Welcome to another bonus episode of the TechMeme Ride Home podcast, another portfolio profile

episode.

This one's unique so far in these portfolio profile episodes.

Let me introduce my guest first.

We're talking today to Kara Borenstein-Maron-Marin. Kara, thanks for coming on again to the show.

Thanks for having me. Excited. Excite to share some learnings. Yes, this is going to be a show of

learnings because when I conceived of doing portfolio profile episodes, you know, it's not just

talking my book or doing promo for companies we invest in.

The idea was that this would be a way for people to follow the whole lifecycle of a company,

you know, from when we get invested to, you know, evolving the product, finding product market fit,

getting, raising rounds, et cetera, et cetera.

But that also includes companies that do not make it.

As people know, VC investing is a power law sort of thing where the majority of your investments

do not make it.

And unfortunately, Kara's company,

which we invested in, I don't know, two years ago now, maybe more than that, has shut down.

So, Kara is here to, as she said, tell us her learnings. And to do that, Kara, I think we should start from the very

beginning. Like, you have been on the show. We have talked about this before, but remind us,

let's start from the moment that you're like, hey, this is a good idea. Maybe I should do this.

Literally the inception of what would become

stashpad. But what was the first idea and when did you know I'm going to do this?

So before stashpad, I was a software engineer at Twilio. And while I was there, there was one thing that I noticed just about myself and where I draw energy, which is talking to customers.

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