Rodeo

Excited to announce that Rodeo is hiring our first Backend Engineer! You will work hand-in-hand with our iOS and Web engineers (and me!) to build Node.js backend systems that model the intricacies of social calendars and planning in an ergonomic and performant way. We have a team of six amazing people and I'm hoping you will be the seventh. Here is our job description: https://lnkd.in/eqk3jzw8 Please DM me for more details. #hiring #backendengineer #rodeo #socialplanning

Thank you so much to Sam (Rodeo) for sharing my ? ?? url to irl (death of 2010s consumer social) ??? thesis at a Wharton class earlier last week. While I love b2b saas (haha), I think we're in a unique position for innovative consumer tech to disrupt our social lives. We need more *real* consumer social products (tools) that facilitate friendship discovery, development, and maintenance. Oh and if you want to read my long-form consumer theses subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/enBhRxFQ More soon :) Zehra

A sincere thank you to The Wharton School and Pinar Yildirim for having me as a guest speaker to talk about Hinge and Rodeo. Made my parents' (and my) dreams come true. #OneDayMBA

~Thanks for all the love on my last post. Here's post #2.~ We started Rodeo's fundraising process by making the pitch deck below. Here’s what we learned along the way: 1. BEFORE THE DECK. You can have conversations with investors without a pitch deck. Initial fundraising is much more about community building than a shark tank. Investors will share insights and pitfalls that will help shape your idea. As a result, you may not need (or want) to have a deck to have your initial conversations. 2. CONVOS. Even after making our pitch deck, we didn’t send it before meetings AND we never presented it. Strange, I know, but this was the conversational strategy. If we sent a pitch deck, we believed the recipient's mindset would be: ‘do I like this idea or not?’ If we facilitated a conversation, we hoped the mindset would be: ‘do we think these founders can figure out this problem?’ 3. SELF-EXPLANATORY. We would usually send our pitch deck after the first meeting. This meant the content of the deck needed to speak for itself. As a result, we used the titles of the slides to tell a story that was hopefully easy to follow, but still emotionally evocative. 4. CONCISION. It’s quite hard to distill all you have to say about your budding idea into ~100 words (10-15 slides x 5-10 words per title). Someone famous, before email, once wrote ‘If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.’ The process of doing this is potentially more important than the deck itself because it prepares you to discuss your idea clearly with investors, candidates, and even your skeptical parents. 5. PRODUCT. We included illustrative product mocks to demonstrate that we had some design sensibilities, but this is unusual for a pre-product fundraise. While I think this helped highlight a team strength, our current beta product looks pretty different and more refined so…. ??♂?. 6. EVOLUTION. Your deck will become outdated quickly, which is a good sign of progress. We quickly added our Co-Founder and CTO Doug Beaver. Our thoughts on the product evolved. We decided to do a bigger round than we initially set out to do. Your conversations will evolve your thinking in good ways! 7. 1-PAGERS. One investor wanted a 1-pager instead of slides, and we actually used this a lot because it was the purest distillation of the project. I highly recommend, especially as a way of outlining the pitch deck. 8. CONFIDENTIALITY. Your pitch deck or 1-pager is going to circulate the VC network regardless of the password protection or confidentiality footnote. Embrace it, as it’s more likely to land in the hands of someone who might invest. Shoutouts: Josh Yeston (@ deq) for helping us make this deck and Joey I. (now a Rodeo advisor) on product mocks! Please note: 1. Our team now includes Doug (AMZN/FB), Saul (Hinge) and Beth (Duolingo). 2. The product executions are outdated. 3. We raised a bigger pre-seed (a topic for another post). Roast our deck! What would you change?

~I’m sharing a series of notes from our first year making Rodeo. If you think what we’re doing is calling your name, let us know @ app.letsrodeo.co and we’ll arrange for some early access.~ About a year ago, my now co-founder (previous Hinge CPO) Tim and I decided to brainstorm a new venture… I came ready with a list of (questionable) ideas… ? A way to predict where a golf ball will land so you don’t lose your ball ? A platform to make meetings that didn’t suck ? A locksmith rollup play ? The IMDB for real estate [what does that even mean!?] ? [the list went on] Then Tim pitched a mission…. ? What if we helped friends be better friends with their friends? We spent the remainder of our time in passionate debate (or at least as passionate as two monotone guys get)…. ? Why does this ubiquitous human desire to strengthen relationships seem to get consistently ignored (and often undermined) by technology? ? Is there any social product incentivized to truly care about the quality of my relationships? We quickly concluded it was a space in which we could happily spend more than a decade and make an impact. Prioritizing Founder-Mission-Fit (what I believe to be a variant of Founder-Market Fit) worked well for us coming from a mission-driven company like Hinge. We had lived what it’s like when you’re 4 years into your journey and still don’t have the right solution. This is the moment when founders without fit quit and understandably pursue the right fit. Founders *with* fit maintain or grow their passion and curiosity as they pursuit their mission. This, in turn, authentically attracts and motivates talented people for the length of time it takes to build something great. The time it takes to achieve PMF is usually longer than you think, but optimism is a good thing! If anyone wants to run with that IMDB for real estate idea, DM me for the full pitch. ?? ?? ?? ~More to come on topics such as what fundraising was like ‘in this economic climate!?’ and other things people have asked me recently...~