Young Founders Podcast

Maia Bittner is a  serial entrepreneur, investor, and social media influencer. She's been a cofounder at RocksBox, a subscription Jewelry company, and Pinch, a financial services app (which was later acquired by Chime). She's also an advisor to Parcel B, an investment fund supporting startups founded by students and alumni at her alma mater, Olin College.

She’s been featured in the Wall St Journal, Huffington Post, Forbes, TechCrunch, CheddarTV, Crunchbase, Lifehacker, and more. She’s also been featured on a bunch of great podcasts, including Chicks Who Give a Hoot, Crazy Wisdom, and Bank On It.

At RocksBox, Maia and her co-founder Meaghan Rose were able to raise ~$15m, despite the challenges of raising capital in San Francisco as a pair of female co-founders targeting women customers.

Later, at Pinch, she raised a pre-seed round of close to $1m with her cofounder, Michael Ducker.

You can follow Maia on Twitter at @maiab.

Some of the things we talk about on the podcast are:

• What does it mean to find Product Market Fit (PMF) and how can you work towards that? 
• How to use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to improve customer experience. 
• How to decide which investors to pitch your idea to. 
• Why you shouldn't always listen to industry standard advice and how A/B testing helped RocksBox grow. 
• Why sometimes founders need to throw in the towel and move on to something else. 

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Jason Levinthal, or JLev as you may know him, is a professional skier turned serial entrepreneur. He’s the guy who founded LINE Skis, Full Tilt Boots, and now J Skis.

He’s been featured in FreeSkier Magazine, Powder Magazine, BombSnow, New Schoolers, and more. He was named a top 40 under 40 professional in the sporting goods industry by Sporting Goods Business Magazine in 2010.

Jason was a bronze medalist in the 1998 X Games, gave a TED talk in 2015, and has sold over half a million pairs of skis.

You can find him on social media @jasonlevinthal, follow J skis @j_skis, and grab a pair of limited edition sticks at jskis.com.

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You can learn more about Zeke's business at pureinvestments.com or click here for more episodes of the Young Founders Podcast.

You can find Sap! products online at SapVT.com and follow along on their journey on social media @DrinkSap.

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Georgia Grace, along with her co-founders Bianca Gonzalez and Charlotte Massey, recently launched SheFly Apparel.

SheFly is a layerable line of pants that allows women to comfortably, safely, and easily relieve themselves in the outdoors, without exposing skin to the elements or to other people. Their mission is to promote inclusivity, accessibility, and women’s empowerment in the outdoors through innovative product design.

I’ll also add that I’m really impressed with the sustainability aspect that’s been infused into the brand, and I’ll let Georgia Grace speak to that later.

Georgia Grace and her team have appeared in several business pitch competitions, including the Vermont Road Pitch and Peak Pitch, both hosted by Fresh Tracks Capital. They’ve been able to generate a BUNCH of press locally here in Vermont, recently being featured on Fox Local 44 and Think Vermont and in Seven Days and the Vermont Business Magazine. On the national level, SheFly has been recognized by Boston Inno and featured on several other podcasts.

Their crowdfunding campaign on iFundWomen far exceeded their fundraising goal, having raised over $20k from 200 individual backers.

You can find their products online at sheflyapparel.com, or follow them on social media at @SheFlyApparel

• How she thought up the idea for SheFly while climbing glaciers in Alaska
• Her crowdfunding experience and how SheFly raised $50,000 before ever selling a pair of pants.
• How to navigate the process of patenting IP and how to leverage patents to license to other companies
• The impact that a class in entrepreneurship hosted by VCET partners David Bradbury and Sam Roach-Gerber had on the SheFly team
• How to build an audience on social media
• Why every startup should build a press kit
• How to define the roles of each of your co-founders (hint: Hustler, Hacker, Hipster)
• How to develop a prototype that you can use to pre-sell your product and how to find a manufacturer to replicate and improve your design

• How customer survey data can inform your marketing and product development

• Why you should fall in love with your co-founders and how to facilitate that
• How Georgia Grace and her co-founders have built their business while being fully remote and living all over the world

• SheFly’s approach to packaging and the unboxing experience

1. Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner
2. Smart People Should Build Things by Andrew Yang

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Nik himself was recognized by Forbes as a top 30 under 30 entrepreneur.

Some of our conversation includes:

• Raising $300k in the first year of starting Barnana
• How much equity you should give away in your first round of funding
• His mindset around entrepreneurship and hustle
• Why his first real business was a web consultancy and how he used it to support his second business
• What it feels like to be too early to market (his augmented reality business)
• Why you should ignore the doubters
• 
  

• How he keeps track of his to-do lists and holds himself accountable
• Why execution trumps ideas every time
• What is an "escalation of commitment" and why you should avoid it
• Why your goal in business should be to optimize for freedom
• The importance of building a personal brand

1. The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink
2. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
3. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca the Younger

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