Episode 11: Vivian Shen
Vivian Shen founded Juni Learning in 2017 to bridge the gap in education that exists between future-looking skills and what’s taught in the classroom. Juni bucks the traditional way of learning and replaces it with dynamic, flexible classes, project-based learning and real-world application that fosters a deeper understanding of subjects and critical thinking, rather than memorizing information to pass a test.
Through Juni Learning, Vivian is on a mission to provide students access to 1:1 teaching to ignite a passion for learning among all students – regardless of their interests and learning styles. In this episode, we talk about growing grit, getting comfortable with ambiguity, and knowing when it’s time to “burn your ships.”
Creativity, Grit, and Defying Other Peoples’ Perception of Success with Vivian Shen
Episode 11: Show Notes [TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
Throughout her life, Vivian Shen always wanted to do the thing that would help her learn the fastest. Eventually, she realized that the best way to do this would be by defying how her peers defined success and starting a business herself. Vivian channeled her passion for education into Juni Learning, an online platform that offers STEAM courses in real-world subjects we all wish we could have learned in school like coding, storytelling, investing, and more. Her vision is for every student to be prepared for the real world and have the tools to really make their mark. Today she joins us to share her story with us. Tuning in, you’ll hear how Vivian studied creative writing at Oxford, how this minor is often more useful than her engineering qualification, and why she believes in cultivating a breadth of interests. You’ll also hear what led Vivian to decide that she wanted to start a business, what the most challenging part of it was, what she wishes she had done differently, and what young women can do to assess their fit with the entrepreneurial life. To hear what it looks like for Vivian to always be learning, her advice for anyone who is going through any sort of failure trauma, and how to cultivate grit, tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
• A creative accomplishment that Vivian Shen is proud of: creative writing at Oxford.
• How her creative writing minor is often more useful than her engineering qualification.
• What it looks like for Vivian to always be learning.
• Why Vivian reads more fiction than non-fiction and how this helps her learn.
• The challenges of defying other peoples’ perceptions of success and starting Juni.
• Vivian’s advice for anyone who is going through any sort of failure trauma.
• Insight into what Juni is and Vivian’s goals for the company.
• How they work with a student on grit and what that looks like.
• How Juni helps parents and teachers to not step in and help kids when they feel stuck.
• What Vivian think's about David Epstein's argument: generalization versus specialization.
• What led Vivian to decide that she wanted to start a business.
• What made Vivian prioritize learning over other things such as generating income.
• Thoughts on how to convince more women to feel confident enough to start a company.
• The community or network that Vivian leans on for support when making decisions.
• What Vivian believes is the most challenging part of starting a company.
• At what point Vivian realized she was starting the company and there was no going back.
• Institutional versus angel money and what Vivian wishes she had done differently.
• What young women can do to assess their fit with the entrepreneurial life.
• Insight into the entrepreneurship class offered at Juni.
Tweetables:
“Failure is totally normal. It can literally be within a day [that] you can go from having one great meeting to one horrible meeting and back again.” — @vivianmshen [0:11:32]
“It's really not about feeling smart, it’s about feeling like you can get over the hump on any kind of problem that you see.” — @vivianmshen [0:14:36]
“There’s jobs that did not exist five years ago that exist now. Stuff that I see on social media, like those creators are totally different from however we used to do things. So, it's more about that adaptability. And breadth, I think, is much more important.” — @vivianmshen [0:18:29]
“My whole life, I've always wanted to do the thing that would help me learn the fastest.” — @vivianmshen [0:21:05]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
[TRANSCRIPT]
EPISODE 11
“VS: I will be the first one to say that my whole life, I've been told there is a certain thing that success looks like. I went to a very competitive high school. I grew up in the Bay Area. It was always this thing where you knew that getting into a good college was the next thing, getting a good job, et cetera. So, starting Juni was a huge leap. Because you go to parties where you say that you work at Juni and people's faces are just totally blank and you have none of that sort of cachet that you used to have when you used to be able to point to all these things that people recognize.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:35] JU: In this episode, we talk with Vivian Shen about growing grit. Vivian is the founder and CEO of Juni Learning, seeking to prepare children for jobs that don’t yet exist. In this conversation, we covered topics like knowing when to burn the ships, how to build your confidence with uncertainty and the importance of breadth and soft skills versus depth and hard skills. It’s a wide-ranging and interesting conversation. We’re excited to share it with you.
[TRANSCRIPT]
[00:01:04] JU: Okay, so we are here with Vivian Shen, the CEO, founder and CEO of Juni Learning and we thought it would be fun Vivian, if you wouldn't mind to start by bragging on yourself a little bit. It can be a hashtag humble brag, or it could be like a straight up brag, we don't mind, but what's a creative accomplishment that you are proud of in your life?
[00:01:27] VS: Yeah, it's great to be here by the way. I wanted to say thank you for having me. I was thinking about this really quickly and it was just such a different part of my brain to flex. But I think when I was studying abroad in Oxford, I got to write an anthology of short stories in my creative writing class. And I'd gone from doing two years of very intense CS classes and engineering classes to go to do three months where all I did was eat scones, read and write, and it was just really, a magical experience. I went there because so many great, J.R.R Tolkien, all these people had written in Oxford and I wrote set of stories just on my upbringing, and what it means to be Asian Americans specifically. Yeah, it was a totally different creative outlet for me, which was amazing.
[00:02:21] JU: Were there any particular challenges you faced as you shifted gears so hard from it's almost like going from drive to reverse, right? From CS in engineering to three months eating scones.
[00:02:35] VS: Scones, yes.
[00:02:37] JU: What was the hardest part about making that shift mentally or creatively for you?
[00:02:42] VS: Yeah, I mean, success is measured so differently in humanities versus technical subjects, especially in the context of school, right? Because for engineering, you have a deadline, you have a project that's due at a certain time, there are test cases that you run on your project, so you know that it is correct or incorrect. For creative writing, it’s just like, you got to submit something by this time, but there's nobody who's going to tell you that it's right or wrong. It's so much more based on the emotions that you elicit in the reader and your professor who is reading, and grading it.
So, it was a really big mindset shift because I had to – I didn't know if it was going to be received well or not, and you kind of have to put your soul into it, and then just put it out there, but there was no way to test it early on and see if you were on track or not. I mean, they did some amount of pre reading with you to kind of guide you, but it was very different to kind of be a very qualitative measure of how successful you were or not.
[00:03:50] JU: Did you just immediately switch back to the CS mindset after that experience? Was there something of that more qualitative, emotion, rich kind of output that you have preserved as a part of your life.
[00:04:02] VS: Oh, 100 percent! I mean, we talked about this all the time to, especially at Juni. Obviously, we started by teaching coding, but so much of the skills that we see in kids that end up helping them longer term is how you present things, how you problem solve all these different things. And so, all of those, I would argue, are more qualitative, and even for myself and my career, I would actually say that the creative writing minor helped me in a lot more practical ways than CS to a certain regard. Obviously, I'm not an engineer day-to-day anymore. And so, what I found that is that most of the time, I spend my time doing storytelling or communicating with people. That muscle is a lot more important.
So, I did find when I came back after that quarter abroad, it was much easier to have both halves of my brain working together than before, versus during the first couple years, I was so obsessed with grades and submitting these projects, and that kind of thing. It really helped me take a step back. That's also when I started getting a little bit more into taking classes at the design school and things like that, too.
[00:05:11] MH: I know you as the CEO of Juni, and the founder of Juni. It's interesting, because I I do think that the best CEOs are both data driven, but have this kind of emotion, strong emotional antenna. I sort of feel that if you just focus on the quantitative, it becomes really hard in the long run when you're running a company. So, I don't know. I mean, I assume I know this about you, Vivian. But knowing that you are a creative writer, now explains a lot of things, I would say.
[00:05:44] VS: Yeah, it's 100 percent. I mean, storytelling, like fundraising, and storytelling, obviously. But hiring people, working day-to-day with people, all of that, it's about how you connect with other people. I'm always learning on that front. It's hard. Every new person that you meet has different things that make them tick. And in some ways, I mean, obviously, I actually find that much more difficult than a lot of technical problems to understand because there's so much nuance and every interaction you have is so different.
[00:06:13] JU: When you say you're always learning. I'd love to learn more about that too, Vivian. Is it anecdotal? Is it loose? Or do you have a practice of reflection? What does it look like to always be learning on this softer stuff? So, I think it's easy to define and categorize the learning on the hard skills? How do you synthesize the learning on the softer stuff?
[00:06:34] VS: That is a really good question. I wish that I was more systematic about it, like I did a Toastmasters course of some other thing to keep me on schedule. But I think that a lot of the times, I'll do gratitude journaling, take a step back and try to have some more of these consistent habits that helped me just reflect on what I've been doing, what I would continue doing, what I would not as well, it also helps. I have a exec coach who works with me, and she really helps me take stock of you know, am I feeling red, yellow, green? What did I learn from a really tough interaction that I had? And she kind of forces me to put things into boxes a little bit more versus just as a fleeting emotion or something like that.
And then on the tactical side, though, I mean, there's been times where I just, I feel like I try to read every book that I can. And then other times, I just try to talk to every person that I can and dial between the two. But yeah, you can always feel like you don't know enough. And so, you're always trying to read a little bit more and take stock of what else is out there.
[00:07:45] JU: What's the last thing you read that actually affected your behavior?
[00:07:50] VS: I actually read a lot of fiction more so, perhaps because of my creative writing background. But I find that fiction helps me think a little bit more about how people think and how people interact with each other. And so, I've been reading a lot of sci fi recently, these books by N.K. Jemisin. And a lot of it's just how people are motivated and how people of different backgrounds come together and have very different ways that they sort of end up prioritizing how they do things. It's tough to – if you haven't read the book, it's a little tough to explain, but it's always really interesting for me to read stories about people.
I think, on the nonfiction side, what's always helpful for me is to read about folks in our space or who have seen success and how they overcame failure as well. I think, right now it's very vogue to read about Elon Musk, but I was reading a little bit about when he was like go from PayPal and some of their repercussions and things like that. Those are always really interesting to see how people kind of pick themselves up and keep going after a setback.
[00:09:05] MH: What have you learned about that? I mean, I know that starting a company is an exercise on surviving failure. One at a time. Yeah, I’m sure you've gotten really good at it. And if you have any advice for people who are going through any sort of failure trauma, what's the best recommendation from you?
[00:09:24] VS: Oh, yeah, I mean, I will be the first one to say that my whole life, I've been told there is a certain thing that success looks like. I went to a very competitive high school. I grew up in the Bay Area. It was always this thing where you knew that getting into good college was the next thing, getting a good job, et cetera. And so starting Juni was a huge leap, because you go to parties, where you say that you work at Juni, and people's faces are just totally blank, and you have none of that sort of cachet that you used to have when you used to be able to point to all these things that people recognize, and so that was a big jump for me.
I think there's all the stuff that, you know, staying grounded with people who value you not for these brands, and things like that always helps. I do think schadenfreude, like, reading about different times when other people were doing incredibly well and then maybe they took some missteps and how they got back out of it, that always helps ground me a little bit, too. But yeah, failure is totally normal. It can literally be within a day. You can go from having one great meeting to one horrible meeting and back again. And so, it's kind of just keeping an even keel and I would say that, most of the folks that I know, look for other outlets, because it's so hard to control sometimes what happens in a day that you have to work out and meditate and whatever else, and that kind of keeps you a little more, even throughout. Because yeah, it can definitely feel like a roller coaster all the time and it's hard not to throw up.
[00:11:02] JU: So, maybe just as we kind of shift to the company context a little bit and think about staying even keel, finding outlets, et cetera. Tell folks because I’m not even familiar, maybe just give the high-level overview. What is Juni? What are you trying to build? And then I get some questions about outlets and things like that?
[00:11:21] VS: Yeah, so at Juni, our vision is for every student to be prepared for the real world and, have the tools to really make their mark on the world. And practically, what that means is, we have a platform where students can learn any real-world subjects online with an amazing instructor. I think a lot of what I've seen in the day to day is that I can learn so much from the students as well about how to stay even keeled and how to cope, because so much of what we do when we work with students is work with them on grit, and how do they kind of face problems, and then keep going and build that confidence. So, it's been really incredible to see the company grow over the last few years.
[00:12:02] JU: And when you say you work with them on grit, I'd love to, can you tell an example about what does it look like to work with a student on grit in particular?
[00:12:12] VS: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just, frankly, it's teaching teachers that it's okay, if students don't know how to do the next step and working through that with them. A lot of the times when someone is stuck, you have this immediate reaction where you want to give them the answer and help them get over that. But that's not always what you should do. And so, a lot of it is giving students the reassurance that it's okay that they're stuck. And the main thing is that we have the tools to figure out how to get unstuck
So, that is actually more important to me is making sure that the instructors understand the pedagogy that we have for that front. And then for kids creating that environment where they're getting, they're building up these wins, so that when they are faced with something that they don't know how to solve, like, there is a new, much more complex project and then one that they did previously, they can take what they did before kind of piece it together, but then also know how to debug their code and know how to literally have the computer send you a bunch of red error symbols and be okay with that like that. That's a big part of it. Yeah, training our teachers to be okay with that as well, because I know a lot of the times – and parents too, like they want to step in and help their kids feel smart, but it's really not about feeling smart. It's about feeling like you can get over the hump on any kind of problem that you see.
[00:13:38] MH: It’s a good question like how do you train parents? I don't know if you had the opportunity.
[00:13:44] JU: We both have kids. We're both in the market, so help us out.
[00:13:48] VS: It's tough. I mean, every parenting style is different. There are people for whom practice makes perfect and they just want as much as their kids can do as possible. And they're very fixated on getting things right. Like, there's not this concept of effort necessarily or working smart. It's about getting to 100 percent. So, that’s very different. I think the parents who are a little easier for us to work with, I suppose, are ones who kind of have taken a little bit more of the view of the long game. These days, we work with people who their kids are 10 years old, and they're trying to figure out how to get into college or even younger than that.
I feel very conflicted about that, because I actually think when you take a longer term horizon view on it, you can help your kids find the things that they're really interested in, so that by the time they're applying to college, they have these things that they're sort of known for, they're very good at, whether it's a sport or computing Olympia that we have, like things like that, that's one thing. But on the flip side, obviously, working with a six-year-old kid, trying to get them into Stanford by the time they're 18 is very intense. But that's a lot of the times better than when people are scrambling when their kids are 16, and they're trying to make up for a lot of lost time. And those I think, are the most tough situations, because I think people just always wish that they had gotten started earlier. And yeah, it's hard to kind of reconcile the two.
[00:15:25] JU: What do you think so, not to get too philosophical here, but I'm curious, what do you think about the whole Dave Epstein range, argument versus specialization? How do you think about cultivating, finding the balance there between – I mean, I don't know what I'm good at. I'm still discovering that. I don't think I could get in Stanford now. Do you have advice for parents? I mean, this is like supposed to be an advice for parent’s session. But even for folks who are listening, how do you strike the balance between cultivating a particular skill versus cultivating a breadth of interest and exposures, et cetera? In some sense, you can add odds with one another, right?
[00:16:07] VS: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's actually interesting, you mentioned that, because I used to think growing up that in order to get into a top college, you had to be exceptionally spiky on one thing. You had to be Malala, in order to even be considered to get into college. But actually, the numbers show that it's more kind of these well-rounded students who do a lot of different things. They're kind of good citizens of the world, I suppose. And they do sports, all these other things actually end up being a more well-rounded profile.
So, from that perspective, I think my view has changed a little bit. But in terms of what I've found to be helpful for a career perspective, breadth is actually more helpful. Obviously, that's different if you're doing something incredibly technical, like if you are trying to be the – let’s say you're very invested in AI, and you want to go work at Open AI, whatever the case is, being very specifically specialized probably is one path. But overall, that breadth makes you so much more flexible, to move into different kinds of careers throughout your life. The way the world works is that everything is going to change every five years. There are jobs that did not exist five years ago that exist now. Stuff that I see on social media, like those creators are totally different, from however we used to do things.
So, it's more about that adaptability and breadth, I think is is much more important. So, that's what I typically advocate for, because we have some kids who by 10 years old, they're like, “I want to be a software engineer. That's all I want to do in life.” And they're so incredibly talented. But at the same time, we want to teach them, how do they communicate their ideas, right? Because software engineering is also a lot about debating other software engineers on whether the architecture you picked should be the one that you move forward with. And things like that are things that I don't think people actually think about, until they're kind of in it. So, those are the skills that I think contribute a little bit more to breadth as well, even if you're in a more technical subject.
[00:18:13] MH: Yeah, this goes back to the original kind of people skills on social emotional learning, and all of those soft skills. I don't know if you've thought about teaching those in Juni or if people ask about them, because I do agree with you, those skills are so critical for ultimate success.
[00:18:34] VS: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I actually don't think a ton of people pull them out as separate skills where they’re interested in taking a standalone class on something like that. But they more want to learn something, let's call it more tangible and then kind of practice those other soft skills as they're doing that. So that's why, even when we're teaching coding, a lot of what we're actually teaching is these more soft skills and resilience, like those kinds of things end up coming through. But yeah, I have definitely seen that become more and more popular over the years, because a lot of parents are starting to read more about the other implications of what you learn early on, and, like getting into a certain learning, like a growth mindset versus not, is really important to do early in life. I think more parents are starting to get on that train, too.
[00:19:32] JU: So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about you and your journey, Vivian. How did you decide you wanted to build a business? And how did you discover Juni? If you could just walk us through briefly, and we'll probably interrupt a bunch of times on the way there, but like, at some point in your life, you probably hadn't had the thought I want to start a business, and now that we're here. What happened in between those two points?
[00:19:59] VS: Yeah, I mean, my whole life, I've always wanted to do the thing that would help me learn the fastest. And when I was younger, I thought that that would be by joining a bigger company, or going into consulting, which is what I did after undergrad. I kind of selfishly came to this point where I was, I thought that the most that I could learn the fastest was by starting something myself. At the same time, I think education in particular has just been such an important subject for me, through my life –
[00:20:35] JU: Is there, just for a second. Sorry, thankfully, I warned you about impending interruption. To me, there's already something there about learning as optimizing for learning. Why not optimize for income? Or how do you think about making a decision to learn the fastest relative to your other options? Because even getting to starting something for myself, I thought I would learn the fastest, right? Well, I think a lot of people go, “Well, I can't afford to learn right now.” So, what was it that enabled you to be able to prioritize learning? Or how did you think about the tradeoffs you're making in ostensibly optimizing for learning?
[00:21:16] VS: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, obviously, I am very privileged in that I've always viewed my worst-case scenario, to certain extent is to go back and be an engineer, which has been very well paid for the last 10 or 20 years. And so that's one thing that I kind of always had that safety net. And so, for me, annual earnings, let's call it, was always sort of more like, I just need enough to live and we'll figure out wealth creation, later on. But yeah, that's not the case for everybody, right? Like, there are people who want to start their businesses at 16, because they don't think college makes sense for them. And that's a totally different lifestyle as well.
I wish that I had the confidence to do that. I was looking for more optionality at that point. I did obviously think that I would learn more in college than I would have striking out on my own at that age myself. But I went for a career wise, safer major, because going into Stanford, I actually wanted to major in political science and history. I took computer science, and I was like, there's so many more applications for this skill set. There are so many more clear careers out of this as well. So, I went with computer science, and my life would probably look very different if I had majored in political science, but that's for another time.
I have always chosen the path that gave me the most optionality and gave me kind of that basic foundation. And so, I will say that by the time I started Juni, I did already have quite a few safety nets, which is that I'd already built a resume that even if the company folded, I could probably go get a job somewhere else and kind of done all these things to de risk it a little bit for myself. And I don't think everybody has the luxury of doing that. By the time I started the company, the choices that I had, were to either go work at another big company, or even a later stage startup where I could probably learn a lot, but I wouldn't have as much impact or ownership as I would have liked. And then the math for me was more that I would learn much more at Juni versus somewhere else.
[00:23:32] MH: Yeah, I have a question that is very interesting. Actually, this may sound a little generalizing so it's a big – I'm going to – with this big caveat. But you talk about having the confidence to start something and de-risking and safety nets. I think I find I work with a lot of female founders. I'm very lucky to have many of them, and I feel like they need a lot more of that to take that step. Whereas, I work with also male founders that I don't think they think about that at all. So, my question is, how do you convince more women to actually feel confident that it's okay to go ahead and start a company? I mean, the risk is not, it's limited, I would say, but what gets you to cross that bridge? And how can you do it?
[00:24:20] VS: Yeah. Of course, like, I will give a plug here, Mar, that having investors like you is huge for the ecosystem. Because having these programs that de-risk things as well for people is incredibly important. I will say that doing an accelerator really helped Juni because it gave us a way to get some validation and some branding that felt like it was heavily de risking already. So, those are like some of the tactical things that I've seen, once people raise that first check, as well, they feel so much more confident and being able to make it their full-time gig. But there is kind of that gap that you're talking about before people even go out and try to do that where it's tough. I know, similar to yourself, I know women who are engineers at big companies, and they'll probably be amazing founders or everything in between. And they always keep telling me there has to be one more thing on their resume before they're ready.
[00:25:19] MH: I hear that.
[00:25:21] VS: All the time. I go, “Maybe I could learn about sales. And then I could start this.” Whatever the case is. So, I think giving an outlet where there's a little bit more of a sandbox where they can build in and de-risk that a little bit is huge. And then I think, to your point, Mar, like consistently just telling the storyline about people who had no business starting a business and they did, and it’s fine, and they're doing great. That's like having more of those stories, I think, is one of the only ways that we can do it as well.
[00:25:54] JU: Could you speak to for a second, when you talked earlier about, you talked about having safety nets and making a decision around learning, are these decisions you're making an isolation? Do you have a community or a network that you're leaning upon? Because I think, for most probably college age students who go, “I don't even know how to think about assessing those probabilities.” So, talk to us about the the learning environment in which you're assessing the various options, and how you drew knowledge or inspiration from it.
[00:26:29] VS: Yeah, it definitely helped that, within the Stanford network, there's so many founders to meet and talk to so many people who, even if they are working full time, somewhere else, they're interested in entrepreneurship. And there's a lot of events and community groups, things like that. So, that really helped. I also worked at a series B company before Juni, so I met a lot of people who wanted to kind of take the risk of doing the startup, but they were in that phase right before they wanted to start their own startup. And they were at another startup, which I found myself to be it as well. And that group of people is also really interesting, where if you're kind of working with folks who are at slightly later stage startups wherever the case is, and they're kind of hungry for that next step, and I found that to be very, very valuable as well.
I think a lot of my friends from undergrad, I wouldn't safely say around half at least are founders themselves as well, and that that's been a huge support mechanism for me because –
[00:27:31] JU: How do you flip into that? How does the support manifest itself practically?
[00:27:36] VS: Sometimes it's just getting drinks and commiserating. Sometimes it's practical advice on fundraising, introductions to investors, things like that as well. First employees, recommending tech stacks to each other, like what should we use for our customer support, all these kinds of things. There are a lot of these early things that you don't actually think are going to be very helpful. But that ends up paying dividends even like how you should incorporate your company, what law firm you should use stuff like that. It’s getting some kind of a either an accelerator or other founders who have been slightly ahead of you to help you with that. It's incredibly helpful.
[00:28:18] JU: What's the mechanism? Is it you're sending people text messages? Do you have gatherings? How do you stay in touch with this network of likeminded compatriots?
[00:28:29] VS: Definitely, group messages or some like internal forums. We used to run a little Slack team, although that's been a little more quiet recently. But if also – once you kind of raise that first check as well within your investor portfolio, your investor’s portfolio companies, there's a lot of cross learnings as well. So, I found that to be really helpful. And then yeah, in person, like just grabbing coffee with somebody can get you a long way as well.
[00:28:59] JU: So, looking back, what was the most challenging part of the process for you?
[00:29:04] VS: I think that really nascent phase where the company is not quite a company yet, and you haven't fully burned the ships on doing something else with your life. That, I think, is the most fragile point. Because you could always go work somewhere else for a paycheck, and you haven't incorporated a company yet. There are no news articles about it. I think, is the phase where it's the easiest almost lose, to have the company fall out of your grasp. I think, for me getting over that was by getting a couple of our first customers. So, having – I think it was like eight students that I was teaching as the first teacher, the first instructor at Juni, that was hugely validating for me.
I know, some companies can't do that. But having people out there who love the product that you're making, that gave me a lot of momentum to kind of get to what the stage where the company felt a little more real. And yeah, there was no going back from there. I think that's always the hardest.
[00:30:11] JU: What was the moment that you – do you remember it? Was there an instance when you go, “I burned the ships?” How did you know when you burned the ships? How’d you know when you're not looking back anymore?
[00:30:24] VS: It's a good question. I mean, I don't even know that I fully burned the ships when I first made some flyers for Juni with our logo on them and handed them out. I could have just shredded those. So, I would say after that. Over the summer of 2017, this first eight people that I worked with, I said it was just going to be over the summer and it was like an eight-week program for kids over the summer. And then in the fall, I had people who wanted to continue and renew their subscription, essentially. I think that's when I was like, “Okay, if I'm doing this, I'm committing to the students and to these parents.” So, it's going to either die now, or we're going to do it now. I think that was, yeah, that was September 2017 and so really no going back from there.
[00:31:16] JU: What made you decide? What was the specific thing that made you say, “Let's, do it.”
[00:31:24] VS: I think that they wanted me back. I had kind of been dreading the end of the summer. To a large extent, I was thinking like, “Oh, kids just have so much time over the summer, and the parents might just have wanted to do this as a throw away.” So, at the end of the summer, all of the parents came back and said, “Hey, you just have a week, an hour every week where we can keep doing this?” That was hugely validating for me. And they also had other friends that they thought would want to do this as well. Yeah, that was the moment, I think.
[00:32:00] MH: I have another follow up question, which I know it was really hard for you to take institutional money. Most people, I think, at least I was calling you, but you said no, “I'm not raising institutional money. I'm just raising angel money.” And I think it was two years, I actually can't remember how many years. But again, what made you finally said, “Okay, I'm going to go for it and take that institutional money.”
[00:32:23] VS: Yeah, it's funny you’ve mentioned that because, you know, in some ways, institutional versus angel money is not very different. And in some ways, angel money is more stressful, right? Because people personal money, and it's not their full-time job to do that. So, in hindsight, I don't know that we needed to be as prescriptive as we were about it. But at the time, it's sort of like, if we do angel money, that means that we're not necessarily on the venture track, and so, we have a little more ownership over how we grow the company. And if we're not trying to hit these crazy growth numbers all the time, we have a little more control over the destiny of the company.
But in hindsight, what I think that did was that it just didn't allow us to hire the people that we needed fast enough, and to, frankly, for users, like create the best experience that we could as fast as we could. And so, in hindsight, I do wish we had taken a step back, maybe raised some institutional money earlier, the goal is that we could get our vision out to the world faster, if we had done that.
[00:33:31] MH: It's like that team of taking that, increasing your confidence level early on.
[00:33:35] VS: Yes. Exactly.
[00:33:41] JU: If there's a woman out there, or thinking about my daughters, even as a personal example, they're wondering, should I try something? What’s something that you might recommend they do to assess their fit with the entrepreneurial life?
[00:34:00] VS: I wish I had started earlier with much – I know we talked a lot about a risk in this call, but something really low risk. I have so much admiration for these kids who are starting businesses out of their basement, like they're selling slime on Etsy, or they're just created – the internet has made so many really interesting ways for kids to just get a taste. Back in the day, it was, it was like the lemonade stand. But these days, there are kids who can set up real businesses, when they're 13, maybe their parents will have to incorporate it, but there's ways for him to test that out. Even when you're in college, or things like that, that's such a fertile time for you to try things out. And the worst-case scenario is you're still a college student, so you can always get a job after college.
But I wish that I had started something on the side when I was an undergrad, or when I had a little more time on my hands, because it does just get progressively harder, the more entrenched in your career you get, which is kind of counterintuitive. But you start thinking much more about opportunity cost back then, and so I think when you're young, and it's a side project, it's something where you can just sell a couple dozen slime buckets, that's where I would start.
[00:35:22] MH: Vivian, can you talk about the entrepreneurship class you guys do at Juni? I think it's very appropriate to answer.
[00:35:29] VS: Yes. So actually, that's a really good point, because that's so much of the kind of ethos of what we're trying to instill in kids is that there's so many ways to make an impact on the world. And if you have a really great idea, how do you validate that idea with users or customers? How would you make money? What's the business model that you would have behind that? And yeah, there are so many ideas out there that they have, and just giving them kind of this scaffolding to understand even like supply and demand pricing, things like that, is so helpful for them. And yeah, we have a couple of them. We're doing, like investment analyses too in companies that they should invest in. So, they're branching out too, not just entrepreneurship, but also how to be investors and things like that too.
[00:36:18] MH: I love it.
[00:36:19] JU: That’s great. That's amazing. So, if folks want to look into that or follow you more broadly, where should they go?
[00:36:25] VS: Yeah, they should go to junilearning.com. All of our courses are up there and you can learn more about, kind of, projects that kids make on the platform too, those are incredible. They can build these portfolios of video games that they build and everything there. But yeah, I mean, we're always trying to work with more instructors, students, parents, everything. So, really excited to keep up the momentum.
[00:36:49] JU: Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Vivian. It's awesome to get to know you better and hear your story and hopefully inspire the next generation of makers and entrepreneurs to take the path less traveled.
[00:37:02] VS: Yes, thank you so much for having me.
[00:37:03] MH: Thank you, Vivian. Thank you for being such a great teacher even to my children.
[END]
The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.