# Transcript: Featured Session: Founder-Led Growth: Turning Audience Signal into AI-Powered Commerce

**Date:** March 13, 2026 · 10:00 PM  
**Session:** [Featured Session: Founder-Led Growth: Turning Audience Signal into AI-Powered Commerce](/sessions/2026-03-13/pp1150309-featured-session-founder-led-growth-turning-audience-signal-into-ai-powered-comm)

## Summary

Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates, co-founders of Phia (an AI-powered shopping agent), discuss how they built a consumer-first product that helps shoppers make more confident purchases. They share their approach to founder-led growth through community building, their podcast 'The Burnouts' as a marketing engine, unconventional hiring via cold DMs, and building an AI-native company culture where every employee is incentivized to automate their workflows.

## Topics

`founder-led growth` · `ai shopping agent` · `consumer product` · `creator economy` · `community building` · `startup hiring` · `ai-native culture` · `sustainable fashion` · `vibe coding`

## Key Takeaways

1. Align consumer incentives rather than pushing sustainability messaging — showing price savings and value retention converts more users than environmental appeals alone.
2. Building a content brand (like a podcast) alongside your product creates an organic marketing flywheel that generates millions in free media value and drives cost-efficient customer acquisition.
3. Always simplify your UI further than you think necessary — information overload discourages action. The Duolingo founder's rule: fewer than five words per surface.
4. In the AI era, high agency matters more than years of experience — screen for people who proactively build automations and learn new tools on their own.
5. Start with the smallest possible version of your idea, validate with real users (not friends and family), then iterate and layer features based on actual consumer feedback.

## Full Transcript

Good morning, ladies. How are you? I'm
doing good. I've never been called a visionary before, so I'm excited to get into it. My brother works in insurance and calls himself a visionary, and I'm always just like, is there a thing as a visionary in insurance?

Um, another day. So, I got up this morning and I get up my I always get out my phone and I always look at my email and there's a sale at NetApporte today and flash sale 20% off code. So I tapped through and I found some stuff
and because I have FIA on my phone, I was able to find and beat the netapporte sale. So women and people that like to shop are obsessive about it and I don't think that technology has really met them where they are. So, can you talk a little bit about why you built this and what you're solving and a little bit why you think it's good for the world?

Maybe take it away, Sophia. Totally. Well, first, hi everyone. We're
so excited to tell you all more about FIA today. By way of background, Phoebe and I launched FIA officially 11 months ago to the date and we have recently crossed over a million users with our AI shopping agent.

So basically Theia is a free app and a mobile shopping agent that while you're shopping helps you to do diligence on your purchase. Our goal is really to help people feel more confident by giving them more information about the items that they're looking at like telling them the resale value, telling them uh the materials, the reviews. And we've now seen in
basically uh almost a year of doing this that our return rates are less than 50% of the industry average for our over 7,000 brand partners. And so this all started as Phoebe and I being Stanford roommates and wanting to just understand how we could make the fashion industry and shopping uh a lot more streamlined and more efficient because we felt like it was very hard to navigate elegantly ac across different sites to find the perfect item. Uh, and now we get to do that with hundreds of thousands of especially female consumers around the world, which has been an incredibly
exciting journey.

Okay. And go ahead. I think to your point, Joanne, I mean, it's ridiculous. Like, just shopping has not adapted in over 20 years. The fact that we're going on the internet and we're still seeing, you know, static product pages that aren't customized for us.

I mean, look at us. We're all dressed closer. Oh, we're all dressed completely differently. We should be able to have personalized experiences. And that's really what we wanted to solve with FIA was instantly saving you time or money, giving you insights on whether that's the best deal, what are the reviews, and then actually being able to go back inside of FIA and have a personalized shopping feed for you or personalized editorials based on what we know you're
actually interested in.

Because honestly, the personal shopper should be completely democratized and given to everybody. And do you think about in the age of AI applying all of those things, right? Um, I worked at a comp I was the president of a company called Honey, and the only thing we did there relentlessly was find you the coupon code. So, it was like, we'll apply the coupon code for you. We ended up selling it to PayPal.

Um, but we solved that very specific consumer pain point. So when you think about it, my view of the world is that while I
appreciate and love Google, Meta, all those folks that they're never going to spend all their day thinking about the specific problem that you're trying to solve. So making it easier, saving money, saving time. So can you talk about how you prioritize your feature and your product roadmap and what you think is the ultimate aha for the consumer in that journey? That's a great question Joanne and I think it goes back to when me and Sophia literally met as
randomly paired roommates at Stanford.

The thing we got so excited about is we saw all these companies building as verticalized agents you know trying to be the parallegal agent or trying to be your agent to help you with coding. And really no one was thinking about the consumer, particularly this consumer that shops, you know, 15 to 20 times a week. Our power of consumers are shopping and they're still doing so much manual work. So no one was thinking about, okay, who's actually going to build the verticalized AI shopping agent that's 100% consumer first. And that's why we got really excited about putting our all of our time into building Fiat and literally, you know, waking up at
night thinking about our customers.

going into how we do feature prioritization. That's a great question and honestly it's changed a lot over time. I'll never forget when Sophia and I got our first funding from our professor at Stanford. We actually went heads down and like for three months we built an application but just for desktop and the only people we'd shared it with was like friends and family. And of course your friends and family are going to say what you're building is great.

It looks amazing. The first time we brought in a group of 50 women we didn't know and got feedback on it. They were like yeah this is cool but I shop on my phone. And that for us shifted
everything. Now every single week we have or every other week we have 40 power users come in or 40 turned users come in and we ask them one thing.

Roast our app. Roast our application. What do you hate? What are we doing wrong? Where can we improve?

Tell us your endto-end shopping journey. And for us now we're starting to do really like both. We learn from this the stats on the app of what people are actually engaging with, what actually interests them, but actively learning from our consumers what they actually want or what they care about. And that's really how the first application of FIA, Google Flights for Fashion, where we'd instantly give you those insights on, okay, is this
item going to hold value? Does it have good reviews?

And then giving you personalized discovery, all came to be really because we learn from our consumers what they'd want. Sophia, what is the most amazing piece of feedback you've gotten in the roastathons? You know, we used to call it, you know, uh, bug bashes when I worked at Pinterest. We had sort of the same philosophy. But what is the thing that has surprised you?

Who has you know delighted you, scared you in the feedback that you've gotten and how have you applied it to the road map? The number one thing that I have realized from building a consumer product is that you always need to dumb it down even further than you ever thought. Uh it's really interesting because in a lot of the earlier iterations of FIA ultimately were an incredibly datadriven company and so a lot of the UI interfaces that we had built was essentially exposing data to the customer about pricing insights, scoring things, a lot of text for lack of a better word. And it was really interesting because that actually discouraged people from shopping. They
felt like they were essentially experiencing information overload.

And that was actually a really big learning because ultimately shopping is an inherently incredibly visual activity. So no amount of information overload was really going to make it easier for the customer. So one of our most difficult UIUX challenges especially on a phone on a mobile interface on the mobile extension is that in a very short small amount of space we essentially have to consolidate as much information as possible to be able to help the consumer feel more informed about their purchase. And so that was definitely a great insight because I I do think Phoebe and I have a tendency to be overthinkers and it it was very helpful to realize that in a lot of cases we just needed to strip away and expose only the most critical information that a customer actually cared about and also to do it in a more visual format. So for example, one of the signature uh kind of things that we developed for FIA is our pricing graph.

So, it's very similar to, and it was part of the reason why we coined it as the Google Flights for fashion, the Google Flights shopping graph, and it
essentially shows you the resale value of an item uh in in a very easy visual format. And so, we adapted that based on the feedback from our users that they could not understand the resale value in the way that we had originally showed it, which was kind of in a mathematical equation. Uh, so that was a really great piece of feedback. Now, every time we do different iterations, we always try to make them as simple and visually appealing as possible. We actually had the Dolingo founder on our podcast, and he said something very similar.

He said, "People don't read." And so, he said
that in any situation, we should always try and aim to have different surfaces have fewer than five words. That's why the exit sign is only just says exit, right? It doesn't say get off here now for a burger. It's like exit. Um, so in the early days of that when you were trying to explain the resale value, um, and reckoning the resale growth market to this, how do you make those choices?

Because I think what you did was rose up more to the shopping m
mission than just like the resale mission. Yeah, it was really interesting because me and Sophia have always had this core principle of like listen, the fashion industry at large is broken, right? I mean we are there is so much excess made. It is you know one of like the second you know admits so much so much CO2 and if you buy secondhand that's over an 80% carbon reduction. So originally we thought okay we'll just show secondhand alternatives and we'll see how consumers react to that.

We would do so much you know we would try different creative campaigns or trying to get users around hey shop more sustainably. What we realize is you
actually need to align consumer incentives. People aren't going to just shop sustainably because you tell them to shop sustainably. Now, if you tell them, hey, why don't you go buy it secondhand and you're going to get a huge price discount if you buy, you know, this pair of shoes or these Nikes off of Depot, eBay, Vista, Real Real, instead of buying it firsthand. We found that actually leaning into the price of how you're saving, like that really moved the needle for our consumers.

The other thing that we didn't realize is that people really wanted to understand
not only okay does a cheaper secondhand alternative exist but like if I'm going to buy this firsthand is this actually a worthwhile purchase and is it something that I'm going to keep over the long haul. Most consumers don't actually end up reselling but wanting to understand like is this a value ad item that is going to retain you know its quality over time and the material quality over time. And so we started leaning into, okay, even if there isn't an exact, you know, secondhand or cheaper alternative, being able to say, is this item actually worth the price or not? Is it going to
retain that value? Is the material quality going to hold over time?

And so really shifting our mindset from really trying to to push sustainability on consumers into okay, how can we align incentives around getting you the best deal, actually making the best purchase for something you're going to keep in your closet for a long time that is going to be a net value ad to your life versus just pushing on the sustainability really actually moved the needle for us and actually allowed us to bring in a lot of other consumers to FIA that had never shopped secondhand before but then were coming to us and said, "Well, when you explain it to me like that, that's why I wanted to convert on
secondhand items. We also saw that people were actually converting more on sustainable um brands that we were promoting towards them because we could show, hey, these sustainable materials are going to be lasting longer. Even if you're spending more on this item, it's actually going to hold its value over time. And so, I'd say that was a really big shift for us was understanding, okay, how do we actually go to the broader fashion community and bring people in that aren't shopping just secondhand today and actually get them onto our tool. Great.

I'm going to um we have we'll take questions from the audience first from the Slidio thing if they want to
put them on there. Um Sophia, let's talk about the podcast. Okay. Um one of the most amazing things that you guys did was go on that journey as telling the story of founders and really using it as a marketing tool. Um because this is the creator session here.

Um I wanted to hear the story from you and Phoebe on how you think about
the podcast as it fits into FIA, what you think about it, the aspirations for it, all those things. And where did the name come from? Totally. So, for those of you who are not familiar, Phoebe and I uh one month before we launched, FIA actually launched our podcast, The Burnouts. And the whole premise behind The Burnouts was that when you are in your 20s, when you're pursuing building your dream career, you have to balance so many things.

You have to balance
relationships, you have to balance work, family, school. And the whole idea was how can you do all of that without burning out? I don't think we're the best people to ask that. We're obviously very early in our careers, but we did have incredible people in our networks, especially a lot of whom were uh investors or adviserss in FIA. And so our goal was essentially to open source a lot of the conversations that we were having privately with them and basically peeling back the curtain behind all of these incredible founders.

How did they build their incredibly successful
businesses, their careers, and what advice did they have for people like us who were just starting out? And so since then, it's been roughly about a year. We have done over 200 million views organically across socials. We have an audience of over 600,000. And it's been such an incredible experience because we've been able to bring on people who have really inspired us.

I mean, people like Chris Jenner, who of course is is absolutely a business legend and media icon, and then also people like Whitney Wolf Herd, who built Bumble, uh Sarah Blakeley, who built Spanx, and it's been
really incredible to just see the authentic reception from our community of just how excited people are to be able to learn from all of these people in a more casual format. And so, Phoebe and I will interview uh usually every few weeks, we'll do a couple of interviews and we'll release them every single week. and it has definitely been one of the best decisions that we've ever made, especially for FIA. It is its own standalone entity and we we talk about topics outside of fashion. But I would say that it has fostered so much goodwill and it's been such a great
opportunity for us to in the public eye be able to document the progress of what we're building.

I mean our audience has been able to see us go from a 100,000 users to 500,000 to a million and also to talk about the challenges the way that we approach marketing the way that we've approached building a team and it has been an amazing opportunity also for us to acquire new users. I mean as a consumer company the number one thing that you need to think about is how can you have extremely costefficient customer acquisition and so we've essentially been able to generate millions of dollars of free media value for the company as a result of doing the podcast. And so so many especially our
target demographic of Gen Z and millennial women across the US listen to the podcast and therefore have actually uh been able to find out about FIA through it. So in in every way more than one it has been a huge win-win for us. And what what's the consumer reaction like?

Do they do they understand the connection to FIA? How do you get that feedback from them? I mean, I think one of the great things about the creator economy is being closer to your your customer and your community. So, how does that show up like in the comments, in the DMs? Like, what goes on in the in
the in the comments and the DM there?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because the way we typically do the podcast is Phoebe and I will interview another founder uh another successful uh business executive on their journey. And rarely we have done solo episodes once in a while. And it's been really wonderful to see that our audience has actually been so excited about hearing only from me and Phoebe directly about our relationship about how we're building the company and just about very honest, candid reflections on how much we've grown over the course of a very short period of
time as two still young 20-year-olds figuring things out. And so it's been really awesome to see that ultimately our goal is that we want to be very transparent and to be honest about the struggles that it takes to build a business. Um, and also the the highs that we feel when we are having these wins and we get to share it with our audience.

And so I think to to Phoe's point earlier, I mean, we have women come every two weeks and give us feedback on the app. Many of them found us through the podcast. Many of them follow along on social media as we
release new versions of the app. And so it really has given us a community that has been able to watch in real time as the app has gotten better and better as we've built new product features and developments. And so I would say that it has been a really really positive experience and honestly far exceeded our expectations in terms of how large just the podcast itself would have gotten.

And when you think about the podcast as part of your marketing and and your whole marketing funnel, like can you walk the crowd through how you what your approach to marketing is? Because I
think it's very different. Um it changes every day because the landscape has changed so much. But I think you guys because you started in the AI period, you started in the creator economy period. Like when I started my career, there were no iPhones.

the internet was barely available. Like think about that and what has happened in your in in the time since you started this company is crazy. I I advise uh FIA and I still remember when I was like let's all try
Clawude. And so when you think about how fast things have moved, what do you think about on your marketing landscape? if they could see your marketing deck for FIA, what would you want them to know and take away?

I think the biggest takeaway would be, you know, there's different stages to your marketing, right? There's going to be like top of funnel, like are people aware of what your company is doing, what you're working on. Um, then there's like, okay, targeted. Now, when you're going shopping, we want to actually find
that consumer who's obsessively shopping, who's scrolling through the internet, who's really the FIA archetype and having more like clear calls to action to go and actually like install the app. And then last is like once you're on the app, how do we continue to engage you over time to make sure that like this is the hub where you want to go when you're making any purchase.

So when we think about like you know our marketing deck I think one thing that's a really important learning whether you're building a company whether you're working at any anywhere right is that you need to have a brand is so important for me and Sophia like community was always our northstar we knew that there
was going to be no chance going to market we could compete with very large companies with giant ad budgets unless we had some sort of organic flywheel where people were like hey those girls are kind of funny you know maybe I will try out their app or maybe I will give it a spin or maybe I'll actually be willing to give them feedback because I feel like I'm part of this journey and so yes when I face a bug I want to reach out to their team or I want to set up a customer interview or come to that customer dinner. We needed to have that you know value from our community in order to function as a company and in order to move really really fast. So I'd say really the biggest learning is like
if you are a consumer company today like you need to have some sort of a brand but you also need to give value to the community and the burnouts episodes like you'll never see us like go download FIA. The reason for that is like the point of those episodes is like we want to create value for our community and it's helpful for me and Sophia right to spend an hour every week talking to someone we genuinely admire and learning from them but then giving back all of that knowledge to our community of okay how does Dolingo think about hiring? What are they looking for today?

what's their number one interview question? What's the biggest fail they made in their first six months post launch? And
actually like giving your community back value, that's the only way your community is going to want to later engage with you. So I'd say two biggest learnings is like you got to have the top of funnel. You have to have some sort of brand and organic to be able to compete in this market.

And you have to actually add value to your consumer base with that content that you're creating before you can have a direct CTA for them to go download or you know play with your application. Yeah. People can't be your champions unless they know what to champion you for. So, it it's, you know, it's it's pretty amazing that you guys have have done that. Can you I want to talk for a
few minutes about hiring people.

Hiring is probably one of the most underestimated challenges that founders face. Um, and I think you guys always have a spicy take on stuff and I know that you're spicy recruiters. So, what are your best recruiting practices without giving all your secrets away here? And how do you think about um hiring everything from interns to engineers? I think you just hired your CFO.

So, take us on the recruiting
journey of FIA. I love this question. It's definitely something that Phoebe and I have spent a lot of our time thinking about. And I would probably break down our hiring into two main funnels. The first of which is definitely the most unconventional, which is that a lot of our hires have come to us through good oldfashioned cold DMs.

And that's actually something that we actively encourage. So, we obviously have a job application that's up on our website through Ashb, but what we've actually found is that we will often put up on
our Instagram stories, on our LinkedIn's direct CTAs asking people if you're interested in a role with us, you have three sentences, give us a pitch about who you are, what you've done in the past, what you want to do at FIA, and how you would be able to solve a problem for us. And it is really interesting to see the different ways and different methods that people use to pitch you on why they are a good fit for your company. I actually think it is the best filtering mechanism. Person one will hit you with an extremely long chatt text that is very hard to understand.

And
then person two has an extremely succinct consolidated pitch of why they are a good candidate for your company. That's an interesting carrot. I will usually then go and look at their LinkedIn profile. I will understand if I think that their skills are a match for what we're looking for and then um we'll usually just directly set up via DM a call with them for around like 20 to 30 minutes. Uh and then from there we will like continue to advance through the stages.

But I definitely think that for us our hiring is extremely founder. FBNA also will constantly cold outreach to
people that we think are a good fit for FIA. Uh we recently had two full-time employees join both of whom were victims of our cold DMs. And then I would say or I guess those are those are two different strategies is like one having people cold DM us two cold DMing other people and then I would say that the last one that's been very successful for us. Um I'm definitely missing some but off the top of my head is is uh cold warm referrals.

I would say that also the best way to find really great people is to have people that you personally trust, really vet for them and vouch for
them. We also of course offer referral bonuses to people in our network who do that for us, but most of our best hires such as our CFO who we hired recently all came from people in our network who personally referred them to us. And so having that person vouch both to the other person that we would be a good employer, but then also to us that that person would be a good employee uh often is the easiest way to have a very quick hiring process because we feel confident that that person has been thoroughly vetted by someone that we trust. So I I would say that we're we're we're
unconventional in our hiring and our team is very small still by design. Uh we have just about 20 people.

We very much believe in building an AI native company where our goal is each person can do the work of 10 people which we very much believe is possible in the AI enabled way that we've built our workforce. Uh and we definitely want to continue to maintain that lean high agency team. And when you think about is hiring Ben one of the hardest challenges being a founder like what you know rank fundraising hiring
product strategy like rank that in order of difficulty. Well they're all hard. They're all hard, but there's different degrees of fun, right?

Like hiring is really fun because it's like you get to get on the phone with really talented people and assess like, okay, are we going to build a generational company together? Like I really, really enjoy that. Product strategy is so fun because it's just like testing, learning, testing, learning, testing, learning. Fundraising is like, okay, how do you take everything you've done with this company for like the last year, package it into a very short deck, and explain why a capital infusion is going to let this
thing skyrocket? like that process is kind of fun, but I have to say for me like product strategy is the most fun and the most challenging.

And then I'd say hiring and then I'd say fundraising. I I also will say my hot take on hiring right now is there's so much anxiety around, oh, if someone's a new grad from college, are they going to be able to get a job? That's a huge issue right now. But the other thing that my hot take is is it's actually a pretty exciting time because gone are the days where there's this huge gap between someone who's super junior and doesn't
have a lot of work experience versus someone who's super senior. If you're a really high agency person who's a new grad and you're doing operations, like you can do so much with automated workflows and build different things out where really we're seeing those years of experience like don't matter as much because it's really about do you have high agency or do you not have high agency.

I'll give an example like we have an incredible person on our operations team who is realizing you know pulling different like occurred revenue from different places was taking a lot of time and so they built up an agent to do that themselves. That's so exciting to me because I think we're
going to see a rise in that you know people with high agency are just going to be able to do more and more and more and going to be able to use AI to basically supercharge and not have to do a lot of these manual or laborious tasks that you used to have to be performed. And when you think about that automation um and getting people to write their own agents, how are you teaching your team that? How are you building you're building an AI company, but you also have to build a culture of AI, right? Just because it's it's a chicken and an egg thing, right?

I work with lots of
companies that are trying to transform themselves into being AI first. You guys are an AI first company. How do you balance that? How do you get everybody on the same page? You know, whether it's accounts receivable, payables, like whatever, sales, any of those things.

What's your AI cultural vision inside of the company? Well, we have an AI and chill channel, which I I think speaks to just how AI
native our Slack channel is. There's a song in there. Um, I mean, our team loves AI and in that Slack channel, people share all of the new AI tools that have come out, the new AI tools that they're using. Almost anytime someone asks us if they can buy a new subscription to a new AI tool, the answer is always yes.

And we very much tell people that they have the liberty in their workflows to set aside a period of time to be able to understand, can I automate this, yes or no? Really with no expectation. And actually because this has been so successful for us that
across every single division in the company, marketing partnerships, we have built finance so many automations, we actually just made our first full-time hire for someone whose explicit role is building AI agents for the company because it has 10xed our productivity across every single division. And I would say also another thing is that now you don't need to be technical to use AI proficiently. With that said, a lot of our more technical team members did have a head start in the sense that they started using those tools earlier.

And so we have set up a couple of workshop
sessions and had some of our engineers basically do a here's how Claude works 101 and here's how you can use it in your workflow. And we definitely are going to continue to do more of those especially with this new hire that we have whose whole job is AIing the company. Um, and I would say also candidly, we we do ask people how they use AI when we interview people. And it's honestly a really great indicator of how high agency someone is. Especially, I've talked to a lot of people where, for example, they don't need to use AI.

It's not like their workplace asked them to use AI, but they of their own sort of accord bought a Mac Mini and set up OpenClaw. That to me is a is a huge indicator that this is a very high IQ, high agency person who is proactively solving their own problems and wants to learn. Having a learner mindset is the biggest way to really be able to get a good grasp on AI. And so that's something that we do screen for as the type of people that we want as part of our culture. So um when you think about that and can you automate this or not?

How many things do you think you've automated? Everything everything hundreds of different things. Okay. And then the other thing is today you came bounding into the green room and you gave me some AI hot spicy news about some AI company. You were like, "Oh my god, this just happened." Um, so clearly you are on top of the AI news.

You Is it in your feed? Is it in your
alerts? Like what are you looking at? What are you reading? What do you guys how are you how are you getting your true north in this?

That's a great question. We actually set up an automation that will scan like the internet for anything that's applicable to our company. So, is there news in fashion? Is there news in resale? Um, did one of our, you know, top brand partners have a really exciting collection that just launched?

Oh, we should probably tee up an email to congratulate them on that. And so, we're actually like filtering through and having every day like these reports of like what's what's cool in the news right now? What should we be checking
out? And then I also just think, you know, incentivizing people to want to share really interesting stories that they're reading. Like we have a whole channel where people will send in exciting news that they just read or their hot take on this or a fun paper that they just read in the space.

And so I think also just encouraging both the company to like share out what they're actively reading and learning about um is really really important and part of our culture. Great. And then what do you guys do? We don't we're not getting any questions on the prompter um to the to the team. Um but what do you guys do to not burn out, right?

Because I know you both you kind
of work 24/7. Why do you work 24/7? Thank you. They're up there now. And um what do you do to relax?

Like you know what's your unplug moment, right? because that is such a big thing in the world these days, like a little digital break. Do you do that? Do you not do it or are you just like on it all the time? I think the most important thing I do to not burn out is I have a co-founder.

To be honest, having someone that can gauge
like where you're at. Maybe I'm really stressed today or I'm not on my agame and Sophia's like there to hop in, you know, take that last minute call, have that support. Having someone you really trust where you can be like, "This is where I'm at today." without even like communicating with them I think is really really important. Also time boxing helps me a lot. Like having actual time in my day where okay this is my chunk of meetings.

This is my time to to think. This is my time to prioritize. And then really keeping like for me like a Saturday morning I go all devices off and just like think take time to go for a walk, hang out with my miniature docs. And I think having that protected space
is also super super important. But I'd say number one burnout hack is having someone you really trust that you can work together with.

What's yours? I totally agree with BB and one thing I would say is that I constantly think about this quote that essentially says burnout is caused by lack of momentum, not working too hard. I love working. I am probably on my computer on my phone 24/7. My my Slack name is I am always online.

I absolutely am always online. But it's because I love it. I love what I'm working on. I can see the progress
every single minute of the day of how our team is moving forward. I can feel the momentum and that energizes me.

And so I think that's something really important for people to take kind of stock in is that also the way that you will feel momentum is when you are working with great people, people who are also working hard, people who are equally as bought in and motivated as you are. That compounds over time and that keeps you feeling extremely energized. And so for me, I always just have a mental check-in with myself to make sure, do I feel energized? Am I
feeling momentum? If not, why am I in a rut?

Why do I not feel great? I need to first triage and understand the underlying issue of why I'm not feeling great. Because the issue is not that I'm working too hard. The issue is something else. And then I usually will try to understand that and then break that down.

When I worked at in tech in the early 2000s, it was just all fueled by Mountain Dew. I mean, there's a lot of Celsius at our office. Caffeine is up there in in solutions. Coolers of Mountain Dew, right? It was
like I Mountain Dew.

Um, okay. Because, you know, everybody's like, "It's very different now." I'm like, "No, it was just Mountain Dew. It's just a different energy drink, right?" Like, um, okay. What, um, we've got a few questions. Um, what's the insight that you can give us into your AI stack that allows every employee to maximize their efficiency?

Host weekly sessions with your team going through, you know, what you guys are working on AI. Have someone who's really technical guide people, answer questions. Make sure people aren't afraid to fail. Like having time to say,
"Oh, I I want to try and automate this." And if it doesn't work or it fails, not, you know, disciplining anyone for that. People should be incentivized to try new things, to build out projects.

I'd say definitely make sure that your team has clawed co-workers set up. Make sure you've got enterprise plans of all of that I think is really important. But I'd say having weekly sessions where people can ask questions or or try different things and where they're incentivized to to learn and fail and try again is something that every single company can apply. Um there's a question on the bottom about um are you afraid of uh Amazon? And I just want to tell a little story
about when I worked at Honey.

at Honey, we would always be like the the best day of our life is the day that um Amazon sends us a cease and desist because it means that they care about us. Um and they did after PayPal made the offer to buy us for $4 billion. We were like, "This is not the day that we wanted that." But it was fine. The thing that I would answer that question on your behalf and then I'd love to hear your answer is that they're never going to they're so broad in their thinking and you're so vertical in your thinking that you're solving all the way down and I'll
tie it to the other thing. What is the feature you're most excited about releasing?

I'm most excited for you to release the digital closet and so and I know that that the the subtlety of that and the nuance of that is very important for the consumer. So if you want to add anything to the answer on those questions. I think that that's a great point. The reality is like Amazon is not waking up sleeping and dying over the target consumer that we are. Right.

The other thing is that we're inside of the browser and an app, right? So, we learn
like, okay, what kind of a shopper are you? Did you buy, you know, these, you know, secondhand shoes that are now in your closet? And so having that moat around, okay, knowing what Sophia owns and no, she shouldn't buy another black top because she already has one that looks just like it in her closet and actually being able to like personalize the insights we're giving her on the widget across every single site is really important for us that in a way that I don't think like one singular merchant could copy us because we're willing to work across every single site and like be your companion that sits there and gives you advice. And then also having that moat around, okay,
you've already used FIA and we already know what's in your closet.

So we're the only place that's going to be able to give you those personalized recommendations. I think that's been really really important for us as we think about like, okay, what is our core mo around what we're building as a company and also just moving fast is the most important thing. I think anytime some sort of development in this space pops up, I actually get really really excited because I think we are doing consumers a huge disservice. When you think about every other vertical, how many people are trying to compete compete to be, you know, your AI coding agent, we see so many more playing in
that space. And yet when you think about people who are solving to be the AI shopping assistant, which we know consumer spend is the lifeblood of the American economy.

It's primarily driven by women, very very few people are innovating in this space. And so it really gets me excited to think about, okay, how can we learn from that? And how can we move super super fast as a team? I'd say having really the the moat around personalization, knowing what the consumer already owns and being able to move super fast are like two key modes. Yeah, I think um I advise a lot of
different companies.

I'm on the board of Baby List. Um and Baby List uh gets captures about 50% of expectant parents because they're so focused on the niche. And then I advise Zachdoc who helps you get a doctor appointment and everybody's like there's not enough you know they're big giant markets but nobody pays attention to the nuance of the user and gives them exactly what they want and both those companies their growth is accelerating as they've applied solving
every problem. So, Zachdoc, it's get your doctor appointment, pay your insurance, understand your doctor. Like, people want to see their doctor.

They want to look at the reviews of their doctor. They want to know if their insurance covers it. They want to know what time it is. They want to know if it's virtual. It's sort of your digital closet, right?

So, someone asked, hey, can what you have learned be applied to services business or consulting businesses? And the answer is yes. the consumer journey can always use improvement. Like it can always get
faster. There can be better selection and the convenience has to get there.

And so I think like I really look forward to a world where things just get easier and better for consumers. Um and that takes us to the next question in this. What do you think on a five to 10year vision? Are are you do you worry about that? I think the 5 to 10 year vision is the most exciting.

I think the 12 month vision is always painful. How do you think about it? I get really excited when I think about the 5 to 10 year vision. I think it's really about as this space picks up speed and momentum, is your company overtaken by these models getting better or does innately your company become better, smarter, are you able to deliver a better experience to consumers? And we fall in that latter bucket.

And that's why I get really excited about thinking about the 5 to 10 year plan. at the end of the day, like we can put something together, but it's all going to be driven by our consumers as we continue to develop. And so for me, it gets me really, really pumped when I think about, wow, what is going to be possible in the next 5 years? Yeah, absolutely. Um, creativity and AI, Sophia, how do you think about it?

Everybody's like, it kills it, it makes it better. I feel both. I feel like when I see a shitty piece of AI content or some chat GPT gibber that isn't good that someone turns me in some work like you talked about in LinkedIn but I feel like it helps prepare creativity in a better way. So I'm sort of pro pre antilast mile like last few I still like a human touch on that you know so how do
you think about creativity and AI as it applies to FIA and the burnouts and just your brain I would say there has never been a better time to be a creative and an idea generator because right now AI has lowered the barrier to go from idea to actually creating ing the thing that you had the idea about. That's the thing that's been so incredible to see over the last few years.

When Phoebe and I were at Stanford, it was right when Chachubt had just come out. It was right
when we saw really the V1 of what AI could do. And it was honestly before even claude code and all of the cursor, all these applications had been created that really made software development so much faster and also lowered the barrier to entry for non-technical people to vibe code. Now that you have vibe coding, I mean, it's genuinely incredible that you can just be a normal person with an idea and over the course of a weekend, over the course of a couple of weeks, you can extremely quickly build a real prototype of the thing that you had originally imagined
and then actually start to sell it, start to make money off of it. I have so many friends who are in their 20s who are vibe coding apps and making hundreds of thousands of dollars and they were really those people that I thought of as creatives.

They were idea generators. They were not technical software developers. And so now the thing that is the most valuable in the age of AI is unique ideas. That is the thing that cannot become commoditized is that layer of human intelligence of what do people want? AI can't tell you what people want.

Only people can do that, at least
right now. And so I would say that for me, it's been so exciting to see working with our team that me or Phoebe can have an idea and then the next day it is a real feature. That is how quickly you can move now. And so creativity is the biggest differentiator when it comes to how successful you can become. It is the quality of your ideas and the quality of your decisions.

And it's been something that I definitely think is going to be a huge alpha for people who are naturally creative and who uh really grow up studying more creative fields. So um when you think about leaving Stamford
and starting your business and the couple of year how many years has it been? Two and a half years. Almost three. We're at three now.

We maybe three. Three. Do you think you're further along now? Uh because I remember when I met you, you were like, "We're going to do all this in 12 months." And it was like, "Okay." And some things take longer, some things go faster. How do you measure your time, your progress against that graduate, the the milestone of leaving Stanford?

You know, where are you on your on your journey in this? That's such a funny question. Honestly, I don't think that we have thought about our progress in terms of timelines or specific moments such as leaving Stanford per se. I would say ultimately Phoebe and I left Stanford when we were maybe 20 and 21. In reflection, we were honestly really young.

We were in school. We were students. There was so much that we had no idea about. And so now it's been 3 years. I mean, I joke with our adviserss that I'm getting gray
hairs and I'm aging rapidly, but really what I mean is that I'm learning so quickly, right?

We now manage over 20 people. We have a team. We're paying their salaries. That is a lot of obligation for a very young person to have. We're still very young.

We're 24 and 23. And so, I think it's been a really incredible reflection period for us to look back on. We were two kids basically when we started this. And now we have a company that's raised over $43
million and has a team and millions of users. So, it's been an incredibly fulfilling trajectory.

And at the end of the day, we're also just at the beginning of it. I know that in 3 years I'll look back at this and think, wow, I was also such a kid and I had no idea what I was talking about. But that's really awesome. And I I do think that the best thing that you can really employ as a founder and really anyone is who is early in their career is the only benchmark that I look at personally is how much have I learned. If I look back at the last month, the last six months,
the last year, the amount that I've learned about product development, about marketing, about finances is pretty exponential and definitely nothing I could have ever learned in school.

And so I would say at least on a personal level, I definitely try to benchmark against how much have I learned in this period of time and how can I continue to leverage that skill set to improve myself, my company, and everyone around me. What about you? I would echo the same thing. I think it's really about the velocity at which you can learn. Even for us when we measure success, you know, down to okay, what did we do as a team this week?

We're not looking at, oh, how many features did we actually ship? When we sit down on Monday, it's how many things did we actually learn? because we might have shipped a couple features but users didn't like them. Okay, those we learned that last week. Now, what questions do we have going into this week?

So, I think both on an individual level, it's been extraordinary to measure like our learning and how exponential that's been, but we're also doing the same when we think about product. Every single week, we need to at least be learning five core things that were that are that a week ago we thought would be impossible to understand and are actually going to add incrementality
towards our product road map. Okay, last question for you ladies on this. Take me through your typical week Monday team Sunday planning uh work planning Monday team sync kicking off the week getting people motivated. It's so cool as a founder.

I mean your job changes at every stage. I remember when we we first started the company it was like me and Sophia up late at night doing our taxes and you know how many hours can we work not sleep was like the biggest output. Now it's like the biggest output we can have is how can we find other incredible people who are 100
times smarter than we are to come build this company with us and how do we take the team that we have today and really motivate them. I mean that's the biggest thing that we can do in our job now and so your kind of job as a founder changes in every single stage and I find that incredibly exciting. So Monday, team sync, getting people motivated, hiring interviews, product strategy, big partner calls, and I think that pretty much ensembles throughout the week, continues user feedback on Thursdays, um wrap up the week, get some sleep hopefully Saturday and and back into it Sunday.

Great. Um we have just a few more minutes on this partner strategy as it
impacts the company, right? You guys need partners, need the ecosystem. You have a lot of partners. Like one of the things that impressed me more than most is that you guys went out of the gate hard and got partners on a platform you hadn't built yet.

You you actually had partners before you had the technology. Is that fair? That is fair. And it's really funny though because when we actually launched like we weren't really monetizing. We had a bunch of like kind of secondhand partners, these thrift shops, secondhand retailers because we wanted to make sure like our data set
was really good.

That's so core to the user experience. If you're trying to look for an item and we don't have it on Fiat, like you're not going to come back to us, right? So now we have over 350 million items in our catalog, which is a huge thing for our data pipeline for search and indexing for the patented search we've built. But so we had some partners really on the secondhand side, but we hadn't really worked with any retailers or brands at all. And we're actually three months post launch and we saw, wow, we are learning so much and actually like driving traffic to these brands.

And that's when we were like, there is a whole play here where we could actually build something that's
net value ad for the brands and net value ad for the consumers. To Sophia's point, when someone actually purchases something on FIA, like we're dropping the return rates 50% below industry average because the consumer is like, oh wait, this is a good value piece. I'm actually going to keep this over time or yes, okay, this is the right size for me. It has good reviews and retained value. And so then it was like, okay, wow, let's go reach out to those brands that are really resonating with our consumers so we can get their data feeds, their product feeds to better serve our community.

And that's when we started doing like that outreach. And it was really great because it was a
win-win for brands, right? When they come on board, we're not charging them anything. We're taking on all the fees of onboarding them, making sure we have their brand pages up, making sure they're featured in, you know, curated personalized editorials for our users. And that's really where it was like this goodwill started to spread and more and more brands wanted to get into the community as well.

And so really, you know, now we're only what, eight months into having an actual partner strategy and we're working with over 7,000 brands. It's been incredibly exciting to see the the growth and momentum there and how we can actually use our brands and both benefit them but also bring
more incredible brands into the ecosystem to give our consumers more options. Great. Um, someone put a question here. What's the first first very the first step you took to materialize FIA?

Um, and how do you actualized your vision? Like what was the what was the moment you put it on a piece of paper, bought the URL, uh, decided what to do? You guys have talked about this a little bit in the past, but I I think it's a great question for this the South by Southwest crew. Well, I I love it through the framework of what other founders should do to materialize their vision. It's pretty simple.

You have to look for a problem. And that's the way that FIA materialized is that Phoebe and I discussed that there was 100% a a gap in the market and a problem when it came to this idea that consumers, including ourselves, were essentially going on product pages, looking at items, and then wondering, should I buy this item or not? are there better options available on other secondhand websites? And that they had unanswered questions about whether or
not that item was the right item for them versus the tens of billions of items that are on the internet. And so the very first thing that we thought about was, okay, that's a big problem.

There's there's a lot of adjacent kind of tangents on that problem. If we were to niche that down into just a very very small specific problem, what would that be? And that's how we came up with the first version of FIA, which was essentially a Chrome desktop extension where as you were shopping, it would ID the item and then it would map and try to find a secondhand version of that
item from a couple of different secondhand websites. So that was V1. And then on top of that, we essentially continued to iterate, iterate, we thought about other problems and then integrated the solutions into that.

We adjusted our application. We realized also that 86% of consumer spend on apparel was happening on mobile. So we adjusted again. But I I think that if you start too big, it feels very overwhelming. It feels incredibly daunting to say we want to build a billion dollar AI shopping agent that solves every consumer's problems.

That
as a as a as a college student is is pretty ambitious. And so it's very helpful to just break it down into one starting step and then to continue to layer on until you can get to that grand scale vision. And so that's definitely the advice that I would give to other founders and to anyone in their career is just look for problems. Look for simple problems and then think about how you can build solutions and then continue to iterate on top of that. Great.

Okay. So last question in Texas. Is it tacos or barbecue? You're giving me a tough one. Joanne, I
told you only you ladies love the food.

I know that. So I got to go for tacos for me personally. Tacos. I completely agree. Tacos all the way.

Tacos all the way. Okay. Thank you. What about you? Um, you know what?

Tacos. Tacos. Wow. RIP Texas. I feel like I mean, I could do a breakfast taco, a lunch taco, and a dinner taco.

I could go to the Driscoll for the breakfast taco. I could go to Torches for lunch, and then I could go a little higherend for dinner, and I'd be happy for two or three days here, and then I'd need to go back to California. Where are we going for the high-end dinner for tacos? There's lots of I mean, there's too many. That's a whole that's just another panel that I'm sure is happening right now.

So, as long as you find your outfit on FIA, we can go. Of course. Um, thank you guys for being amazing founders. Thank you for helping solve a problem and thank you for sharing your journey via the burnouts and via this stage with the world because everybody needs inspiration. It's a lonely journey for most people.

So, it's amazing to see you guys do this together. Thank you so much. Thank you, Joanne. Thank you, Joanne.

---

*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6*

[← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-13/pp1150309-featured-session-founder-led-growth-turning-audience-signal-into-ai-powered-comm)