Ep.11 Michelle Kennedy: From Billion Dollar Deputy-CEO to Raising Millions whilst Pregnant
Working Hard with Grace Beverley
sophie@grace-beverley.com
4.2 • 904 Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2022
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Michelle Kennedy is the founder and CEO of Peanut, one of the fastest-growing social networking apps for women focusing on fertility, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause, which has raised $23m to to date. Peanut was founded in 2017 when Michelle had her first baby, serving as a gift to like-minded mothers during their most uncertain and uncanny moments. Women now use the Peanut app for all sorts of reasons, whether that be trying to find a playdate for their children or networking with other working mums.
Having worked as Deputy CEO of dating behemoth Badoo, Michelle has extensive experience using swipe-right technology to match people online, her expertise invaluable to Peanut. While Peanut continues to flourish, Michelle has joined the chase for the next unicorn brand and is now a strategic investor in several early and late-stage start-ups including TALA.
While the internet is full of advice for women, in this episode Michelle shares the prestigious tale of how Peanut changed the female demographic forever. Michelle talks candidly about the importance of surrounding yourself with other great women, both in business and personally, being open to new experiences and knowing how to fail fast without getting broken by it. Michelle stands out as a true example of how to be a respected leader in today's society: ambitious and driven yet taking challenges with a heart and passion unlike no other.
Topics:
- Whistle-stop tour of career: tech and the dating industry
- Building and expanding the concept for Peanut
- The personal toll of entrepreneurship
- The beauty of making business mistakes
- 'Women making products for women' - it just makes sense.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the first customer of the day. |
| 0:02.0 | The unexpected 20% tip and the 100% boost to your confidence. |
| 0:07.0 | Business is a numbers game and sum up has the tools you need to stay ahead. |
| 0:12.0 | With tap to pay, you can accept contactless payments using just your smartphone. |
| 0:17.0 | And with our free business account, you can manage all things money with zero hassle all in one place. |
| 0:24.4 | Make it count with SumUp. Download the app or find out more at sumup.com.uk. |
| 0:32.5 | Starting a business is all consuming. To throw into the mix of two and a half year old, whilst you're |
| 0:37.5 | flying to the US once a month, it was really, really hard. |
| 0:42.0 | Michelle Kennedy is the founder and CEO of Peanut, one of the fastest growing social networking |
| 0:46.5 | apps for women, focusing on fertility, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause. |
| 0:50.7 | It's hard on your friendships, it's hard on your relationship. It was really challenging. I had no team, no product, half of the funding. I was fundraising whilst pregnant. Literally, I think we closed the round and I had Nula three days later. Male money. That's where it starts and that's where it ends. Then getting richer and we're not part of it. And unless we increase women's wealth, |
| 1:13.1 | we can't increase the land share of anything. |
| 1:15.6 | Hey guys, I hope you're having a good week. |
| 1:30.7 | Welcome back to working hard, hardly working. |
| 1:33.0 | Today I'm talking to Michelle Kennedy, who was one of the inaugural board members of Bumble, |
| 1:39.1 | which actually IPOed at a cool $13 billion. |
| 1:42.5 | She's raised over $23 million to date. Her story is amazing. She's from |
| 1:47.2 | quite a traditional background, which we've been seeing as quite a theme in a lot of entrepreneurs |
| 1:51.8 | that I've talked to. And I think that's really interesting because a lot of the kind of |
| 1:56.5 | entrepreneurial sphere or like representation is a lot of these like very young, straight out, |
| 2:03.0 | and always knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I actually think it's really great to see some insight that's showing what you learn as well from a more traditional background and how you decide that actually maybe like a more traditional background isn't for you. |
| 2:13.6 | But I think most of those things are really interesting. And this episode, I loved talking to her particularly about funding for women and women making products for women at Tala. |
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