- The speaker, Ellie Sheref, is the founder of HireArt, a tool for finding jobs and recruiting employees.
- She shares three pieces of advice for female founders: 
  1. Just do it - start your company and keep trying, even if it takes a long time for success to come.
  2. Have confidence - believe in yourself and your company, and be able to communicate that belief to others.
  3. Embrace failure - learn from failure and keep pushing forward, even when it feels like you're close to failing. 
- She shares personal anecdotes and examples, including her own experience starting HireArt and Meg Whitman's story of failure and subsequent success.

- The speaker recalls a difficult time after Y Combinator where they were struggling to raise funds for their startup.
- They felt discouraged and thought they were going to fail, but their co-founders encouraged them to keep pitching and eventually they found investors who believed in their mission.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of having confidence and belief in your own work.
- They encourage the audience to enjoy the journey of entrepreneurship and appreciate the experiences and opportunities it brings.
- The speaker shares personal moments of pride, such as driving on Sand Hill Road and seeing their home country included in their company's global reach.
- They conclude by expressing gratitude and wishing the audience luck.

Elli Sharef, cofounder of HireArt, at Female Founders Conference

I'm Kat Mignolak, YC's Director of Outreach.

I'm so super thrilled to see you all here.

The next speaker that we have is Ellie Sheref.

Ellie is the founder of HireArt, a tool that makes finding a job and recruiting employees less painful.

When we asked Ellie about the most important lesson she's learned from higher art so far, she talked about her first day at Y Combinator, when she realized that done is better than perfect.

It's so great to be here and it's almost otherworldly because the last time I stood on this stage was probably the 3 most terrifying minutes of my life.

It was just as we had finished our Y Combinator 3 month stint and had now to present to all these investors who were mostly male sitting here.

I was telling Jessica earlier, 1 of the funny moments when you realize how different it is when you have to stand in line for the bathroom this time around, which I definitely did not have to last time.

Okay, so when Jessica asked me to come and talk, I thought, wow, this is such an amazing thing to be able to talk to a group of female founders, and particularly in such an amazing setting as this event here.

But I wanted to get a sense first about who all of you are.

And so my first question to you was, who here has actually already started a company and is a founder today?

And who here is thinking about starting a company but hasn't quite done so yet?

So I'm gonna say a bunch of stuff that is interesting to both of you and I'll try to address them a little bit separately.

I have 3 pieces of advice I wanna give to you all today.

And if you've already started, keep doing it.

I think Adora's story is probably the most exemplary of how long it can take for you to achieve success.

But the first step in starting that success story is actually putting your foot down and starting.

I decided I wanted to do a startup when I was in college, but it took me until I was 27 to actually get started.

And for a long time I had jobs and I thought, hey, I can't just quit my job and get started.

The reality is that there's never a good moment to do it.

There's never going to be a moment when you feel, oh, all the stars are aligned.

I have a perfect idea, and I have a perfect co-founder, and I have a lot of money sitting in my bank account, and I have all this time to go and devote to this, and I don't need health care anymore, so I'm going to go do this.

I had wanted to start a company, and I was able to connect with Nick Sedlitz, who's my co-founder and had been a friend in college, but we had sort of lost touch.

A friend reintroduced us and said, hey, you guys are both interested in startups, why don't we talk?

And I distinctly remember the first time we talked on the phone.

He was living in New York and I was living here in San Francisco.

We talked for 5 hours on the phone just about startups and ideas we had and thoughts we thought, and actually the company we started was the idea we talked about that very first time.

Luck is part of it, but part of it is also just saying, hey, I'm gonna step in there.

Nick called me 1 day, out of the blue, and said, hey, Ellie, I quit my job at Goldman Sachs.

And I thought, oh my goodness, we're actually doing this, aren't we?

Because I had not quit my job yet, but I did the next day.

For those of you who already have done the first step, keep trying.

It's hard to emphasize how long it can take for your idea to take hold.

And even though our idea at Higher Art has stayed more or less the same.

The number of small pivots we've done is amazing.

You have to keep smelling, trying to figure out, you know, what's the customer saying?

It always reminds me of playing Carmen Sandiego as a small child and figuring out, what's the next clue?

For us at Higher Art, the experience was also, we started the site and 2 users came, and then we did this other little thing and 5 users came, but it took a long time for where we are today.

The next thing I think is really important, especially for women founders, is confidence.

Having deep-rooted sense of confidence in your abilities and in your company and what you're trying to build.

The first is internal confidence, actually believing what you're saying.

So you guys saw Adora get up here and say, we're going to disrupt the cleaning services industry, which is a $100 billion industry, or however large it is.

And I get up to my investors and I say, we're a recruiting company, so we're gonna disrupt the recruiting services industry.

And you have to get to the point where you really believe that.

If you're starting a company right now, and you don't currently truly believe that, that's OK.

But you have to get yourself to the point where your idea is formed fully enough in your head where you think, you know what, I know exactly what we're trying to do, I have the steps lined in my head, and if it works out the way I want it to, we're actually going to be able to do this.

Which leads me to that second point, which is being able to then externalize that to all your stakeholders, investors, hires, friends, your mom, she has to believe in you too, eventually.

Being able to say this is what we're trying to do and this is why, and 1 of the things I notice is men are great at this.

They come out there and they have so much bravado and they just say, we're gonna kick ass, we're gonna kill the competition, we're gonna take over this industry.

And at first I thought they were just, you know, this is just something they said, but they actually believe it.

There's a reason why we women don't do that, in my opinion, and I'm not sort of saying this from any scientific perspective, but I think the reason we don't do it comes from a good place.

And we think, no, well, why would I be the 1 who's going to be able to disrupt the recruiting industry?

And believing, always having that sense of confidence, is the only way that you're going to get through the really hard days.

Which brings me to my third point, which is around failure and getting up from failure, or what I call getting up from near failure.

You hear the stories of somebody who fails and then they have to get back up again and pull themselves together.

But what happens in a startup is that you actually always feel like you're really close to failure, but you haven't quite failed yet.

So my best analogy for this is I was taking a flight to come here from New York.

And I got to JFK Airport with 20 minutes before the flight was supposed to depart.

And so when that happens to you, and probably most of you have had this experience, you have 1 of 2 choices.

You can either say, I've missed the flight.

You know what, I'll find a way to get there somehow anyways, tomorrow, whatever.

Or you can say, there's a security line, and I'm going to cross that security line, I'm gonna tell everybody I have to get there, and I'm just gonna hustle my way until I make it to the airplane, and there's a small chance that I'll make it, And most likely I won't, but I'm going to try anyways.

And that's what a startup is like all the time.

You are trying to get ahead of that security line.

Sorry, I have to get to Mountain View tomorrow.

Another great story I love about failure is 1 around Meg Whitman, who is the CEO of Hewlett Packard today, was the CEO of eBay, 1 of the most amazing tech CEOs in history.

She took eBay from 30 people to 15,000 people, which was amazing to me.

So I had the great pleasure of meeting Meg at a conference in Singapore that I was also speaking at, which she was at, too.

And I distinctly remember the first time I saw Meg.

So I walked out of the elevator in Singapore at the 4 Seasons Hotel, and I had sort of these Singaporean dumplings in 1 hand, my coffee in the other, my backpack.

I was kind of straddling along trying to get to this conference.

And then I saw this woman who was much, much taller than anybody else there.

She had this little army of people walking aside for trying to just keep up.

And I immediately recognized this is Meg Whitman.

I was kind of straddling with all my accoutrements, and she was marching forward.

That brings me to my point about confidence, right?

Like having that confidence, that presence is important.

But in her talk in that conference in Singapore, Meg told the story of what it was like to fail in the race for governor of California.

So Meg ran for governor and she spent 140 million of her own dollars on this race.

And it was, in her own words, 1 of the most humiliating and devastating experiences of her life.

Can you imagine putting yourself out there in that way after you've accomplished success and then failing.

And she talks about the next day, after she failed to run, after the results were out.

And she said she just sat and watched daytime TV for the next month or so.

And 1 day her husband came home and she was watching Oprah.

And he said, Meg, maybe you should go do something.

And what's amazing to me, here's what's amazing to me about this story, not just that she failed and that she was watching TV, but what she did next was become the CEO of Hewlett Packard, like right after that.

Like in her story, she's like, well, Hewlett Packard was really close, so I'd gotten my car, and I already knew those guys, and I just drove over there.

And Hewlett Packard is not an easy company to be CEO because it's in turnaround mode.

So there is a great risk that she will fail again.

And yet despite the fact that she had just had an enormous failure, she went out there and is putting herself in that position again.

I remember at 1 point at Higher Art, I thought we were going to fail.

Right after Y Combinator, what everybody does is they go out and raise money.

About 3 or 4 weeks out, almost all of our batch mates had raised their round of funding and we had not raised a single dollar.

And I remember talking to all these people, they were like, oh yes, you know, Andreessen Horowitz just invested and Sequoia just invested, all these great things are happening and I thought, oh man, you know, we have not yet raised anything.

And I remember sitting in my car at 1 point.

I had just gotten the email from Sequoia telling us that they were not going to invest.

I was the 1 who was supposed to be fundraising.

We were all living in this house in Mountain View.

And I got back to the house and I told them, guys, you know, this isn't working.

And my co-founders at the time said, no, we're gonna do this, we're gonna make it happen.

You have to get up and you have to keep pitching.

I know you've already had 70 meetings, but you're going to have 70 more until we find somebody who's going to give us some money.

And lo and behold, we did find somebody who believed in our mission and is an awesome set of investors.

But being able to get back up from feeling like you're about to fail is incredibly important.

And that goes back to that point I said around having that confidence here in your belly.

Nothing can stop you if you really believe that what you're doing is going to work ultimately.

Because I would get to these investors and I'd say, why are you not investing?

My final thought to you before I leave here is enjoy the ride.

If you've already started, you're already doing it.

If you're just about to begin, just step in and start doing it and really enjoy it because it's an otherworldly experience.

You're here in Mountain View, in the center of technology, and you're here at a Y Combinator female founders conference, and you're starting your own company, and you're the CEO of something or the co-founder of something and you're part of this journey.

I remember driving down Sand Hill Road at 1 point and it was miserable.

But I was driving down Sand Hill Road and I'm not even a great driver, but I thought, man, I am driving on Sand Hill Road.

Like, I am here, and this is like a movie.

I mean, I should make a movie out of this.

There was another really out-of-world experience I had recently where I'm originally from Columbia, from South America, and I moved to the US when I was 17, and 1 of our large customers is Cisco, and they were doing recruiting globally.

They were already recruiting with us in about 150 countries, but they emailed me and they said, hey, we'd like to add another country to the list.

My peers that I went to school with in my country are going to be taking a higher art interview on this platform that my co-founders and I have built.

Enjoy the ups, enjoy the downs, enjoy that you are really living life, you're not just sitting in an office, you're trying to do something, you're trying to accomplish something.

And that is worth more than anything else that you can do.


Speaker 0: Awesome.

Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. I'm Kat Mignolak, YC's Director of Outreach. I'm so super thrilled to see you all here. The next speaker that we have is Ellie Sheref. Ellie is the founder of HireArt, a tool that makes finding a job and recruiting employees less painful.

When we asked Ellie about the most important lesson she's learned from higher art so far, she talked about her first day at Y Combinator, when she realized that done is better than perfect. Ellie was part of the Winter 2012 batch. Here's Ellie.

Speaker 0: Hi everyone. It's so great to be here and it's almost otherworldly because the last time I stood on this stage was probably the 3 most terrifying minutes of my life. It was just as we had finished our Y Combinator 3 month stint and had now to present to all these investors who were mostly male sitting here. So it's amazing to be here. I was telling Jessica earlier, 1 of the funny moments when you realize how different it is when you have to stand in line for the bathroom this time around, which I definitely did not have to last time.

Okay, so when Jessica asked me to come and talk, I thought, wow, this is such an amazing thing to be able to talk to a group of female founders, and particularly in such an amazing setting as this event here. But I wanted to get a sense first about who all of you are. And so my first question to you was, who here has actually already started a company and is a founder today? Raise your hands. Wow, amazing.

That's awesome. And who here is thinking about starting a company but hasn't quite done so yet? Okay, awesome, fantastic. So I'm gonna say a bunch of stuff that is interesting to both of you and I'll try to address them a little bit separately. I have 3 pieces of advice I wanna give to you all today.

The first of them is just do it. And if you've already started, keep doing it. I think Adora's story is probably the most exemplary of how long it can take for you to achieve success. But the first step in starting that success story is actually putting your foot down and starting. I decided I wanted to do a startup when I was in college, but it took me until I was 27 to actually get started.

And for a long time I had jobs and I thought, hey, I can't just quit my job and get started. The reality is that there's never a good moment to do it. There's never going to be a moment when you feel, oh, all the stars are aligned. I have a perfect idea, and I have a perfect co-founder, and I have a lot of money sitting in my bank account, and I have all this time to go and devote to this, and I don't need health care anymore, so I'm going to go do this. For me, my story was 1 of luck.

I had wanted to start a company, and I was able to connect with Nick Sedlitz, who's my co-founder and had been a friend in college, but we had sort of lost touch. A friend reintroduced us and said, hey, you guys are both interested in startups, why don't we talk? And I distinctly remember the first time we talked on the phone. He was living in New York and I was living here in San Francisco. We talked for 5 hours on the phone just about startups and ideas we had and thoughts we thought, and actually the company we started was the idea we talked about that very first time.

Luck is part of it, but part of it is also just saying, hey, I'm gonna step in there. Nick called me 1 day, out of the blue, and said, hey, Ellie, I quit my job at Goldman Sachs. And I thought, oh my goodness, we're actually doing this, aren't we? Because I had not quit my job yet, but I did the next day. So just get started.

For those of you who already have done the first step, keep trying. It's hard to emphasize how long it can take for your idea to take hold. And even though our idea at Higher Art has stayed more or less the same. The number of small pivots we've done is amazing. You have to keep smelling, trying to figure out, you know, what's the customer saying?

Oh, I have to go that way. It always reminds me of playing Carmen Sandiego as a small child and figuring out, what's the next clue? For us at Higher Art, the experience was also, we started the site and 2 users came, and then we did this other little thing and 5 users came, but it took a long time for where we are today. The next thing I think is really important, especially for women founders, is confidence. Having deep-rooted sense of confidence in your abilities and in your company and what you're trying to build.

Now there's 2 aspects of confidence. The first is internal confidence, actually believing what you're saying. So you guys saw Adora get up here and say, we're going to disrupt the cleaning services industry, which is a $100 billion industry, or however large it is. And I get up to my investors and I say, we're a recruiting company, so we're gonna disrupt the recruiting services industry. And you have to get to the point where you really believe that.

And it's not immediate. If you're starting a company right now, and you don't currently truly believe that, that's OK. I've felt that way too. But you have to get yourself to the point where your idea is formed fully enough in your head where you think, you know what, I know exactly what we're trying to do, I have the steps lined in my head, and if it works out the way I want it to, we're actually going to be able to do this. Which leads me to that second point, which is being able to then externalize that to all your stakeholders, investors, hires, friends, your mom, she has to believe in you too, eventually.

Being able to say this is what we're trying to do and this is why, and 1 of the things I notice is men are great at this. They come out there and they have so much bravado and they just say, we're gonna kick ass, we're gonna kill the competition, we're gonna take over this industry. And at first I thought they were just, you know, this is just something they said, but they actually believe it. Okay? There's a reason why we women don't do that, in my opinion, and I'm not sort of saying this from any scientific perspective, but I think the reason we don't do it comes from a good place.

I think we're a little more humble. I think we're a little more realistic. I think we're practical. And we think, no, well, why would I be the 1 who's going to be able to disrupt the recruiting industry? I mean, others must have tried.

But maybe others haven't tried. And maybe you do have a good idea. And believing, always having that sense of confidence, is the only way that you're going to get through the really hard days. Which brings me to my third point, which is around failure and getting up from failure, or what I call getting up from near failure. So I think that's actually more common.

You hear the stories of somebody who fails and then they have to get back up again and pull themselves together. But what happens in a startup is that you actually always feel like you're really close to failure, but you haven't quite failed yet. OK? So my best analogy for this is I was taking a flight to come here from New York. Our startup is based in New York.

And I got to JFK Airport with 20 minutes before the flight was supposed to depart. And so when that happens to you, and probably most of you have had this experience, you have 1 of 2 choices. You can either say, I've missed the flight. You know what, I'll find a way to get there somehow anyways, tomorrow, whatever. Or you can say, there's a security line, and I'm going to cross that security line, I'm gonna tell everybody I have to get there, and I'm just gonna hustle my way until I make it to the airplane, and there's a small chance that I'll make it, And most likely I won't, but I'm going to try anyways.

And that's what a startup is like all the time. You are trying to get ahead of that security line. Everybody's mad at you. Why are you here? Why are you doing this?

Why are you trying to get ahead of me? Sorry, I have to get to Mountain View tomorrow. Another great story I love about failure is 1 around Meg Whitman, who is the CEO of Hewlett Packard today, was the CEO of eBay, 1 of the most amazing tech CEOs in history. She took eBay from 30 people to 15,000 people, which was amazing to me. So I had the great pleasure of meeting Meg at a conference in Singapore that I was also speaking at, which she was at, too.

And I distinctly remember the first time I saw Meg. So I walked out of the elevator in Singapore at the 4 Seasons Hotel, and I had sort of these Singaporean dumplings in 1 hand, my coffee in the other, my backpack. I was kind of straddling along trying to get to this conference. And then I saw this woman who was much, much taller than anybody else there. She had this little army of people walking aside for trying to just keep up.

And I immediately recognized this is Meg Whitman. She was so confident. She was marching. I was kind of straddling with all my accoutrements, and she was marching forward. That brings me to my point about confidence, right?

Like having that confidence, that presence is important. But in her talk in that conference in Singapore, Meg told the story of what it was like to fail in the race for governor of California. So Meg ran for governor and she spent 140 million of her own dollars on this race. And it was, in her own words, 1 of the most humiliating and devastating experiences of her life. Can you imagine putting yourself out there in that way after you've accomplished success and then failing.

And she talks about the next day, after she failed to run, after the results were out. And she said she just sat and watched daytime TV for the next month or so. Which is probably what I would do too. And 1 day her husband came home and she was watching Oprah. And he said, Meg, maybe you should go do something.

And what's amazing to me, here's what's amazing to me about this story, not just that she failed and that she was watching TV, but what she did next was become the CEO of Hewlett Packard, like right after that. Like in her story, she's like, well, Hewlett Packard was really close, so I'd gotten my car, and I already knew those guys, and I just drove over there. And Hewlett Packard is not an easy company to be CEO because it's in turnaround mode. So there is a great risk that she will fail again. And yet despite the fact that she had just had an enormous failure, she went out there and is putting herself in that position again.

I just love that story. I remember at 1 point at Higher Art, I thought we were going to fail. And it was right after Y Combinator. Right after Y Combinator, what everybody does is they go out and raise money. And so we did that as well.

About 3 or 4 weeks out, almost all of our batch mates had raised their round of funding and we had not raised a single dollar. And I remember talking to all these people, they were like, oh yes, you know, Andreessen Horowitz just invested and Sequoia just invested, all these great things are happening and I thought, oh man, you know, we have not yet raised anything. And I remember sitting in my car at 1 point. I had just gotten the email from Sequoia telling us that they were not going to invest. And I just started crying.

And I thought, we're not going to raise. I've let down my team. I was the 1 who was supposed to be fundraising. And this experiment is now over. And then I got back to the house.

We were all living in this house in Mountain View. And I got back to the house and I told them, guys, you know, this isn't working. And my co-founders at the time said, no, we're gonna do this, we're gonna make it happen. You have to get up and you have to keep pitching. You have to keep doing it.

I know you've already had 70 meetings, but you're going to have 70 more until we find somebody who's going to give us some money. And lo and behold, we did find somebody who believed in our mission and is an awesome set of investors. But being able to get back up from feeling like you're about to fail is incredibly important. And that goes back to that point I said around having that confidence here in your belly. Nothing can stop you if you really believe that what you're doing is going to work ultimately.

Because I would get to these investors and I'd say, why are you not investing? Seriously, this is going to work. I'm telling you. And I really believed it deep down. My final thought to you before I leave here is enjoy the ride.

If you've already started, you're already doing it. If you're just about to begin, just step in and start doing it and really enjoy it because it's an otherworldly experience. I mean, think about it. You're here in Mountain View, in the center of technology, and you're here at a Y Combinator female founders conference, and you're starting your own company, and you're the CEO of something or the co-founder of something and you're part of this journey. I remember driving down Sand Hill Road at 1 point and it was miserable.

I mean, I hate Sand Hill Road. But I was driving down Sand Hill Road and I'm not even a great driver, but I thought, man, I am driving on Sand Hill Road. That is badass. That is so cool. Like, I am here, and this is like a movie.

I mean, I should make a movie out of this. There was another really out-of-world experience I had recently where I'm originally from Columbia, from South America, and I moved to the US when I was 17, and 1 of our large customers is Cisco, and they were doing recruiting globally. They were already recruiting with us in about 150 countries, but they emailed me and they said, hey, we'd like to add another country to the list. We'd like to add Colombia. And I thought, is this really happening?

My peers that I went to school with in my country are going to be taking a higher art interview on this platform that my co-founders and I have built. That was 1 of the most amazing moments. So enjoy the ride as you go through it. Enjoy Sand Hill Road. Thank you.

Enjoy the ups, enjoy the downs, enjoy that you are really living life, you're not just sitting in an office, you're trying to do something, you're trying to accomplish something. And that is worth more than anything else that you can do. Thank you so much and good luck. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching!

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Elli Sharef at Female Founders Conference 2014