Sarah Kunst
Founder of Proday Fitness. Investor, diversity advocate and contributing editor at Marie Claire.
Discussion
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
Hi! I'm Sarah Kunst. I recently founded Proday.co, the fitness app that let's you workout alongside professional athletes anytime, anywhere. Prior to that, I was a venture capital investor. I'm also a writer about tech and business and I spend a lot of time talking about diversity for obvious reasons. Ask me anything!
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casie millhouse
@casielane · Singapore Director, SheWorx
Would love to know what hobbies, sports or activities you did as a kid?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@casielane I started dance classes when I was 2 and that was a huge part of my life until I graduated high school. I also grew up in a town of 300 people so summers were spent 4 wheeling and playing in the woods and going to the lake and taking long bike rides and winters were spent sledding and skiing and building snow forts. I played softball and was a fast runner too but reading and dancing were my main hobbies. One summer I read 3000 pages in a month :)
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
Hi Sarah, what have been some of the biggest challenges in getting Proday off the ground? How have you overcome these?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@ems_hodge The hardest part of a consumer mobile app like Proday is getting people to know about it and go to the app store to download it. Breaking through the noise and app store discovery are some of the hardest unsolved challenges for great apps right now. But we also know that our focus has to be on building a great brand and user experience so that's what we focus on first. When users find us, they will love us.
Andrew Ettinger
@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)
You recently talked about 4% of female-led startups being led by black women. What is the root of this disparity and how can we change it?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@andrewett Well, the root of the disparity is discrimination. You don't get funding levels so far off of population parity - and even college graduate parity - without bias and discrimination. The key to change is holding investors accountable for who they invest in and pressuring them to invest in more diverse founders. It's that simple and that hard.
Jacqueline von Tesmar
@jacqvon · Community, Product Hunt ✌️😻
How did you approach your own funding for ProDay - what advice can you give to other female founders starting out their first fund raise?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@jacqvon I spent 10 years meeting people in tech and building a reputation before I started my company. That's certainly not required but it helps. Build a network and reputation for being a good, very smart, talented person and a lot of doors will be open when you're ready to talk through them. If you're at a big company now, go find a startup to advise on the side or get super active on twitter or medium or product hunt. Show that you're more than a biz dev or iOS dev at company x and people will start to notice. Be helpful, when someone you admire mentions visiting a city and wanting recs, send them. Tweet congrats over nerdy articles or speaking gigs others might have missed. I built my network before twitter became the force it is now, so I had to do it in person. Now you can do it from your computer anywhere in the world. There's no excuse for not having a warm intro.
Kerry Benjamin
@kerry_benjamin1
Hi Sarah. In your opinion what's needed for more underrepresented groups and founders to become investors?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@kerry_benjamin1 More funds to hire them. There are so few investors overall that moving the needle on that particular issue is easy in numbers - if the funds who hire 2 new people a year decided to focus on hiring diversely until their ranks were at population parity they could get there in under 5 years. If the funds who knew they were going to bring on new more senior investors in the next decade started actively grooming CEOs and mid level VCs and focused solely on people who would bring in diversity, that problem would be solved quickly too. The problem isn't a lack of great people to be hired into investor roles, it's a lack of investors who want to bring in diverse hires vs their buddy or a kid 15 years their junior who went to the same school and wears the same down jacket and plaid shirt.
Phil Nguyen
@p_ngu · The Daily Water Cooler + Vettery
Hi @sarahkunst - thanks for making the time to answer questions today! What's something (not matter how small) that a small startup with limited resources can do immediately to promote and enhance diversity/inclusion?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@p_ngu Hire diverse people. Look around the room and see who's sitting in it and look at what your next hires need to be. Make a choice to not hire someone for that role who looks like everyone already in the room. If your network isn't full of anyone who doesn't look like you and didn't go to your school, go expand your network. Twitter and Angellist are great places to find and follow diverse people that you may not already know. Task your team and managers with diversity in hiring - no one should get bonuses or raises if they aren't hiring diverse people because it's proven that less diverse teams do worse overall. If people in your company aren't optimizing for the most successful company they can build, you should fire them. That includes not ensuring that there's diversity in your company. Yes, even down to the interns you bring on or outside contractors you hire.
Harry Stebbings
@harrystebbings · Podcast Host @ The Twenty Minute VC
Hi @sarahkunst thanks so much for joining us today, big fan of @prodayco and would love to hear the major acquisition channels were for you with ProDay? What were the most effective and least effective? Would love to have you on @twentyminutevc would be a pleasure to hear the story in more detail!
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@harrystebbings @prodayco @twentyminutevc thanks! I'd love to join you :) We look at earned media, social reach and paid social as three key acquisition channels. We are building a brand, not just an app so we focus on getting users to know our name and associate it with a behind the scenes look at athletes as well as an amazing workout. It's early but so far it's working.
Joe Lamoureux
@josephlamoureux · Founder, Go Pro Workouts
@harrystebbings @twentyminutevc Great podcast. just listened to Sarah Travel!
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
As a diversity advocate, what can we all be doing in our own way to make the tech world a more diverse place?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@ems_hodge Hire diverse people! It's the most direct way to change things. Look around your office - if everyone looks the same(no matter if that's black guys, asian women, whatever, homogeny is the enemy) then hire people who are different. It will bring new viewpoints and diversity. Don't hire more guys name Jeff than women. It's easy to not suck at this.
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
What made you leave the world of VC and would you ever go back?
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sarah kunst
@sarahkunst · .
@bentossell Of course I'd go back. Being an VC is an amazing way to invest in and see the future unfold before your eyes. It's also a job that's best done by people who are in control of the capital they deploy and at most funds, that means being a senior exec with past operating experience or big early wins in investing. Nothing compares to the rush and stress of running your own company but investing is a great way to grow the ecosystem and make sure the future you see comes to life.