YC Female Founders Conference: Talks and advice from six women building companies

Executive overview

Building a company as a woman — especially a woman of color — means confronting funding barriers, imposter syndrome, and the absence of role models simultaneously. Every speaker at this conference confronted that reality and found a way through.

The talks cover five distinct companies (criminal justice tech, security compliance, sleep hardware, a gaming unicorn, and a fashion platform), a VC's perspective on pitching, and live on-stage office hours. Together they form a manual for the early years: finding the idea, getting customers, fundraising, hiring, and staying sane.

The common thread: persistence past the point where most people would stop.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins — Promise: criminal justice reform as a startup

Promise builds software to help counties reduce jail populations by replacing cash bail with supervised release and payment plans.

• 74% of people in jail are awaiting trial — most have not been convicted of the crime they were arrested for
• 85–90% have bails under $500; most are nonviolent offenders who lose jobs, housing, and custody of children within days
• Promise launched without a technical co-founder, without a prototype, and without funding — and still got into YC
• Relationship-based sales, not cold outreach, was the only channel used to land six government clients before leaving YC
• Phaedra's advice: investors need you more than you need them; brand name VCs are not required; YC's main value was forcing a focus on growth metrics and funding deadlines
• On not having a technical co-founder: "We would have been getting bossed around. Now I understand the technology we've built."

Panel — Essential startup advice: Vanta, Remix, GemNote

Make something people want

• Vanta (security compliance automation): spent six to nine months doing manual security audits in spreadsheets before writing code; demand proof came when strangers — not just friends — started requesting the service
• Remix (city transportation planning): a side-project prototype got written up in ten publications overnight; 250 emails from city planners arrived within days asking to use it for long-range plans
• GemNote (corporate gifting): customers liked the handwritten card product but didn't love it; a client told them exactly what they needed (gift fulfillment for HR teams), and the pivot followed

Do things that don't scale

• Vanta manually wrote security audit reports by copying and pasting raw JSON — and told customers the service was "automated"
• Remix hand-carried broken banner stands to a transportation trade show two days after deciding to attend; the presence alone made them look credible in an industry not used to startups
• GemNote fulfilled Airbnb's first 500-gift order with one employee and a boyfriend, while Airbnb assumed they were a 50-person company

Finding customers who love you, not just like you

• Vanta: customers emailed to report bugs on a "brutalist" half-functional website — and kept using it anyway
• Remix: defined a metric called "wins" — every time a city used Remix to communicate a plan, make a policy decision, or publish to the public; customer success team was measured against it
• GemNote: tracked LTV, repeat purchase rate, and net promoter score; qualitative feedback loops with customers were treated as essential, not optional

Firing customers

• Vanta: was upfront when a requested feature was not on the roadmap; some prospects walked away, which was better than over-promising
• Remix: signed Vancouver before realising the product only supported US data and the imperial measurement system; the pilot failed; they eventually won the customer back three years later on a full-featured platform
• GemNote: the test was whether unit economics worked, whether the contact would champion internally, and whether repeat business was likely

Product development in long sales cycles (Remix)

• Sales cycle and product feedback cycle ran in parallel — decoupled entirely
• Weekly touchpoints with customers (visit or call) created a container for bottled-up feedback
• The worst question to ask: "What did you think?" — instead, point at a specific feature and ask what they didn't like, then hold silence

Alexandra Zadarain — Eight Sleep: building a hardware company from zero

Eight is a sleep technology company that makes a smart mattress. Alexandra is co-founder and CMO.

Romance: the idea

• Co-founder Matteo wanted to understand why his restless leg syndrome was worse on some nights; existing trackers weren't designed with sleep in mind
• Three co-founders built a prototype in a garage within weeks; Alexandra joined without consumer marketing experience and with a one-month launch deadline

Becoming a couple: the launch

• Crowdfunding was the validation strategy — if they hit $1M in pre-orders, they could attract VC funding
• $100K raised in the first six hours; $1M by day 45; 8,000 units sold across 67 countries
• None of the team had hardware or manufacturing experience; most of the engineering team moved to China to figure it out

Dissolution: the hard middle

• An investor raised the married co-founders as a problem; sales dried up after the crowdfunding spike; press coverage disappeared
• Applied to YC three times; rejected twice; accepted on the third attempt after bringing a mattress to the interview
• YC shifted their thinking: weekly growth targets replaced the original launch-spike-and-hope model
• Getting beta units into other people's bedrooms — not just the team's — was the key learning shift

Creating lasting love: four lessons

• Customer discovery never stops: Alexandra still does 15 customer calls per month and reviews hundreds of weekly survey responses
• Hire for culture fit, not just skill: early hires who were skilled but misaligned with the working environment created damage that took time to undo
• Track the metrics that drive the business yourself — don't outsource that to a report; ignore vanity metrics (press, followers, capital raised)
• Find your tribe: peers who have seen your problem before, investors who specialise in your category, and mentors who will take a call

Jess Lee — Polyvore to Sequoia: what founders miss when fundraising

Jess joined Polyvore as first PM, became co-founder and CEO, led the Yahoo acquisition, then joined Sequoia as a partner. She co-founded All Raise.

On getting the job by being a user

• Wrote an unsolicited note to Polyvore's founders with product ideas and complaints; they invited her to implement them
• Left Google when her learning had plateaued; the VP's parting words — "you can always come back" — confirmed she should go

On becoming CEO without planning to

• Did whatever fell between the cracks: wrote code, found office space, answered advertiser calls, built out functions; eventually most of the company reported to her
• The founders gave her equity and the co-founder title retroactively — she describes it as one of the most generous acts she witnessed in her career
• The hardest part of being CEO: every time she felt competent, the company grew and the role changed underneath her

Lessons from the Yahoo acquisition

• The process required a "double life" — acquisition meetings hidden from a team that had always had full calendar transparency
• Team reaction on announcement day: cheering, not anger; she had prepared individual envelopes with each employee's earnings
• Integration was harder than the deal: she lost control of culture, hiring decisions, and promotion decisions

What she now looks for as a VC

• Grit and tenacity over pedigree; she asks for a founder's story before asking about the market or product
• Grit is hard to interview for — personal reference calls matter more than pitch performance
• Women founders consistently undersell the dream in fundraising: they say "even with conservative assumptions, we'll be $100M" while male founders just show $500M projections without qualification
• Fix: pitch the big vision unapologetically, then show where you are today as evidence

All Raise

• Started from a dinner Aileen Lee organised after the Me Too wave exposed how siloed women VCs were from each other
• Goals: double the percentage of senior women in VC (from 9%), and increase capital going to female founders (from 15% to 25%) within five years
• The conversation needs to shift from fear ("I don't want to get caught") to greed ("if I don't invest in women, I'll miss huge markets")

On pitching a female-focused product to male VCs

• Don't rely on empathy ("you know that moment when your closet has nothing to wear") — it doesn't land
• Use analogies and numbers: stacking physical copies of September Vogue issues on the table to represent $100M of print advertising, then asking them to imagine it online, worked immediately

Holly Liu — Kabam: from corporate social network to billion-dollar mobile gaming exit

Kabam started in 2006 as a workplace transparency tool, pivoted to TV fan communities on Facebook, then pivoted again to mobile games, and sold for over $1B in 2017.

Pivot one: nobody wanted the original product

• After seven months and three product iterations, only 1,400 users had signed up for the "democratise the workplace" tool
• The saving insight: go to where the users are; Facebook had just launched its developer platform
• Clean slate (not blank slate): they wanted to learn from what failed, not start from nothing

Pivot two: from fan communities to games

• Ad revenue collapsed overnight during the 2008 financial crisis; a $3M contract disappeared; Sequoia sent its "RIP good times" deck
• Three questions for the pivot decision: what's going well? what skills do we have? what are our passion points?
• Answer: Facebook games were growing, the team had 100 years of combined Facebook app experience, and they genuinely loved playing games

Kingdoms of Camelot

• Built on public-domain IP to avoid licensing costs; art students created the assets
• User testing with friends and family was brutal — they nearly abandoned it; launched anyway with parts of the game unbuilt
• The insight from launch: strangers became friends through the game, not existing friends sending each other items; this was a new social mechanic in gaming at the time

Pivot three: from Facebook to mobile

• Facebook enacted a 30% developer tax in 2011 despite prior promises; Kabam's paid acquisition model made this immediately fatal
• With 400 employees and a board, they issued a firm internal edict: no new game launches on Facebook
• Sent a co-founder to China to build a mobile team; Kingdoms of Camelot Mobile became the top-grossing iOS app of 2012

The internal story that nearly cost them everything

• Holly told herself throughout the company's life that she was incompetent and didn't belong
• Her advice: everybody is incompetent; there's no instruction manual; you are the right person because it's your dream
• "You can always have failure without success, but you cannot have success without failure"

On-stage office hours: two early-stage companies

PadPiper — matches interns with furnished short-term rentals from individual landlords

• Supply-constrained: 250 beds in San Francisco; 2,000 students signed up through word of mouth
• Revenue: $300–600 per intern matched; Bay Area market is 30,000 interns per year; US total is 12M
• Core insight from the session: landlords prefer vetted intern tenants over Airbnb (avoids transient risk, rent is often employer-guaranteed, bypasses San Francisco's short-term rental restrictions)
• Suggested customer acquisition: approach real estate lawyers and landlord networks directly

Nifty — Chrome extension that surfaces cross-app data for software engineering teams

• Engineers use 7–10 apps per feature (Confluence, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Zeppelin, Evernote); context-switching costs an estimated 15–20% of productive time
• The product scrapes team data and surfaces relevant content in a sidebar keyed to what the engineer is currently working on
• Main feedback from the session: messaging too abstract at pitch stage; lead with the concrete problem (tab switching, missed updates) not the vision