>> Narrator: From Menlo Park, California,
in the heart of Silicon Valley, It's theCUBE!
Covering CloudNOW Awards 2020
brought to you by Silicon Angle Media.
Now, here is Sonia Tagare
>> Hi, welcome to theCUBE,
I'm your host Sonia Tagare
and we're on the ground at Facebook Headquarters
in Menlo Park California.
Covering CloudNOW's top women entrepreneurs
in Cloud innovation Awards.
Joining us today is Mada Seghete the co-founder of Branch.
Mada, welcome to the Cube
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> So you're receiving an award today
for being top woman entrepreneur in Cloud innovation,
how does that feel?
>> Feels awesome, I'm humbled to be in such amazing company
with some great ladies,
that have started really great companies,
so pretty excited to be here.
>> Great, so give us a brief overview of your background.
>> Sure, my background.
Well , I probably don't have
the regular silicon valley background.
I was born and raised in communist Romania,
in a pretty small town called Bacau
in the region of Romania Como La Via.
I was very good at math and my parents pushed me
to explore applying schools in the United States
which I did and I applied to 23 colleges,
ended up getting a full scholarship from Cornell
where I studied Computer Engineering.
I dreamt of working for big companies,
which I did for a while until one day when,
I remember I was doing a Master's at Stanford
and one Professor told me,
I was; I told him I was like,
I don't think I could ever start a company
and he was like, "well if you don't, who do you think will?"
I was like, oh, I never thought about it that way
and that's when I think my entrepreneurial dream started
and a few years later I started,
with some co-founders and started the few companies
that eventually ended up being Branch.
It's a long answer to your question.
>> No, that's perfect,
so what inspired you to start Branch?
And how did you navigate getting funding?
It's an interesting story.
I think we came together, my co-founders and I,
we were in business school.
Stanford we all wanted to start a company
and we did what all business students do,
which just started something that sounded cool,
but maybe we didn't have such a big market.
And then pivoted and ended up building an app.
So we worked on an app
with a mobile photo book printing app called Kindred.
We worked on the app for quite some time,
it was over a year.
We sold over 10,000 photobooks.
I've see a lot of images of babies and pads
and we reviewed manually every single book
and we had a really hard time growing.
So if you think about the mobile ecosystem today,
and if you compare it to the web,
on the web, the web is a pretty democratic system,
you have the HTTP protocol
and you are able to put together a website
and make sure that the website gets found
through social media,
to search to all these other platforms.
Apps are much more harder to discover.
The app ecosystem is owned by the platforms
and we had a really hard time applying.
I was coming from the web world
and all these things I had done to market the websites
just didn't work with apps
and it was hard, you know.
You could only market the app,
and how about all the content inside the app?
That's a lot more interesting than the app itself.
So we felt that we were like really really struggling
and we needed to kind of shut the company down.
And then we realized that one of the things
that we're trying to build for us.
It's the ability to allow people to share
and get to content within the app,
which is in our case was photobooks.
It was actually something
that everyone in the ecosystem needed.
So we asked a lot of people
and it seemed like this was a much bigger need
than you know, the photobooks.
And, we had started to really build it
to solve our own problem.
So we started building a linking contribution platform
to help other app and mobile companies grow
and understand the user journey
and help build like interesting connections for the user.
So, you know our mission is
to help people discover content within the apps,
through links that always work
and it's been a wonderful and kind of
pretty exciting journey ever since.
>> That's really inspiring and solving a real world problem.
>> A real world problem.
So it's interesting when you ask about fundraising.
It was so hard to raise money for the photobook app,
and we raised actually from payout ventures
and they actually, even now, I remember the guy
Pageman sat us down in a very Silicon Valley fashion
at the Rosewood, and it was a very hot day
and there was like Persian tea being served.
And he gave us money,
he said, you know I just want to tell you something,
I'm not investing in the idea,
I'm investing in you as a team.
And if you pivot away from photobooks, you know,
which we did, and I think we pivoted away
because we ended up finding a much much bigger problem
and we felt that, you know, we could actually make
an actual change into the mobile and cloud ecosystem
and that's how it all started.
And it wasn't, actually it was easier to raise money
after we had a really big problem.
We had a good team that had been working together
for almost two years.
We product-market fits, so, yeah.
>> So what are some things that have influenced
you in your journey to become an entrepreneur?
>> Some things interesting.
Well, I would say the Stanford design school.
I think I came from working for Siemens,
which was a giant company
and I started doing these projects.
And I remember one of the projects was
we built a tool bar.
We were supposed to; we were doing a project
for Firefox which you know; Mozilla's browser.
Which was in some ways because it's Chrome
and we're trying to help it grow
and we didn't know and one of the ideas
was we will build this toolbar for eBay.
And eBay hadn't had toolbar for Firefox.
And we, you know, we were some students.
For two weeks we build this toolbar
and then someone bought the car to our toolbar
and I was like, wow,
like, how incredible is it that you can
just kind of put your thoughts on something
and just get something done
and make actual impact in someone's life.
And, I think that's when the spark
of the entrepreneurial spark,
it was during that time that Michael Dearink was a professor
in one of my d.school courses,
who also told me the thing,
that if I don't do it, who will.
And I think that's when it all started.
I think that things that have helped me along the way
I mean my co-founders,
I think I've been incredibly lucky
to find co-founders that are incredibly good at what they do
and also very different from me.
So I think if you think about why many companies implode
it's usually because of the founding team.
We've been together for almost seven years now
and it's been an interesting way to find balance
through so many failed companies,
so many stages of growth,
Branch has over 400 people now, so, you know,
our roles have shifted over time,
and it's been like an interesting journey.
And I think recently more in the past few years,
I think one of the things that helped me find balance
has been having a group of female founder friends.
It's really interesting to have a peer group
that you can talk about things with,
they've been vulnerable where,
then I didn't have that in the first few years
and I wish I did.
My co-founders are amazing,
but I think in some aways we are also co-workers.
So having an external group has been incredibly helpful
in helping me find balance in my life.
>> So I think a lot of women feel that way.
They feel that it's really difficult to navigate
in this male-dominated workspace.
So what advice would you give
to female entrepreneurs in the space?
>> Yeah, I mean it was really hard ,
and I think confidence is something that I've noticed
with myself, my peers, the women I'm invested in,
I do investing on the side.
I would say believe that you can do it.
Believe that only the sky is the limit.
Believe that you can do more than you think you can do.
I think sometimes, you know, our background and the society
around us doesn't necessarily believe that we can do
the things that we can do as women.
So I think believing in ourselves is incredibly important.
I think the second part is making sure
that we build networks around us.
They can tell us that they believe in us,
they can push us beyond what we think is possible.
And I think those networks can be peers,
like my female founder group.
We call each other, the feministas,
or I think investors,
I think it can be mentors
and I've had that, I've been lucky enough
to have amazing women investors, women mentors,
and it's been really incredible to see
how much they helped me grow.
So I think the interesting thing is,
when I was just getting started I didn't look
for those communities.
I didn't look for a guy, I just kind of felt,
oh, I can do it, but I didn't realize
that being part of the community, being vulnerable.
Asking questions, can actually help me go so much further.
So the advice would be to start early
and find a small group of people
that you can actually rely on.
They can be your advocates in your champions.
>> Well thank you so much for those words of wisdom.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> Thank you for being on theCUBE.
I'm your host Sonia Tegare, thanks for watching theCUBE.
Stay tuned for more.
(upbeat music)