese spoke with Debjani about what it takes to create a new realm of AI-driven personalization and a company Gartner designated a “Cool Vendor.”

LS/TR: Tell us about the origins of your company.

DD:  was founded in March 2014 by Arnab Mukherjee, chief technology officer, Manish Malhotra, chief of products, and me. Just prior, Manish and I both had our own social media companies, which were acquired around the same time. Arnab was head of engineering for a call center software company and saw that the need for real-time customer engagement was coming fast.

Whether it’s financial information, clothing or food, millennials want things immediately; they don’t want to wait on hold for a half-hour with a call center. They prefer to use text and messaging services to get answers right away. This group has been driving communications. With this in mind, we felt the next step for brands and enterprises was a new technology stack that would enable real-time engagement as millennials were defining it.

It was perfect timing in many ways and we had the expertise. We started out whiteboarding information at a public library and vowed to build that platform.

LS/TR: What market need are you solving, and how is your approach different from how others have addressed this need?

DD: Our Customer Engagement Hub platform provides large brands — retailers, banks, hospitality companies — an in-the-moment view of each customer. We deliver this in milliseconds and it allows our customers to engage users in ways that truly resonate and drive sales, loyalty and lifetime value.

Further, in addition to the usual digital communications channels, we provide personalization capabilities on-site at physical locations. If a user walks into a clothing store, they’re notified how many reward points they have, when they expire, what “wish list” items are in stock. If they’re in a grocery store aisle, they’re presented with coupons — at the meat counter, they receive wine pairing suggestions. Reacting to users in real-time requires a new set of technologies and that is what we power.

This is the next generation in a customer engagement solutions market that analysts projected would already top $14 billion last year. What’s different is we use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to harness ever-changing user data, which adds a whole new level of personalization, and we make that available on every customer communication channel. Lots of organizations are now pursuing this, but we had a big head start. We’re in this at the right time and in the right position.

LS/TR: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

DD: It takes a lot of time and money to bring an enterprise product with an average selling price in the millions to market. It took two and a half years to build; time in which we had no money coming in, which can be unsettling. But we knew if we could get the right fit, the dollar value we could command from enterprises would be very high.

It wasn’t always easy, but the payoff has made it all worthwhile.

LS/TR: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

DD: 2019 is going to be our “coming of age” year. In 2018, we proved our product market fit and that we could deploy successfully. We’ve now got 100 million users and many large enterprises have signed up for multi-year deals. We are now entering our scaling year: We want to take what we did in 2018 and multiply our clients, geographies and so on.

Our big desire is to be first in AI-driven personalization, so we are laser-focused on driving that market leadership. We are pushing the envelope on technology, filing multiple patents and speaking at large conferences. Simply put, we plan on defining and leading this segment.

LS/TR: What advice do you have for early-stage founders about raising money, growing a team, fostering company culture or other issues you’ve had to address?

DD: Be focused on the fundamentals of what it takes to build a company. In Silicon Valley, there’s too much hype around fundraising — how much money you raise does not define success. The fundamentals are revenue, profit, margins, product, people. Build a solid product, a cohesive team. Figure out who will be those first customers that will pay you well and provide them with an awesome experience. Do this and you’ll win.

LS/TR: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

DD: It’s been awesome. Golden Seeds has always been right by our side. Particularly for female entrepreneurs at early stages, it is a great organization to have as a partner. Personally, their people have been there through all the ups and downs, listening to me and providing moral support, which was really helpful during those first years when it was difficult to see more than a few months out.

Learn about Golden Seeds’ work.

How did she do it? A Q&A with Louise Wasilewski, CEO and Founder of Acivilate

Posted on by Brian Jones
Louise Wasilewski, CEO and Founder of Acivilate

After working in aerospace, this entrepreneur turned to more traditional technology, helping to create digital TV and securing five patents. But what she dreamed of doing was providing people released from incarceration a second chance. Today, her company keeps these returning citizens from going back to prison. Her efforts to reform criminal justice were recently recognized with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Golden Seeds’ David Nethero and Kim Seals discussed with Louise how a childhood goal led to the creation of a software-as-a-service platform (SaaS) with a goal to have 20 percent market share this year.

DN and KS: Tell us about the origins of your company.

LW: When I was a teenager, my father was convicted of a felony, receiving a suspended sentence and probation. That meant he wouldn’t get locked up as long as he completed the probation period. He was fortunate. Even so, that one conviction cost him his office job and he was never able to get regular work again due to the stigma.

A returning citizen must have stable employment and housing. They also can’t consort with other felons. If they fall short, they’ll be reincarcerated. Getting a job is challenging enough, but when it comes to an apartment, many landlords won’t rent to someone with a criminal background. Even if a landlord does, the complex will likely house others with similar pasts. These are people a returning citizen isn’t legally supposed to be around, let alone speak with.

A professor of mine, Charlie Goetz at Emory University, once said: “New businesses start when people answer old questions in new ways.” My question, after 25 years, was how could I create second chances for people like my father? That got me looking at criminal justice and researching the market.

That led to the creation of  and our product, Pokket℠. It’s a SaaS platform that helps returning citizens, service providers and correctional supervision work together. It keeps people from reincarceration and brings greater efficiency to all stakeholders in criminal justice.

DN and KS: What market need are you solving within the criminal justice system, and how is your approach different from the way others have addressed this need?

LW: This is a broken system. The U.S. spends between  a year on prison, jail, probation and court systems. It’s one thing for a person to return to prison because of a new offense. It’s another when they mistakenly didn’t follow one of the many conditions or obligations that can accompany probation or parole.

Sending them back only sets them back, overloads prisons and jails, bogs down the criminal justice system and causes costs to skyrocket.

Pokket uniquely empowers returning citizens to build their own plan with a case worker, probation officer and housing counselor, and then demonstrate they’re fulfilling it. They can self-submit with a mobile phone to show they’ve applied for jobs this week and that they’ve completed their community service. They can easily work with an agency that has relationships with employers. They can find a healthy living environment.

Most importantly, those involved can function as one team and guide the person towards a common goal cost efficiently. Without this, each agency may have its own plan that pulls a returning citizen in opposing directions. Everyone wants to see success, not the continuation of a cycle that holds progress back. Pokket functions as a mobile workforce management tool for those agencies.

DN and KS: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

LW: Surprisingly, being painted as simply well-intended was a challenge. Government is “where the rubber hits the road,” you need to work together, and sometimes non-profits, activists and policy people aren’t willing to compromise. This can create issues around trust.

Those that focus entirely on the ideal, often burn out. That can make a government reluctant to sign a contract because they don’t want to tackle systematic change with a partner that may back out. Also, agencies need to know you won’t abuse the position of trust. No one asks you to look the other way, but you’ll be privy to sensitive information. They need to know you can live within the complexities of criminal justice.

DN and KS: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

LW: The recent MacArthur grant was a tremendous endorsement. The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia is one of 12 additional jurisdictions joining their , a $148 million national initiative aimed at reducing over-incarceration. In partnership with us, they applied for the grant, and not only will they adopt Pokket, the Urban Institute will provide in-depth technical assistance.

As for upcoming updates, we have three new deployments underway. By the end of Q1 2019, we will have doubled in size and have a foothold in 20 percent of the entire serviceable population.

DN and KS: The First Step Act was recently passed by bi-partisan legislation. Its goal is to reduce recidivism rates among federal prisoners. What are your thoughts on this and will it have an effect on Acivilate?

LW: First Step addresses the federal correctional population, which represents only five percent of the whole, however, it provides political cover for continued reforms at the state level. In 2018, Acivilate was invited to respond to a U.S. Probation (federal) RFI. Since most federal inmates are held far from the state they wish to return to, they experience a unique challenge in planning for reentry. Pokket is well-positioned to serve them, because it’s designed to enable someone in one geography to find resources and coordinate with providers in another geography.

DN and KS: What advice do you have for early-stage founders about raising money, growing a team, fostering company culture or other issues you’ve had to address?

LW: I hire experts that know more than I do about their specific areas and defer to their advice. We talk about culture this way: It’s more important for us to get it right than for any of us to be right.

DN and KS: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

LW: When we look at a prospective location, Golden Seeds members give us the “lay of the land.” We have a lobbyist firm to guide us on policy-makers and government issues. But members give invaluable local perspective, such as public reaction to an incident that may cause particular sensitivities.

Golden Seeds has a board observer at Acivilate, Kim Seals. She has given us a very useful framework for conversations with customers on change and workforce management. We’ve gained insights and have been able to make inroads very quickly that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Learn about the work of Golden Seeds.

The One Question to Ask Before Investing

Posted on by Brian Jones
Merle Sprinzen Tessier, managing director of Golden Seeds

There’s no sure thing when it comes to investing. Daydreaming about a payoff can be fun but understanding risk is critical. You might wonder if an unfamiliar CEO is ethical. Perhaps you’re unsure the leadership team is the right fit. We could fill pages and pages with possible questions but answering all of those questions is not an efficient — and maybe not even effective — way to reduce investment risk. Instead, I think there’s a single, universal one to ask every entrepreneur before investing.

“What does the success of your company fundamentally depend upon?”

All startups are experiments. The founders are testing whether their hypothesis about a business idea is true, and if so, they (and you) can potentially achieve great success. The most important aspect of due diligence is to understand the key hypotheses a startup is testing, what has already been tested even somewhat, and whether the right plans are in place to test those hypotheses more rigorously — quickly.

This said, an entrepreneur must be able to clearly articulate what their success uniquely depends upon, not a generic set of factors. Of course, it’s likely that the key factors are in the “buckets” we all know: management team, product-market fit, market size, supply chain, business model, etc. But it’s on the unique set of two or three specific factors that the startup’s success depends.

What do I mean by a hypothesis?

Let’s take eBay as an example. I wasn’t involved in eBay when it started, so this is just a guess. But it seems to me that eBay’s success depended on sellers having access to the widest number of buyers possible and buyers having access to the widest range of sellers possible — the creation of a true free market. That would mean, then, that there could only be one true powerhouse in their category — they needed all buyers and sellers to come to their site — it was a “land grab.”

So, if I were betting on eBay in the beginning, I would have wanted to know how they intended to rapidly build that mass of buyers and sellers — their own success would block out competitors. I wouldn’t have cared about initial profitability. Achieving that mammoth scale rapidly was what was required for success, and if a competitor got there first, eBay would have lost.

Then there’s Starbucks. Again, there’s a lot behind their success, but I’d guess a key early hypothesis was their belief that people would pay around $5 for higher quality coffee and a better in store experience. If the top price for their cup of coffee was set at $2, letting customers hang around wasn’t going to work for their proposed scale; there would have been no need to invest in ambiance and build a brand reputation.

For “Starbucks the startup,” you would have wanted to know how they were testing people’s willingness to pay a lot more for what typically had been a cheap “get it and go” experience. You might also have asked about their marketing strategy, specifically, how they planned on educating consumers on quality and introducing a new coffeehouse culture to the United States.

In both the eBay and Starbucks examples, the hypotheses were gutsy. One entailed a winner-take-all sprint to market, the other challenged long-held consumer behaviors. They paid off, but undoubtedly, to get the capital they needed, they had to prove they were on to something.

This process — identifying hypotheses, requiring answers — happens every day at Golden Seeds. Here are a few examples of different types of startups we’ve supported and the hypotheses they are testing.

Little Passports is a consumer subscription service that “delivers the world” to children ages three to 12 each month with fun activities and online games. Its founders felt it was important to inspire children to learn about the world around them and other cultures from an early age. They also knew that children are not learning about geography at school.

They believed that in our increasingly global society, parents would pay for their children to begin acquiring a global focus early on. It meant identifying targeted parents/grandparents and convincing them to purchase in a cost-effective way. They spent their time testing messages and marketing channels. Of course, their product had to delight the children, but that delight alone would not bring business success. They had to be able to convince parents to purchase, and as the company enters its 10th year, it’s clear they’ve figured that out.

Work Truck Solutions is a business to business (B2B) play. They provide an online solution to help dealerships sell more commercial vehicles and save time doing it. The idea arose when its founder tried to help a colleague who owned a car dealership find a plumbing truck for a customer. She quickly discovered that it wasn’t easy to search for such trucks online.

The hypothesis was fairly straightforward — commercial salespeople would pay for a faster way to sell more trucks. By making the information about commercial trucks easily accessible for the first time, their clients have a demonstrable ROI for turning web visitors into customers.

And as a third example, there’s nVision Medical, a life science company that provides early detection of ovarian cancer. Like all companies, but perhaps more obviously for life science companies, the product needs to actually deliver the health benefits it claims — a key hypothesis. A second hypothesis, given the nVision Medical business model, was could it attract a large company with the resources to get it to market quickly and therefore not have to raise the commercialization funds itself?

The nVision Medical solution was promising enough to attract a $275-million exit to Boston Scientific. This allowed the company to return more than 10x to investors on a pre-commercial product in just five years.

“What does the success of your company fundamentally depend upon?”

I meet with many entrepreneurs and they would be well served in making this the primary point of discussion. Once I understand what problem they’re trying to solve (when I’m still not entirely sure by the end of their presentation, that’s another warning sign), I then want to know the very few factors on which their success depends, and how they have and are going to test those.

Asking this question is my “golden rule” for angel investors. Entrepreneurs should be able to answer it articulately. It’s how I can tell whether the entrepreneur has thought deeply about their business and how you can evaluate if they’re on the right track.

For all involved, it decreases risk and increases the likelihood of success.

Learn more about Golden Seeds companies and how women entrepreneurs are achieving success with Golden Seeds.

How did she do it? A Q&A with Julia Hu, CEO and founder of Lark

Posted on by Brian Jones

How one founder’s medical condition led her to create a personalized care management platform:

Julia Hu, CEO and founder of Lark

GE: Tell us about the origins of your company.

GE: What market need are you solving, and how is your approach different from how others have addressed this need?

GE: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

What was helpful was having a good team around me and being able to discuss and go through the different ideas and test them. We spent three years perfecting the “voice” of Lark and it was a really exciting day when we launched the app and saw how people were enjoying it. In fact, they were calling Lark “she” instead of “it.” Then Apple named us one of the top 10 apps of the year and interest really took off.

GE: You have made some very big pivots that take a lot of courage and determination. How did you find your own compass and what propels you to continue on the road less traveled?

GE: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

GE: What advice do you have for early-stage founders?

GE: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

For more wisdom like this from other amazing female leaders, follow Golden Seeds on Twitter.

Getting Inc.: Top business magazine names leaders of three Golden Seeds investment companies to Female Founders 100

Posted on by Brian Jones

For nearly four decades, Inc. has been regarded as a world-leading business news source, particularly covering those responsible for building, growing and nurturing the most innovative small to midsize companies. Simply put, when it comes to professional recognition, there’s no “ink” like appearing in Inc.

That’s why Golden Seeds is pleased to congratulate three Golden Seeds company leaders for being named to Inc.’s “Female Founders 100.” This is a prestigious list of the top “100 Women Making Money, Creating Jobs and Changing the World.” It’s gratifying to have worked with such executives and see the visions they had for healthcare, technology and consumer markets become a reality.

Here’s some inspiring information about each.

A serial success in technology

Christina Lampe-Onnerud, Cadenza Innovation, appeared in Inc.’s Serial Entrepreneurs category, one that specifically focused on women who “are building their second (or third or fourth) company, and it likely won’t be their last.” Founded in 2012, Cadenza Innovation was her second startup in the lithium ion battery space. The first was Boston-Power, the only battery startup in the world to sell batteries to HP for use in its laptops.

For Cadenza Innovation, Lampe-Onnerud assembled a world-class team that built a pioneering battery pack architecture and global Tier 1 partner network. The company is backed by more than $10 million in Series A funding led by Golden Seeds, along with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the states of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The company is now working with some of the biggest battery companies across the globe. Earlier this year it began a clean-energy project with New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, where they’ll be involved in demonstrating the impact of electricity leveling and peak shifting.

Solving a healthcare problem

Surbhi Sarna, nVision, appeared in the Problem Solvers category. As Inc. explains: “Some entrepreneurs divine the future, while others recognize the massive opportunity to fix what’s right in front of them.” For Sarna, the quest to detect ovarian cancer started with a health scare she had as a teenager.

About 20,000 women get ovarian cancer annually, some 600,000 have their ovaries removed as a preventative measure because there hasn’t existed a good diagnostic tool. In 2012, Sarna created nVision, which developed a device that could travel up the fallopian tubes and extract ovary cell samples; the origin of most lethal types of the cancer. Four years later, it won FDA approval.

Sarna’s work earned nVision initial investments from angel groups and venture capital firms, including Golden Seeds, followed by larger round of funding in which we further participated. Recently, she sold the company for $275 million to Boston Scientific, knowing that an organization with more resources would help her team reach their ultimate goal of getting “this product to market as fast as possible.”

A movement embraced by consumers

Fran Dunaway, TomboyX, is in the Movement Makers category and with good reason. It lauds strategically brilliant entrepreneurs who have gotten people to rally around a cause that is bigger than their brand — and that’s what TomboyX is all about.

In 2013, TomboyX was created to sell gender-neutral shoes, shirts, belts, hats and other attire. However, what interested women most from the outset were boxer briefs. After selling out of inventory in two weeks, Dunaway decided to focus entirely on underwear (though swimwear and loungewear would be added later). Throughout it all, diversity and inclusion has been its hallmark, punctuated by messaging such as “comfortable underwear made for unapologetic people of all sizes and genders.”

Congratulations to all these leaders. If you’re known by the company you keep, we’re proud to be known as a supporter of yours!

Learn about the work of Golden Seeds.

How did she do it? A Q&A with Maggie Louie, CEO and co-founder of DEVCON

Posted on by Brian Jones

Editor’s note: This is an update to the original blog post, “How did she do it? A Q&A with Maggie Louie, CEO and co-founder of DEVCON,” published on Nov. 13, 2018.

We are thrilled to share that Golden Seeds company DEVCON was recently named a World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer. Congratulations to Maggie and her team!

The Technology Pioneers bring together 100 early to growth-stage companies from around the world that are pioneering new technologies and innovations. By joining this community, DEVCON will begin a two-year journey, where they will be part of the World Economic Forum’s initiatives, activities and events, bringing their cutting-edge insight and fresh thinking to critical global discussions.

As a result, DEVCON is now a part of the Forum’s Global Innovators community, which is an invitation-only group of the world’s most promising start-ups and scale-ups. Additionally, DEVCON joins the Technology Pioneers as part of the Forum’s Strategic Intelligence ecosystem. The Forum helps industry leaders and decision-makers navigate transformations across industries, economies and global issues.

“We are thrilled to be recognized by the World Economic Forum and named a Technology Pioneer,” said Maggie Louie, CEO and co-founder of DEVCON. “This prestigious recognition confirms our belief that in the era of digital transformation, security transformation is the single most critical key to enabling safe and fast innovation.”

Read a recent interview between Karen Zimmerman, Golden Seeds member and lead investor, with DEVCON CEO Maggie Louie below.

After working with law enforcement to facilitate the first-ever conviction for online ad theft and money laundering, Maggie Louie knew she could help solve this costly problem for publishers. Her passion to do so was driven by deep roots in journalism and a commitment to preserving independent reporting.

Prior to developing DEVCON, a cybersecurity software company for news media publishers, Louie created digital products for the Los Angeles Times, E.W. Scripps and American Public Media. It was during this time her interest in protecting digital revenue grew as she saw how much damage ad fraud was doing.

Below, I speak with Louie about the impact of her software and how she’s moving the industry forward.

KZ: Tell us about the origins of your company.

Maggie Louie, CEO and co-founder of DEVCON

ML: I started the company in 2017 after catching a hacker who had exploited a publisher site and stole an estimated $1 million. After helping win the first-ever conviction for these crimes, I realized ad fraud wasn’t going away; it was a huge issue that publishing and journalism needed to solve.

In recent years, the publishing and advertising industry has come under siege from ad fraud. An estimated $19 billion is stolen each year by advertising cyber criminals, and by 2020, researchers suggest that will rise to $44 billion. We launched our proprietary anti-fraud technology to stop this number from growing. Already, we’ve blocked more than six million exploit attempts and stopped $18 million from getting into the hands of these online fraudsters.

KZ: What market need are you solving, and how is your approach different from how others have addressed this need?

ML: Hackers are always looking for new industries and vulnerabilities to exploit. Ad tech — the technology infrastructure that enables all online advertising — is one of the fastest-growing industries under cyberattack. It is also one of the most underserved by cybersecurity solutions. This is due to the extremely complex nature of ad tech, making it next to impossible to shift into easily for cyber experts. The ad quality companies that exist, while good at measuring bot traffic and viewability, lack cybersecurity expertise to detect and block viruses, trojans, crypto-miners and other exploits leveraging the ad-highway to attack businesses and consumers. It’s also not an area of expertise for large, broader security software like Norton and Symantec. DEVCON is the only cybersecurity software that’s specifically developed and designed to defeat malicious exploitation of ad-tech “advertising-technology.”

DEVCON, in partnership with the Local Media Association, OpsCo and Adhack.org, is now providing thousands of publishers with free access to its premier platform with our one-of-a-kind FREEDOM for MEDIA program. This is allowing small- and mid-sized publishers to have real-time alerts on ad fraud breaches and attacks.

KZ: What challenges have you encountered along the way? How have you overcome them?

ML: One of the biggest challenges was educating publishers and media companies about the underlying attacks happening in their industry every day. Invalid and non-human traffic, viewability issues and pop-ups are all interlinked. For example, a pop-up could be delivering an exploit and injecting ad tags onto a website that then siphon off revenue from the publishers legitimate traffic. A savvy hacker could also bombard those pages with bot traffic, multiplying the ad dollars that are being diverted to those injected tags. That’s just one example of the many types of exploits happening every day.

Initially, educating the industry about what was happening, and finding the key customer who understood the problem we are solving proved more challenging than we expected. Through education and research we were able to finally connect the dots, but understanding the needs of our core customer was ultimately what brought us to a true product market fit. Now, we have a 26 percent conversion rate from free users to paying subscribers.

KZ: What’s coming up next for your company? Any big milestones on the horizon?

ML: The launch of our FREEDOM for MEDIA program was a huge milestone for us. In addition to partnering with Local Media Association, OpsCo and AdHack.org for this program, we are working together to create the largest study of ad fraud across small- and mid-tier publishers. The study will bring awareness and transparency to this overlooked side of ad fraud that is using the ad tech infrastructure to deploy deep cyberattacks, and move billions in ill-gotten-gain without detection. A panel of thought leaders participating in the study will present the results at the 2019 Mega-Conference.

We are also closing a Series A funding round for $3.5 million and have $9 million in the pipeline. This will be important for supporting future expansion.

Of course, our tremendous growth is resulting in a need for additional talent, so we are currently recruiting. If you’re a talented engineer, developer or business women looking for an opportunity, please reach out.

KZ: What advice do you have for early-stage founders about raising money, growing a team, fostering company culture or other issues you’ve had to address?

ML: Know your product market fit before beginning the funding process. If you understand this and research what your competitors are doing, it will help you develop a unique proposition early on. This gives you a selling advantage and moves the conversation with investors along quicker.

All early-stage founders should ask themselves, “Do we need to take funding? If I do, how much do we need to take on and what will it be used for?” Knowing this in advance is critical to ensuring your investors are aligned with your goals. Make sure you take money from the right people who understand your company values and can provide strong direction with their operating skills, extensive network or follow-on money.

As an example, we were comfortable working with Golden Seeds because their mission aligns with ours. We value the organization’s commitment to build wealth for women and create opportunities for gender-diverse companies.

KZ: Tell us about your experience with Golden Seeds. How has the Golden Seeds network been helpful to you?

ML: Some of the most valuable aspects of Golden Seeds include the diverse expertise of skills and relationships you gain from the network. Golden Seeds brings together some of the strongest, most powerful women in the U.S. and they work together to support up and coming women-led companies. No matter what industry you’re in you can find Golden Seeds investors who can introduce you to someone or something that’s relevant in your industry.

The organization is always reaching out with mentorship and advisory guidance. They can provide hands-on or hands-off assistance, depending on what you need. And it’s great for those who are looking to invest in women-led companies because you will be part of that next generation of successful women.

For more wisdom like this from other amazing female leaders, follow Golden Seeds on Twitter.

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