- I want to be in a place where it doesn't matter
if you're a female founder or you're a male founder,
you're just a great founder.
And it doesn't matter if the company is run
by a female CEO or a male CEO, it's a great company.
My name is Paulina Raygorodskaya,
I'm the founder and CEO of Wanderu.
We help people find and book bus and train travel
from any two points in the country.
(upbeat electronic music)
So I was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia
and I came to the states when I was four
with my family who immigrated from there.
My mom worked at Harvard School of Public Health
as a research assistant.
My father worked in computers as a programmer
and so watching my parents work really hard
to live that America dream
has always been a major inspiration
and showed me that you can really do anything
that you want in life if you work really hard.
Because my dad was into computers,
he was lucky enough to be able to get computers
into the house when I was very young.
At about nine or 10 my dad actually taught me how to code
and I built my first website.
Before I even knew what entrepreneurship was,
my mind was always thinking about,
okay, how can I make money off of
doing something that I enjoy doing.
(upbeat, high energy music)
When the idea for Wanderu came up,
myself and a group of friends wanted
to do this cross-country road trip
to raise awareness for National Parks and Forests.
So we created a website called GreenXC
which is a blog to document a trip that we had planned
to go cross-country using only rideshares.
This is pre-Uber and Lyft days
so people thought we were completely crazy
hitchhiking across the country.
We were in this tiny town called New Castle
when I got a call from our next rideshare
who said, I'm really sorry but something came up
and I can't give you guys a ride to your next destination
and so then we were like, crap, we don't have a plan B.
We did what any millennial would do,
we turned to Google and looked through all the places
that we could potentially go through
to connect with another bus or a train
and spend over an hour trying to figure this out.
And so that was the pivotal moment
where we decided that we wanted to start Wanderu.
When we got back from the trip
we started doing research into the market
and we saw that there's actually more people traveling
by bus then there are flying in the United States
and more importantly, the demographic of people
that were traveling by bus are millennials.
Wanderu launched in August of 2013
just in the Northeast of the United States.
We quickly expanded to the Midwest
and then the West Coast and then the Southeast
and then we just covered the entire country within a year.
And then from there we expanded into Canada and Mexico
and then about a year ago we expanded into Europe.
So we now cover over 40 different countries,
over 10,000 cities and over 100 million different routes.
From the first time that I went to a bus conference,
I became aware that a lot of the people working
in the industry were male.
I remember when I was starting out
I would take my male co-founder with me
to every single meeting 'cause I was afraid
that I wouldn't be taken seriously.
It felt like a old boys club
where you have family businesses
that are passed down from generation to generation,
often times the sons are running the businesses
of their fathers or grandfathers
and in my mind it made me extremely insecure thinking
that I would not fit in.
I think a lot of my insecurities also stemmed
from being in the tech space.
You know it was very clear with some VCs
that I would be speaking to
that they would be judging me because I am a woman
or they were not going to invest in me because I was a woman
and I've had that experience over and over again.
I think that the tech industry should look at
what can they do to make women feel more included
and you know, what is the reason why most VCs are male.
There needs to be a change in the space
where women feel more included,
where you are proactively hiring female VCs
because just like male VCs will hire other male VCs
they will also invest in male founders
and that needs to change.
There will be a lot of people that are naysayers.
There will be a lot of people
that try to tell you not to do something
and tell you to stay out of the industry
and to go into something more female, like fashion.
There's no such thing as a female industry
or a male industry.
There's is just what is in your head
and the barriers that you create for yourself
and of course there's barriers that people create for you
but you need to be strong
and willing to push through those barriers to succeed.