Selina Tobaccowala, the CTO and president of SurveyMonkey, is leaving the company to start a new venture with her co-founder from Evite. She shares advice on finding the right co-founder, scaling a company, building for international markets, assembling a board of directors, and leading a technical team. She emphasizes the importance of aligning with your co-founder from the start, thinking about global expansion early on, using data to drive decision-making, and finding mentors outside of your investor network.

- The CEO emphasizes the importance of communication and ensuring that engineers understand the impact of their work on the company.
- The CEO joined SurveyMonkey because of the great leadership, passion for the product, and the company's values regarding family.
- Lessons learned from the passing of the previous CEO include the importance of a strong leader and hiring people who believe in the company's mission.
- The CEO is starting a new company because it is the right time and she has gained valuable knowledge and experience.
- The CEO believes that the tightening of the capital markets is beneficial as it ensures that funded startups have good ideas.
- The CEO's process for vetting ideas involves prototyping, learning, and getting customer feedback.

- The importance of understanding the market size and solving a problem for consumers when seeking investment
- The significance of building a strong company culture, including factors such as compensation plans, vacation policies, and hiring practices
- The importance of trust and flexibility in creating a family-friendly company
- The advice to focus on driving revenue and maintaining positive gross margin when starting a company
- The consideration of how much investment is too much, and the potential loss of control when taking on large amounts of funding.

Selina Tobaccowala speaks with Y Combinator's Colleen Taylor about her work as President and CTO of SurveyMonkey, co-founding Evite, and building her new startup.

All right, Selina, we have so much to talk about, and I'm very excited for this.

I know you were just introduced as the CTO and president of SurveyMonkey, which is where you've been for the past almost 7 years now.

But you also just announced that you're doing something new.

Yes, my last day at SurveyMonkey is Wednesday.

And I'm teaming back up with my co-founder from Evite, which was 19 years ago that we started Evite, and we're going to start something again.

And so just to start, I want to go back to those early, early days.

Because as you mentioned, Selena was a co-founder of Evite, which is really 1 of the more enduring brands, I feel like, from the past 20 years in consumer internet.

So just to the earliest days, you know, when you were growing up, did you always know that you were going to be an engineer or that you were going to found a company?

So as far as the engineering side, that was something I did always know.

I mean, I was kind of on computers right from an early age, developing my own programs to play with.

And it was something that was just in my household, because my father is also a technologist, is also a technologist.

But as far as starting a company, it was really, you know, we were graduating in 98 from Stanford, 97 was when we started the company.

There was Yahoo, Excite, some that made it, some that didn't.

But there was the ethos on the Stanford campus, which was you were doing computer science, like you should start a company.

We decided we were gonna do like an object-oriented coding language.

And eventually, in about the summer of 98, So we really were at it for over a year.

And how did you team up with your co-founder?

Because obviously it worked out because it's the same co-founder that you're starting your new thing with.

He was my next door neighbor in my freshman dorm, and we had worked on a project together.

But I think the real thing that I've learned from that experience and how we really have the conversation now is really aligning up front in terms of what are the important things for you to consider with your co-founder?

And that goes right from the start of, are you trying to build a company or are you trying to exit?

And if you're gonna exit, what is that amount or that dollar amount that you're willing to do that for?

Because trying to make that decision in the heat of the moment is very different than trying to actually think about that up front.

Similarly, is what is the type of values that you actually want to build?

So when we got together now, we had the conversation that bringing technology to consumers that can make a difference in their real lives is something that's important to us.

And so what are those characteristics of a company, of a culture, what are the things that you wanna decide on the financial outcome?

Like deciding those things up front with your co-founder as early as possible, I think is really, really important.

Were there any things that you learned the hard way, the first time around that you didn't quite do in the early days that now you'd know to do?

I think that it was how much money we raised.

We took $37 million for online invitations.

Like it sounds crazy when I say it out loud.

it doesn't sound so crazy, but I'm sure it was even crazier.

So I think thinking about that now, or we're looking at it and saying, obviously we have kind of an opportunity to fund it ourselves for a little bit in comparison, but also just thinking about where do we want to raise capital and so forth and kind of having those conversations.

And I want to talk about scaling as well, because you built Evite and then you really, when it was sold to Ticketmaster, you really scaled it.

And then all of your work really at SurveyMonkey has overseen some incredible scaling.

What kind of advice do you have for that?

For like the early stage folks in the room, what can they think about in the longer term?

I mean, to give a little bit of backstory at SurveyMonkey, when I joined SurveyMonkey, there were about 20 people.

And we were doing, and actually, now we're at about 600 people.

And we're doing about $200 million in revenue and about $70 million in EBITDA.

So we've really about 6x the revenue side in this last 6 and 1 1 1 1 years.

And so in terms of scaling, there are some things which you realize, especially watching a company and scaling out a company, that I wish we had thought of at the beginning as SurveyMonkey and also learned from my experience at Ticketmaster.

And so 1 thing I would really, really, really advise everybody to do is think about global and international from the beginning.

Because if you have to go back and retrofit your application, retrofit your entire user experience when you think about like in the average non-US languages 1.3 times, is how do you think about that up front when you're sort of designing your engineering stack as well as your user experience design.

Another thing that we found was really, really important when you're thinking about scaling is how you use that quantitative and qualitative data and how you build that into the culture of the company.

But it was the time where you would have sort of everyone's email address listed out for everybody else to see, which nowadays would have so many privacy issues.

And we A-B tested constantly, and we added a little link that said, do you want to see your name here?

And that just changed the trajectory of how many people were registering and that viral coefficient of getting the invitees to become creators.

And at the time, there was tons of competition.

There was literally a site called Invite Me To, time dance, you name it.

And so kind of building that culture of A-B testing right into the both technically into the platform as well into the company is something that I think is absolutely important, both from the beginning, but then also when you're scaling.

Because now at SurveyMonkey, we have a mantra that you should always be testing.

And the amount of improvement we've been able to make, whether it's in conversion rate, engagement rates, is just enormous over the past 6 years.

I want to go back really quickly, because you mentioned really building for international from the very beginning.

That sounds really hard to do, or like such a massive problem.

I mean, there are so many countries in the world, there are so many different things.

Is there an easy, like a couple of easy steps that you would give specifically?

So again, I don't think you necessarily need to think about, you know, right away, let's support the 16 languages, let's support the 28 different currencies.

But I think, you know, if you're an e-commerce site or you're taking people's money, just right from the start knowing that I am going to have to support different currencies.

When you're thinking about language and design, again, the English is much shorter.

When you think about mobile, obviously, iOS is much larger in the US market.

But when you think about globally, over 75% of the mobile devices are Android.

And there's a very different ecosystem on Android than iOS.

So I think it's just right away starting to make sure that when you're building, you're building for the global market, especially when you think about now, even in the large countries, I mean the large companies, over 80% of their user base is international.

And I also want to talk about boards, because you've obviously been a part of companies and you're also on the board of directors of several companies.

I'm on the board of directors of Redfin and a couple of advisory boards.

How do you think about, what would your advice be to founders who are assembling their own advisory boards or boards of directors?

So I think assembling a board, people often do it too late, and then the only people that they'll have on their board will be the venture capitalists.

And the difficulty with that is, I mean, ultimately, the venture capitalists, they're there to give you money.

But if they've gained control, they can also obviously fire you.

So thinking about how do you actually is the makeup of that board So you're both getting the best input and advice on your startup, but also somebody that you can have as a mentor for you.

And so finding that independent board member from fairly early on is generally extremely, extremely helpful.

And if you're looking for strong women, there's also the board list to check out, which Sukhinder started, that has great women leaders to also add to your board.

But just in general, whether it's thinking about your advisory board, or you're thinking about your board of directors, like making sure that makeup is extremely, is varied but also is bringing you that level of mentorship and experience is super, super important.

How would you advise people, besides looking at things like the board list and coming to events like this, how would you advise especially female founders to find a great mentor?

I think in general it is things like coming to events like this, looking on the board list.

You can get executive recruiters to help you, but it is important that that person doesn't necessarily just come from your investor.

Like it is important that that person is coming from some network, ideally, that you've made.

I mean, and you wanna make sure you're spending enough time with that person to have them on your board.

So they'll give you that straight opinion of what's actually going on.

And to change gears a little bit here, too, there are so many things to cover.

I want to talk about leading a technical team.

Because as CTO of SurveyMonkey, you've done a phenomenal job in this regard.

And I would say that the most important thing I feel with engineers is everybody wants to understand why they're building what they're building.

And when your team is small, you get your quarterly team together, you have your weekly scrums, and everybody's covering what they're doing.

And you as a leader, as a CEO, as a president, you can communicate to everybody of every single thing that they're working on.

So every person knows how what they're doing is impacting the company.

As that starts to grow and that starts to scale, that becomes harder.

I remember 2 years ago, I walked up to this 1 engineer And I said to her, I said, oh, it's so awesome.

It's going to have such a great business impact.

And she looked at me, and she's like, thank you, but why?

And my heart sort of fell into my stomach.

I thought, OK, we've kind of lost the communication down to the engineer of why they're building and the impact that they can have.

And if you think about engineers, again, I'm a little biased here, but I generally believe they're going to be the most innovative people you have in your organization.

So empowering engineers with the business metrics is very, very important.

So at SurveyMonkey, we embed a business analyst on every single team.

And they read out the weekly metrics that's happening.

We try, when something launches, to do a seven-day or 28-day readout of this was the impact.

And that's something that I think is really, really important for engineers is like, if you want engineers to love your product and be there because they believe in the mission of your company, making sure they understand the impact of what they're doing is super important.

And going back to when you joined SurveyMonkey, how did that decision come about?

I know there's a bit of an interesting story here.

And how did you decide, I'm not going to go and start something else myself.

I was responsible for leading the European product engineering and the consumer marketing for Ticketmaster.

And I'd done a bunch of technical and business diligence and did a bunch of acquisitions.

And it was a really fantastic experience.

But I got to the point where I was missing the valley.

I was missing the innovation in San Francisco, missing the startup and small company culture.

And I was also traveling about 60% of the time, and I wanted to start a family.

So I came and I looked at a bunch of different opportunities from a really small company to SurveyMonkey to something kind of similar to it.

And it really comes down to me when I'm choosing something to 3 different things.

And I tell this to anybody, whether it's like why I made the decision to start something when I did back then.

But as it comes down to people, product, and what you're going to learn.

So the number 1 important thing is who is the people that you are going to work with?

Whether you're joining your organization, whether you're starting an organization.

I had the good fortune of our CEO was a gentleman named Dave Goldberg, who unfortunately passed away about 11 months ago.

But he was just 1 of the most phenomenal, inspirational leaders that 1 could ever imagine.

For me, whether it was Evite, like getting people together to go have fun, Ticketmaster, where, you know, whatever you might say about the brand, in the end, you're trying to get people to really, really fairly go see a show that they love or help them go see a show and inform them about it through marketing channels of a long-running show.

And you think about that, and it's like the end experience is going to see like you 2 in Croke Park.

And with SurveyMonkey, for me, it was about helping people use data to make great decisions.

And that was listening to your constituents, listening to your customers.

I mean, I talked a little bit previously about quantitative data.

But the importance of understanding the why from your customers or from your employees, if they're satisfied or not satisfied, and taking that qualitative data into account is massively important.

I mean, when I was talking about running an engineering organization, I mean, I survey the team every quarter to find out what are the things that they enjoy the most and what are the things that they want us to fix the most.

It's having that passion around what you're doing.

And you're all gonna be founders or founders, and so of course you're gonna have passion around what you're doing.

But the third piece of it is what you're learning.

And every year, I literally write down and deliberately write down what I want to get and what I want to learn out of that year.

And I think that it's really, really important to do.

And then there's going to be a point where you look at it and say, I'm not learning as quickly as I want to.

And then the fourth component, as I said, was where you are in your life.

So when I, the day before I went to go interview at SurveyMonkey, I had flown here, I noticed something was, I had passed a certain date and I found out I was pregnant the day before I interviewed.

And I still went through the interview and flew, I was on my way home, and on my way home, Dave sent me sort of like, we want you in an offer.

And I wrote him back a three-part email, both negotiating for more equity, telling him I needed more time, and third, that I had early signs of pregnancy.

And he wrote back to me almost immediately about how his goal was to build Survey Monkey into a company and a culture where family was valued.

And he said, we'll work out the rest of it.

And that, to me, again, goes back to the first principle of the people you are going to work with.

But at that point, I said this is where I want to be.

And you mentioned briefly, Dave Goldberg's passing.

And I was curious if now, you know, 11 months out, if there are any lessons or advice that you could share, that was a pretty major impact on a company, talk about an unexpected, traumatic thing.

Have you had the time to think back about anything you've learned?

I think that, you know, 1 of the main things I learned was just how important that leader was.

I mean, we've gone through a few leaders since then.

And just when you think about the importance of that culture of the company, the executive team really pulled together and was able to hopefully get the whole entire employee base through a really big, grieving time.

And the philosophy in terms of hiring was always, first and foremost, make sure that you had people who believed in the mission of the company.

And then secondly, make sure that you had people often where you were giving them a great opportunity in their career.

We believed in the philosophy as much as possible of promoting from within, as much as possible of giving people the biggest job they've ever had.

And of course, there's those times you need to balance it by bringing in some very specific talent, whether that's a creative director or whether that is a specific engineering, mobile engineering, whatever.

But in general, it was promote from within and get people that really sort of understood the culture of the company.

And I think that really helped us get through a very, very difficult time.

And what you're doing now, you're starting something new.

I'd imagine you went through those 4 questions again.

There's a lot of people in here, everyone in here is making a similar decision as you right now starting a company.

What's so exciting about right now for you?

1 of the fact is that both Al, my cofounder from Evite, and I, it was really just a good time.

But it did come back a little bit to what I was learning.

And I realized I've gained so much knowledge since we sold Evite 15 years ago, and that doing a startup now would just I would be able to bring that knowledge to bear and kind of drive it forward.

The other thing is I do think it's actually good that the capital markets have tightened a little bit because it means that the startups that are gonna make it, the startups that are gonna get funding, actually are good ideas.

I mean there are just, you know, there was an influx of capital over the past couple of years.

So if you're debating whether doing it, I mean, I think the thing that you can hopefully be reassured is if you are able to raise that capital, more likely than not, it's been more vetted than I think it was a few years ago.

And I know you don't want to talk about ideas, or it's still very, very early stage, but what advice do you have for people, I mean, when you went through those early stages of Evite, of coming up with an idea that wasn't really, something so opposite from what Evite came to.

What's your process like when you're vetting different ideas?

And I can tell you what our, I mean, we are, as I said to you, I don't really believe in the concept of stealth.

I strongly believe in the idea that you should tell, you know, shout off the rooftops when you have your idea and talk to as many customers, as many investors, as many people as possible.

Because if you truly believe somebody's going to steal your idea and it's that easy, I mean, it's all about execution.

Like the way that you execute your idea and the way that you build out that product.

And if you have that vision, that's what matters.

So it's not that I'm not standing up here and telling you my idea because I'm keeping it secret.

I'm still working at SurveyMonkey until Wednesday, and we sort of get our co-working space in a week.

But kind of our process and the process that even we went through at Evite was as much as possible as that prototype and learn.

You know, obviously, when we were at Evite, we were right out of school, so we didn't really have as much financial need.

So it was much easier just to say, hey, Let's try and just iterate on a bunch of different ideas.

Let's get a lot of consumers and let's put it in front of a lot of customers.

But as quickly as you can, kind of getting that product market fit and getting as many customers in front of it is the right way to validate an idea.

And, you know, investors, they're very open to talking to you to see, is the market size big enough?

Because you need to understand both, is the market size big enough that you're going after?

And then, are you actually solving a problem for consumers?

And the only way you can understand those 2 things is by talking to a load of consumers or businesses, obviously, if it's more of a business idea, and then talking to a load of people who understand that market.

And so we're just out there talking to a bunch of people about a variety of ideas.

And how do you think about culture as well?

Now you have a chance, again, 19 years later, to start something from the ground up.

So again, I think that 1 of the things we did extremely well and we've done extremely well at SurveyMonkey is build that culture.

I mean, the fact that that was kind of 1 of Dave's big important things, and I learned a lot from that.

Like, are you gonna have a compensation plan that is performance-based or market-based?

Are you saying that we're going to put, in my view, when you have a market-based compensation, what it does is you're saying we have a collaborative culture.

We're either all going to make it, or we're not going to make it.

And you have that view, which is like, hey, everybody's paid equally and yeah, you can use equity to kind of do your best performers, but that changes your culture.

If you think about, you know, what is your vacation policy?

Is it that, you know, use what you need and it's like a very much trust-oriented policy or not?

So if you think about right from what are the benefits you're offering, you know, are you doing sort of the fancy free lunch every day?

It's like, well, what happens if that's what, you know, what happens if you have to cut that back if you, you know, kind of aren't funding, if you aren't getting the funding you need.

So from all of those little decisions to what are the type of people you hire, I heard someone else when I was watching back there say, you know, kind of the rule of hiring no assholes.

And again, I think everybody now says that.

Like what are the interview questions that you're asking?

So like 1 of the important questions that I tend to ask and that has worked for us is behavioral interviewing.

If you were in this situation, how would you actually handle it?

If you are in a situation where you see somebody who has done something that doesn't have that has treated somebody else poorly, what is your reaction?

What is your responsibility to the person who actually you saw do something that you thought was rude.

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Selina Tobaccowala at the Female Founders Conference 2016