From Stitch Fix to AI Search with Daydream Founder Julie Bornstein | Inside Summit 2025 [LIVE]

The reality is that it was very hard to get people to think about search in a different

“way. And then once chat she became launched it was like instantly retraining everyone.”

And so that was the moment where I was like, okay, we're not going to do what I thought we were at Pinterest. And then search was like becoming so interesting now. And then the straw that broke the camel's back becoming in founder again was my husband saying, someone's going to build this. And if it's not you, it's really going to bother you. Welcome back to season 13 of the room podcast. Claudia, can you believe we've been doing this

this long? No, it's been five years. So many episodes, so many incredible conversations telling the stories of some of the world's most iconic founders and funders. And whether our listeners are new for the first time today or have been with us from season one, we're so grateful for the community we've built. Completely. We've had the mission to open the door to the room where it happens for those entire five years. And have been able to do so over 120 episodes with hard

earned lessons from some of the top technology and consumer founders of our time. And we've been through a lot personally as we have indeed. I built, scaled, sold my startup drive. You were our first investor. So you've been there through the entire journey. And you've also recently graduated from HBS. You're now building up for a cell. And through it all, we've brought the funder and

founder perspective. Yeah, it's really been an incredible journey. And I'm thrilled that I'm back

full time in San Francisco. And we're probably here to stay. That means that there's more for us in terms of growth, both inside and outside of the physical room. But what's important to have really out there is these stories. And we've been able to do so over incredible guests from the CEO and founders of Flexport Proplexity, Part of Ful. Xavier Zillow, Vanta, I could go on these guests and their enterprises have generated over a hundred billion enterprise value. And really frankly,

move the markets and growing, especially in 2025 with everything that's going on in AI. So I'm so excited to share season 13 stories that are maybe a little bit more AI focused than past seasons. Absolutely. And you can find as IRL and URL, especially with our events such as our annual conference

“inside Summit or upcoming SF Tech Week events and beyond. And if you want to get information around”

those events, subscribe to the room podcast and subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com. PerkinsCouies supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high growth sectors, addressing their merit of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. PerkinsCouies Interactive website startup percolator offers

access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and PerkinsCouie C-O-I-E.com. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking platform businesses like the room podcast used to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can, with Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices.

Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork, giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances all from one account. Apply in minutes at Mercury.com. On the last episode of 2025 for the room podcast, we close out with our final session of Inside Summit. Claudia and I had the pleasure of welcoming Julie Borenstein back into the room this time with Daydream. Daydream is building the intent layer

of fashion commerce, sitting between consumers and retailers to reduce overwhelm and improve decision-making when shopping. Julie has spent over two decades building the digital commerce experiences that have become industry standards. Often years before the rest of the industry caught up, she helped launch Nordstrom.com back in 2000, went on to redefine loyalty, mobile, and social shopping as chief marketing, and digital officer at Sephora,

and later skilled statistics passed a billion dollars in revenue as COL. She pioneered the

blend of human taste and algorithms before AI was even a buzzword. And 2018, Julie stepped into the founder seat herself, launching the yes, a personalized fashion discovery platform acquired by Pinterest and 2022. You could hear about this company and her early career story on that episode of the room podcast from Season 6. However, at this year's Inside Summit, we dove into this decision-making process of getting back into the founder arena with Daydream. Along the way,

Julie has served on the boards of household consumer brands, such as Weight Watchers and Sweet Green. She invests and advises a wide range of consumer and technology startups,

“and naturally holds a BA and BA from Harvard. Key Insights and themes in this episode include”

how consumer search shifted from retrieval to interpretation. A abundance not access

Let's open the door. First of all, thank you so much for joining us here today in the room.

“My pleasure. We have a classic opening question. And so, where did you grow up?”

And how has that shaped your view of the world? I grew up in Syracuse, New York.

Really? Let's go. Shout out. So never had I've never had a lesson. My first Syracuse woo, yeah.

That's like cold and boring is how I would summarize it and pre-internet because I'm old. And I spent literally from like 8 to 12. I spent every Saturday at the Roller Rink, which, by the way, was a great way to spend my childhood. And my daughter, who lives in New York, just told me that there's a Roller Rink Brooklyn that has amazing themed sort of Roller. Yeah, so we're going to do that at some point.

After I turned 12, I spent the rest of my free time in the mall. I was doing search before I realized what search was. I would get my 17 magazine. I would try and go find the Liz Clayborn purse that I couldn't wait to buy. And it wasn't there. And I would have to wait many months. But I would say that it was definitely a very middle America place to live. And the mall was very much the place to be. That amongst a few other things, very much shaped amazing.

Yeah, we're going to touch on the mall again, especially at the digital one. But before we go

down that path, today you are a founder, you're a twice over founder. Did you always think

you were going to become one? Yes. When I was little, I wanted to be Gloria Vanderbilt. The biggest dilemma I had, first of all, my Gloria Vanderbilt's were like, I laid them out

“and literally remember for the first day of fifth grade. I always had lots of ideas as many, I think”

female entrepreneurs did like made and sold stuff when I was a kid. In those days, it was like these ribbon breaths. I think I didn't know entrepreneurialism as it existed. I did not exist anywhere near the even when I graduated from college in 92. And there were no capital markets for young founders. So I wasn't because I was a woman. It just didn't exist. No, the first company that I had heard of was CNET. And it was like 93, 94. One of my friends moved out to San Francisco to go work there.

And we were like, what? Where are you going? And then email became a thing. And then the world changed. The world changed, right? As you were moving to Seattle in the late 90s, early 2000s. And you found yourself working at Nordstrom, which began your career in retail all the way through to before starting the gas with Stitch Vix. So you've really seen digital e-commerce at its inception. Talk us through a little bit about how some of those insights have shaped what you're doing today

“or what your learnings were from that period of your career. I remember when Amazon went live in”

1996 and where I was sitting. And I was like, this is going to be it. And I have to do this with fashion. It took me a few years to get there. Books are great. Love to read. But I sort of felt like this is now going to unleash a whole new world where we do everything and buy everything. And so the opportunity was just so exciting to me. And then I moved to Seattle because my husband actually

was working for Amazon. I basically spent about six months trying to convince Dan Nordstrom

to hire me. So he was trying to start Nordstrom.com didn't really know what he needed. Took a little while. But eventually, yeah, I got there. And what I would say is having spent since 1999 focused on e-commerce. There were so many things in the early days that we wanted to do that we couldn't. And so everybody was seeing the exact same thing. And it was really hard to build anything. It just took a long time. Like the tech was just hard. And we had to do a lot of things

very manually. And so it's been really fun to be a part of this sort of journey because I'm feeling like I'm chasing technology like as soon as a new thing emerges. And we can do it that I'm like, okay, how do we apply it to shopping in fashion or at Sephora and beauty? And so it's been really fun, especially being out in the Bay Area where all the tech comes first. And you hear about it. It's funny. The Harvard Business School faculty of a group came out to San Francisco recently. And they

were like, we just feel so out of it. And Boston, like, how do we, you guys just know so much more. You're so dialed in. And it's true. It's like just in any conversation you have. People are thinking about this. And you're hearing about it. And so it's been, I would say, a great place to be to get access to technology early. Your curiosity and passion for shopping e-commerce retail has been a through line in your career, but it's manifested in different ways with Stitch Fix. It was

styling and algorithms with the yes, it was social discovery. And now with daydream, which we'll dig into a little bit more shortly, you're looking at pure AI intent of fashion. And what people should be buying, there's been clearly a philosophical evolution across the three companies tell us a little bit more about that journey. And ultimately, why you are so excited about daydream?

focus shopper, I have an intent, whether it's like I have this event that I need something for, or like

“I need a navy blue cardigan and I want to find the best version. And searches are really hard”

problem to solve. Search also didn't feel robust enough until chatchipati launched. And suddenly, this idea of being able to ask anything that you want as opposed to needing to know what the name of

something was to be able to find it, basically, or how it was categorized on a site. Stitch Fix was

super interesting because a guy named Eric Colson, who had built the algorithms for Netflix was our chief data scientist and spending time with him and learning about the data science side of building algorithms around fashion was really interesting. And I loved that. And there were so many great things about Stitch Fix. But at the end of the day, Stitch Fix actually works best for people who aren't particularly fashion lovers. It's actually really good for a customer who doesn't want to go out

and necessarily shop for herself. And it's that customer that's more of the fashion enthusiast is much harder to send five items to and get it right. And so what I found there was that there was a lot of love averages in the way that we were like building our algorithms. And also when you own the inventory yourself, which is the model that Stitch Fix is, it's just much more limiting. But it gave me a lot of the ideas around building the S, my next company, which

basically was more of a fashion recommendation engine built off of other people's product.

“But for fashion enthusiasts, I can't even remember the question. I'm like, now talking, I'm like,”

I have no idea if I just answered the question. You absolutely did. And it's then incredible to

hear your thesis. And clearly the passion behind it. Let's dig into the yes a little bit. As Madison mentioned in your intro, it was acquired by Pinterest and incredible place to shop and discover. Tell us a little bit more about your decision to get back into the founder arena and start Adrian. It's very tied to the story that happened with the acquisition with Pinterest. So we were acquired when Ben Silverman, who's the founder of Pinterest was a CEO and he wanted to make

Pinterest more commerce enabled and had been trying a number of things for many years. And he and I had met many times. And so he was following along the S journey. And basically reached out to us and said, super interested in what you've built. It's clearly built with so much love and like understanding of the consumer he really liked the app. And we started talking and we ended up doing this deal. And the idea was to go in and build basically this new business unit that was e-commerce

really at Pinterest. And then he stepped down and a new CEO came in and that CEO had just had a different vision. And really felt like he wanted to double down on the ads business. And while he was interested in shopping, he was much more interested in the ads model to sort of drive shopping. And so it really changed the direction of the company, you know, of what we were planning to do. And so after sticking with the commitment to helping Pinterest, the whole team went over. So we found

the right roles for everyone. And we spent some time building and then unwinding. And as these

crazy M&A things can go. And then chat to be launched. So I was like, wait, first of all is amazing.

But also one of the things that I was really interested in with the yes that we couldn't get customers to do was to think about search more broadly and rather than doing redress to actually like be able to give a whole prompt like I am searching for a revenge dress for a wedding in Paris, which is my favorite prompt that someone searched. Oh, go. Yeah. And it was actually I'm searching for a revenge dress for a wedding in Paris with a salt burn vibe. So grateful. I can never handle.

And so the reality is that it was very hard to get people to think about search in a different way. And then once chat to be teed launched, it was like instantly retraining everyone. And so that was the moment where I was like, okay, we're not going to do what I thought we were at Pinterest. And then search was like becoming so interesting now. And then the straw that broke the camel's back becoming in founder again was my husband saying, someone's going to build this. And if it's not you,

it's really going to bother you. And I was like, it's so true. Also, my youngest went to college. And suddenly, I found myself with more time than I had ever had, which depending on where you are and you're not yet having children having children or having your children, you know, leave very different things. But I really had so much energy and enthusiasm. And I clearly am obsessed with this subject matter. And so yeah, I'm very glad I decided to do it. But it has been,

I thought the second time would be easier in its own harder. Interesting. Daydream is really

“a layer between consumers and retailers, solving a ton of really important problems for consumers.”

But I'd love to peel back the onion a little bit more around the product. And then also the dynamic between working with retailers and consumers. How do you navigate that dynamic without getting squeezed out? The product itself is really focused on understanding the context of your request. So what we found is that most people have two or three different components to prompt.

asking for a location. Oftentimes people will say, like, what should I wear to this kind of thing? Where it's still in beta. And we have a new product releasing in a few weeks. And it's sort of understanding and getting a really good answer back with product results that are not just relevant to the query, but also relevant to the user because we have so many brands like we have Uniclo and we have Gucci. And so when you have over a million styles, it's very overwhelming.

And I've always said to my team, like, if you're going to do personalization, you need a

huge assortment. But if you're going to have a huge assortment, you better do personalization well because it's just overwhelming, otherwise. And overwhelm is the problem on the web in general.

“That's why people are so excited that they don't have to go search through Google for all these”

articles. They can just now go to chat to your meeting and get the article summarized. Just the content is insane. And same with the commerce like in the early days. And when I was starting Nordstrom, it was like trying to convince brands to sell online. And now it's like, how many brands are there? Like, I don't know, 50,000 fashion brands, probably more, 100,000 fashion brands. That problem of overwhelm is a hard one to solve. And the product that we're building

is anchored around being able to understand you the user and also understand the product catalog of the world and being able to match those really well. And then we have so many ideas of how to extend the product once we get the search working really well. I would say on the brand side and the relationship with brands and retailers is interesting because the retailers are so over exposed to Google and Facebook and or meta in terms of their ad spend. And they're all looking for new

customers. They're fairly big mature businesses at this point. And so they're looking for additional sources of growth. They're also looking to learn and they're interested in what Gen AI is going to do for them and how search is going to change. And so they benefit from having an additional source of new customers. They're as opposed to most standard affiliates that are focused on discounts and that kind of thing. We're actually just focused on getting you the right

product. And we're not an ads business. We only make money if you end up buying something. It's a commission-based business. And so we are intended to show the customer the best products for them. And that sort of serves the retailers and brands well too. And for the most part, they know us. They trust us and they're learning alongside us. You mentioned this problem today of being overwhelmed by how much is out there. And I think that's a little bit different

than the Stitch Fix problem, where regardless of where you are on the loving fashion and spending a lot of time with it versus not really knowing what to wear, the problem of being overwhelmed runs across the spectrum. Tell us a little bit more about who your core customers.

“Ultimately, we will have a very broad customer base. When you're doing a startup, you need to pick”

a core customer and you need to focus on that customer and the customer that we're focused on is a millennial who is interested in fashion and engages in the category and a woman. We have women's and men's and the reason we chose that as our sort of target customers because young people aspire up and older people aspire down. Men trust women when it comes to fashion and so if it works for her, then we see it ultimately working for everyone.

I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into your fundraising journey for Daydream. You've raised

over 50 million from incredible funds, whether it's four-runner, index, google ventures,

true, the list goes on. Tell us a little bit more about who was the first to say yes to your vision of Daydream. Kirsten Green at Foreigner. She was an investor, but to give John Callahan some credit. The truth is that I just happened to talk to Kirsten first, but when I talked to John, he was like, great. So they were both investors in my first company. We had pretty well formed a relationship and I think they were both interested in the problem space a lot

because of what we saw at the yes and what they learned through that. And also obviously they trusted me because we had worked together before. It's really great to have pre-existing relationships and then Google ventures and index were new relationships. The theme of the long-term relationship has very much been a consistent thread throughout today's conversations. And sometimes your long-term relationships are what get you through tricky times as a founder. And we know that the path is

not always a straight line. Tell us a little bit more about something that was unexpected or challenging

that has happened in the early daydream journey and how you overcame that. There are a lot.

“I'm trying to think of which one I should choose. I think the most important part of”

building a business is your team and having the right people on the team. And Alyssa, my chief recruiter, someone who wears many other hats and who have worked other than many companies is here. But I feel like the stat is something like 50% of people you hire work out. I don't know if it's

with before, then you're in good shape, which is Alyssa. But when you're hiring new people or you're working with new people, it's just really hard to know. And hopefully AI can figure out how to solve this problem for us. And I've really do that interview that works and proves it's self-out. I'm super excited for that to be honest. But just getting the right team is everything. And I would say I didn't get the right team up front. And it really slowed us down. And it's painful. It's painful too.

Not get where you want to go with the product. And it's painful to have to part ways with early co-founders and other employees who, you know, bet on you and agree to come on and stuff. So I would say the like people side of things is the hardest.

Claudia and I got very lucky. This is the first time we officially worked together and starting the

podcast. And it has worked out. I also got the chance to invest in her company. And that also worked

“out. But we got really lucky. And I think what I've learned being on the inside of this partnership”

is that it would have been really tough. We had gotten this wrong. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm glad we're on the right side of the 50%. You know, we think it's like every day. You talk every day. So that super resonates. I guess as we look towards the future of daydream as you're in the early innings of building in this broader space that's rapidly changing under your feet, the prosumer model has been one that was not really appreciated for number of years because

honestly, people were willing to pay for individual productivity apps or other consumer experiences. But I feel that's really shifted in terms of AI and user willingness to pay. So I'm curious how that's informed your decisions around daydreams business model. My feeling is that we'll have

to see what our business model is. Ultimately, definitely think that there's going to be an

opportunity potentially to charge some kind of subscription because of what it takes to build. But I feel like in the early days, we just want users and we want to learn. We set up this sort of commission structure where we get paid when we drive a sale. That makes it a ton of sense. I guess we talk a little bit about retailers, which are a key stakeholder in your ecosystem. And you alluded to this, but they've been so indexed on Google's crawlers and traditional SEO as the ability to drive

their business, but of course, strategy BT, perplexity and daydream are shifting this away from actually about being where you find these insights. If AI power dropping tools are the future, should retailers be thinking differently about their site architecture? For sure, but I don't think we know exactly what they should be doing yet. You can just search on chat to BT and say, like, how do I

“make my site most indexable for chat to BT? And it'll tell you. And I think that there are a lot of”

structural things that are going to help. But I think it's not totally clear like they're now starting to be a couple companies, pitching themselves as being able to help retailers show up better. But yeah, I think we're just in the early innings and I don't think people know how to do it yet. No, I think it's a really evolving question. It's definitely something up for salt. We're thinking a lot about we were a part of the server side rendering revolution and how that shifted the way that

retailers support their front end loading. And we have seen that that's already shifting with AI. And we believe it will continue to shift. And so I guess if you had any advice that you've learned maybe from asking chat or in building your product, how can you make anything you're building today more search engine friendly in the LLM world? Go ask that question to tech to be take great. Perfect. We'll do that. And answer as well as they. That's totally high. They know a lot

in those models. So I guess maybe a bit of a future a question for us. If every retailer has perfectly optimized their websites to be readable by AI shopping tools, does that hurt daydream? Or where does our value shift in terms of shoppers? Definitely doesn't hurt daydream. One of the things

“that you need to do is not just be able to access a site, but then you need to basically augment”

the information that the site has about the product. So we're really focused on product enrichment. So we get whatever the text drills and the image details are of the site. But that's not enough. And so, you know, we're using LLMs to basically enrich our understanding of the product and understand how to translate our understanding of a product to the way a user talks and describes and asks for things. So we have kind of this model where we think about what we're seeing

users ask for. The words that they use and how they describe things. And then we need to basically make that map to product. So our focus is not just about getting access to the content. It's about what you do with it. And so we're just spending all this time going super deep on this vertical. So that we truly understand like, is that dress good for speaking engagement? Is it good for winter or summer or fall? Is it good for someone who likes these kind of silhouette? There's just so much

nuance to it that I think the level of detail that's interesting. I was with a bunch of Google

people last night. And they were telling me, "Goals never are going to go to this level of detail

on building." Because they have so many other billion dollar businesses that they're focused on. And it's just not their focus. And it was actually a company that's spinning out recently of Google because it's sort of another startup that's using AI. It's actually really interesting. It's called

there to augment the real referee, but it'll make a call so that it's less debatable. And so that is something that was Google technology that was built inside of Google. They decided they weren't going to do something with it so they spun it out and now it's a startup. And so I think that there are lots of capabilities that these huge tech companies could theoretically do. But the question of if they decide to do it and if they put the focus to it, I think is a different question.

Absolutely. And speaking of that, there's all of these model providers now, including Google having one too. I guess for you guys, have you hitched your wagon of daydream to a specific LLM? Or how have you thought about interoperability in regards to them changing so quickly amongst

the LLMs? Absolutely not. We have basically a model where we're constantly testing new model.

It's interesting. Pretty much anyone who's like their business is an application layer on top of

“these LLMs realizes you need to use multiple models. And the truth is even we have like this”

ensemble of mini models that understand things like color and fabric. And we get really specific. And even for each of those models, we test them against like multiple Gemini models and chatchipati models and constantly testing with new models and we use multiple models. I'm really excited for that. I did not realize this dressed as Jersey material when I got it. And I was a little bit disappointed. That's not the vibe I actually wanted for today, but here we are.

Although so cute. But it's one of the things where like it's hard to tell online. If I had known that it wasn't me, very wouldn't have bought it. So it's just super helpful to have. This is a bit of my like hot-take question. But you're working with so many different players in the ecosystem. And of course, like a cloud provider is another key partner of yours. How do you see or do you feel short any of the cloud providers as it relates to this e-commerce experience? I know, for example,

when I was at GAP, we would never have worked with AWS. There was this fear of them in like being

the conglomerate. We were an Azure shop. But like, that had its problems. So how have you been thinking about that for retailers? So I think Amazon is phenomenal. Andy Jesse is a friend from business school. Wow. Okay. And his nice statement is always incredibly generous with offering whatever services they need. But I do think that if you're a retailer being on another cloud provider is understandable. And we've had a lot of success working with Google. But in part because we have

ex-Googleers on our team who know how to take advantage of it, make the most of it. And Google Ventures is one of our investors. We have a lot of reason to be working with Google in that case.

“Yeah. It's nice to have a buffet. They all do what you need to do. And so the question is really”

each company that's making a decision about who to work with as different factors that they're making that decision around. And back to your early point about team like hiring people who perhaps have preferences, know how to find two in two particular clouds advantages could be something that's something to think about in the room. Would you consider D3 AI native? And if so or if not, what does that mean to you? I would. And the reason that I do is because we started post-LLM and our whole business

is based on leveraging AI. And so it's interesting because I was talking to another portfolio company of true ventures. I'm pointing to true ventures. Yes, Caroline. And it was Amy from Madison Reed. It's a consumer product. It's not a tech product, but still. And then we recently also got together with a bunch of other founders. And I think that any company that was built pre maybe 2023. Even when I think about the yes, the way we built the yes was completely different from how we built

a dream. And there's a lot of similarities in the businesses, the different fundamental models. But

totally different tech stack. Always the case with technology like the newest player as the advantage

of building on the latest tech. And that allows you to move faster and be more nimble. The sort of challenge that I gave the team is like, how do we build in a way that in five years where not the old out of date? And I do think that's a huge challenge for anyone building tech. But the questions that the teams were asking about had a leverage AI in the way they work are even things we think about. The past couple of years have been big years in terms of just how AI

has evolved pretty much everything. And so I'd love to look forward a little bit now. Let's say everything went right with daydream, which it will of course. Where would we be as consumers in call it five ten years? Are we still shopping, shopable grids? How's the paradigm completely shifted? Is there going to be a step-wise function change in consuming retail? I'll tell you my little vision, but what I would say is I know it's not going far enough. And if I truly knew

where was going? I'd be worth a lot more. Let's just say. But what I envision is we think about the capabilities that we're building is really a stylist in your pocket. So I'm assuming you still

“have a phone. I know Open AI is working on a new device. But I think that if you're replenishing”

your lucky charms, I don't know. I said that. I do love lucky charms, but you don't necessarily need to see a picture of it. But if you're doing something that's more aesthetic, you want to see a photo. So a little device that doesn't have that. And I'm super bearish on virtual reality.

glasses that's doing everything for us. Partially, I hate that thought. It makes me really upset. And so I like to believe what I want to happen. But I do think it'll be you pull out your phone. You say I have a speaking engagement two weeks. Give me a couple of ideas what to wear. And literally up will pop a couple of different outfit ideas. You're wearing them all. Right? So the virtual

“model piece, I think will become universal. And you get to flip through and see what it is and say”

great, send me that. And that's it. You don't have to go through check out. You don't have to look

through a million things because you have basically built a relationship with daydream where we

have now understood enough about you where we understand what you're going to like and what you're not and know how to push you a little bit and make you look a little bit better than you might do if you were just on your own. And I also think there could be a notification that says, hey, you have this event that's coming up. Do you have something to wear? Do you want some ideas? Yes, I have some ideas. Send them to me. You can like flip through and then you can say yeah, that

wouldn't send it to me. It's incredible even to hear in your answer how the fundamentals of how e-commerce infrastructure have evolved over the past few years, whether it's payments to notifications lottering up to this new world. Let's shift gears a little bit. We have a ton of builders, founders, under 35, what advice do you have for them? If you're young and a first time, one of the things that is very helpful when running a business and I've seen this go well and not well is having had

experience working for a company before you're actually starting your company. So when people want to start companies out of college, some have done so very successfully, I just feel like it's very hard to grow with your business because you actually have no model that you're basing it off of

“and it's very, very hard to replace experience. You can ask people for advice all you want and you should”

and that's I think my second piece of advice is find some people who are expert in the space that you're working in and engage with them and convince them to be advisors too because that is so hugely valuable. There's huge value in getting experience working for other people. I think seeing what good and what bad looks like in managers and leadership is helpful. I think bad is stuff

you know not to do, right? You're like shit, my boss sucked at that. I am never going to do that.

I remember I had a boss who literally was like, I would like you to show up every week in our one-on-one with a binder. I want everything through whole punched so I can put it the things that you want to give me in my binder. It was like this crazy organization system, eventually the guy laughed and I was like thank God and he was a very nice guy but not the way I felt being managed was getting the best out of me and I also worked for someone who was a single mom who adopted a

baby while I was working from her and who wrote my recommendation to Harvard Business School and she was such a good role model and so many levels and so I just think there's so much value and getting experience both seeing how companies are run and learning about different ways of managing and leading people. So I would say soak up as much experience as you can before you go to start your own thing and then once you do start your own thing find some people who are really

“inspiring to help be advisors to. Sometimes you have to see excellence to be excellent. We're going”

to ask the last question. Here are a question of the pod. You're probably familiar with this one who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on your career maybe in the last 10 years. I would say Katrina who I worked for at Stitch Fix. First I was on her board and then I went and worked for her and I would say it's a combination of things that I thought were great and things that I thought were really great learning opportunities. She was very young when she started Stitch Fix.

She was very bold and she had strong conviction and she was able to stay really focused on what mattered to make that business work in the early days and it was really fun to watch and really fun to be a part of and I learned a lot by being a part of that company which she built and I learned

a lot of things from watching her too. Wow, yeah, incredible. Julie, thank you so much for joining

us in the room. Physical room today, it's been a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining us at the room pod cast. If you want more from the room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode and inspirational guest Tuesday, 10 a.m. Eastern 7 a.m. Pacific. See you in the room. Perkins Kooey supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast moving and high growth sectors addressing

their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end to end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Kooey's interactive website startup percolator offers access to programs,

To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and Perkins Kooey C-O-I-E.com. This podcast is brought to you

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