Building a Fashion Forward Team

Well, how nice that you were more enlightened than some of the male investors that said no to you, you realize that, hey, there may be some great value here, bringing some women on the executive team.

Yes. In fact, for Poshmark, since our vision from day one was around shopping, and around sort of shopping from closets, and certainly fashion, even before I started the company, I actively actually went out and said, you know, besides the technology and product angle that we had, I wanted someone you know, hopefully a woman but someone who grew natively in the fashion scene and grew outside of the Bay Area. So, my co-founder, Tracy Sun joined me in the journey about them through our first investor Mayfield, and Tracy and I partnered up together with two of my co-founders and partners from Kaboodle, and that’s how Poshmark came to be.

Why was it so important for you to find someone from outside the San Francisco Bay Area where you’re based?

Well, if you go back to 2010, Silicon Valley was not as connected to fashion as it is today. And so I wanted someone who not only brought in media and sort of core consumer expertise, but really understood the nuances of connecting fashion to the consumer, and Tracy bought that and much more than that. And that was critical to really building a company because you need to have a team that fully understands the customer, fully understand the product, fully understands the technology. And in fact, all of that is part of how I innovate is you know, not only—innovation is not just about understanding problem and customer, it’s also putting the right team to solve that problem. And a great team surpasses anything else out there, because the sum of parts can be much bigger than the parts themselves.