![]() ![]() employees aren’t knowledgeable about different breeds and ages, and new products and brands are hard to find. I came in for a meeting with Matt and Henrik, and I was like, “When do I start?” Their idea was along the lines of “Birchbox for dogs.” But it was more about how it’s difficult to find really cool stuff for your dogs. She knew I was an operations person and I loved dogs. “If you have any friends who might be good, let us know,” it said.Īlex made the introduction right away. One day, Matt sent out an email sharing the idea of BarkBox and that he and Henrik were looking for an operations partner. My friend Alex was working on a startup there. Matt was running Dogpatchlabs, a co-working space for tech startups. I feel like it was a luck thing that I met Matt Meeker and Henrik Werdelin at the exact moment they were hoping to get BarkBox off the ground. I kept coming back to, Well, I just want to hang out with my dog all the time. I started to think about what I could do if I applied these skills to something I deeply cared about. I had to say a number of times, “We’re going to do this with or without you.”Īfter eight months at Uber, I started seeing the impact of things that could be done in a startup. I can imagine some of those men thought, I can’t take her seriously. But those were the types of relationships I was tasked with building. I was going out to steakhouse lunches with what felt like taxi mob bosses. But that’s also the part that makes it exciting and fun and motivating to do every day. ![]() The stresses that come with that are immense and the amount of self-doubt you have is huge. Going from executing someone else’s work for clients at a huge company to doing something I feel real ownership of became the best and worst parts of the job. One of the most attractive things about working at a small company is being able to learn from incredibly smart people who you work closely with every day. I can’t tell you how many people thought that I was quitting my job to become a taxi driver. I left Deloitte in May 2011 to join Uber as its New York City operations manager. I think most startups in their early days are just looking for smart people who can solve problems, collaborate, and get something moving. The role was figuring out and understanding how the taxi and limousine commission works in New York City, how drivers operate, and how we could entice them to want to serve Uber’s customers in New York. The company was just getting ready to launch in New York City, and they needed someone to head up operations. One of my friends from Homefield introduced me to Ryan Graves, who was leading expansion efforts at Uber. Homefield worked out of the Techstars incubator, where I met a lot of entrepreneurs. I spent my nights and weekends helping them with their financial projections as a way to figure out what I could contribute to the startup world. I had a couple of friends from college who were working on a startup called Homefield, which was a video tool for collegiate sports. I was like, Hey, I wonder if this is something I could also do? I was envious and inspired by the challenges they were solving every day, the pace that they were working, even the fact that they could wear jeans to work. You can only feel so attached to your work.Īt this time, a few of my very best friends in New York City had joined startups. ![]() But at the end of the day, Deloitte is a client-services company. I graduated in 2008 with a BS in mechanical engineering and was offered a full-time job at Deloitte in their financial advisory group. He kept me anchored in my day-to-day life, taught me responsibility, and gave me something to look forward to at the end of every day. I had always been a dog lover, but I never owned one of my own. While studying mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I adopted my first dog, Cooper, a puggle. ![]()
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