- The speaker begins by quoting Zaha Hadid, an influential architect, and expresses admiration for women like her who take on ambitious projects.
- The speaker introduces herself as Urška, the co-founder of Belavit, a company focused on designing technology for women's health tracking.
- Urška shares her background as a sculpture student and how it influenced her approach as a founder.
- She admits that starting a tech company was a big step outside of her comfort zone, but she followed her passion.
- Urška credits meeting her fiancé and co-founder, Sandro, as the tipping point that led her to switch careers.
- Together, they worked on various projects that failed before stumbling into the health space, which matched their interests and skills.
- They created Bella Beats, an app and device for pregnant women to listen to their baby's heartbeat, which taught them about the needs of women as users of technology.
- Three years later, Belavit has grown to a team of over 60 people with offices in multiple locations and has shipped profitable hardware products.
- The speaker acknowledges that she hasn't had time to reflect on their journey but shares some defining aspects of their team and company.
- She mentions that they are not American and started their company in Croatia, which presented challenges in terms of raising funds.

- European start-ups face challenges in raising money and lack the same level of experienced investors and talented founders as Silicon Valley.
- Moving to Silicon Valley is a desire for many European founders, but it is not easy due to legal and emotional barriers.
- Y Combinator provided a base for the speaker's start-up and helped them develop an underdog mentality and learn important skills.
- Commitment is crucial for founders and their teams, as they may face challenges and people may leave during periods of growth.
- Hardware start-ups require even more commitment, as operations often need to be moved to the factory floor.
- Having a strong vision is essential for a start-up, as it guides decision-making and helps overcome obstacles.

The speaker discusses the process of creating a product and emphasizes the importance of imagination and communication. They mention that their newest product, the Leaf, is a versatile piece of jewelry that tracks activity, sleep, menstrual cycle, and offers breathing exercises for stress relief. They acknowledge that this product is just one part of their larger vision for their company.

- Urška, co-founder of Belavit, a company focused on women's health tracking, shares her journey of starting a tech company outside her comfort zone.
- She credits meeting her fiancé and co-founder, Sandro, as the tipping point that led her to switch careers.
- They created Bella Beats, an app and device for pregnant women, which taught them about the needs of women as users of technology.
- Belavit has grown to a team of over 60 people with offices in multiple locations and profitable hardware products.
- European start-ups face challenges in raising funds and lack experienced investors and talented founders like Silicon Valley.
- Y Combinator helped develop an underdog mentality and important skills for their start-up.
- Commitment and a strong vision are crucial for founders and their teams to overcome challenges and guide decision-making.
- Belavit's newest product, the Leaf, is a versatile piece of jewelry that tracks activity, sleep, menstrual cycle, and offers breathing exercises for stress relief.

Bellabeat co-founder and chief product officer Urska Srsen speaks at Y Combinator's 2016 Female Founders Conference in San Francisco, California

Before I actually start talking about myself for the next 20 minutes, I wanted to kick off this speech with a quote from a woman that I admire a lot and who unfortunately died last week.

For those of you who don't know her, Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-born, London-based architect and just a formidable force in the world of design and architecture and the architectural business.

And I chose this because I think, so she answered this quote as an answer to a question when they asked her if she thinks that she had it specifically hard during her career because Her projects were particularly ambitious.

So I chose this quote because I think that this and the legacy of her and women like her and like you is so women who are devoted to their passion and are not afraid of taking on particularly ambitious projects is that I get inspiration from.

And without that, I don't think that I would be here today.

My name is Urška and I'm the co-founder of Belavit, which is a company devoted to designing beautiful and easy to use technology for tracking the health of women.

And I'm Slovenian, and when I became a founder, I was 23 years old.

And before that, I was actually studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland.

And I decided that I want to be a sculptor when I was 9.

And this is me in my last year of college, living the dream.

And I was really, really passionate about working with different materials and just art itself.

But why I actually always mention my background as an artist is because I think that it influenced a lot about who I am as a founder today and how I approach designing our products.

But also because I think it was it is the passion that I always wanted to follow.

As you can imagine I'm probably the least likely person to start a tech company, like coming from studying art and then starting just a startup in the world of technology.

I didn't go to business school and I'm not a developer, and I'm not even a designer.

So the best how I could justify it to others and myself as well sometimes is that I just try to follow my passion throughout all the twists and turns and wherever it takes me.

But even though becoming an artist wasn't really a conventional decision, you don't just decide to go study art and, you know, like not being able to earn anything for the rest of your life.

But even for me, going into startups was a big step from my comfort zone.

Because I struggled with the thought that I'm not qualified enough, that I don't have any idea what I'm doing.

Like, I'm standing here, and I realized meeting a lot of the other founders that nobody is really qualified to start this.

It's just like there's not like nobody can teach you what to do.

But you must probably be wondering what was that tipping point like what made me just design to switch my careers?

Well, like many young and naive girls, I met a dude.

This dude in particular, I think he's watching and he'll be very angry that I put up this picture.

Fast forward a year, he convinced me to drop my studies and move all the way back across the Europe from Helsinki back to the Balkans, more particularly to Zagreb, Croatia where he's from, and live and work with him.

So we actually just, you know, I moved to Zagreb and we started to work on several projects individually, and together, and they all failed.

I mean, they weren't big projects, but when you're 23, everything feels, you know, big, and especially at that transition when you're going from college to adult life and you think, like, oh, my God, I have to start earning something and, like, not draining my parents anymore.

But actually, throughout that process, it was actually just a year.

And we stumbled just across different fields into health space.

Like, there's no particular reason why we ended up in health space.

It is true that my mother is an OBGYN, and this is where we kind of got some crumbs from.

But mostly it was just that we found, we both found that field really interesting and our skills matched.

I was really interested in how technology for checking the health was designed and actually wasn't designed at all.

And he was interested in the technology itself.

And a lot of the founders, you know, have a reason or are solving a problem that they've encountered through the technology that they're developing.

But maybe our problem was just like how to stay and work together.

And out of that, our first product was born, which was an app and a device that allowed future moms to listen to their baby's heartbeat while they were pregnant and share the experience with their loved ones.

I mean, who doesn't want to hear their baby's heartbeat?

But essentially, it taught us a lot about women as users of technology who have always been overlooked, and also what kind of technology they need or they want and how we can help them.

And this became a huge part of the Bellabit vision.

And fast forward 3 years later, we are a team of more than 60 people and have offices in Zagreb, Croatia, London, San Francisco, and Dongguan, China.

So We're quite an operation right now, and we've already shipped 2 hardware products, 350,000 like physical units, and we're already profitable.

So we've learned quite a lot, and we've been through a lot of the things but I actually still avoid giving advice to anyone because I've never really had a time.

Like, having a startup is just like sticking your head out of a driving window on a headway.

It's like you're trying to keep your eyes in your skull.

So I never really had the time to reflect on things and, like, just understand what actually happened.

But I tried to put together a couple of things that I think define us as a team and a company the most, and I think that some people might be able to relate to that.

And the first 1 is that we're not American.

It's just that we started Balabeat in Croatia, which is not even a fancy part of Europe, like London or Paris.

But it's even more known than Slovenia, so that's why we went there first.

But yeah, it's just that we built this great product.

But we were stuck with no prospect of raising any money.

And neither was the technology that we were developing.

A big gig with the users where we were, all our users were in the States.

And Europe in general is just not a very nurturing environment for early age start-ups, Because it's such a fragmented market, and notoriously bureaucratic.

But also, what it's lacking, what it actually makes Silicon Valley the Hollywood of startups, is a couple of things that are essential, that are lacking in Europe.

And first of them is, of course, the money, and not just the concentration of it, but the knowledge of it.

When you get a Silicon Valley investor, they've seen people go through what you're going several times, like many times.

And most likely, they've been through it as well.

It's not that Europe is lacking in talent, but it's just lacking in very accomplished talent, because they all moved to Silicon Valley.

And the lack of really successful founders influences your perspective a lot.

Before we came to the States, I never even thought that it's possible that you can get an investment bigger than, like, what your mom gave you.

And you know, you read about billion dollar exits in a couple of years, like, after a couple of years of working on something, but you don't really meet these people, you don't really see them in person, so it's just like something out of the movie.

It influences your perspective on things.

It influences the perspective of investors in Europe.

You know, which influences then your valuations and your scale as well.

But, you know, European founders are all aware of that, and they all want to move to Silicon Valley.

This is like emotional extortion or how is it called?

But even not counting like this legal and emotional burdens, you can't just like pack your bags and move to the States because you can't just start out of nothing.

And for us, luckily that base became Y Combinator when we got accepted into the winter 2014 batch.

We packed all our bags and all our product, moved into a house in Mount View.

But, you know, we realized that we're complete idiots.

Like, I was literally scared to open my mouth at YC dinners in case somebody realizes that I don't belong there.

I literally just felt like I don't belong there.

I have no idea what's going on, and I will never, ever catch up.

And you don't even know like basic things like how to answer an email properly.

Like Americans answer an email like in less than 24 hours.

I don't even answer to my mother in 24 hours.

But yeah, once you start learning things like that, you know, what really made us who we are today is that feeling those kind of like idiots made us obtain this underdog mentality.

We just kept our mouth shut and our eyes and ears open, and I think this is really important because building a startup is not an IQ test.

It's who can observe things best, who can recognize changes really fast and hack it.

And this brings us to the last, like, having a YC family support you is really incredible because you meet other founders who are prepared to work for you for beer.

Which brings me to the second really important thing, commitment.

You will hear a lot how working hard is really important, but I think working hard is not the same as commitment.

Being committed to something, I think it means that you're putting your team's and your company's interests always first before your comfort or even your personal interests sometimes.

And that means, you know, doing and moving, doing whatever it takes, moving to wherever it takes, meaning that you have to call your angry customers or fire someone or even move to China.

So, Yeah, being committed as a founder is I think the hardest thing you have to do because you have to it has to come from within yourself and you have to maintain it.

But even harder than that is transferring that commitment to your team.

Because in an operation larger than just founders, you need a committed team as well.

We've just gone through a phase of really fast growth because we've been scaling our product pretty fast and having the hardware product and having the whole roller coaster of logistics that come with it, we needed to scale the team as well.

And how it feels like it's just like the ground is shaking, like you're in a rocket launch.

And people will fall off during that ground shake.

We've had an engineer come in and then quitting in a week.

He was like, this is just too much stress for me, guys.

And I'm like, this was like vacation for me, like nothing.

But then you will have harder things, like people quitting that were with you from the start, like that were working with you for 2 years or a year, and who really participated in teamwork.

But what you have to keep in mind is that that is normal, because you have to imagine your startup as a rocket.

Like I couldn't find a better picture, but you know with a rocket launch where all the debris is falling off.

Like not all parts were designed to go with you, unfortunately.

Some parts were designed to go to the moon, and the rest were parts that took place at the beginning or just made you grow as a founder.

And being committed brings me to hardware.

Jessica asked me to talk about some war stories from hardware, but I really don't want to scare you.

So I felt like this picture of our Chinese, that's our office, is good enough.

No, but I think everybody has this perception of hardware that it's really, really hard to build.

It is hard to build, but what is even harder is to ship it.

And unfortunately, you can't do it from the States.

The only place where you can do it from is from the factory floor.

So if you're doing hardware, the essential thing is that you are prepared to move your operations to where you're making it.

And that means yourself or a team that you really trust will go with it.

And that brings me to the last thing that really, really defines us, and that is the vision.

This is me trying to present our vision to our team.

We're totally on the same page, don't worry.

But, yeah, the vision is actually like a glue in everything else, like in cracks of your commitment, in cracks of your team, even in cracks in your product, the vision is the 1 that fills it.

And also when you're getting blows and you don't know what's your next step, You should be able to play that vision in your head and it should bring some answers.

And for us, that vision is to change the preventive care.

And I know that this is really abstract, but you will develop it as you go.

It becomes really, like it becomes more defined with each product, with each step, with each stage of your company.

And the nicest thing about it is that you see how it evolves in front of your eyes.

So these are some of the sketches that we've done during designing our newest product called the leaf.

And it just holds a special magic to see that something that you've imagined is possible to create.

Like you don't we're doing hardware and we didn't have any money to buy 3D printers or anything fancy, so I just made our first prototype in clay.

Like, you can make it in Play Doh or whatever, or make sketches on paper.

Just enough so that you can communicate it to your team and other people that you're going to create your product with.

So the Leaf is our newest product, and we just launched it in October.

And it's designed as a beautiful piece of jewelry that women can wear in any way they want, as a bracelet, as a necklace, or as a clip.

And it helps them track their activity, their sleep, their menstrual cycle, and overcome stress through breathing exercises.

And I know that this product is just a small part of our bigger vision, but all the little pieces that you put together are going towards developing the future of your company.


Speaker 0: Hello. Before I actually start talking about myself for the next 20 minutes, I wanted to kick off this speech with a quote from a woman that I admire a lot and who unfortunately died last week. For those of you who don't know her, Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-born, London-based architect and just a formidable force in the world of design and architecture and the architectural business. And I chose this because I think, so she answered this quote as an answer to a question when they asked her if she thinks that she had it specifically hard during her career because Her projects were particularly ambitious. So I chose this quote because I think that this and the legacy of her and women like her and like you is so women who are devoted to their passion and are not afraid of taking on particularly ambitious projects is that I get inspiration from.

And without that, I don't think that I would be here today. So, back to me. My name is Urška and I'm the co-founder of Belavit, which is a company devoted to designing beautiful and easy to use technology for tracking the health of women. And I'm Slovenian, and when I became a founder, I was 23 years old. And before that, I was actually studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland.

And I always wanted to study sculpture. I was really passionate about it. And I decided that I want to be a sculptor when I was 9. So this is me when I was like 9 or 10. And this is me in my last year of college, living the dream.

And I was really, really passionate about working with different materials and just art itself. But why I actually always mention my background as an artist is because I think that it influenced a lot about who I am as a founder today and how I approach designing our products. But also because I think it was it is the passion that I always wanted to follow. As you can imagine I'm probably the least likely person to start a tech company, like coming from studying art and then starting just a startup in the world of technology. I didn't go to business school and I'm not a developer, and I'm not even a designer.

So the best how I could justify it to others and myself as well sometimes is that I just try to follow my passion throughout all the twists and turns and wherever it takes me. But even though becoming an artist wasn't really a conventional decision, you don't just decide to go study art and, you know, like not being able to earn anything for the rest of your life. But even for me, going into startups was a big step from my comfort zone. Because I struggled with the thought that I'm not qualified enough, that I don't have any idea what I'm doing. But at the end, I'm totally fine.

Like, I'm standing here, and I realized meeting a lot of the other founders that nobody is really qualified to start this. It's just like there's not like nobody can teach you what to do. But you must probably be wondering what was that tipping point like what made me just design to switch my careers? Well, like many young and naive girls, I met a dude. This dude in particular, I think he's watching and he'll be very angry that I put up this picture.

But this is Sandro. He is my fiancé and co-founder. I met him in my last year of college. Fast forward a year, he convinced me to drop my studies and move all the way back across the Europe from Helsinki back to the Balkans, more particularly to Zagreb, Croatia where he's from, and live and work with him. And I said yes.

So we actually just, you know, I moved to Zagreb and we started to work on several projects individually, and together, and they all failed. I mean, they weren't big projects, but when you're 23, everything feels, you know, big, and especially at that transition when you're going from college to adult life and you think, like, oh, my God, I have to start earning something and, like, not draining my parents anymore. But actually, throughout that process, it was actually just a year. We learned so much. And we stumbled just across different fields into health space.

Like, there's no particular reason why we ended up in health space. It is true that my mother is an OBGYN, and this is where we kind of got some crumbs from. But mostly it was just that we found, we both found that field really interesting and our skills matched. I was really interested in how technology for checking the health was designed and actually wasn't designed at all. It was just like crappy.

And he was interested in the technology itself. And a lot of the founders, you know, have a reason or are solving a problem that they've encountered through the technology that they're developing. But maybe our problem was just like how to stay and work together. And we solved that with Bella Beats. And out of that, our first product was born, which was an app and a device that allowed future moms to listen to their baby's heartbeat while they were pregnant and share the experience with their loved ones.

And it was a great product. It was really emotional. The users loved it. I mean, who doesn't want to hear their baby's heartbeat? But essentially, it taught us a lot about women as users of technology who have always been overlooked, and also what kind of technology they need or they want and how we can help them.

And this became a huge part of the Bellabit vision. And fast forward 3 years later, we are a team of more than 60 people and have offices in Zagreb, Croatia, London, San Francisco, and Dongguan, China. So We're quite an operation right now, and we've already shipped 2 hardware products, 350,000 like physical units, and we're already profitable. So thanks. So we've learned quite a lot, and we've been through a lot of the things but I actually still avoid giving advice to anyone because I've never really had a time.

Like, having a startup is just like sticking your head out of a driving window on a headway. It's like you're trying to keep your eyes in your skull. So I never really had the time to reflect on things and, like, just understand what actually happened. But I tried to put together a couple of things that I think define us as a team and a company the most, and I think that some people might be able to relate to that. And the first 1 is that we're not American.

It's like nothing really bad about it. It's just that we started Balabeat in Croatia, which is not even a fancy part of Europe, like London or Paris. It's just off the map. It's like nobody knows where it is. But it's even more known than Slovenia, so that's why we went there first.

But yeah, it's just that we built this great product. We knew that our users loved it. But we were stuck with no prospect of raising any money. And neither was the technology that we were developing. A big gig with the users where we were, all our users were in the States.

And Europe in general is just not a very nurturing environment for early age start-ups, Because it's such a fragmented market, and notoriously bureaucratic. But also, what it's lacking, what it actually makes Silicon Valley the Hollywood of startups, is a couple of things that are essential, that are lacking in Europe. And first of them is, of course, the money, and not just the concentration of it, but the knowledge of it. When you get a Silicon Valley investor, they've seen people go through what you're going several times, like many times. And most likely, they've been through it as well.

And the other thing is talent. It's not that Europe is lacking in talent, but it's just lacking in very accomplished talent, because they all moved to Silicon Valley. And the lack of really successful founders influences your perspective a lot. Before we came to the States, I never even thought that it's possible that you can get an investment bigger than, like, what your mom gave you. Like pocket money.

And you know, you read about billion dollar exits in a couple of years, like, after a couple of years of working on something, but you don't really meet these people, you don't really see them in person, so it's just like something out of the movie. So that influences everything. It influences your perspective on things. It influences the perspective of investors in Europe. You know, which influences then your valuations and your scale as well.

But, you know, European founders are all aware of that, and they all want to move to Silicon Valley. Well, most of them. But you can't just move. This is like emotional extortion or how is it called? But even not counting like this legal and emotional burdens, you can't just like pack your bags and move to the States because you can't just start out of nothing.

You need a base. And for us, luckily that base became Y Combinator when we got accepted into the winter 2014 batch. And it was great. We were like, yay, we're going to move. We packed all our bags and all our product, moved into a house in Mount View.

But, you know, we realized that we're complete idiots. Like, I was literally scared to open my mouth at YC dinners in case somebody realizes that I don't belong there. I literally just felt like I don't belong there. I have no idea what's going on, and I will never, ever catch up. And you don't even know like basic things like how to answer an email properly.

Like Americans answer an email like in less than 24 hours. I don't even answer to my mother in 24 hours. Like a week is still normal. But yeah, once you start learning things like that, you know, what really made us who we are today is that feeling those kind of like idiots made us obtain this underdog mentality. We just kept our mouth shut and our eyes and ears open, and I think this is really important because building a startup is not an IQ test.

It's not like who's the smartest. It's who can observe things best, who can recognize changes really fast and hack it. And this brings us to the last, like, having a YC family support you is really incredible because you meet other founders who are prepared to work for you for beer. Which brings me to the second really important thing, commitment. You will hear a lot how working hard is really important, but I think working hard is not the same as commitment.

Being committed to something, I think it means that you're putting your team's and your company's interests always first before your comfort or even your personal interests sometimes. And that means, you know, doing and moving, doing whatever it takes, moving to wherever it takes, meaning that you have to call your angry customers or fire someone or even move to China. So, Yeah, being committed as a founder is I think the hardest thing you have to do because you have to it has to come from within yourself and you have to maintain it. But even harder than that is transferring that commitment to your team. Because in an operation larger than just founders, you need a committed team as well.

We've just gone through a phase of really fast growth because we've been scaling our product pretty fast and having the hardware product and having the whole roller coaster of logistics that come with it, we needed to scale the team as well. And how it feels like it's just like the ground is shaking, like you're in a rocket launch. And people will fall off during that ground shake. We've had an engineer come in and then quitting in a week. He was like, this is just too much stress for me, guys.

And I'm like, this was like vacation for me, like nothing. And literally he just quit in a week. But then you will have harder things, like people quitting that were with you from the start, like that were working with you for 2 years or a year, and who really participated in teamwork. But what you have to keep in mind is that that is normal, because you have to imagine your startup as a rocket. Like I couldn't find a better picture, but you know with a rocket launch where all the debris is falling off.

Like not all parts were designed to go with you, unfortunately. Some parts were designed to go to the moon, and the rest were parts that took place at the beginning or just made you grow as a founder. And being committed brings me to hardware. Hardware takes a lot of commitment. Jessica asked me to talk about some war stories from hardware, but I really don't want to scare you.

So I felt like this picture of our Chinese, that's our office, is good enough. No, but I think everybody has this perception of hardware that it's really, really hard to build. It is hard to build, but what is even harder is to ship it. And unfortunately, you can't do it from the States. You can't do it from Europe.

You can't even do it from Hong Kong. The only place where you can do it from is from the factory floor. So if you're doing hardware, the essential thing is that you are prepared to move your operations to where you're making it. And that means yourself or a team that you really trust will go with it. And that brings me to the last thing that really, really defines us, and that is the vision.

This is me trying to present our vision to our team. And I swear that everybody gets it. We're totally on the same page, don't worry. But, yeah, the vision is actually like a glue in everything else, like in cracks of your commitment, in cracks of your team, even in cracks in your product, the vision is the 1 that fills it. And also when you're getting blows and you don't know what's your next step, You should be able to play that vision in your head and it should bring some answers.

And for us, that vision is to change the preventive care. And I know that this is really abstract, but you will develop it as you go. It becomes really, like it becomes more defined with each product, with each step, with each stage of your company. And the nicest thing about it is that you see how it evolves in front of your eyes. So these are some of the sketches that we've done during designing our newest product called the leaf.

And it just holds a special magic to see that something that you've imagined is possible to create. And you don't need a lot to do it. Like you don't we're doing hardware and we didn't have any money to buy 3D printers or anything fancy, so I just made our first prototype in clay. Like, you can make it in Play Doh or whatever, or make sketches on paper. Just enough so that you can communicate it to your team and other people that you're going to create your product with.

So the Leaf is our newest product, and we just launched it in October. And it's designed as a beautiful piece of jewelry that women can wear in any way they want, as a bracelet, as a necklace, or as a clip. And it helps them track their activity, their sleep, their menstrual cycle, and overcome stress through breathing exercises. And I know that this product is just a small part of our bigger vision, but all the little pieces that you put together are going towards developing the future of your company. Thank you.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Urska Srsen Speaks at Y Combinator Female Founder Conference 2016