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Discover the remarkable stories behind successful startups on 'How I Became...'.
Join me, Kelly Yefet, as we dive into the journeys of extraordinary founders, marketers, investors, and industry experts. Uncover the breakthrough moments, challenges, and strategies that propelled their ventures to greatness.
Each episode delivers inspiring narratives and practical insights for entrepreneurs of all stages. Get ready to be captivated by the untold tales of innovation, resilience, and triumph in the world of startups. Tune in now to fuel your own entrepreneurial journey.
Interested in marketing and growth support for your business? https://www.kellyyefetconsulting.com/
Kelly Yefet (00:01)
Emilie is joining me today on the How I Became podcast and I'm so excited. She is the CEO and co -founder of Turbine, a financial software for companies that manage physical inventories. Turbine is helping consumer brands with supply chain visibility, cost optimization, and expanding sales channels.
Previously, she was data strategist in residence at Amplify Partners, director of data at Netlify, and held multiple roles at GitLab. She's currently living in Columbus, Georgia with hubby Casey and her sons, RJ and Will, and their dog, Bo.
I'm really excited to jump into this conversation.
Kelly Yefet (00:40)
Emilie, thank you so much. I'm so happy we're doing this. I thought maybe we could, you know, start at the beginning, your career has seemed to be with a lot of startups of varying size. But I was reading up on you and I saw that you identify as a bit more risk adverse. So I want to hear a bit about your background and your experience and even with the mindset of being risk adverse how you
felt comfortable becoming a founder,
Emilie (01:07)
Yeah, it's so interesting because when you think of risk aversion, people don't always think of people who are really attracted to startups. But I think the thing that I care most about in my work is being able to drive an impact. And that's kind of the continuous thread across every role I've taken is, am I able to drive the sort of business impact that brings me joy and does good for the organization, right? Like two sides of that.
And so I took a post -grad fellowship after graduating from college called Venture for America. It's very similar to Teach for America, but the idea was what if we can take top college graduates and help funnel them into non -traditional American cities? So instead of like San Francisco and New York and Boston, but what if we can put them in Cincinnati and Cleveland and Baltimore, which is where I ended up.
And so the idea is you can bring really high quality talent to these cities and some of that talent is going to stay there, some of it's not. I moved out of Baltimore after about a year, moved to North Carolina, moved to Georgia, moved in Georgia again. But I do think my perspective of what it is to be impactful came from the fact that my first job was this early stage startup where
I was employee number nine and at that stage of a company, everyone does everything. And so in the morning I might be doing customer support and in the afternoon I might be picking up printer ink because we ran out and then on my way out the door in the evening I might be taking out the trash because it's trash day. And it's just one of those like you have to do whatever gets done mentality. And I think that's where like I care.
so much about driving change and seeing the results of that change. And in a large org, that feedback loop can be, what, two, three, five years? Which is fine. I just find the instant gratification of pushing out a feature and getting feedback from a user where you had an idea over the weekend, shipped it on Thursday, and it's in people's hands and you're hearing about it on Tuesday. That's incredible to me.
Kelly Yefet (03:30)
that really quick turnaround. And sometimes it's going to be great feedback. And sometimes it means you have to tweak it. But it is it's such an exciting piece of being a founder or being in the startup world. So you mentioned venture for America. But can you explain a little bit more about what that actually is and your experience
Emilie (03:50)
Venture for America, the models changed since I went through it, you know, a decade ago, which is almost to think that I'm a decade out of college. Venture for America is a post -grad fellowship. It's so scary.
Kelly Yefet (03:58)
Yeah.
It's scary.
I'm sorry.
Emilie (04:07)
You know, this idea, so I graduated from Princeton where like a third of the graduating class goes into investment banking consulting. And it's not that those things are bad, but like, it's a funnel for talent that isn't necessarily creating the most opportunities for the most people. Like, making money for people who have money is good and important and lots of benefits to the economy, but
Kelly Yefet (04:30)
Right?
Emilie (04:37)
There is something about entrepreneurship that does more for the economy, not just of a local region, but the country more broadly and you can extrapolate even to the world. And so I found that idea of startups to be really appealing. The hard thing is if you want to go work in an early stage startup as a fresh out of college grad, like you really don't know how to start or where to go or it's not like you're going to
C, four person company hiring fifth person opportunity on LinkedIn, right? Like if you're not connected to one of those people, it's nearly impossible to find. And so that was a problem that Venture for America solved for me and a lot of other folks. Today, I would say VFA is a little bit more oriented to help get people to start their own companies, which is awesome. The founders,
Kelly Yefet (05:15)
Yeah, that's true.
Emilie (05:34)
VFA fellows have gone on to start really incredible companies. Many of them have been through YC. Bonza, the chickpea pasta is founded by Adventure for America fellows, stacks sticks in the women's health space. Just a variety of companies.
Kelly Yefet (05:46)
Wow, huge
Emilie (05:48)
Chili revival food truck, like the kinds of businesses are all over the place. And it's really incredible to see what people can do when they're given the right resources. And I talk to people and they're like, yeah, I started this company and now we employ five people in the city that I wouldn't have been in if it wasn't for Venture for America in the first place. Like I think that's incredible.
Personally, it's the path for me that got me into startups. And it wasn't like I came into VFA saying, I want to start a company someday. In fact, if you had asked me, probably right up until I started a company, if you had asked me, do you see yourself starting something? I would have said, no. You know, I'm too risk averse.
want a family and you know whatever the the situation at home is like I just don't see myself taking that sort of risk and then
Kelly Yefet (06:45)
sort of other things are priorities in your life, in your headspace.
Emilie (06:49)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Whereas I think a lot of fellows, if you had talked to them from the beginning, they'd say, yeah, I want to start something or I've already started something and here's my side project.
Kelly Yefet (07:00)
So how did you get involved at that point? Like what drew you to it if that wasn't the end game for you?
Emilie (07:08)
You know, it was the opportunity to work in a startup. I mean, I see now kids are graduating. Georgia Tech has a huge entrepreneurship program. So I'm in Columbus, Georgia, Atlanta is a stone's throw away.
And the things that are coming out of Georgia Tech are incredible. Like the students are graduating or sometimes not even graduating, dropping out to work on their endeavors full time because they just have these really wonderful ideas. They are battle testing them while in school. They have mentors helping them understand what they need to be successful. Sometimes they're raising angel funds, but sometimes they're bootstrapping it and they live like college students. So like a diet of...
Ramen and a frozen bag of vegetables is all they need. And it's really incredible to see the things that they're doing and what's coming out of those entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Kelly Yefet (08:05)
And if they're dropping out, you're getting a whole other side of education from starting a business anyway. So it's not like you're not, you know, bumming around and doing nothing. Like you're starting something and potentially having an impact on the economy or people's lives or whatever it may be is like also so incredible.
Emilie (08:27)
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think the...
do you watch The Bachelor? I don't watch The Bachelor, but I know a lot of people do, and I've seen all the memes that are like, entrepreneurship, or entrepreneur is the code for unemployed. Have you seen
Kelly Yefet (08:41)
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emilie (08:43)
Yeah, and so I think about that and there's this somewhat disdain or this confusion over like what is entrepreneurship or what does it mean and what does it have to look like, right? Is someone who I'm working out of a co -working space today.
I'm working out of Startup Columbus, which is our local incubator here. And I'm thinking Lindsay from Soothe Beginnings, who has a desk over there. She started a pacifier company.
And then I look two desks over from her, you have Michelle who runs a company called Cirrus Gold that does photography and mental health workshops And then I look between them and you've got Stephen Kumpf, who's the CEO of CharityVest. CharityVest went through YC, raised a couple million dollars, I think $6 million. Like,
the three of them are entrepreneurs and is one better than the other? No, they're all just very different kinds of entrepreneurs. And so sometimes I think people get this idea that like entrepreneurship needs to fit this very specific mold or it needs to mean this very specific thing. And if instead we just caught like cast a wider net and said,
It's about creating opportunity and creating jobs. Like we can make it a lot more accessible to folks.
Kelly Yefet (10:16)
It's interesting that you bring this up because at the beginning when I started this podcast journey, one of the questions I asked was what does being successful mean to you as an entrepreneur? And it was interesting to see the shift in entrepreneurs from when I first got, you know, got started, it was about raising, getting VC or hitting a million ARR or whatever. It was very these like classic,
Emilie (10:40)
Mmm.
Kelly Yefet (10:46)
big ideas versus once I actually started, I realized it was about being a really great leader or hiring the first person who I truly felt was smarter than me or whatever these things are. And it goes to your point of like, you can look at this room of people all ending up working in the same space, but having majorly different goals, objectives, metrics, stages, which is so fascinating in the entrepreneur world.
Emilie (11:10)
Mm -hmm.
Kelly Yefet (11:15)
But I want to go back to you for a second if that's okay. I want to hear from Venture for America. You ended up at Smile Direct.
Emilie (11:20)
Yeah.
my first VFA job was Allaview, which was based out of Baltimore, Maryland. And then I left Allaview and I joined Small Directs Club, which was based out of Nashville, Tennessee. I was the first fully remote hire at Small Directs Club.
Kelly Yefet (11:30)
Okay.
Emilie (11:41)
lots of reasons that was an absolutely terrible experience. But I spent some time at SDC. And for those who are unfamiliar, Small Direct Club is like direct to consumer in this line. And when they were around in 2016, they were really pioneers of the direct to consumer telehealth in this generation that was really defining direct to consumers. So if we think,
Harry's and Dollar Shave Club and Casper Mattresses, those sorts of companies were kind of the big ones at the time. Before Shopify was the behemoth that Shopify is today, these companies were all building their own internal tech tools and building their own websites.
I was the first data engineer at Smilendirect Club. I left STC to go work at GitLab GitLab was my first foray into true B2B SaaS. And so much of what I learned about building a company, operating a company came from my time there. GitLab was the largest all remote company pre pandemic. And so,
I learned a lot about like operational excellence in a remote first world.
I left GitLab, you know, we can talk about this if you'd like, but I had a moment where I was like, this company is too big for me. I can't have the impact I want anymore. And that's what prompted me to start looking at new opportunities. I left GitLab to go work at Netlify where I was director of data.
I led ML data engineering and analytics engineering data analytics. And so we started Turbine in 2022, raised some venture capital at the end of 22, had a couple of team members come on in 2023. And then...
Here we are in 2024 and it's just been a wild and crazy adventure.
Kelly Yefet (13:42)
point in that journey when did you start thinking about turbine and leaving to go do something fully on your own? Because I imagine the mindset shift makes you start to think about learnings that you're gonna start to pull into your own company.
Emilie (14:00)
Yeah, for me, those were two very separate kind of timing situations. It was that for lots of reasons, I wasn't happy at Netlify. And so I made the decision to leave separately from the like, what am I going to do next? And so I had a really wonderful opportunity to join the folks at Amplify Partners, kind of working with their portfolio of companies.
So I did that for about a year. And then I was having my second kid and I wasn't, you know, I didn't have a full -time job. I wasn't gonna have maternity leave. And so I had saved up to like comfortably cushion myself to be off work for a couple of months, give myself my own version of maternity leave and said, like I had been throwing this turbine.
idea around. It wasn't called Turbine back then. But I'd been throwing this idea around, had done some customer discovery and validation. And I said, okay, I've got three months of maternity leave, strong air quotes there. Let's see if we can make it work in this three months. And at the end of three months, I either go all in on Turbine and or I'll go find a job like
this will be my test window, right? So risk averse personality, this is my like baby stepping my way there. So, yeah, yeah. And time bound, right? Like I'm not gonna sink forever into this. I'm gonna go all in for three months and then reevaluate.
Kelly Yefet (15:34)
Plan A, Plan B, very clear. Yeah.
Emilie (15:46)
We were lucky enough to have our lead investors wire us in December 2022. And so we hit the ground running. In January, we had two team members join us full time. And it was just a really wonderful experience.
Kelly Yefet (16:08)
How did you, so talking about being a mom, you have two little ones. I think you and your husband are both full time. How do you balance it? And I use balance hesitantly because I think there's a lot going on and I'm sure some scary moments or funny moments of trying to balance it all, quote unquote, but like how was that experience?
Emilie (16:35)
Yeah, so I have given up most social media, but like a lot of millennials, I have some vices that I just can't kick. And recently Reddit has become one of mine. And I read a lot of these working mom. really? Okay, after we're done recording, I want to know what subreddits you're into because this is like a new thing for me.
Kelly Yefet (16:50)
Me too.
Recently, yeah. Love it, yes.
Emilie (17:02)
I like the text based communication anyway. you know, something that keeps coming up on a lot of these working mom subreddits is like, I feel so guilty that my kids are in daycare. And I respond to all of them with the exact same comment, which is why wouldn't you want more people to love on your kids? And, you know, I'm not here to judge anyone's lifestyle decisions, but
What has worked really well for me and my family is that I look at the daycare teachers and the babysitters we hire and our nanny and my sister and my brother -in -law and all these people who are around that are helping be a part of our village as exactly that. Like whether it's a paid person through daycare or my sister who...
I just can tell that maybe I should take, she should take my kid for a couple hours. Like those are all my village. And so the way we make it work is by not trying to do it alone. And I think if there's any, it's so hard. Like I recognize that it's impossibly hard. Everyone wants to put on this show of like, I can do it. I'm so tough. I'm figuring it all out by myself. And the reality is it is.
nearly impossible to be vulnerable enough to say, hey, I need help right now. Can you help me? But the only way, the only way I have figured out to have two working parents with more than full -time jobs is to have a village around you. And...
Kelly Yefet (18:41)
I fucking love I love that because I my husband I when we talk about having a family and what it will look like I really struggle with the idea of call it a nanny or I'm like well I should be the person who does who like wakes up with the kid in the morning and puts in the bed and be there for every moment but just when you're like why wouldn't you
Emilie (18:42)
I s -
Kelly Yefet (19:06)
It doesn't mean you love your kid less because there's other people helping. It just makes your kid feel more loved and more different personalities and more ways of encouragement. I've never heard it put that way, but it honestly, that just like really gave me a mind shift into what that could look like. I absolutely love it. Thank you.
Emilie (19:25)
Good!
Good. I mean, so my oldest now is three, almost three and a half. And when, prior to having any kids, like pre -pandemic, I was one of those annoying people did CrossFit six days a week. Now I'm one of those annoying people who only does CrossFit three days a week. And there was a lot, yeah, I only talk about it half as much now.
Kelly Yefet (19:34)
Right?
Right.
That's better.
Emilie (19:56)
The big thing for me after I had my, you know, I got pregnant with my first kid, the pandemic hit, I stopped leaving the house, so I stopped doing CrossFit. And then my second life got crazy after my first kid and trying to figure out how to be a mom and work and everything. And then I had my second kid and so I didn't go back to the gym. And then after he was born, I started getting back into like training and weightlifting and.
I was struggling with where to fit it in my schedule. How could I possibly find two hours, or an hour and a half, it's really two hours, a couple days a week to go to the gym. If you're in the gym for a one hour class, it takes you 20 minutes to get there, maybe it takes you 20 minutes to shower, there you go, two hours.
you know, my husband's job has him out of the house early every day. My alarm goes off at 5 .30 and he's already gone for the day. And so he never does the morning shift. And so I was doing that five days a week and I had someone say to me like, what if you did it two days a week? Or what if you did it two days a week plus only one of the weekend days and your husband could take the other?
And that was just like such an aha moment to me that like, I don't need to be the only person who shepherds my kids to daycare. Because what does it mean to wake up my kids in the morning and get them to daycare? It's nagging them the whole time.
And the woman who takes my kids to school, let's call her Sally for Sally, my toddler says all the time, Sally's my best friend. Sally, I love Sally.
Kelly Yefet (21:25)
Right.
Emilie (21:35)
For Mother's Day, he wished her a happy Mother's Day because she is part of this care team that's caring for him and she loves on him. I think about what it was like when I was growing up where I had two lower middle class parents, working class parents, and a babysitter who in a home daycare situation. I grew up with her kids. I'm the godmother.
to my babysitter's daughter's children. There's no reason that just because we have these care relationships doesn't mean we can't also genuinely care for the people that are part of our lives. I certainly, I'm not perfect, but I don't feel guilt when I travel for work for three days and get.
three beautiful nights of sleep. I definitely don't feel guilt if I have to wake up a little bit early to get some work done. Like, those are the things that work for me. They're the things that work for my husband. It's not for everyone, but we love our careers and our families. And I don't think we should have to
Kelly Yefet (22:29)
Right.
Emilie (22:43)
Choose between those.
Kelly Yefet (22:44)
It's so refreshing to hear and it's true because you are so passionate about what you're building and the company and your family. You can have it all, you just have to make it work for you. I did want to actually touch on your family and growing up a little bit you do come from an immigrant family. They were not entrepreneurs. I'm curious about anything you learned from your family or your parents.
that impacted the way you're a founder, the way you're a leader, or how you started your business.
Emilie (23:13)
Mmm.
Yeah, I have this like super clear memory and I don't remember any of the details around this memory But growing up, my mom worked at, my mom actually still works at Dunkin' Donuts. She's worked at Dunkin' Donuts since 1999, which is incredible.
So, my mom's working at the Dunkin' Donuts, a couple blocks from my school, and I can still see it on the inside of my head, but we're walking out of the store, and there's a straw wrapper on the ground, and she just, as she's walking, she picks it up, she puts it in her pocket. She doesn't make a stink out of it, she doesn't put on a show, she just, like, picks up the straw wrapper.
puts it in her pocket and moves on. And this really stuck out to me. But like, if there was an example of like, see problem, fix problem, that stuck with me, that was it. Because what I saw was like, my mom saw a problem. And there are lots of ways she could have handled it, right? She could have said, hey, Johnny, can you clean the dining room?
Or she could have made a big show of like, I'm gonna clean this straw wrapper. Nope, she just picked it up and she put it away and we moved on. And things were better than they were when she walked out of the dining room, right? And I think about that all the time because if there's anything that I hope that someone can use to describe my own work style, it's that, like, solve problem, fix problem. And not because I'm doing it for pomp and circumstance or because I want all that.
But just this idea that if we all just make things a little bit better every day, it will be better for everyone, a whole lot better in a month, incredibly better in a year. Life is easier when we play like we're on the same team. And so this straw wrapper, it's such a small thing, but in the grand scheme of things, if she had walked right by it and she didn't care about it, like,
Kelly Yefet (25:15)
Yeah.
Emilie (25:21)
for her employees who would have seen her not care about it, they would have taken the impression that it's okay to not care about those things. And then when they walk by it, they would have done the same thing. So it can be this chain reaction for good or this train reaction for indifference.
Kelly Yefet (25:38)
Isn't it funny how these little meaningless things, to your mom, she probably did not think twice about it, but that it has stuck with you as such a message and such a meaningful message in so many different ways all these years later. I find it so fascinating and to think about all these other little moments of impact as a leader growing a business when people are constantly watching you and picking up on these little things you're doing.
that forms the culture or forms the way that you're building your business or raising your children.
want to dig in a bit to Turbine and the business. If my understanding is correct, you started as a solopreneur. And I'm curious if that was a decision you made, if you have since brought on a co -founder or what that experience is because I...
The more that I have these conversations, the more I realize how difficult it must be as a solo founder.
Emilie (26:37)
I did have a co -founder who's a really wonderful human. We had never worked together prior, and I think that there is, that is a very hard thing to learn to do on the fly in such a high stakes situation.
And we just had really different work styles. you know, the, we both kind of mutually looked at the situation and recognized that it was not the best fit. And.
there was a very amicable separation there. And I think it was best for all parties involved. Yeah.
Kelly Yefet (27:20)
That's lucky. Yeah. How did you, because you raised also quite early in the business. So how did you balance raising? Isn't like you whip together a deck in an evening and that's it. It's almost a full -time job. So I'm curious how you balanced the decision to raise and all the pieces that come with that and starting the business at the same time and being a full -time founder, because those are.
two very, very full -time jobs.
Emilie (27:51)
I did a lot of customer discovery before.
like before we decided to raise and before I like did that all in quit my job to work on Turbine. And so like, I was having serious conversations with potential design partners six months before, before I ended up working on Turbine full time.
Kelly Yefet (27:57)
Okay.
Emilie (28:16)
I remember wanting to talk to a very specific persona. A couple of my friends, I would go through their LinkedIn connections and say, hey, can you introduce me to this person? And after doing that a lot, I started seeing a pattern.
in the problems that I was talking to people about. And then the other thing is people have other people who do their job in their network, right? Whether it's people they work with or people they worked with in a previous role. And so I would talk to someone at this company and say, do you know anyone who's dealing with this at a company similar to yours? And they would say, yes, you should talk to my friend ABC. And,
Kelly Yefet (29:00)
Mmm.
Emilie (29:01)
Then it was almost like I could find that target persona and hear the problems that they were all having. And that allowed me to do a lot of validation and de -risking before I was at the point where I was like, okay, we're gonna do this as a business. So, you know, I must have had...
close to 100 discovery conversations between March and September while working full time. So it was like a side project for lack of a better term. And then, so when September rolled around and I said, I'm gonna go all in on this, I had already kind of found some of the contours and the shape of what we were doing. We weren't like figuring it out.
Kelly Yefet (29:53)
find when working, because I do some growth advising or brand advising for startups that if it's really early stage, sometimes that piece is missing. It's like they have a great idea, but finding that product market bit or really doing that discovery early on is not thoroughly done because they're just so passionate about the idea. And it ends up meaning that you have to pivot a lot more down the line. So it's a, I mean,
I definitely feel this de -risk theme coming through your story, but what a way to save you so many headaches down the line. But I guess my question from that naturally is like, were there still mistakes or pivots that you had to make even with that?
Emilie (30:35)
Yeah, so I'll highlight one that is probably the biggest pain point and ended up posing the largest hurdle for us down the road is that the timing, we were selling to multi -channel, omni -channel consumer brands, right? And you know, the worst time of year to sell into those brands, November, October, November, December, it's like,
You know, it's not uncommon for...
brand that does most of their sales around Christmas to do like 50 % of their revenue in the last quarter of the year between Black Friday and the holiday season. And so like we got all this great validation, we got all this feedback. I'm like, great, I'm gonna quit my job to work on this full time. And everyone goes radio silence.
Kelly Yefet (31:27)
Yeah, BFCM, that's the only thing they're focused on. Nothing else, yeah.
Emilie (31:31)
I know. Yeah, and so, you know, I was looking at it from what's the best timing for me, and that was the right timing for me. But what that meant was we had like all these traction conversations that just froze
And so, I don't know what I would do differently, but I will say that was one lesson that if I could only go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be that.
Kelly Yefet (32:08)
It's hard when you don't have a, like, I would have done, you know, you're not saying, but I would have done a X, Y, Z, that there's not a clear alternative. It was just the timing sucked and.
Emilie (32:19)
Yeah, yeah.
Kelly Yefet (32:21)
That's tough.
Emilie (32:22)
yeah, I don't know what the alternative would have been. Actually, I was just listening to a podcast this morning from the founder of Shipt, S -H -I -P -T,
Kelly Yefet (32:33)
Okay.
Emilie (32:34)
he actually stopped going to school and then school called his parents. And then after a lot of conversations and sounds like potential disagreement with his parents, his parents eventually let him drop out to start this venture full time.
If you shifted the timeline even by two years so that I actually finished high school before starting that first company and pushed the shift timeline out two years, it wouldn't have worked. And I think about that a lot because it's like, if we had started Turbine three months later, would we have found, what would have been different? Like, I don't know.
Kelly Yefet (33:13)
even maybe the VCs wouldn't have been ready anymore or your first amazing hire wouldn't have would have gotten a different or whatever it may be but it's true everything sort of happens you know the way it's supposed to which frequently
Emilie (33:16)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Maybe our name would be Turbine Chat GPT or something.
Kelly Yefet (33:32)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. It could have been so different. So you're two years into it, you're going strong.
Emilie (33:36)
Haha.
Kelly Yefet (33:40)
What is it that continues to value or things that just have stood out to you as you are bringing on new customers?
Emilie (33:48)
you know, I, I regularly am just so impressed by the sheer willpower of our customers to solve some of their problems.
I have this recurring task every Friday that says hit email inbox zero and I don't think I've hit it in like six weeks. It just keeps rolling over and yelling at me. But it's just absolutely incredible, the dedication and the diligence and that discipline. And so when I talk to them about Turbine and I get to see their faces light up and they're like, my God, I can see how this is gonna save me time and energy. I get excited by that.
it's a team effort because so much of what we've built, so much of what we've done is in direct response to the feedback we're getting from our customers. Our customers, our design partners, our early users, the people who are willing to hop on a call and listen to us talk through these things. Those are every step along the way.
Kelly Yefet (34:50)
Yeah, and such a great way to build like then you know that you're truly building the right features, the right product. So I have my last two questions for you. So the second last one, as founders, you're told a million one pieces of advice. And I'm curious if there's a myth or something you were told that for future founders, you would want to dispel.
Emilie (35:12)
I think there is this stereotype of like the young 19 year old founder who lives in a hacker house with no obligations. I think part of the reason people are like tech founder or like tech bro is that that's what they think of. You know, it's Mark Zuckerberg as the jerk in the social network movie or something to that effect. And.
Kelly Yefet (35:22)
Right.
Mm -hmm.
Right.
Emilie (35:41)
I want to challenge the idea of what we think of as founders. I think that's one of the reasons I loved your podcast, Kelly, is that it's not that, like that isn't what every tech, every entrepreneur or every tech entrepreneur looks like. And I do think it's hard for people to imagine themselves in a position if they don't see someone who looks or sounds or has life experiences like them. So.
Kelly Yefet (35:54)
We'll be back in a minute. All right.
Emilie (36:11)
yeah, I think I'd want to dispel the idea that like the only successful founder is like young something, 20 something tech bro who stays up till 2 a on like ketamine and bread bowl or something.
Kelly Yefet (36:28)
It's very true. And that's part of why I love these conversations because it goes to show what an array of people can start really incredible businesses. It was part of what I loved working at Shopify was that...
It was empowering anyone to be an entrepreneur and any type of entrepreneur. So I think I like that myth. I think that's a really great one. My last question for you, as you know, the podcast is called How I Became. So I leave it to you to name your episode. So we're talking about Emilie and how you became.
Emilie (36:43)
Mm -hmm.
I think it really comes down to how I became the Turbine founder. And part of it is because I'm only 10 years into my career. Turbine is what I'm doing now. It takes up my brain space. It's what I hope to be doing for the next five, 10 years. But it's not what I'm gonna be doing forever. And I think all those things that we talked about from being in college to being in Venture for America to all these crazy startup experiences to starting a family, those all -
shape how I approach my role at Turbine. But that's only a small piece of the Grander Emilie puzzle.
Kelly Yefet (37:40)
Thank you so much, Emilie, for joining me today. I really enjoyed this podcast and I know our listeners are going to love it too.
Emilie (37:48)
Thank you, Kelly. I really appreciate it.