20VC: The Rent the Runway Memo: How Paid Marketing & Growth Hacking Ruined a Generation of Companies, When Will Rent the Runway Be Profitable & How Does it Compare to Other Fashion Co's and Why "I Wish I Ran My Startup Like a Public Company"
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jennifer Hyman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, the world’s first and largest shared designer closet. Under Jennifer’s leadership, RTR has made history by being the first company to go public with a female founder/CEO, COO, and CFO. Jennifer serves on the Board of The Estée Lauder Companies and Zalando, and also is a Founding Member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council, a Member of the Women.nyc Advisory Board and a Member of the Launch with GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs.
In Today's Episode with Jennifer Hyman We Discuss:
1. The 14-Year Overnight Success: Scaling Rent The Runway To IPO:
- What was the a-ha founding moment for Jennifer with RTR?
- What does Jenn know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
- Does Jenn believe that naivete is good or not when starting a business?
2. Building the Best Team:
- What have been Jenn's single biggest lessons when it comes to acquiring the best talent?
- What have been Jenn's biggest hiring mistakes over the years?
- How does Jenn approach the interview process? Why does Jenn not focus on their professional career and achievements? What questions does she ask?
- What does Jenn believe are the single biggest mistakes founders make when building their teams?
3. Building the Business for IPO and Beyond:
- Why does Jenn wish she had run RTR as a private company in the same way she does now as a public company? How does the way you run the company differ?
- What about the unit economics of RTR suggesting it is a fundamentally better business than apparel competitors? How have their margin profiles changed over time?
- Why does Wall St not love RTR? What is required for that to change? Why does Jenn believe the street is wrong on how they analyse RTR?
4. Boards 101: Leading and Learning from Estee Lauder:
- What are Jenn's biggest lessons to founders on how to manage boards successfully?
- What have been 1-2 of Jenn's biggest lessons from being on the Estee Lauder board?
- What do the best board members do? What do the worst board members do?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The way that I run the company today as a public company is how I wish I had run it more as a private company. |
| 0:05.9 | As a private company, the name of the game is by proving that you're different. |
| 0:11.0 | How you run a public company is looking at all of the ways that you're the same. |
| 0:15.9 | And distinguish, what are the aspects of your business model and your P&L that actually give you a competitive advantage? |
| 0:22.9 | This is 20VC The Memo with me, Harry Stebbings. |
| 0:25.5 | This is the monthly show where we deep dive on the incredible scaling story of a company. |
| 0:29.6 | Today, we're focused on Rent the Run the Runway and Jennifer Hyman. |
| 0:32.8 | Jennifer Hyman is the co-founder and CEO, and under her leadership, |
| 0:36.3 | Run the Runway has made history by being the first company to go public with a-founder and CEO and under her leadership, Run the Runway has made history |
| 0:37.8 | by being the first company to go public with a female founder and CEO, C.O. |
| 0:44.0 | If that wasn't enough, Jennifer also serves on the board of Esté Lauder and Zolando. |
| 0:48.2 | But before we dive into the show's day, we need to talk about SANA. |
| 0:51.7 | SANA is an AI-powered learning and knowledge-sharing platform. |
| 0:54.7 | Think of it like chat GPT for all of your company's knowledge. |
| 0:58.1 | SANA integrates with all your company's apps in under five minutes and can search through |
| 1:02.2 | every single file, doc, pull request, video and more in under 100 milliseconds. |
| 1:07.5 | Assistant is generative AI at its most useful. |
| 1:10.4 | Say you need to create a course on |
| 1:12.9 | OKR fundamentals for your employee onboarding program and you're just really short on time. Assistant |
| 1:18.3 | can generate the outline and contents from scratch, complete with relevant imagery. You can tweak |
| 1:24.1 | it, check it and then ask assistant to publish it in five other languages |
| 1:27.9 | and assign it to all new hires in five markets and they've raised over $50 million to date |
... |
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