Anastasia Leng
A graduate of my alma mater, the University of
Pennsylvania, Anastasia began her career at Google. After implementing Google
programs to develop entrepreneurs for several years, she decided to become one
herself. Partnering with a former classmate and colleague at Google, Anastasia
founded Hatch, a firm that offers mass-customized products via an internet
platform. I hope you enjoy her founding story as much as I.
1. After
majoring in psychology at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn),
you worked at Google in their new venture business, through which you became
intricately involved in implementing programs for start-ups, and in product
development for five years before launching a company that has now become
Hatch. Was this career progression deliberate, or did your desire to become an
entrepreneur gradually evolve from your studies at Penn and experiences at
Google?
My
career progression has definitely not been deliberate. At Google, I realized
that I tended to gravitate toward early-stage projects and products. I
preferred working on something brand new for which there was not road map
rather than on an already-established project where I would be following in
someone else’s footsteps. I think I owe Google credit for my love of
entrepreneurship. One of my last projects at Google involved helping the
company set up entrepreneurial centers around the world starting with a South
African accelerator and culminating in a large hub called Campus in London.
While doing so, I met many incredibly inspiring people creating companies,
building business from the ground up, infecting me with the start-up bug.
2. Can
you tell us about your business model and operations? How, exactly, do you earn
a profit? What does your supply chain look like? Whom do you consider your
nearest competitors? Do you feel large retailers like Amazon are a threat? How
are you different from competitors? More specifically, what do you believe is
your competitive advantage over them?
Let
me frame my answer by telling you who we are and what our vision is at Hatch.
Our vision revolves around creating an interactive, customized shopping
experience in which the costumer can tweak every product to create a version
that incorporates their preferences. The genesis of this idea lay in my
realization that every shopping experience requires you to make a binary,
yes-no decision to every product you come across. Hatch set out to transcend
this limitation. To do so, we partnered with small crafts people and businesses,
artists who were able to incorporate a degree of personalization and
customization into their design, creating a two-fold product differentiation
advantage. Every product featured on Hatch is a starting point for the final product
determined by the customer’s preferences. You can change the material, color,
size, and shape to personalize an item.
Regarding
your question about our closest competitor, the macro answer is that we compete
with every online retailer because when a customer is shopping online, the
person is not thinking, “I want this customized piece.” Rather, the customer is
thinking, “I want this item, and I will buy it from the company that gives me exactly
what I want.” In that sense, we compete with everyone, including Amazon.
On
a micro scale, etsy.com has made their name by aggregating makers of hand-made
goods. For us, hand crafting has never been the differentiating factor. We are
concerned with the personalization and customization that makers are able to offer,
as well as the quality of the makers. In this sense, we are much more of a
“curated” marketplace; all products are carefully vetted before being approved
for sale on our site. We aim for a product and customer experience not
available through other, similar sites.
3. How
would you describe your corporate culture?
Our
corporate culture is incredibly fun. We laugh a lot. We are all very close,
almost like a family. We genuinely like one another. We also disagree and argue
about a lot of issues, but we also have lots of fun doing things together.
Recently, we started working out together once a week, helping each other with
our New Year’s resolutions to shape up. A few of us have formed a book club,
and we meet once a month to talk about books and enjoy wine. I feel personally
close to everyone on the team. The company would not be where it is now today
without them. They are a great team.
I
hope that we will be able to maintain this culture as we grow. We have had to
let some people go because we realized they were not a good fit, they did not
share our values.. The ones who are still here embrace our vision. Of course,
companies typically become more bureaucratic as they grow. This evolution is
inevitable. But maintaining a core of down-to-earth, smart, humble,
hard-working culture is not impossible.
4.
Tell
us about Campus and other Google initiatives aimed at supporting start-ups.
What is Google doing in Japan for start-ups? Broader Asia?
I
am not sure what Google is doing for startups in Asia. While I was still at
Google, I know they did have people on the ground in Asia exploring ways to
support entrepreneurship and startups, but I had left before anything
materialized.
I
am familiar with their Campus model, which involves creating a hub in a city
where can gain access to everything they need to begin their startup journey.
In the same building, entrepreneurs can access mentorship, secure space to
work, form a community with other aspiring entrepreneurs, and utilize suppliers
of services who will help them with everything from legal documents to
accounting issues. The Campus model in London really took off, and the hub was
viewed as a success. I think the same model has been replicated in Tel Aviv,
the Czech Republic, and at least one more place, though I do not clearly
recall.
I
know Google is still very much committed to start ups. In fact, they formed a
team, Google for Entrepreneurs, led by Mary Himinkool, a brilliant woman with
whom I had myself worked at Google. That team is actively working to develop
entrepreneurship in other countries, looking at ways to help local
entrepreneurs to enter the start-up world. In some countries, becoming an
entrepreneur is difficult. Startups are not viewed as glamorously as in the
United States. The Google team is working on ways to help entrepreneurs on the
long, difficult journey of establishing a start up, with special focus on
founders that are typically underrepresented in the technology industry.
5. What
skills, resources, and lessons from Google have you utilized in founding and
running Hatch? What key lessons have you learned since founding Hatch?
Though
Google is a company of incredibly smart, brilliant, and accomplished people,
the most important lesson I learned there was about how incredibly important
soft skills are. The factors most correlated with personal growth and success
in the company were your ability to relate to others, your skill in leading a
team, soft-touch abilities than cannot be learned from textbooks.
I
have taken this lesson very much to heart in my work here at Hatch. When I
think about all of the small victories along the way, like attracting investors
and building a team, I feel they are all primarily people based, not data or
product driven. Every single Hatch employee likely took a pay cut to join the
team. Because they are all intelligent, rational people, I believe the
opportunity to honestly and transparently interact with others who share a
common goal motivated their decisions and helped us accomplish everything we
have. I also had the opportunity to see different leadership styles at Google,
so I have been able to cherry pick models in developing my own style.
As
for lessons learned at Hatch, no experience better exposes you to the ruthless
need to prioritize when you could be doing absolutely anything. There is the
constant battle between data and intuition. Because no formula for the right
balance exists, I have had to hone my own. At Google, if you couldn’t or didn’t
do something, someone else there certainly could have stepped up to fill your
shoes. In addition, Google had clear roadmaps for what they were doing. At
Hatch, in contrast, the path is wide open; we could be doing anything. Creating
a vision for what we want to be, combining it with tactical realities to
determine what we need to accomplish and being ruthless about prioritizing are
lessons and skills I will take with me wherever I go next.
6. Coding
and web design seem to be at the core of your business. What difficulties have
you encountered with this technological facet of operations? How are you
dealing with these difficulties?
As
a founder, I never think that I am moving quickly enough. Our engineers are
brilliant, and they do a phenomenal job. But we have a product roadmap that is
miles long, a veritable laundry list of all we aspire to accomplish. No matter
how fast we are moving, we constantly feel our pace is not brisk enough.
When
we started Hatch, and when we first received funding, we lived and breathed by
the numbers. Showing growth was vital. This concern drove us to implement every
e-commerce practice we could think of and do whatever we could to increase the
site conversion rate. In this process of doing so, we lost sight of the source
of our uniqueness and the subtle differences that separate us from everyone
else. At the end of our month of optimization, our revenue and conversion rates
were up, but we were no longer able to see how Hatch was different from other
e-commerce companies. We looked and felt like all the other sites out there.
Since
the end of 2014 and early this year, we have committed to spending the next
quarter setting up a strong foundation of who we are as a company, including
the people who are the company, and building the design of that foundation. For
the first time ever, we are thinking of building a brand. The process will be a
design exercise as well as an exercise in strategy and marketing. Design,
engineering, and strategy are all intertwined.
7. In
your talk, “Rise of Customization in Ecommerce,” you mentioned that you had effectively
resisted pressure to vertically integrate coming from investors, noting that
90% of repeat purchases on your site were from a different product category.
Clearly, you make data-driven decisions. In the age of Big Data, how do you
determine what and how much information you need? How do you collect, analyze
and ultimately utilize it in decision-making processes?
To
be perfectly honest, I continue to grapple with these issues. Obviously, I do
look at a lot of data. However, as mentioned, knowing who we are as a company
and determining the pillars of our brand are pivotal for me as we go into 2015.
This way, we do not run the risk of optimizing the data only to end up with a
company that does not reflect our values. It may not even feel like it reflects
your vision or philosophy. That balance is a tricky, delicate one. There is no
point building a company reflecting an idea you have when customers are telling
you it is not what they want. You cannot build a business that way. But if you
totally abandon your beliefs and values, you end up with this one-size-fits all
product that is neither highly useful to anyone nor something they can identify
with, become attached to emotionally, and serve as an evangelist of. I cannot
give a perfect answer to your question because I am still in the process of
determining the right mix.
8. How
do you think being female has impacted your business? What are the benefits?
The disadvantages?
That’s
a very charged question. In a way, the benefits and the advantages are two
edges of the same sword. There are far fewer female founders than male ones. I
think the latest figures indicate that only 3% of venture-backed founders are
female. On the one hand, I am a minority, so some venture firms will make an
added effort to find me and other females.
My
understanding of venture capital suggests the business relies heavily on
pattern recognition. More specifically, the firms seem to look at the traits
they have observed in past successes, using them to screen for pockets of
possible future opportunity. Some of those traits are related to people, and
some investors will look for founders with certain characteristics. Because
most previous founders have been males, this pattern-recognition approach
malfunctions when female founders appear.
Some
articles suggest that investors are inclined to fund female founders who
exhibit more male-like characteristics. I am sure that observation is partially
true, but I have no complaints. We are lucky to have come this far.
Occasionally, I have felt that being the only female in the room was a
disadvantage. At times, I have received questions that a male would never be
asked. For these reasons, I go to a VC meeting, I dress differently. I will
never wear a skirt or a dress. I always wear my glasses. Everything I do
broadcasts my business acumen and professionalism. I do this, in part, due to
stories I have heard from other female founder friends about their experiences.
One
plus is the tight culture among the female founder community in New York City.
I have the opportunity to meet some incredible women who are starting and
growing companies. We tend to be open about the good and bad, serving as a
strong support network for one another. On my team at Hatch, I work with three
females and three males.
9. As
you may know, start ups are relatively uncommon in risk-averse Asia, notably
Japan. What recommendations would you give to young Japanese who aspire to
become entrepreneurs, especially young women?
That’s
a tough question because I think that bucking the culture climate in a country
is difficult. Access to a strong support network could make the situation a bit
better. My suggestion is that aspiring entrepreneurs find people doing what
they would like to do, then stick to those people like glue. Offer to do unpaid
internships. I did many of them in high school and college. Offer to shadow
these entrepreneurs, even if doing so means spending the summer before you become
a high-school junior fetching coffee for them. You will be amazed by how much
you will be able to learn and absorb just by being around someone doing what
you aspire to do.
In
countries that do not have a strong appreciation for entrepreneurship, being
part of a sub-culture that rewards and celebrates this enterprise makes a big
difference regarding whether or not you are likely to start up a company.
Furthermore, if you do take the risk, you will be more likely to stick with you
your plan because you are surrounded by people struggling through the same
journey as you.
