Oh, I'm sorry.
I think you must be in the wrong room.
I had to convince them that, no, I was in the right room.
There is something about Harvard.
The Ivy League school has an undeniable mystique, giving its name outsized influence and importance.
The stamp of approval of merely getting accepted to Harvard, let alone graduating from the institution,
opens untold doors.
See, it wasn't until Jean Brownhill, the founder of home renovation company Sweeten, attended the Ivy
League school that she found entrepreneurial success.
And it wasn't for lack of trying.
So what's Harvard secret?
There are three numbers to look out for in Jean's story.
$150,000. The amount she personally invested to launch Sweeten.
$1.3 million.
The amount of her first outside investment.
And $1.8 billion.
The dollar amount of projects the company currently has in its pipeline.
Ready?
Ready.
Perfect.
Here's how Jean Brownhill turned her Harvard education into Sweeten, a home renovation matchmaking company.
For CNBC Make It, I'm Nate Skid.
This is Founder Effect.
Jean grew up in New London, Connecticut, where her mom and dad bounced between blue collar jobs but somehow
managed to cobble together enough money to pay for a private education.
My mom is an atheist, but she really believes in education.
And so she sent me to private Catholic school.
It was definitely a very, very rich education I got growing up.
Jean was entrepreneurial from the jump.
As a kid, she held yard sales to peddle old toys.
As a teenager, she put out ads in the local paper for her babysitting services in an effort to widen her
customer base. And she used all of that money to decorate her bedroom.
Both entrepreneur impulse and creative impulse were there from a very
early age.
After graduating high school, a mentor suggested she pursue a career in architecture.
My mom was flipping through the College for Dummies book, found Cooper Union.
They had architecture. It was free.
She was determined I was going to go there.
Now, what she didn't mention to me is that Cooper Union, because it's tuition-free, because every
single student, it is merit-based scholarship and every single student who gets in gets this
benefit. It's harder to get into than West Point.
But it was how she got into the exclusive university that says the most about the way her mind works.
One of the questions on the entrance exam asks her to draw a road that can't be driven on
And being like a teenage kid who just recently got her license.
I did a number of different sketches and, you know, ultimately came to the conclusion that this question
was a false question and that anything that I put on paper, I could drive on.
And so I took that piece of paper.
I drove over it several times and I sent it back to them.
Jean was just one of 32 students admitted in her class.
While attending class at Cooper Union, Jean waited tables to make ends meet.
She managed to impress one of her professors so much, she hired her without ever having to formally interview
for a position. That does not happen often.
Yeah.
Yeah. And it was my first office job.
She is still a mentor to this day and it was incredible.
Jean squeezed as much knowledge as she could out of the boutique firms, but left to work as an architect for
the luxury retail brand Coach.
She was ready for a bigger challenge in the lessons that came with it.
Why Coach? I mean, that's a really popular brand.
The opportunity for me was learning about the business.
How do you run a big organization?
You know, I had very, very small P and L responsibilities at the time.
I had a very small team, but I got to learn these things and that was the opportunity for me.
Jean excelled as a traditional architect at Coach, but she had an idea to increase efficiency by creating an
internal platform to monitor the status of the company's various projects.
And so I got certified in information architecture and built web platforms there that helped
make the architecture group.
Infrastructure group more efficient.
In fact, I won the chairman's award and I haven't checked in lately.
But last I checked, they were still using those platforms.
But Jean was uninterested in climbing the corporate ladder at Coach or any other company, for that matter.
And so what did you do next?
So I left Coach and started a bit of
consulting before I started the company.
I read everything that I possibly could about starting a company.
I went to every single meetup.
I talked to every single person that I could and took incremental first steps to starting the company.
At the same time, she was witnessing what the digital revolution did to the business models of the music and
journalism industries.
And she was convinced a similar fate was coming for architecture.
So she gave a series of lectures to anyone who would listen.
A woman overheard that presentation and ran me down and said,
"Hey, I am a Loeb Fellow at Harvard.
I think you're great. I want to nominate you."
And that was it.
What's one educational concept that you took?
What do you remember?
So I was very fortunate to take a class by a professor named Ron Hibbits,
and he teaches a class about leadership and adaptive leadership and
how to think about navigating through challenging leadership
scenarios that don't have a technical solution, that require an adaptive
solution, that require people to think about what is possible in a different way.
And so that class was incredibly thought provoking, educational, and it
really cemented my commitment to values based leadership.
But Jean says the idea for a tech-based company that matches general contractors with home renovation
projects came while she was re-doing her Brooklyn apartment.
So I walk into my living room and I see a gaping hole in
the ceiling and having been to many different construction sites, like I had an idea of, you know,
what the hole in the ceiling should look like and this hole looked wrong.
We'll just say wrong.
Janky. Wrong. And I asked my contractor at the time, "Hey,
you have moved interior stairs before.
Correct?" And he said, "No."
And so in that moment, you know, I realized three things.
One, this was going to be a terrible renovation.
Two, that other homeowners had to be having the same challenge and finding the right general contractor
for their project. And three, this was a terrible way for this general contractor to be
building his business.
He took a project that he knew that he wasn't really qualified to do in hopes that he could expand his
business, make a profit and get a reference, none of which he got.
She saw that general contractors needed as much structuring guidance through the process as the
homeowners did.
They are small business owners that are not great at marketing or in sales, documentation,
communication.
They're great at being in the field.
They're great at their craft of construction.
And so we handle the rest for them.
While the idea for Sweeten might not have come from Harvard, she credits her time there for clarifying her
vision.
So much so that she began working nights and weekends on the basic website and building spreadsheets.
And I thought, OK, I have one more idea.
I'm going to do it. What's the worst can happen?
I'll go to Harvard. I'll spend a year there.
I'll do something else. And so, of course, that was Sweeten.
And it worked. And it worked immediately.
Sweeten matches general contractors with home renovation projects and charges the contractors a fee
on projects awarded to them.
To grow her business, she began attending general contracting conferences, investor meetings and building
a network. Even though she was often the only woman of color in attendance.
The very first thing someone said to me when I came in and sat down, they said, "Oh, I'm sorry.
I think you must be in the wrong room."
I had to convince them that, no, I was in the right room.
But as she continued to do her due diligence, Jean realized just how big of an opportunity was presenting
itself.
And one of the very first things when you start talking to venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs, they
will ask you what the total addressable market or TAM is.
And so looking at a $1.2 trillion market was certainly very interesting.
In 2011, she emptied her 401(k) and sold her investments to cobble together $150,000 to
officially launch Sweeten and most of that money went into tech.
And this was before there were third party softwares that allow you to test marketplace
ideas.
So now you can easily test your value prop if you are interested in creating a
marketplace. But at the time, I needed to build all of that technology.
And so that was expensive.
So how fast does the business grow from the launch before you leave Cambridge
to when you need to get V.C.?
Like, what does that rise look like?
How long did it take?
Give me an idea of the craziness.
We had this moment where we had renovated a bathroom for someone that
we didn't know was an editor at a magazine.
The renovation went really well.
They were super happy.
They nominated us for the best of issue that year.
It comes out. We're the best contractor locator of 2012 New York Magazine.
And it really was like you see in the movies, like the servers broke, everything broke.
People were signing up too fast.
We didn't have enough general contractors.
Like, it was complete pandemonium.
When did you decide that you needed V.C?
What was that like? What was the pitch?
How much did you get that first round?
And then, like, did it get easier after that?
At the time, I remember reading something that said any entrepreneur.
So raising capital is just hard.
Being an entrepreneur is hard for everyone.
Full stop. And that entrepreneurs would do better to focus on the, you know,
the algebra and not on the statistics.
Meaning the statistics are: Most entrepreneurs, most companies fail.
No matter who they're led by. But the algebra is: What are your unit economics?
How are you going to make this business profitable?
What are your costs? What are your expenses?
Those things are knowable and you can continue to work your plan to get the
algebra of your business to make it so that you are not one of those statistics.
Or you are one of the statistics in a positive way, meaning that you are, you know, in my case, one of at
the time, a small handful of African-American women who have raised venture capital.
I raised $1.3 million led by Great Oak's venture capital.
And I did my A in 2015 led by Navitas Capital.
I did a follow-on round, which Navitas capital and New Voices also participated in.
Sweeten has raised about $20 million to date.
In 2011, the average home renovation order on Sweeten was about $1,500.
Now, Jean says it's over $85,000 and the company has over $1.8 billion worth of
projects in the pipeline.
But none of the success was a given.
It's hard to not talk about the fact that you have succeeded into extremely male and
extremely white industries.
That's not luck. You didn't luck your way into that.
And so I'm wondering, is there a commonality between those two different worlds and how you've
managed to succeed in both of them?
The best life skill as a person and certainly as an entrepreneur is problem solving.
And when I think about the challenges of being a woman in construction or being a woman in in venture, being a
person of color in either one of them, I see it as a set of problems to solve.
That's it. It's pretty straightforward to me.