Aoifinn Devitt: As a female founder, typically, so it’s, no one will probably tell you this to your face, obviously, but there’s a female founder discount. What that means is typically, if you’re a female founder, you don’t get as high of a valuation for your company, or you don’t get as much money than your male counterpart. The reason for that, who knows, right? It may be the way female founders pitch, maybe the way male founders pitch, maybe the difference between those two, or maybe unconscious bias of venture capitalists that majority male. But regardless of the reason, that is the reality. As a female founder, if you haven’t raised a lot of money or you’ve raised money but you diluted more of your company, therefore you’re not able to really take the secondary financing, you’re not able to invest that money back into other female founders.
Ahryun Moon: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Focus Podcast., a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the worlds of investment and tech by focusing on people and their stories. I’m joined today by Arianne Moon, who is founder and head of company strategy at goodtime.io, a company designed to boost employee productivity by making scheduling meetings easier. This is not her first time founding a company. She also founded Etch Keyboard and previously worked as a financial accountant and financial analyst. Welcome, Arianne. Thanks for joining me today.
Aoifinn Devitt: Thank you for having me.
Ahryun Moon: Well, let’s start by talking about your career journey and your background. Where did you study and how did you come to enter the world of tech and finance?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. So I was born and raised in South Korea. I grew up there until I was 16 and I went to high school in Canada, Vancouver, Canada, and then came down to Austin, Texas for college. So my upbringing was pretty much entirely in South Korea. I went to college in Austin, Texas, and that’s where I started my first career as an accountant and financial analyst as well. And through my journey as a financial analyst, I realized I actually really had a lot of passion for engineering, automating workflows, and so on. I can get into more details later, but through that, I was able to really find my new passion in engineering. So decided to move out to San Francisco and really pursue a career in engineering. And what happened is I kind of stepped into more of an entrepreneurial journey, and I can tell you more about how I was able to get into an entrepreneurial journey and became the CEO of GoodTime.
Ahryun Moon: That’s great. We’ll certainly go back into your background and some of the, I suppose, the characteristics of that that made you have the entrepreneur’s mindset. But let’s talk about maybe the problem that you saw that you needed to solve. What was that problem that maybe kicked all of this off?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. So, early on before GoodTime, the 3 founders, we were all builders. We were all technical. We were all builders. So, we thought it would be really a lot of fun to go to a bunch of hackathons together. So, we did. We went to some of the largest hackathons, including Salesforce Hackathon, Launch Hackathon, Toyota Hackathon, and so on. We thought it was a lot of fun to build something over 3 days’ work and so on. So, we won, I believe we won all of the hackathons that we’ve gone to as a team. The last hackathon that we went to, the person who was in charge of giving us the award for winning the hackathon was a recruiter. She was a recruiter from Coinbase, and she mentioned in passing to us that she spends more than half of her day scheduling interviews rescheduling interviews and tracking down people who didn’t show up to the interviews and so on. And she was complaining about how she didn’t have enough time to actually do the recruiting work. And that was really the impetus of the time. We thought, oh, what if we could automate the part that she hates? And then beyond that, we really expanded our horizon to include all meetings because we found out that that’s not just limited to recruiting world. Meeting ineffectiveness affects every single professional. So, we wanted to expand the horizon, and now our product really encompasses is not only interviews, but all meetings outside of interviews.
Ahryun Moon: And can you talk us through then some of the research you did to establish whether this was an industry-wide problem? Because I know that your LinkedIn profile talks about undercover work. Can you talk about that?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. So early on when we were building GoodTime, our flagship product, GoodTime Hire, which is to make interviews smarter, automating the entire interview process, and so on. We realized quickly that we didn’t have the expertise in recruiting. And how do we build an amazing product when we don’t really understand our end users, our customers, and aspirations and frustrations that they go through and they have on a daily basis? So, we thought, what if we could actually embed one of us in some of our customers-to-be? And really understand what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes. So, I embedded myself in 3 of our customers and customers-to-be. They all ended up becoming customers, but it was MuleSoft, which was acquired by Salesforce a few years back, Airbnb, and Dropbox. So, those 3 companies I worked at as a $0 per hour contractor. I just asked them to use me for anything. I just want to feel the pain points on a daily basis and actually go through the manual process myself. So that I can build a better product. So, at MuleSoft, it was definitely undercover work because my colleagues actually didn’t know that I was there to really learn the process instead of actually working there. And then, the other two positions, everyone knew, so it was— that’s why I put NASA undercover. But that’s really how we built the product early on by being the customer and What that really helped us do was we started building the product and we were able to make more of a faster decision and more accurate decisions because I knew exactly what it’s like to go through that manual process. So, a lot of the learnings that I had from working at those 3 companies actually became part of GoodTime.
Ahryun Moon: Well, I’d love to dig in now to the concept of employee productivity because we all crave it. We all need more of it. And tech was supposed to bring it. It’s obviously bringing it to a huge degree, but what are some of the, I suppose, the challenges and the weaknesses in our current working model? And I think you can talk about your experience there that we’re facing. And I suppose, how did you go about solving that?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, definitely. So, I guess now after COVID, now that most teams are either remote or at least hybrid. Though there are quite a lot of companies that are really bringing all the employees back to office full-time, still we are seeing majority of the companies that are being okay with hybrid model or a fully remote model. Like, for example, GoodTime is a fully remote company now. And with that, there’s productivity that comes with that, and also the opposite side of it as well. The productivity is that each meeting is just a Zoom click away. Instead of having to find a room and traveling to the room and so on, which you end up losing a lot of time doing so, and it’s more hassle to book a meeting. Now, it’s meeting is just a Zoom click away. So you can go from one meeting to another really, really quickly. So therefore, there are even more meetings on everyone’s calendars. Before COVID there were with kind of a really rough calculation about 44 million business meetings that happen every single day just in the United States alone. And after COVID, now that everything’s pretty much virtual, there are 66 million business meetings that happen on a daily basis. So about a 50% increase in the number of meetings. So people are going into meetings really, really quickly, and it’s a lot easier. So yes, you get a lot more productivity from that, but at the same time, because of that, the fatigue that comes with it. And if you are going from one meeting to another, then you kind of lose focus. Sometimes people completely defocus from the conversation. You end up doing a lot of things. You have Zoom on one screen, and then you’re doing something else on the other screen, so you lose productivity and so on. So there’s definitely pros and cons that comes from being remote and being virtual. So what GoodTime is setting out to do is to make meetings smarter. How we do that is, number one, is putting the right people into each and every meeting. Based on data, we try to put the right people into each and every meeting. And with our second product, GoodTime Meet, we are venturing further into how do we make actually meetings more smarter. That includes making sure that there is an agenda for it, there’s clear outcome for every single meeting that everyone is aligned on. So that at the end of the meeting, you can actually rate the meeting, whether the meeting was successful or not successful because you didn’t get to the goal that you’re trying to get to, and so on. So, how we are solving the efficiency issue that comes with being remote and virtual is through meetings, because you at least spend about 30% of your time in meetings, and if we can actually make those 30% of your time more effective, more impactful, and you actually get more out of every single meeting, then we think that we can solve at least 30% of the efficiency issue that comes with being virtual.
Ahryun Moon: I love that the discipline around an agenda and also that sort of self-critique at the end, the assessment of the efficacy of a meeting, which I think is good governance that probably a lot more committees and meeting groups probably need to do. One of the other issues that comes up a little bit, especially in remote meetings, is airtime. And everybody getting to speak, I suppose you also track perhaps how much different people are contributing.
Aoifinn Devitt: So we don’t participate yet in the actual meeting. So we automate the meetings and making sure that the meeting is happening at the right time. And also you have the right people in every single meeting. And we also, right now, our new product that I lead is contributing to making sure there’s the right agenda and goal and so on, but we don’t necessarily participate in, for example, a Zoom meeting. But we don’t know who’s speaking how much. We may venture into that in the future, but that’s the area that we don’t participate in. But if the team at the end of the meeting rates that, hey, it was 5 out of 5, we got to the goal, then we know that those people who rated the meeting high had a chance to have some airtime and was able to speak their mind in the meeting and got to a good conclusion. That’s how we know that meeting was actually successful or not.
Ahryun Moon: It’s really interesting. It definitely gets to the core of management techniques and leadership techniques that we’re focusing on now is making those meeting times productive. Let’s talk now about your experience as a founder. Can you talk us through that in terms of the decision to strike out on your own? You mentioned you’re all remote as an entity, decision behind that, and maybe how you get that funding to get off the ground.
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, definitely. So early on when we were starting GoodTime, By the way, Edge Keyboard was the idea that we built at the hackathon, and that kind of evolved into GoodTime through our conversation with the recruiter from Coinbase. So, it’s actually a continuation. So, it’s the same company. And when we were building GoodTime early on, actually, I never really founded a company before. I didn’t know how to raise money, and I had no one that I really knew in San Francisco either. I had no network. Couple of things that I did was one, we participated in an accelerator called Alchemist Accelerator, and they gave me this network that I could tap into. And also I had one friend who now is an extremely successful CEO of another company called LaunchDarkly, Edith Harbaugh. So I knew her from my personal network that I built when I first landed in San Francisco. And I just went to her and I asked her, because she just raised Series C at that point, and she is an extremely successful entrepreneur, another female entrepreneur. I went to her and asked, hey, how do I raise money? And I was kind of frustrated at that point because really in San Francisco, it’s who you know, and I really didn’t know anyone. She told me that, hey, why don’t you use my name and raise money? I’ll give you a little bit of money and be your first angel investor. And you can use me as the first stepping stone to get your second check and then third check and so on. So I did. So she actually wired $100 to our company bank account. I still have her on the cap table. And I was able to use her name to get to my second and third check. And pretty much the rest is history. And the question about how we decided to go remote, that was back in March 2020, when everything kind of shifted overnight. We were extremely in-person culture at that point. And we had an office, really nice office in San Francisco, and we had to adjust a lot to make this work. And then we realized there’s a really huge benefit in being remote because you can hire from anywhere and you can hire amazing talent. Regardless of their geographical location. So we decided to stay remote and just get really good at this.
Ahryun Moon: And that’s worked well for talent, say, that you’ve never met in person. Have you found that you’ve been able to connect and be productive together, even if you’ve never actually been in that office together?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So that’s a really great question. Yes and no. So yes, meaning we do try to reinvent this experience, employee experience in a remote setting. But there’s definitely challenge. It’s not the same as being in the office, going out to coffee on a daily basis, having lunch together, and so on. That type of physical proximity and the camaraderie that comes from that is missing there. So, what we try to do is, yes, we do a lot of things remotely and try to kind of reinvent this experience, but at the same time, we try to meet in person and do company offsite. So we did last one in December last year in Las Vegas, and that was so much fun. And you just have a very different energy that you take away from the company offsite. So we are doing another one pretty soon, and we are going to try to do that every other quarter or so, and in the future, if possible, every quarter.
Ahryun Moon: And I’d like to also ask about the importance of that endorsement that you had from a well-known tech personality or somebody who’s very well respected in this space. It seemed that both that endorsement, as well as the fact that they were not going to be the first check, were two factors. How would you describe the fundraising process, notwithstanding having those two positives?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, that’s my personal experience. So without those endorsements, would I have been able to raise money? I don’t know, to be honest, but there’s like no set journey that you take as a founder to get to your first check and, you know, being able to successfully raise money. Everyone has their own way to get there. It’s so much hustle and creativity and just resilience. And you do whatever it takes to get to your first check and be able to raise your first seed round and so on. The answer is, I don’t know, but I would say without endorsement, it’s probably really, really difficult because it’s all about the network and people, you know, in Silicon Valley.
Ahryun Moon: And I’d love to also ask about your impression of the diversity in the industries that you work in and how much that has had a bearing maybe on your network or on your ability to make contact with angel investors or venture capitalists? This whole podcast series is generally about diversity. What would be your score maybe that you give the industries you’ve worked in?
Aoifinn Devitt: Let’s see. Great question. It’s an interesting question. So diversity is a clear problem in the entrepreneurial world. There are not a lot of female founders. There’s a bit of glass ceiling, I do think that, or I would say not ceiling, I would say glass wall that I ran into that I had to break through. As a female founder, typically, so it’s, no one will probably tell you this to your face, obviously, but there’s a female founder discount. What that means is typically if you’re a female founder, you don’t get as high of a valuation for your company. Or you don’t get as much money than your male counterpart. The reason for that, who knows, right? It may be the way female founders pitch, maybe the way male founders pitch, maybe the difference between those two, or maybe unconscious bias of venture capitalists that are majority male. But regardless of the reason, that is the reality. But that actually has a downward spiral impact So if you, as a female founder, say a male founder was able to raise a lot more money and a lot better valuation, and as a female founder, you don’t get that same treatment, what happens is you raise less money or you dilute more of your company to be able to raise the same money. What happens is then as a startup founder, if you are doing the right thing and making the right business decisions, money creates more money, right? And then you grow faster, your company does better, your company grows faster from ARR perspective, your usage perspective, and so on. You can hire more people, you can hire better people, therefore your business outcome is better if you raise money, a lot of money at the beginning. If that’s not an option that’s given to female founders, then the opposite of that is you don’t grow as fast, your company doesn’t do as well, you’re not able to hire people of high caliber, higher caliber, and so on, or you don’t get to hire as many people. So there is a talent stream impact to that, and that actually carries on through the rest of your funding round. So unless you do exceptionally better than, for example, your male counterparts, then it’s really hard to catch up. If you are subject to that kind of effect from the beginning of your entrepreneurial career. And then the downstream impact to that, what ends up happening is female founders, we want to grow faster, we need capital to do so. Then what ends up happening is you dilute more of your company. So you end up with smaller chunk of your company. Then what happens is I’ve heard that a lot more male founders end up taking secondary financing and then they actually reinvest that into their other founder friends’ startups, but they become investors too, and therefore you have a lot more say in the investment community, entrepreneurial community, and so on. As a female founder, if you haven’t raised a lot of money, or you’ve raised money but you diluted more of your company, therefore you’re not able to really take the secondary financing, you’re not able to invest that money back into other female founders. So I really wish that somehow we can come to some kind of equilibrium where female founders are able to raise at the valuation that they deserve and they are able to raise more money. And therefore, with that money, they can in the future, when company does really well, take the secondary financing and use that money to reinvest back into female founder community. Right now, that positive cycle is just not happening. Female founders typically don’t even have money to be able to reinvest back into female founder community, which I think I really wish we can change that.
Ahryun Moon: That is such an interesting observation. And it actually, I’ve heard it from not just female founders, but from any underrepresented group, because it is exactly the same dynamic at play. And I think what we need to do is it’s a chain. It’s like the poverty trap becomes a trap. One factor creates another and it traps people in that category. I think this is clearly a system we’re talking about. You’re a tech expert and engineer. You know what systems thinking and it’s everything is affecting the other. It is a chain reaction. So I almost think instead of endorsing, as International Women’s Day did this year, groups to break the bias, which is perhaps a lofty aspiration, we probably can’t break it completely. But if we could just break the chain somewhere along the chain, maybe that would be not all that’s needed, but that would be so key to stop that, as you mentioned, the downward spiral. Such an interesting observation. Thank you. Have you found that there are any affinity groups or groups that maybe are women in VC or female founder groups that have somehow been supportive? Have you come across any of those?
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s a great question. I recently was invited to this dinner where some female venture capitalists as well as female founders got together. That was actually extremely encouraging to see other female founders that are extremely successful. They’re really forging their own path. And also there are female venture capitalists that are there to help. And sometimes people don’t know how to help or where to find female founders to extend help to. And those organizations that do exist definitely are extremely helpful. And the one that I went to, to have dinner with, that was actually extremely encouraging to have some colleagues in this, or like comrades in this type of entrepreneurial journey. So definitely there are ones out there. Yes.
Ahryun Moon: That’s so interesting. And I think it is true that the more we do to get to showcase stories, and it’s like coming full circle to the recruiting question we raised at the beginning, that’s often a problem in recruiting is that people cannot get a diverse pool of applicants because maybe they’re not looking in the right places. So I think having more visibility is all about making these pools more obvious. Just want to return to some personal reflections now. Would you say there were any highs and lows of your career as a founder so far that you can share?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, a lot of them. Many highs and many lows. Let’s see, some lows were back in 2020 when the world was turned upside down. It was definitely a difficult time for a lot of startups, and we actually had to make some really, really tough decisions at that point. Furlough a couple, some of our employees, I think it was 3 to 5 or so of our employees, and that was probably the toughest decision that I’ve ever made in my career ever. We were able to bring some of them back, And some of them actually found another position while being furloughed. But that was a very, very tough decision. But as a founder, that’s the types of decisions that you make, you have to make, you have to be that person to make those types of decisions and stand by it, even though it weighs on you, it’s extremely, extremely difficult. And probably, frankly, it’s even more difficult for those employees that are being impacted. And also the ones that are at the company that are being impacted by their seeing their colleagues being furloughed. So, it’s difficult for everyone, but it wasn’t an easy decision at all as a founder. So, that was one of my lows that I recall. Highs, there’s so many highs. The very first high that I remember was when we got the first check from a customer. We were like, whoa, there’s actually companies out there that are willing to pay for what we made. That was a revelation for us. Yeah, we, I still have the photo of us, the founders, actually holding the check together. So that was my first high. And every funding round is a high for me. Every amazing customer that we work with is a high for me. Salesforce is one of our customers. And now we’re extremely proud of the fact that our customer base is growing and the caliber of our customers is really amazing. So that really goes to say about our product reputation and how much of value our product drives to our customers. So those are all extreme highs, and we live for those moments and get through those lows when it gets really tough. But yeah, there are a lot of highs and lows.
Ahryun Moon: And it’s interesting because some founders, it seems right now, are only just now, as some of the sheen is coming off the tech world, experiencing that pain of layoffs and furloughing and hiring freezes, and they may have only seen the good times so far. So really interesting that you saw that at the outset. They say sometimes that the life of a founder can be a lonely one. Have there been key people in your career that have really made an impression on you and made a positive impression?
Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I am a female founder, but at the same time, we are what I call a couplepreneur. So one of my co-founders is my husband. We’ve been together for more than 15 years now and we founded the company together and I’m total like a bulldozer. I’m like, let’s move forward type of person. So I have high highs and low lows, whereas my husband is a very much of a very zen type of person. He’s a very even-keeled person. He’s an ocean for me. So he influenced me a lot throughout my entrepreneurial career. He really grounded me. When things either get extremely happy or, you know, extremely tough, he was the one who grounded me, who kept me going, who gives me a lot of advice and provides a lot of perspectives that are in my blind spots. So, I would say my husband actually influenced me a lot in my career, so much so that I probably wouldn’t be able to do a startup without him, ever.
Ahryun Moon: And when you look back, maybe at any key pieces of advice you were given, Is there anything you can share or any creed or motto that you live by?
Aoifinn Devitt: Oh yeah, absolutely. The motto that I live by is there’s no answer. There’s no right answer. Typically, when you go through an accelerator, they give you dos and don’ts. Also, a lot of people will give you, hey, this is the way you do it. This is the way you raise money. You shouldn’t be doing that. That’s a no-no type of thing. But that’s Typically what everyone else thought. And I found out that my journey was not a normal one. And I just did whatever I, whether it be dos or don’ts, even the don’ts that people told me never to do. I’m like, what the hell? I’m going to try it. I’ve exhausted all the other avenues. This is the only one I’m going to just try it. And it worked. There’s no right answer to success or no right answer to raising your first dollar. Or landing your first customer. So my motto is there’s no right answer. What you do, you have to really believe in your decision and do it and make that the right decision.
Ahryun Moon: So my last question is around any advice you would have at this stage of your life for your younger self. If you were perhaps that young student coming out of Austin or thinking about problems to solve in the productivity space, Is there anything you know now you wish you had known then?
Aoifinn Devitt: Oh yeah, absolutely. If I were to give advice to my younger self when I was back in early 20s, for example, I would definitely tell myself to explore a career in engineering earlier. It happened to chance that I fell in love with engineering, programming, coding, but that was like in my mid-20s, late 20s. I really wish I was able to can explore engineering as an option. Growing up in South Korea back in the 1990s and 2000s, it wasn’t necessarily an option to me. No one really put that on the table as an option, as a career option for me, but I really wish someone did because that was the best decision that I’ve ever made, to put finance and accounting behind me and really pursue engineering, programming, Coding, creating something out of nothing and really turning my idea into something that people can use and that makes a huge difference in people’s lives. So I would absolutely give that advice to myself.
Ahryun Moon: Well, thank you so much, Arianne. I think in the aftermath of COVID we’re also much more focused on having productive work environments and deriving a sense of purpose from that. And productivity is absolutely central to that. And minimizing time and busywork and I suppose less productive tasks. So thank you so much for finding a solution for that. But moreover, thank you for being such a visionary and bringing such clear enjoyment and enthusiasm and optimism to this area. It’s been really infectious and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
Aoifinn Devitt: Likewise, thank you so much for having me today.
Ahryun Moon: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Focus Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring founders and their stories, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitt: As a female founder, typically, so it’s, no one will probably tell you this to your face, obviously, but there’s a female founder discount. What that means is typically, if you’re a female founder, you don’t get as high of a valuation for your company, or you don’t get as much money than your male counterpart. The reason for that, who knows, right? It may be the way female founders pitch, maybe the way male founders pitch, maybe the difference between those two, or maybe unconscious bias of venture capitalists that majority male. But regardless of the reason, that is the reality. As a female founder, if you haven’t raised a lot of money or you’ve raised money but you diluted more of your company, therefore you’re not able to really take the secondary financing, you’re not able to invest that money back into other female founders.
Ahryun Moon: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Focus Podcast., a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the worlds of investment and tech by focusing on people and their stories. I’m joined today by Arianne Moon, who is founder and head of company strategy at goodtime.io, a company designed to boost employee productivity by making scheduling meetings easier. This is not her first time founding a company. She also founded Etch Keyboard and previously worked as a financial accountant and financial analyst. Welcome, Arianne. Thanks for joining me today.
Aoifinn Devitt: Thank you for having me.
Ahryun Moon: Well, let’s start by talking about your career journey and your background. Where did you study and how did you come to enter the world of tech and finance?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. So I was born and raised in South Korea. I grew up there until I was 16 and I went to high school in Canada, Vancouver, Canada, and then came down to Austin, Texas for college. So my upbringing was pretty much entirely in South Korea. I went to college in Austin, Texas, and that’s where I started my first career as an accountant and financial analyst as well. And through my journey as a financial analyst, I realized I actually really had a lot of passion for engineering, automating workflows, and so on. I can get into more details later, but through that, I was able to really find my new passion in engineering. So decided to move out to San Francisco and really pursue a career in engineering. And what happened is I kind of stepped into more of an entrepreneurial journey, and I can tell you more about how I was able to get into an entrepreneurial journey and became the CEO of GoodTime.
Ahryun Moon: That’s great. We’ll certainly go back into your background and some of the, I suppose, the characteristics of that that made you have the entrepreneur’s mindset. But let’s talk about maybe the problem that you saw that you needed to solve. What was that problem that maybe kicked all of this off?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. So, early on before GoodTime, the 3 founders, we were all builders. We were all technical. We were all builders. So, we thought it would be really a lot of fun to go to a bunch of hackathons together. So, we did. We went to some of the largest hackathons, including Salesforce Hackathon, Launch Hackathon, Toyota Hackathon, and so on. We thought it was a lot of fun to build something over 3 days’ work and so on. So, we won, I believe we won all of the hackathons that we’ve gone to as a team. The last hackathon that we went to, the person who was in charge of giving us the award for winning the hackathon was a recruiter. She was a recruiter from Coinbase, and she mentioned in passing to us that she spends more than half of her day scheduling interviews rescheduling interviews and tracking down people who didn’t show up to the interviews and so on. And she was complaining about how she didn’t have enough time to actually do the recruiting work. And that was really the impetus of the time. We thought, oh, what if we could automate the part that she hates? And then beyond that, we really expanded our horizon to include all meetings because we found out that that’s not just limited to recruiting world. Meeting ineffectiveness affects every single professional. So, we wanted to expand the horizon, and now our product really encompasses is not only interviews, but all meetings outside of interviews.
Ahryun Moon: And can you talk us through then some of the research you did to establish whether this was an industry-wide problem? Because I know that your LinkedIn profile talks about undercover work. Can you talk about that?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. So early on when we were building GoodTime, our flagship product, GoodTime Hire, which is to make interviews smarter, automating the entire interview process, and so on. We realized quickly that we didn’t have the expertise in recruiting. And how do we build an amazing product when we don’t really understand our end users, our customers, and aspirations and frustrations that they go through and they have on a daily basis? So, we thought, what if we could actually embed one of us in some of our customers-to-be? And really understand what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes. So, I embedded myself in 3 of our customers and customers-to-be. They all ended up becoming customers, but it was MuleSoft, which was acquired by Salesforce a few years back, Airbnb, and Dropbox. So, those 3 companies I worked at as a $0 per hour contractor. I just asked them to use me for anything. I just want to feel the pain points on a daily basis and actually go through the manual process myself. So that I can build a better product. So, at MuleSoft, it was definitely undercover work because my colleagues actually didn’t know that I was there to really learn the process instead of actually working there. And then, the other two positions, everyone knew, so it was— that’s why I put NASA undercover. But that’s really how we built the product early on by being the customer and What that really helped us do was we started building the product and we were able to make more of a faster decision and more accurate decisions because I knew exactly what it’s like to go through that manual process. So, a lot of the learnings that I had from working at those 3 companies actually became part of GoodTime.
Ahryun Moon: Well, I’d love to dig in now to the concept of employee productivity because we all crave it. We all need more of it. And tech was supposed to bring it. It’s obviously bringing it to a huge degree, but what are some of the, I suppose, the challenges and the weaknesses in our current working model? And I think you can talk about your experience there that we’re facing. And I suppose, how did you go about solving that?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, definitely. So, I guess now after COVID, now that most teams are either remote or at least hybrid. Though there are quite a lot of companies that are really bringing all the employees back to office full-time, still we are seeing majority of the companies that are being okay with hybrid model or a fully remote model. Like, for example, GoodTime is a fully remote company now. And with that, there’s productivity that comes with that, and also the opposite side of it as well. The productivity is that each meeting is just a Zoom click away. Instead of having to find a room and traveling to the room and so on, which you end up losing a lot of time doing so, and it’s more hassle to book a meeting. Now, it’s meeting is just a Zoom click away. So you can go from one meeting to another really, really quickly. So therefore, there are even more meetings on everyone’s calendars. Before COVID there were with kind of a really rough calculation about 44 million business meetings that happen every single day just in the United States alone. And after COVID, now that everything’s pretty much virtual, there are 66 million business meetings that happen on a daily basis. So about a 50% increase in the number of meetings. So people are going into meetings really, really quickly, and it’s a lot easier. So yes, you get a lot more productivity from that, but at the same time, because of that, the fatigue that comes with it. And if you are going from one meeting to another, then you kind of lose focus. Sometimes people completely defocus from the conversation. You end up doing a lot of things. You have Zoom on one screen, and then you’re doing something else on the other screen, so you lose productivity and so on. So there’s definitely pros and cons that comes from being remote and being virtual. So what GoodTime is setting out to do is to make meetings smarter. How we do that is, number one, is putting the right people into each and every meeting. Based on data, we try to put the right people into each and every meeting. And with our second product, GoodTime Meet, we are venturing further into how do we make actually meetings more smarter. That includes making sure that there is an agenda for it, there’s clear outcome for every single meeting that everyone is aligned on. So that at the end of the meeting, you can actually rate the meeting, whether the meeting was successful or not successful because you didn’t get to the goal that you’re trying to get to, and so on. So, how we are solving the efficiency issue that comes with being remote and virtual is through meetings, because you at least spend about 30% of your time in meetings, and if we can actually make those 30% of your time more effective, more impactful, and you actually get more out of every single meeting, then we think that we can solve at least 30% of the efficiency issue that comes with being virtual.
Ahryun Moon: I love that the discipline around an agenda and also that sort of self-critique at the end, the assessment of the efficacy of a meeting, which I think is good governance that probably a lot more committees and meeting groups probably need to do. One of the other issues that comes up a little bit, especially in remote meetings, is airtime. And everybody getting to speak, I suppose you also track perhaps how much different people are contributing.
Aoifinn Devitt: So we don’t participate yet in the actual meeting. So we automate the meetings and making sure that the meeting is happening at the right time. And also you have the right people in every single meeting. And we also, right now, our new product that I lead is contributing to making sure there’s the right agenda and goal and so on, but we don’t necessarily participate in, for example, a Zoom meeting. But we don’t know who’s speaking how much. We may venture into that in the future, but that’s the area that we don’t participate in. But if the team at the end of the meeting rates that, hey, it was 5 out of 5, we got to the goal, then we know that those people who rated the meeting high had a chance to have some airtime and was able to speak their mind in the meeting and got to a good conclusion. That’s how we know that meeting was actually successful or not.
Ahryun Moon: It’s really interesting. It definitely gets to the core of management techniques and leadership techniques that we’re focusing on now is making those meeting times productive. Let’s talk now about your experience as a founder. Can you talk us through that in terms of the decision to strike out on your own? You mentioned you’re all remote as an entity, decision behind that, and maybe how you get that funding to get off the ground.
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, definitely. So early on when we were starting GoodTime, By the way, Edge Keyboard was the idea that we built at the hackathon, and that kind of evolved into GoodTime through our conversation with the recruiter from Coinbase. So, it’s actually a continuation. So, it’s the same company. And when we were building GoodTime early on, actually, I never really founded a company before. I didn’t know how to raise money, and I had no one that I really knew in San Francisco either. I had no network. Couple of things that I did was one, we participated in an accelerator called Alchemist Accelerator, and they gave me this network that I could tap into. And also I had one friend who now is an extremely successful CEO of another company called LaunchDarkly, Edith Harbaugh. So I knew her from my personal network that I built when I first landed in San Francisco. And I just went to her and I asked her, because she just raised Series C at that point, and she is an extremely successful entrepreneur, another female entrepreneur. I went to her and asked, hey, how do I raise money? And I was kind of frustrated at that point because really in San Francisco, it’s who you know, and I really didn’t know anyone. She told me that, hey, why don’t you use my name and raise money? I’ll give you a little bit of money and be your first angel investor. And you can use me as the first stepping stone to get your second check and then third check and so on. So I did. So she actually wired $100 to our company bank account. I still have her on the cap table. And I was able to use her name to get to my second and third check. And pretty much the rest is history. And the question about how we decided to go remote, that was back in March 2020, when everything kind of shifted overnight. We were extremely in-person culture at that point. And we had an office, really nice office in San Francisco, and we had to adjust a lot to make this work. And then we realized there’s a really huge benefit in being remote because you can hire from anywhere and you can hire amazing talent. Regardless of their geographical location. So we decided to stay remote and just get really good at this.
Ahryun Moon: And that’s worked well for talent, say, that you’ve never met in person. Have you found that you’ve been able to connect and be productive together, even if you’ve never actually been in that office together?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So that’s a really great question. Yes and no. So yes, meaning we do try to reinvent this experience, employee experience in a remote setting. But there’s definitely challenge. It’s not the same as being in the office, going out to coffee on a daily basis, having lunch together, and so on. That type of physical proximity and the camaraderie that comes from that is missing there. So, what we try to do is, yes, we do a lot of things remotely and try to kind of reinvent this experience, but at the same time, we try to meet in person and do company offsite. So we did last one in December last year in Las Vegas, and that was so much fun. And you just have a very different energy that you take away from the company offsite. So we are doing another one pretty soon, and we are going to try to do that every other quarter or so, and in the future, if possible, every quarter.
Ahryun Moon: And I’d like to also ask about the importance of that endorsement that you had from a well-known tech personality or somebody who’s very well respected in this space. It seemed that both that endorsement, as well as the fact that they were not going to be the first check, were two factors. How would you describe the fundraising process, notwithstanding having those two positives?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, that’s my personal experience. So without those endorsements, would I have been able to raise money? I don’t know, to be honest, but there’s like no set journey that you take as a founder to get to your first check and, you know, being able to successfully raise money. Everyone has their own way to get there. It’s so much hustle and creativity and just resilience. And you do whatever it takes to get to your first check and be able to raise your first seed round and so on. The answer is, I don’t know, but I would say without endorsement, it’s probably really, really difficult because it’s all about the network and people, you know, in Silicon Valley.
Ahryun Moon: And I’d love to also ask about your impression of the diversity in the industries that you work in and how much that has had a bearing maybe on your network or on your ability to make contact with angel investors or venture capitalists? This whole podcast series is generally about diversity. What would be your score maybe that you give the industries you’ve worked in?
Aoifinn Devitt: Let’s see. Great question. It’s an interesting question. So diversity is a clear problem in the entrepreneurial world. There are not a lot of female founders. There’s a bit of glass ceiling, I do think that, or I would say not ceiling, I would say glass wall that I ran into that I had to break through. As a female founder, typically, so it’s, no one will probably tell you this to your face, obviously, but there’s a female founder discount. What that means is typically if you’re a female founder, you don’t get as high of a valuation for your company. Or you don’t get as much money than your male counterpart. The reason for that, who knows, right? It may be the way female founders pitch, maybe the way male founders pitch, maybe the difference between those two, or maybe unconscious bias of venture capitalists that are majority male. But regardless of the reason, that is the reality. But that actually has a downward spiral impact So if you, as a female founder, say a male founder was able to raise a lot more money and a lot better valuation, and as a female founder, you don’t get that same treatment, what happens is you raise less money or you dilute more of your company to be able to raise the same money. What happens is then as a startup founder, if you are doing the right thing and making the right business decisions, money creates more money, right? And then you grow faster, your company does better, your company grows faster from ARR perspective, your usage perspective, and so on. You can hire more people, you can hire better people, therefore your business outcome is better if you raise money, a lot of money at the beginning. If that’s not an option that’s given to female founders, then the opposite of that is you don’t grow as fast, your company doesn’t do as well, you’re not able to hire people of high caliber, higher caliber, and so on, or you don’t get to hire as many people. So there is a talent stream impact to that, and that actually carries on through the rest of your funding round. So unless you do exceptionally better than, for example, your male counterparts, then it’s really hard to catch up. If you are subject to that kind of effect from the beginning of your entrepreneurial career. And then the downstream impact to that, what ends up happening is female founders, we want to grow faster, we need capital to do so. Then what ends up happening is you dilute more of your company. So you end up with smaller chunk of your company. Then what happens is I’ve heard that a lot more male founders end up taking secondary financing and then they actually reinvest that into their other founder friends’ startups, but they become investors too, and therefore you have a lot more say in the investment community, entrepreneurial community, and so on. As a female founder, if you haven’t raised a lot of money, or you’ve raised money but you diluted more of your company, therefore you’re not able to really take the secondary financing, you’re not able to invest that money back into other female founders. So I really wish that somehow we can come to some kind of equilibrium where female founders are able to raise at the valuation that they deserve and they are able to raise more money. And therefore, with that money, they can in the future, when company does really well, take the secondary financing and use that money to reinvest back into female founder community. Right now, that positive cycle is just not happening. Female founders typically don’t even have money to be able to reinvest back into female founder community, which I think I really wish we can change that.
Ahryun Moon: That is such an interesting observation. And it actually, I’ve heard it from not just female founders, but from any underrepresented group, because it is exactly the same dynamic at play. And I think what we need to do is it’s a chain. It’s like the poverty trap becomes a trap. One factor creates another and it traps people in that category. I think this is clearly a system we’re talking about. You’re a tech expert and engineer. You know what systems thinking and it’s everything is affecting the other. It is a chain reaction. So I almost think instead of endorsing, as International Women’s Day did this year, groups to break the bias, which is perhaps a lofty aspiration, we probably can’t break it completely. But if we could just break the chain somewhere along the chain, maybe that would be not all that’s needed, but that would be so key to stop that, as you mentioned, the downward spiral. Such an interesting observation. Thank you. Have you found that there are any affinity groups or groups that maybe are women in VC or female founder groups that have somehow been supportive? Have you come across any of those?
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s a great question. I recently was invited to this dinner where some female venture capitalists as well as female founders got together. That was actually extremely encouraging to see other female founders that are extremely successful. They’re really forging their own path. And also there are female venture capitalists that are there to help. And sometimes people don’t know how to help or where to find female founders to extend help to. And those organizations that do exist definitely are extremely helpful. And the one that I went to, to have dinner with, that was actually extremely encouraging to have some colleagues in this, or like comrades in this type of entrepreneurial journey. So definitely there are ones out there. Yes.
Ahryun Moon: That’s so interesting. And I think it is true that the more we do to get to showcase stories, and it’s like coming full circle to the recruiting question we raised at the beginning, that’s often a problem in recruiting is that people cannot get a diverse pool of applicants because maybe they’re not looking in the right places. So I think having more visibility is all about making these pools more obvious. Just want to return to some personal reflections now. Would you say there were any highs and lows of your career as a founder so far that you can share?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, a lot of them. Many highs and many lows. Let’s see, some lows were back in 2020 when the world was turned upside down. It was definitely a difficult time for a lot of startups, and we actually had to make some really, really tough decisions at that point. Furlough a couple, some of our employees, I think it was 3 to 5 or so of our employees, and that was probably the toughest decision that I’ve ever made in my career ever. We were able to bring some of them back, And some of them actually found another position while being furloughed. But that was a very, very tough decision. But as a founder, that’s the types of decisions that you make, you have to make, you have to be that person to make those types of decisions and stand by it, even though it weighs on you, it’s extremely, extremely difficult. And probably, frankly, it’s even more difficult for those employees that are being impacted. And also the ones that are at the company that are being impacted by their seeing their colleagues being furloughed. So, it’s difficult for everyone, but it wasn’t an easy decision at all as a founder. So, that was one of my lows that I recall. Highs, there’s so many highs. The very first high that I remember was when we got the first check from a customer. We were like, whoa, there’s actually companies out there that are willing to pay for what we made. That was a revelation for us. Yeah, we, I still have the photo of us, the founders, actually holding the check together. So that was my first high. And every funding round is a high for me. Every amazing customer that we work with is a high for me. Salesforce is one of our customers. And now we’re extremely proud of the fact that our customer base is growing and the caliber of our customers is really amazing. So that really goes to say about our product reputation and how much of value our product drives to our customers. So those are all extreme highs, and we live for those moments and get through those lows when it gets really tough. But yeah, there are a lot of highs and lows.
Ahryun Moon: And it’s interesting because some founders, it seems right now, are only just now, as some of the sheen is coming off the tech world, experiencing that pain of layoffs and furloughing and hiring freezes, and they may have only seen the good times so far. So really interesting that you saw that at the outset. They say sometimes that the life of a founder can be a lonely one. Have there been key people in your career that have really made an impression on you and made a positive impression?
Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I am a female founder, but at the same time, we are what I call a couplepreneur. So one of my co-founders is my husband. We’ve been together for more than 15 years now and we founded the company together and I’m total like a bulldozer. I’m like, let’s move forward type of person. So I have high highs and low lows, whereas my husband is a very much of a very zen type of person. He’s a very even-keeled person. He’s an ocean for me. So he influenced me a lot throughout my entrepreneurial career. He really grounded me. When things either get extremely happy or, you know, extremely tough, he was the one who grounded me, who kept me going, who gives me a lot of advice and provides a lot of perspectives that are in my blind spots. So, I would say my husband actually influenced me a lot in my career, so much so that I probably wouldn’t be able to do a startup without him, ever.
Ahryun Moon: And when you look back, maybe at any key pieces of advice you were given, Is there anything you can share or any creed or motto that you live by?
Aoifinn Devitt: Oh yeah, absolutely. The motto that I live by is there’s no answer. There’s no right answer. Typically, when you go through an accelerator, they give you dos and don’ts. Also, a lot of people will give you, hey, this is the way you do it. This is the way you raise money. You shouldn’t be doing that. That’s a no-no type of thing. But that’s Typically what everyone else thought. And I found out that my journey was not a normal one. And I just did whatever I, whether it be dos or don’ts, even the don’ts that people told me never to do. I’m like, what the hell? I’m going to try it. I’ve exhausted all the other avenues. This is the only one I’m going to just try it. And it worked. There’s no right answer to success or no right answer to raising your first dollar. Or landing your first customer. So my motto is there’s no right answer. What you do, you have to really believe in your decision and do it and make that the right decision.
Ahryun Moon: So my last question is around any advice you would have at this stage of your life for your younger self. If you were perhaps that young student coming out of Austin or thinking about problems to solve in the productivity space, Is there anything you know now you wish you had known then?
Aoifinn Devitt: Oh yeah, absolutely. If I were to give advice to my younger self when I was back in early 20s, for example, I would definitely tell myself to explore a career in engineering earlier. It happened to chance that I fell in love with engineering, programming, coding, but that was like in my mid-20s, late 20s. I really wish I was able to can explore engineering as an option. Growing up in South Korea back in the 1990s and 2000s, it wasn’t necessarily an option to me. No one really put that on the table as an option, as a career option for me, but I really wish someone did because that was the best decision that I’ve ever made, to put finance and accounting behind me and really pursue engineering, programming, Coding, creating something out of nothing and really turning my idea into something that people can use and that makes a huge difference in people’s lives. So I would absolutely give that advice to myself.
Ahryun Moon: Well, thank you so much, Arianne. I think in the aftermath of COVID we’re also much more focused on having productive work environments and deriving a sense of purpose from that. And productivity is absolutely central to that. And minimizing time and busywork and I suppose less productive tasks. So thank you so much for finding a solution for that. But moreover, thank you for being such a visionary and bringing such clear enjoyment and enthusiasm and optimism to this area. It’s been really infectious and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
Aoifinn Devitt: Likewise, thank you so much for having me today.
Ahryun Moon: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Focus Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring founders and their stories, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
