CC >> Welcome back to
Entrepreneurship in Society. This is a course that is offered
through the UW School of Human Ecology.
I'm Jeanan Yasiri Moe. As we begin today, I'd like to
extend thanks to our partners in supporting this course, the UW
Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering
for their technical support, and financial support which is
offered through the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which is
committed to advancing academic education in entrepreneurship.
Additionally, we thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public
Television and their University Place crew for taping today's
lecture. I'm quite pleased to introduce
our special guest today, Heidi Allstop, founder of Spill.com.
Heidi graduated from the UW Madison with a degree in
psychology and a certificate in business in 2010.
She started Spill during her junior year of college when she
herself was going through a bit of a hard time but faced a
two-week wait to see a counselor.
The company that she founded has since expanded to over 20
schools and prevented 17 potential college student
suicides to date. After going through the
prestigious TechStars' Boston incubator for high growth
start-ups, Heidi grew her team to six people, raised a half a
million dollars and is now looking to expand the program to
veterans and high schoolers. As a young entrepreneur with
very little formal education in the area of business, Heidi
offers a no nonsense perspective of what starting a company looks
like. Please join me in welcoming
Heidi Allstop. [APPLAUSE]
Hi, everyone. Looks like I didn't backup my
software. All right.
So I'm Heidi Allstop. Nice to meet you all.
I'm the CEO and founder of Spillnow.com Spill is a peer
support system online. So you can basically write in,
vent privately about whatever you're struggling with in your
personal life and get feedback from a handful of peers who have
been through similar problems. So if you're going through a
roommate problem, you can get feedback from other people who
have been through that issue, all anonymously and all within
24 hours. So, how it works is you go to
Spillnow.com, write out whatever you're struggling with, it gets
screened by crisis professionals to look for red flag issues that
might need further attention. After it's screened, it gets
sent to a handful of peers from schools across the country.
You can choose if you want to hear from students on your
campus or off your campus. They respond within 24 hours
offering support, feedback, resources.
Their responses are screened to make sure they don't say
anything detrimental. They don't say go jump off a
cliff or you're going to go to hell if you get an abortion,
anything like that. Once they're screened, they're
sent back to the spiller and they feel a little bit better.
So, as mentioned previously, I started Spill when I was going
through a hard time at college. I was a junior and I was going
through a bad breakup, some depression, just feeling kind of
lonely, and I didn't want to bother my friends with my
personal problems. I know we've all been there
where you're like, I really don't want to vent to you again.
And it was around finals time and everyone was really busy.
So I called the counseling center to get some help.
It was a two-week wait for an appointment, and they didn't do
any screening on the phone to make sure I wasn't at that kind
of tipping point. And I remember sitting outside
of Helen C. and looking at everyone walking into the
library so stressed out, heads down, ear buds in,
totally inverted, and I wondered how many other people
were feeling the same way I was but we just had no way to
connect because we had so much pride for not opening up.
And I wanted to change that. So I figured how can we connect
these people who are similarly struggling?
The first step was to create a student org.
I thought of the idea of Spill, what if we had an online place
to connect? Literally went inside the
library and started filling out an application for a student
organization. I had no idea what it was going
to be. And I don't know who approves
those applications, but somehow they approved it.
So over Christmas break I started building a website so
that we'd have a landing page to go to.
And it was so, I have no technical background so it was
like email your problems to studentspill@gmail.com.
We'll keep them safe and private.
People did it. So I printed up some posters,
went to the student org fair. 120 people signed up to become
responders, and 10 of them wanted leadership positions.
I was like we don't have a leadership team, but, sure,
we'll make one if you want to help.
So it just started taking off, and the students at Wisconsin
then started telling their friends at other schools, and by
the time I graduated we had 10 schools wanting the program.
Some of them even wanted to pay for it.
And I hadn't done any marketing for it.
It was just purely student word of mouth.
So I wondered how is it that students are picking up on this
thing so fast and why? It turns out, you guys know,
college is hard. It's a big adjustment period.
You're away from your friends from home, your family, your
trying to be so cool in front of your new friends, and nobody
wants to be the vulnerable one who's stressed out and feeling
on the edge. Colleges know this but they
don't know how to deal with it, so they pour money into things
like counseling that only reaches about 12% of the
population on average. So it's actually a really
expensive problem in that one in four college freshman drops out
before their sophomore year. That's a huge loss in tuition
dollars to the university, a loss to taxpayers, and a loss
just in general to society. And a lot of the reasons have to
do with depression, failure to adjust, loneliness.
They're all solvable, but 80% of students say they wouldn't even
consider going to counseling even in times of crisis, which
is kind of ridiculous. Our generation just doesn't want
to do it. So Spill reaches out to people
where they are: online. It's safe, confidential,
available 24/7. You don't have to call a
counselor at 3:00 in the morning when really you just need to
vent about a bad breakup. So after we started expanding,
we started getting messages from people saying it was changing
their lives, saying they didn't drop out of school because of
it, and it was really astonishing to me that so many
people were going through this same thing and none of us knew
it. To date, we've intervened on 19
potential suicides, which is probably one of the things I'm
most proud of right now. The cool thing is that spillers
want to become responders. They want to pay it forward and
help other people after they get their responses.
So it creates a very scalable model in that it's a group of
people who is giving back to each other.
So after all of this kind of concept and this early proof of
concept started, I thought there's probably a way to make
money on this, especially since some of the schools are even
saying how much does it cost, we want it.
So I started a company. Didn't know how.
I wasn't a business major. I hadn't even declared my
psychology major yet. I was kind of slacking.
And it took off. So I applied for, let's see,
actually I'll go to that later, but I guess how it works is when
a student spills or becomes a responder online, the whole
process is online, they serve as a lead to us, to these schools.
We reach out to the school, tell them about the program.
Then we create a group of students on that campus who act
as the leadership team. They recruit other students to
be involved as responders. From there, there's actually a
chapter on campus of people spilling and responding to each
other. The cool thing is that these
students are submitting their innermost thoughts, fears,
weaknesses, and we're able to collect data on that that is
valuable to the university. These are the people who aren't
going to the counseling center. It's, like I said, the 88% of
the population who isn't going in.
So we create data reporting on what students are struggling
with when and how that school compares to other schools.
So we can say you're loneliness levels in freshman boys are
three times higher than at other schools.
Or we can say did you know that sexual assault spikes on week
13, maybe you should launch some self-defense courses or do some
awareness around that. We also sell program upgrades so
schools can push out their local resources through it, they can
put their brand on it, they can customize training, all that
jazz. Here's an example of some of the
data analytics that we collect. Things like depression,
confidence, body image, and comparisons between different
schools. Here's an example of trends
also. So you can see this school has a
huge spike in future worries around week 12.
So maybe the school should throw a career-building campaign or
something like that. In the future we hope to
establish this as kind of a standard for how students know
more about that university and know more about what the
population of students on that campus are like.
For purchasing schools, they see it as a huge investment.
So they understand that if it keeps one student in school or
if it prevents one crisis, it's literally paying for itself.
For us, the opportunity in colleges is cool.
High schools is really cool. When you think back to high
school, that's a hard place to be.
Also, veterans is an even greater opportunity in that
we're losing more troops to suicide right now than we are in
both Afghanistan and Iraq in combat.
So an update on company standing.
We're at 21 campuses. We'll be at 75 by September.
Everywhere from UC Berkeley to MIT we're starting this coming
semester. We've been featured in the New
York Times, TechCrunch, MTV, you name it.
Won Most Investment-Ready Company at the Burrill Business
Plan Competition, and that was honestly a joke because I had
just created that business plan for a class like the week
before. It still wasn't a company.
Went to TechStars in March of this last year, found out we got
in a week before the competition.
So I literally packed up, moved to Boston, and I've been there
ever since. They have about 150 schools
within a five mile radius there, so it's kind of our heaven.
I bootstrapped it at first. We got a couple grants and a
little money from TechStars, and then after the closing of the
program, we raised $400,000 in investor money from angels.
So the more exciting thing that's going on right now is
we've been presented with an opportunity to partner with a
company that reaches eight million college students every
month. And they want to push out the
ability to spill in their resource.
So now our challenge is scaling quickly so that we can
accommodate that type of traffic.
This summer we're going to be raising a couple million dollars
to do that and also to expand into the military and high
schools. So that's now but that's not
really relevant to you guys. I want to go back when it
started, when I was sitting in your seat.
So, I had no idea that I was going to be doing this full time
I had no idea it would be a real company.
It was more so just, hey, let's enter this business plan
competition and see how it goes. When it started expanding I
started realizing that if I wasn't going to take hold of
this, no one else was going to manage it.
And actually, senior year I applied for a job with Accenture
saying, hey, maybe I want to do consulting, and, surprisingly, I
got it. And so then I was faced with the
question of do I take a full time, stable job that will
provide me with stability or do I do this crazy dream that might
turn out to be a flop? And it was the hardest decision
of my life to date. And so I thought about it.
I accepted the job right away, actually, and kind of parked on
it. My start date wasn't until,
let's see, August. So I had a few months to try
Spill, see how it would go. So I did a lot of brain storming
during that time talking to mentors, talking to people who
worked at Accenture, people who owned their own companies,
trying to figure out what do I do.
My solution was I'll do them both.
I'll work this full time job and start a company.
No. Obviously, that's not
sustainable. So I remember one of my mentors,
well, to step back, do you guys know what Merlin Mentors is?
So Merlin's amazing. If you have the opportunity and
you even have an idea of a business, go pitch to them.
They gave me a team of four mentors, and, literally, they've
shaved a year off of Spill's development in that they act
like kind of the bumpers on the bowling lanes.
And whenever I say, oh, this is a great idea, I want to do this,
they say, no, Heidi, stay focused.
And they kind of steer you in the right direction.
So I had a mentor team, and I really picked their brains on
what to do. One of the solutions they had
was write a list of the best and worst situation that will come
of each. And also make a list of things
you want out of your life, and then put a little S by it if
Spill's going to give that to you, and put an A by it if
Accenture is going to give that to you.
At the end, you tally up, see how many each gets, and the
winner resides. So I did both of those exercises
and I realized that the worst case scenario for taking Spill
would be that it flops and I learn a lot and I go apply with
Accenture again. I go take another interview and
have more to talk about. The worst case scenario for
Accenture was that I miss out on this opportunity, I let Spill
slip through the cracks when it has the potential to help a lot
of people, and I regret it in the future.
And I think regret is worse than potentially screwing up, so I
chose Spill. In the process I saw a passage
that said leap and the net will appear, and it gave me so much
faith in my decision in that if I just jump into this, something
good will come of it. And it has.
So this is kind of the laundry list of what I've learned in
doing this. I feel like if I were to make
this laundry list of what I would have learned in a
corporate job, it would be a lot smaller.
It might be formatting spreadsheets.
It might be getting to work on time.
I don't know what it would be, but I feel like you rarely get
the opportunity to be a manager, be a salesperson, be an HR
person, be a fundraiser, be a financial specialist, learn
tech, you rarely get that. So, I guess, one message I want
to give, though, is that entrepreneurship is not
glamorous. Right now there's some weird
trend around entrepreneurship in that everyone's got these
start-ups. It's so cool to start your own
company. Everyone's a risk-taker.
Everyone's going to make the next Facebook.
It's not. It's not easy.
It's not glamorous. It's a lot of late nights.
You kind of make the decision of do I want a 9 to 5 or do I want
a 9 to 12? 9 to midnight.
And I can say that even though it's not glamorous, I've learned
more in doing it than I did in my whole college career.
That might be because I didn't go to class a lot.
[LAUGHTER] But it does teach you
a lot. It's funny because so many of my
friends who got the awesome corporate jobs and were all
excited to go work for Groupon or Intuit or whatever, a lot of
them, actually I'd say all but one, have quit by now.
And some of the people I interviewed at Accenture who I
asked them do I want to take this opportunity and they all
tried to persuade me that, yes, Accenture is amazing, do it.
One of them actually came to me looking for a job.
They were like, you know, I'm hating it.
I want to get out and do my own thing, can I work for you?
You get an opportunity to meet with a lot of higher ups.
So it's kind of cool. When you start a company, you
start at the top, and there's no where to go but down.
It's really a preference thing. Do you want to start at the
bottom and climb the ladder to the top, or do you want to start
at the top and be able to admit when you need to be pushed down?
I get to travel all over. Madison today.
North Carolina this next week. Phoenix in two weeks.
Kentucky in three weeks. It's crazy.
And I get to see and feel the difference I'm making in the
world. So that's really motivating to
me, so if your motivation is I need to get this project done
because my boss will be mad at me and I won't get a good
reference, that's one thing, but, for me, motivation is I
need to get this thing down, otherwise a hundred students
might not be able to use our website and have a better day.
So people, entrepreneurship teachers always ask me to give
tips, and I don't know. I'm still figuring it out too.
But this is what I do know. I would say figure out what you
want in life and do whatever gets you there.
So if you want to be an accountant, be the best damn
accountant you can and go for it.
Entrepreneurship is not for everyone.
It sounds morbid but write your own eulogy.
So what do you want to be remembered for?
I think that was a really cool tip I got senior year that stuck
with me. What do I want to be remembered
for at my funeral? Don't be afraid of risks.
They're really not that scary at all.
Trust your instincts. Don't worry about what other
people think of your choice. So many of my friends who didn't
have jobs were just mortified that they were living in their
parents' basement, didn't want anyone to know, but it's like,
who cares? None of your classmates care.
They care about their own thing. Don't worry if you're not taking
a glamorous path of a great, well-paying job after college.
Do whatever floats your boat. If it means starting a company
or entertaining an idea for a problem you want to solve, do
that. When the bird and the book
disagree, trust the bird. I love that quote.
Really, there is no book for life.
Just follow your heart. And if you're stuck in a
difficult decision, I really, really like the exercise if
writing down the worst possible situation, addressing it before
it even could happen. If you're uncertain at all about
your future, consider being a creator.
Some people just don't do entrepreneurship because they
haven't even thought of it. They haven't even thought that I
could do something that would impact a ton of people.
And in reality, it's just a big word for problem solving.
Think of a pain point in your life and how you can fix it and
how you can scale that to help other people with that pain
point. One of the best books, if you do
decide to go into entrepreneurship, is Four Steps
to the Epiphany. So you might have been told to
read that already, but it's a great guide for testing ideas so
that you don't waste a ton of time making them perfect.
If I would have never creating a really ugly Google site and said
email your problems to studentspill@gmail.com this
never would have come. If I had spent 20 grand paying a
web developer to make that site, we wouldn't have been any
farther along. Test your concept immediately.
Ask anyone you know. They don't have to be in a
prestigious position. Your mailman might have better
input in your idea than a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Spend time on actions that actually produce results.
I feel like in business school, or in school, so many times
you're forced to write business plans or think through all the
steps to getting there, but in reality they're not going to
turn out that way. You're not going to open up that
word doc and say, okay, I want to start a company, I better
follow these steps. Do stuff that actually produces
results. Find a mentor team and a support
system because entrepreneurship is really lonely.
You're starting something and you're funneling all of your
time into it, and if you don't have people around you who also
believe in you and it, it can get really closed really quick.
Start a rejection folder or box, and let things go in but never
come out. I have so many rejection emails
and someday I'll look at it, but for now, let it go in, grow some
tough skin and don't think about it.
Email me if you have any questions, honestly.
I'm happy to talk to you if you want to talk about a business
idea or how do I go about even starting this.
Happy to help. Doesn't matter what phase you're
in. And that's about it.
So I guess I will open myself up for questions.
Terrific, Heidi. Thank you very much for your
comments. We want to thank Heidi.
[APPLAUSE] And the students know
that I just look for their hands to go up, and I pass off the mic
so that you can go ahead and ask your questions of Heidi.
I have a couple to get us started, but if I see some
hands, I'll hand this off pretty quickly.
Go right ahead. >> Hi.
Thank you for coming. My name's Eric.
I was just curious, you said you had very little business
background going into it, and I'm in the Business School so I
know how daunting that can be even after learning some things,
but how did you go about learning all of the things about
marketing and finance? Did you just do the hard work
online and research, or did you outsource it to other people?
How did that go for you? >> I feel like if you, it's kind
of funny. This is maybe my bias, but if
you start with a business background you almost have to
unlearn it because they teach you so many formal steps that
just aren't real. Like our marketing plan doesn't
contain Facebook advertising and billboards and PR releases.
It's like, okay, have the students chalk the sidewalks.
Put up posters on campus. Hand out swag in the dorms.
It's like real life practical stuff that just has the brand of
marketing. So I would just say follow your
common sense and do what you know works and don't be
intimidated by the formalities of all the business jargon that
doesn't really matter. You can worry about that later
when you have to impress someone.
I'll bring you the mic. Actually, as I'm walking down,
Heidi, let me throw out a question that I've got.
You had mentioned the revenue that Spillnow.com generates,
some of it from selling the data that you get to schools and
other organizations that care about that.
Are there other revenue generating sources for the
organization? Do you charge individual
participants for logging on and getting counsel?
You may have mentioned that, and I may have missed it.
No, we don't charge the students at all.
So, basically, it's like a freemium model in that the
school can use the website for free, but if they want an
on-site chapter that's thriving and pushing out their resources,
they pay for it. So that's kind of right now the
primary revenue stream because data takes a while to collect.
So the data reports aren't sellable within the first
semester. You've got to wait a year.
I may follow up on that. >> Okay.
Hi. My name's Darian Pearlmutter,
and my question for you is kind of going off of both of these.
Did you learn and start developing your marketing based
off of a business model that you saw things working for, or did
you start realizing you needed to do more things just based off
of your experiences as you went along since you kind of started
from scratch? >> Yeah.
It was pretty much just based on experience as I went along.
I looked at other kind of comparable companies and what
they were doing, but their decisions aren't always right
for you. And since we bootstrapped in the
beginning, a lot of it was just really low cost, like what makes
sense. Printing a bunch of posters and
chalking the sidewalks. We get such a better response
from that and it's so much cheaper, so I was just kind of
learning as I went. And I feel like when I went
through TechStars, that was kind of the formal business education
in that they taught us what kind of street smarts you need to
start a company. They didn't go through a
business plan with us and tell us how to word stuff.
It was more like let's do it, and then we'll teach you when
you screw up, and we'll teach you when you succeed.
Heidi, are you at TechStars right now?
So we're located there, but the program finished in June.
Okay. Great.
I know somebody who's going through it right now and I was
just wondering if you were working them.
Yeah, I'm on the same floor so I know those companies.
Oh, excellent. You mentioned that you raised
about $400,000 plus, can you talk a little bit about that
process? How did you find the prospects?
What did you share with them? That's a lot of money.
Yeah, it was painful. Raising money sucks.
I was lucky enough after TechStars, they basically take
you, put you on stage and you pitch in front of 400 investors
which is scary especially because you're onstage with 10
other top-tier companies that are like MIT graduates, they
have patentable biomedical stuff, and I'm like let's talk
about feelings. It's a little bit, it was
daunting. I'd say most of our investors
are people who believed in the team and the mission.
So they're more patient money, they call it, in that they don't
expect a 10-fold return within five years.
It's more like eight years. So, yeah, just a lot of talking
to people, picking through my network, and usually if
someone's not interested, they'll connect you with someone
who is interested. So it's kind of climbing that
ladder. >> Great.
We have a question back here. >> Hey, Heidi.
Hi. >> I just wanted to ask you more
about how do you decide where to expand to?
How do you decide that you're going to break into a new
university, and what do you make sure is there because you talked
about having an actual framework of the organization on campus?
Yeah, so it's usually the students who decide.
So we'll get a nomination from a school or someone will sign up
to be a responder from the school, and we'll ask them if
they want to start a chapter. So we do have kind of a
strategic plan in that we want to create chapters that are
close to each other so that the marketing dollars go farther and
so that word of mouth kind of spreads it to all of those
campuses. So our focuses right now are in
New York and Massachusetts in that there are so many colleges
within such a small area. But it is, honestly, the
students decide. >> Hi.
I'm Nahal. Thanks for being here today.
I have a question about how you actually started building your
website. What was that process like and
how did you know how to do it? >> Yeah, so I went on Google and
typed in free websites. [LAUGHTER]
And, surprisingly enough, Google sites came up
first. And I was like, this is a pretty
template and so chose it. I don't have any coding
experience. So that was the first minimum
viable product, and then the second one I went through a
contractor in town which basically I contacted a bunch of
companies that build websites, build software, had them give me
proposals. Proposals, oh, my gosh,
proposals ranged from $2,000 to $65,000.
So deciding who I wanted to build it was a huge process.
And then I kind of worked with them to make sure everything was
right, and it wasn't. I ended up going on the cheaper
side. So I had to learn from my
mistakes. But then it evolved so fast.
Eventually we brought on Jason. Actually, I'll show you my team.
Jason's the middle guy who's our VP technology, and he then
actually redid the whole site and made it prettier.
We're still going through a site redesign, but it's a process.
So, yeah, you can do it even though you don't have technical
experience. If you have an opportunity to
get technical experience, I'd say do it.
If you start a business and you don't have tech experience, you
are kind of limited in that you have to vet people a lot more
and you have to, it's kind of like am I getting screwed right
now because I don't know how much it costs to write 20 lines
of code. If you have an opportunity to do
even some preliminary coding classes, I would do it,
completely. >> We have a student back here
who has a question, but I'm recognizing your team and I was
curious earlier, it looks like you have a licensed social
worker on board who is in charge of sales.
Do you have other mental health professionals on board or are
you kind of farming that out in another way?
So we have a psychologist on our board of directors, and then
Meredith is the social worker, but we contract with Heart of
Florida United Way which is a 211 national suicide prevention
lifeline crisis center that takes calls 24/7.
They also do crisis chat. So for us it was a perfect
partnership in that they already have social workers screening
emails. So we just kind of outsourced
that. They screen all the emails, and
it's a good partnership. >> So just to follow on that,
that actually then becomes a revenue source for that
nonprofit, that United Way. >> Yeah, so they love it because
it's a little extra spending cash for them, and for us our
contract with them is a fraction of the cost of a social worker,
let alone having three social workers 24/7 on-call.
And it's also a good way to triage the liabilities to
professionals rather than just investing in one particular
professional. >> Hi.
Hi. >> Thanks for being here.
So I was actually just browsing through the brag wall on Spill,
and you've got a lot of positive feedback.
I was just wondering about the training and how the peers and
people who respond to the spill questions, what kind of training
they go through in order to be part of the team.
So we've changed it a lot. It used to be that you get
trained on campus if your school has a chapter, and we realized
that that wasn't scalable. So the training is now online.
Any of you could take an hour right now and get trained to be
a responder. Basically, you learn how to
reflect feelings, active listening, empathetic response,
and then you take a quiz on the presentation to make sure you
paid attention. It's one of those annoying
quizzes where you have to keep taking it until you get
everything right. And then you're basically live
in the system, and you can be a responder.
Responders typically respond to about five to 10 emails a
semester. So most people do it in
conjunction with another activity on campus, but it's a
good way to boost your resume and you don't have to do much.
Right over here, Heidi. >> Yeah.
Hello. Thanks for coming.
My name is Patrick. I'm actually a veteran here, and
I just was wondering if you could go into a little bit more
information on how you plan on addressing this thing to
veterans because I've actually lost a friend who actually was
out of the service at the time. Thank you.
Yeah. It's going to be a huge
undertaking. I guess the goal is to connect
veterans with other veterans who have been through similar
problems. So whether it's losing a friend
to other people who have lost or if it's operating a, I don't
know any of the military terms, but one of those cannons in the
field. So the goal first is to start
with a military-based school so we can actually wet our feet in
the student veteran population. And then from there it's either
to go to the VA or the military. However, there's so much, not
security, but it's such a bureaucracy that it's going to
be hard to tackle. I don't know.
Do you have any suggestions? >> There's a lot of sources you
can go through. I know here we actually have a
program called Vets for Vets, and it's the chapter and all of
that which I'm a member of. But there's also places like the
Veteran Center which offers free counseling to veterans.
And I just wasn't sure if you have any way of trying to reach
out to the VA or other companies to try and make a pitch for this
because it does sound like it's a really good idea, and even
while I was in the Persian Gulf we had internet access.
It's not like we really had counselors in the ships.
So it would have been something that's very valuable I thought.
Yeah. I think so too.
And it's also, I get that feedback from soldiers and
veterans a lot that it's something they would use, but my
question is people don't always do what they say they'll do, and
right now our primary demographic is we have about 75%
of the people writing in are female and 25% are male.
And in the army or in the military it's a lot different.
It's like 16% female. So I wonder, if people use it,
what steps we have to go through for the military to be okay with
it because, in reality, we have a lot of data on what their
soldiers are struggling with, and that could be kind of a
honeypot for hackers. So I want to make sure we go
through all those steps. >> What's your name again?
Patrick. >> Patrick, what's your last
name? >> Kirby.
Patrick Kirby could be your team member.
[LAUGHTER] >> Patrick, email me after.
Heidi, I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more,
because we haven't talked about this in class, about working
with your board. You mentioned some of the folks
who serve on your board, but it isn't an area that we've
explored in this class. Who are they?
How did you put them together? What do they want from you?
So they're these guys. So Rimas Buinevicius, he's the
former CEO of Sonic Foundry; John Wiley, the former
chancellor of UW; Laurie Benson, former CEO of Incacom; and
Dr. Michael Spierer, who's a clinical psychologist.
How we put them together, basically my Merlin Mentor team
was huge in this in that they were kind of growing me as a
person and an entrepreneur to this step where they were like,
okay, we've given you all we can, and you need some people
who have expertise that can help you.
So someone who knows about how to navigate school systems: John
Wiley. Two people who know about
growing huge companies, and someone who knows all of what
psychologists are thinking. So they helped me identify these
people. I pulled them together, asked
them if they'd serve on my board which was kind of intimidating.
Just emailing John Wiley and being like, hi, you don't know
me but will you serve on my board?
And they've all just been phenomenal.
What we do is we give them a percentage of equity for doing
it, and then we meet every two months.
And they participate in three-hour long meetings and
kind of steer me in the right direction.
And we had one yesterday. It was fantastic.
These are the people who, they're the ones who push me to
think big. So I say we're going to do
another round of fundraising. I think we're going to raise
$800,000. And they say, I think you should
raise $5 million. And I say, wait, what?
And so those are the kind of conversations they make you
think about. Yeah.
It's been great. I got lucky, though.
A lot of my cohort in TechStars has had different experiences
with board members where they're controlling, maybe there's an
investor on there, but I think my mentors' goals in putting
together this board early on was getting a bunch of people who
are on my side and will like looking out for my best interest
so that when investors do come in, we've already kind of
stacked the board. >> Pardon the pun, but a
prestigious group, no question, but also want to draw attention
to the fact that, as Heidi said, this is a group of real
diversity in terms of the kind of intelligence that they bring.
And you said they're compensated by...
Equity. >> By equity in the firm.
So it's part and parcel with any enterprise that you would want
to be creating, be it a for-profit or a nonprofit
organization, you would need to be putting together a board that
would be providing advice to you and pushing you on those big
ideas. Who's your competition, Heidi?
Counselors. No, it's funny because I don't
want to be competing with them, but that doesn't mean that they
don't see us as competition and that they don't feel threatened.
In reality, we don't want to be a replacement for counseling.
We just want to be peer support for every day problems.
If you look at our numbers of what people spill about, it's
like roommate problems, relationship problems, school
stress, loneliness. Those are the top four.
And, I guess, there are no other entities that are doing exactly
what we're doing. There are online crisis chat
centers, but since we're not focused at crisis we don't
really view them as competitors. Also, most are nonprofits.
So, yeah, I know it seems naive to be like we don't have any
competitors, but that's why we're trying to move fast
because it's going to be easy for someone else to come in.
The good thing is that we have two years worth of data on what
students are struggling with that kind of pushes us ahead of
the competitors. >> Any final questions for
Heidi? Yeah?
Thanks. So another question I have for
you is when you have a computer between you and a student and
they have very serious questions and confessions, maybe it's
sexual assault, suicide, how do you go about doing that and how
do you make it really personal so that you could be miles away?
How do you go about that? >> Yeah, so that's where we, in
the training we really use a lot of counselor-like techniques to
teach people how to be empathetic listeners, but in
crisis situations that's actually where our crisis triage
center steps in. So if they see a red flag, they
follow up with the student. Say, hey, just wanted to check
in with you to make sure you're doing okay.
They ask the question, are you feeling suicidal?
It sounds funny but that's a crucial question to ask, and
it's one of the best practices in suicide prevention is being
direct about it. They ask that question, then
they encourage them to call in their direct line or to chat
with a counselor online. And, in doing that, we basically
figure out where that person is at, what level.
If they're a level three, which is like extreme crisis, I have a
bottle of pills in my hand I'm going to take them or I already
took them, in that case we break confidentiality and we contact
the local police. And they would take it from
there. >> She actually just answered
it. >> Any final notes for Heidi?
Well, I know that the entire class joins me in thanking you
so much for coming to our class. [APPLAUSE]