Venture Everywhere Podcast: Emma Lawler with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, Co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, chats with Emma Lawler, Co-founder and CEO of Velvet on episode 25: Decoding Data.
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In episode 25 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, chats with Emma Lawler, co-founder of Velvet. They make infrastructure for startups to unify disparate data sources and ship real-time product features. By unifying all data sources, Velvet leverages AI to automate SQL queries. Not only does Velvet streamline data analysis, but it also facilitates the creation of API endpoints for seamless integration with other tools, democratizing data access and enhancing organizational efficiency. Emma discussed how Velvet's AI-powered platform is revolutionizing data accessibility, empowering every team member to act as a data engineer.
In this episode, you will hear:
Velvet's platform is driving the evolution of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and UX design.
The idea of founder-market fit and capturing VC interest with a compelling founder story and distinctive product differentiation.
The nuances of co-founder dating and collaborating on projects to assess compatibility, skill alignment, and shared vision.
Velvet's role in addressing data architecture and technical debt challenges while enhancing product experiences with AI.
The role of backend data interoperability in creating an intuitive frontend user experience.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:20 Scott: I'm so excited to be here today with Emma Lawler, the founder and CEO of Velvet. Emma, welcome to the podcast.
00:00:27 Emma: Thanks, Scott. Thanks so much for having me on today.
00:00:30 Scott: So first of all, tell us a little bit about Velvet and what it does.
00:00:35 Emma: Velvet makes everyone on your team a data engineer. And we do that by unifying all of your data in one place. So your database, all of your third party sources, even events that come from your product. And then we use AI to automate SQL. So anyone on your team could ask a question like show me all paying customers who joined last month and then return an array of content recommendations for them.
00:01:02 Emma: And we would automate that SQL for you, return results. And then what gets really exciting is when you can turn that query into an API endpoint and then make it interoperable with anything else in your product ecosystem.
00:01:16 Scott: It's so amazing. The levels at which technology has advanced since my early days of being on a team at Google 15 plus years ago where we literally had a business analyst that you had to walk across the building. You had to sometimes take a scooter because the building was so big to get across the whole office. And you'd go to the business analyst desk and you'd ask them to make this query for you.
00:01:36 Scott: The only way to extract data from a particular client list or whatnot was to go to a business analyst bottlenecked by that person to enter the SQL query and ping the right database to get that one answer that you needed. This is just fragmented 10 times or a hundred times more over the last decades as you've had all these explosions of services like Mixpanel and Snowflake.
00:01:59 Scott: So we'll talk a bit more about the complexity of the data architecture and data infrastructure and how a company like Velvet that's making it seamless on the front end for anyone to be able to ask a question across a number of different data categories in lay speak. You don't have to be a crazy backend database engineer to be able to ask this kind of query that democratizes that ability to be smart within your own organization.
00:02:24 Emma: Yeah. And we're even seeing that for engineers, they're really excited by this product more than anyone else because they're the ones who are tasked with querying all this data and doing data migrations and even writing SQL. And they don't have to know that much about their own data model. Like if they're an early stage startup provider.
00:02:41 Scott: I know nothing says weekend fun like data migration.
00:02:44 Emma: Exactly. Nobody wants to do that task.
00:02:48 Scott: As many founders, all founders have had to come to arrive, to the epiphany of starting Velvet. You obviously had the ups and the downs, the trials, the tribulations, the fun times, the good and the bad across a number of different organizations. So I know you were, early employee at Fitstar that was acquired by Fitbit. And you founded a company called Moonlight.
00:03:06 Scott: You also have joined high growth companies like theSkimm as they were scaling from Series C and beyond. Tell us a little bit about some of those experiences and maybe how that led you to founding Velvet.
00:03:20 Emma: I've worked at startups at every phase. And so I've gotten to experience what it's like to be at a pre-seed company, go through an acquisition, go through an IPO. And when I joined Fitbit after that acquisition, I found myself on this team of some of the best engineers and designers in the Bay Area at that time. And that really served as the testing ground for me to learn all these skills about, how do you build really high fidelity products at scale.
00:03:47 Emma: We were launching products to 28 million users and then got to stay there and build that entire organization through the IPO. And so going through both an acquisition and an IPO, so young in my career, really prepared me to be an entrepreneur and experiment with those things myself.
00:04:05 Scott: It's fascinating. I listened to a podcast a number of years ago, now that was about walking in the woods and it was, a boy and his brother. And they grew up in Scandinavia, and the whole conversation was around how they would try as kids to go, get lost in the woods. And the premise was the more they could get lost in the woods, the less that the woods were intimidating to them.
00:04:25 Scott: And so they would high five when they got lost because they say, gosh, we found this new part of the woods, we'll never be lost here again. I think as an entrepreneur, many of these experiences, they're all unlocks. They might seem challenging at the time, but going through a shutdown, going through a pivot, going through an acquisition, going through an IPO. Any of these, the good or the bad, are just different parts of the woods.
00:04:47 Scott: And the more you've experienced the deep and dark corners of the woods, the less you can get lost in the future. And I think those are the experiences that set you up for success on whether it's wave one of your startup journey, two or three. And I think at this point, you've been through so many experiences that by the time you're starting Velvet, it's like you've seen a lot of the woods to use that metaphor, which is very cool.
00:05:08 Emma: Totally. I started my last company. It was called Moonlight and doing that for the first time was so much scarier, and I made so many more mistakes. And doing it the second time with Velvet, raising money again and building a team and having a remote team, all of these things just become so much more obvious as you repeat them over and over again.
00:05:29 Scott: So with Moonlight, part of the premise of that company was focused on remote work and you were able to be living around the world, doing work remotely. Did that experience provide any context for these challenges that you see now that you're solving with Velvet across just different fragmentation of infrastructure, fragmentation of team, did any of that inform the problem?
00:05:51 Emma: Yeah, so with Moonlight, it was much more of an operational business. So it was different in Velvet that we could make money without writing a line of code because we were matching software developers to projects and then taking a cut of that payment. So it was much easier to monetize that business. But we also were using tools like Velvet to piece together this entire ecosystem that we were building on top of.
00:06:15 Emma: And so that was interesting going from Fitbit, where I had this massive personalization team, to Moonlight, where we were just two people building something in a really scrappy way and seeing the gaps there. But like you said, every decade, new innovations come. AI is one of them right now. It just makes the possibility of what one single software engineer can do so much wider. And even since the time where I stopped working on Moonlight and started working on Velvet, that landscape has rapidly changed again.
00:06:47 Scott: And I know that you also spent some time with Chicago Ventures while you were at Booth in Chicago. Having been at the pre-seed through IPO and also on the venture side of the table, how has that changed the scope of how you entered into scaling Velvet or the early days of raising money?
00:07:04 Emma: It was so interesting to work on the other side of the table after I had already raised money myself. I had such a deeper level of empathy for VCs and what they have to do to raise their own money. I think you've said this before, but as a GP of a venture capital firm, you have to go raise money from LPs. And then you're running your own startup and hiring your own team and running all these operations.
00:07:27 Emma: So I just have a totally different level of empathy after going through that process. And I think I'm a much better entrepreneur because of it. But I'd be curious, I know you've been both a founder and a VC as well. So what are the parallels that you see there?
00:07:40 Scott: Yeah, it's a good observation. The venture side of the table often don't get this credit of being a founder, but in many ways, it parallels those realities. There's still fundraising. You still have a client base or a clientele that you cater to, which are both the founders that you work with, obviously, in building the reputation that enables you to provide value and meet great founders, but also your limited partners who are the capital providers for the fund capital that you raise.
00:08:07 Scott: And I think one observation that a friend of mine chuckled and called me up as he was trying to raise a hundred million dollar fund and he'd built three successful companies previously and he said, Gosh, I forgot, it's so much harder to raise on the venture side because your biggest LP investor is only a 10% anchor position. At least on the startup side, when you get a lead investor, maybe they're 60% or 70% or 80% of your round.
00:08:30 Scott: On the venture side, it's, maximum 10% of your round in the sense that nobody wants to take more than about a 10% to 15% anchor position in a VC fund. So there are definitely parallels. And I think it's great for VCs to have been founders, obviously, and have the empathy and really understand the grit and perseverance it requires to build a company.
00:08:50 Scott: And I think vice versa, it's interesting for you to have spent time on both sides of the table just to give you that extra ability to storytell, understand what those investors might be looking for, understanding that they're really looking at you as a founder at the tailwinds behind the market and the believability of this problem. And then why are you the right person to be solving it at this time? And so timing comes so much into the story there as well.
00:09:14 Emma: Yeah, it was also interesting to me just how many companies a VC sees every year. They've probably seen 10 other versions of you when you go pitch them. So that was very telling in the bar is high, especially in this market. If they see 10 people just like you, why is your product differentiated and why are you the person to build this?
00:09:35 Scott: Yeah, 100%. It's so interesting too, because it's that thin line as a founder between having the backbone and the conviction in your own direction and your own vision to not be wayward in the feedback of what investors say well, I've seen this before, but you should go 10 degrees to the left or 10 degrees to the right. And you say, no, we have conviction that this is the right direction.
00:09:55 Scott: And so it's this trade-off between having that conviction yourself and being smart and listening to feedback. You're hearing the same point of feedback over and over again. There's plenty of stories of 60 rejections from the venture side, and then the one big round that gets it done and the unicorn rocket ship that was the overnight success. There's equal times where you might get the 60 rejections and you should listen to the feedback that maybe that direction of product market fit isn't quite there. And so that's one of those wrinkles that's very hard to tease out.
00:10:26 Scott: And obviously you have a ton of context and experience to be able to do that with Velvet. Maybe talking a little bit more about your background. I know that you've spent time in a number of fun cities. I was very jealous to read that you've lived in all these great places, including now in New York City, which is a place that I called home for over 10 years, but from Mexico City to Buenos Aires to Barcelona to Chicago, LA, SF. Obviously, that's informed probably a lot of your global background and expertise, but talk a little bit about that experience.
00:10:54 Emma: I think one thing I learned when I was building Moonlight, which was bootstrapped for half the time and I was living as a digital nomad, and then we raised money and moved to New York for half the time. And it was such a stark difference between those two states. One being an entrepreneur somewhat feels like being an immigrant or an outsider already. And it's really hard to do just that one thing.
00:11:17 Emma: But then traveling or living in a foreign country at the same time is also very difficult. And so that felt like a little too much to me all at once. It was hard to focus enough on the business goals I wanted to meet while also going through so much personal change. So that was a good realization for me. And then I really love building businesses in New York and San Francisco. And the reason why is because you have this entrepreneurial ecosystem of other founders who are going through the same thing, raising money from the same investors, working on very technical problems.
00:11:50 Emma: So those are the two cities that I want to be a founder in. And I think both of them have very great ecosystems within them and I can be convinced that either is better. But personally, I loved living in other countries just because you learn so much about yourself and other cultures by really investing in people and speaking the local language and getting to know how local entrepreneurs or just regular people exist. So it definitely informs a ton of how I am as a person and how I run a team as an entrepreneur.
00:12:24 Scott: Yeah, it's fascinating. I definitely empathize with some of that as well. Just from experience a number of years back writing a book, I had these goals of writing the book all over the planet, flying around and living cafe to cafe. And then you realize that consistency if you're in the throes of really trying to build something. Focus and consistency are so vital.
00:12:42 Scott: And so for me, even though that was part of the goal and the orientation around writing the book, it became more productive to sit in Brooklyn, do rinse, repeat, go to the exact same cafe at the exact same time every single day. Black coffee, nothing fancy, just rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat hundreds of days in a row.
00:13:00 Scott: And I feel like the thing is controlling the things you can control and then leaving the stuff that's hard and unpinned down as you're building a company. Maybe there's some elements of control that you need to pin down. Say I need to have a strong team, I need to have a strong co-founder, I need to have consistency around some pieces that I can control, and then let the market decide the other pieces that we can't really control.
00:13:21 Scott: And I think that gets to another topic we want to talk about, which is this founder market fit and how you find that perfect co-founder because it's so difficult to embark on this journey with limited information, limited experiences with this new person that you're about to have a pseudo marriage with or a number of years into the future, going through these trials and tribulations of building a company. So how did you meet Chris, your co-founder, and how did you decide or know he's actually the right person for the job?
00:13:49 Emma: At every company I've worked at, I didn't really realize this until I went through this co-founder dating process, but I work best and I've always worked with very technical engineers. I'm a product designer by trade, but I pair very well with a very technical engineer. And so that's the type of person that I was looking for.
00:14:07 Emma: I also had worked at theSkimm, which is a tech company and it's VC backed, but it's very media forward. And a lot of the emphasis within the organization goes towards the sales team. And so I didn't really enjoy working there because of that reason. I was one of the only technical people working there and I'm not even that technical. And so it was hard to make things happen. It was hard to build systems at scale that I really believed in.
00:14:33 Emma: And so I knew going into this co-founder relationship that I wanted someone who had been an engineer at a high growth startup or a couple of them and had started a few companies of their own. I wasn't too particular about whether they were a bootstrapped founder or a VC backed founder. So that person is very hard to find, especially someone who hasn't already started a company of their own and someone who has that variety of experience.
00:15:00 Emma: I looked for someone for about two years. I did all of the different founder dating profiles. I looked within my business school network. I looked at YC co-founder dating. I met a ton of people through YC actually, so that was a really good exercise. And I started engagements with probably 6 or 10 of them. And so I would go through the process of, let's spec out some work together. Let's build a mini project. Let's launch it. And let's meet a couple of times a week and see if this works.
00:15:28 Emma: But I didn't find someone, a lot of those people work at Google or Amazon and/or not entrepreneurial. They want to be entrepreneurial. But if you've worked in big tech and you've had a cushy salary your whole life, it's pretty hard to leave that. So I met Chris because I raised money by myself from Chicago Ventures, because I had been working there as an EIR and then put up a job post and someone introduced me to him.
00:15:51 Emma: So I met him and then I did some background checks with people he had worked with at Pebble because he had worked at Pebble that also got acquired by Fitbit, and it was automatically the right fit. I went down and visited him in North Carolina, because that's where he was living. And we met for a weekend and just white boarded out a bunch of ideas, agreed on an equity split and salary, and then moved forward from there.
00:16:17 Emma: So there's a ton of trust built in to just say, my gut is right, this is the right person. And so far, it's been an amazing relationship. We've pivoted several times together. And what really matters is that our skill sets are a good fit for each other. And we're both going to keep working through a problem no matter what. And so that seems to have mattered much more than what the initial idea was.
00:16:41 Scott: It's so tricky, that early founder, dating in the sense that sometimes there's this notion of, some people want to pin down the specifics and other people just want to start the work. And obviously you don't want to get too far down the pike doing the work without having pinned down the specifics. But it's also if somebody sort of, Hey, well send me an NDA, and I want this in writing, and I want this amount of equity. And they're too transactional on the front end.
00:17:06 Scott: It's clearly a negative signal to being motivated to build the right things in the company. And so that tricky navigation of those early stage conversations of how do you prioritize the work, be fair around the transactional components of building a team together and those pieces, but it sounds like you guys really saw eye to eye, and that's the first litmus test I think of being a co-founder is just that ability to have those hard conversations, that ability to see eye to eye. And it sounds like you were really lucky to find that person.
00:17:35 Scott: Although it's easy to say overnight success. It sounds like you had two years and millions of other conversations that led you to all the data points that enable you to make that quick decision. It's not as if it's just one quick decision. It's a quick decision informed by tons and tons of data and tons of reps. And I think that's very similar to how we make quick decisions in venture capital, making an investment.
00:17:56 Scott: People say, well, how did you come to conviction? You say, well, 10 years and 10,000 other companies helped me get the data to come to conviction on one 30 minute call. But it's probably a very similar mechanic to that co-founder dating question.
00:18:10 Emma: Totally. I actually think about that a lot. Recruiting and sourcing for a VC firm are almost the same job because it's just wraps of seeing someone do the same thing over and over again, and then building an intuition around what feels right.
00:18:24 Scott: Pivoting a little bit or talking a little bit more about infrastructure as a service and the core of what Velvet does, I think it's so fascinating. You get these waves of innovation around consolidation and expansion. And I think you were the one who articulated to me how Stripe rolls up and consolidates one complex process into one black box that's then extensible via API or Shopify doing that in the backend for merchants. Or a number of these other experiences that have rolled up a process and packaged it up.
00:18:56 Scott: And I think where you guys are going with Velvet is really taking the complexity of fragmentation of data infrastructure across data warehouses and data analytics and these different fiefdoms or silos of data behind the scenes in your backend and making them all packageable and extensible via a much easier user interface to your experience as a designer. Does that summarize to some degree where you guys are going with Velvet?
00:19:24 Emma: Yeah, that's a great summary. And I think the background to that is that the best companies in the world and probably your favorite products are built on top of this kind of infrastructure. So it seems like a boring thing just combing through data and making it organized and being able to do something with it. But that's why your Facebook feed has relevant information on it. That's why you can open the Headspace app and it recommends a good podcast for you to listen to. That's why Amazon has recommendations for you.
00:19:56 Emma: So I think it's until you work in one of these big companies, it's not clear how much work goes in on the backend, goes into making these experiences feel really personalized and frictionless and later stage companies have access to a really expensive team of experts who can do this. Those are engineers, product designers, product people in general. And so we're bundling that all together to make it more accessible to a team of any size.
00:20:22 Scott: Yeah, it's really fascinating because, as with any fast scaling organization, stuff starts to break and then you say, well, how do we fix it? We need to adopt Mixpanel to get this type of data. Oh, we need this new tool to do this one thing. And you end up with this Rube Goldberg or Frankenstein of 20 different products that don't really talk to each other. They're all just thrown in the closet behind the door.
00:20:44 Scott: And you say, well, let's just have one person that helps us, go sort things out and pull the one thing out of the closet that we need. And at some point that scale starts to fail, right? And you need something that then says, okay, well, we've adopted these five different things under the hood. Now we need some way to interface with this at a higher level that's extractable to anyone on the team to be able to query it.
00:21:05 Scott: I think it's so fascinating what you talked about in the sense that as a designer, as somebody that might be more oriented on to UX and UI on the front end, really understanding that data interoperability on the backend informs product experience on the front end. And I think that's something that a lot of people miss.
00:21:24 Scott: They think, oh, cute UI, nice colors, nice buttons that clicks through, but those buttons that click through are pulling data from a backend architecture and infrastructure that if it doesn't have interoperability or the right under the hood components, it's not going to create a good user experience regardless of the colors, regardless of what the skin of the UI looks like.
00:21:46 Emma: Absolutely. That's something I've come across so many times at companies when I was a designer, is, I would ask why we couldn't build a feature. And the answer was always some sort of tech debt. And it was this exact problem that the right data wasn't available to the right parts of the system and the data model had to be re-architected.
00:22:05 Emma: And that's the worst feeling to be like, we know how we can make this better, but we can't do it because we didn't make the right decisions five years ago. And so we really hope this becomes a day one hygiene product where you just implement it right away. And it really facilitates a better product experience and faster company growth for the next 10 years.
00:22:26 Scott: So in some ways, Velvet could be seen as a bit of an antidote to data architecture, technical debt, or things that are stuck in the bowels of your data infrastructure that you want to fix, but you just don't have time to go back and clean up. And this is a layer on top that enables you to get out of some of those sticky situations on your data infrastructure.
00:22:46 Emma: Yeah, and AI really, makes the interface for this so much more interesting than it's ever been. You're not just going into Rails admin or Postgres admin and manually doing a bunch of queries and filters. It means you can just ask natural language questions like you're talking to a friend and it can source through so many volumes of data that just weren't possible before.
00:23:07 Scott: Yeah, as Reid Hoffman said on a recent podcast that I was listening to, “The coding languages of the future are gonna be English and Chinese.”
00:23:14 Emma: Yeah, I did see that.
00:23:16 Scott: That speaks to the whole topic of a book that I wrote five, six years ago, which is that you need to be able to have a broad-based education that enables you to ask the right questions, because that's really the coding language of the future, is critical thinking logic, which I think segues nicely into my last question for you, which is, what are you reading? And I already know the answer is Chris Dixon's book, Read Write Own.
00:23:39 Scott: But what's fascinating about Chris Dixon is we forget that he's actually a philosopher and a linguist. And so he's rooted in this base logic as far as education, which is maybe the coding language of the future. But tell us a little bit about what you're reading and maybe how you're generating new ideas for yourself.
00:23:56 Emma: Yeah, so I started following Chris Dixon because Velvet actually started more in the Web3 wallet space and I loved everything he had to say about the internet. But I saw him speak a few weeks ago at a small book talk in New York. And we got a free version of this book. And it's also a beautiful book, which I also love. But it's not really about blockchain. He has put himself into the blockchain bubble. It's much more about the history of the internet.
00:24:20 Emma: And so I've just been going through and taking notes about what was phase one, phase two, phase three of the internet? And even if the solution doesn't end up being blockchain, which it might not, all of his thoughts about how you make data accessible, data interoperable, give users more control over what's happening inside of their digital ecosystem.
00:24:42 Emma: All of that should be the future of the internet and really hearkens back to phase one where it was complete access to anything online. So I've really been enjoying the book and highly recommend it. And two others that I think are inspiring for new entrepreneurs. One is Venture Deals, which is a very dense book. But if you're ever going to raise money, you should read the whole thing and have a copy on hand at all times.
00:25:03 Emma: And then the other is Super Founders. I like that book. It's kind of a fluffy book, but it's fun and it makes you feel like you can be a founder, especially if you're a first-time founder, because they go through the data of how entrepreneurs don't have to be 22 years old and dropouts from Harvard. You can be any age, any background, and there are still people who built huge billion dollar businesses. So I find that one to be interesting as well.
00:25:28 Scott: It was three recommendations that one or two of them are already on my bookshelf, but Read Write Own by Chris Dixon and Super Founders by Ali Tamaseb and then Venture Deals by Brad Feld, right?
00:25:40 Emma: Yes, those are the three.
00:25:41 Scott: Moving to the speed round, favorite tech-focused podcast that you listen to frequently?
00:25:47 Emma: Yeah, I try to listen to Pivot by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway when I can. I like that they are tech people and they know a lot about tech, but they also balance it with what's good for society. So it's not just brute force capitalism, which is what the All In podcast can be. I like that there's some other context there that's a little more human and woven in with international politics and stuff like that.
00:26:11 Scott: I like that too. Yeah. Kara Swisher has got a good sense of humor as well. I remember at one point she was lambasting the San Francisco startup scene as mom-as-a-service and most startups were solving problems that mom once did. Like drive me to the movies, Uber, deliver me food, Uber Eats or DoorDash. It was all these services that she quipped were basically mom-as-a-service. So that was funny.
00:26:35 Emma: That's totally true also. When I lived in San Francisco, that's what I felt like. VCs were just paying for things that felt parental.
00:26:43 Scott: Yeah. So you've lived all over the world, but if you were picking one place other than New York City, where would that be to live?
00:26:49 Emma: Yeah, I really loved living in Mexico City. I speak Spanish and so anywhere that's Spanish speaking is almost as accessible as an English speaking place. So that's part of it. But also it's in the same time zone as the US and I grew up in Denver. So it's that same time zone part of the year. And the people there are just super friendly, super educated. You get some of the best food in the world. You can get a taco that's amazing for 60 cents. And then the exchange rate for Americans is obviously really nice, but it's a beautiful city.
00:27:20 Scott: It's only about 20 times more expensive for a taco in LA.
00:27:23 Emma: Yeah, exactly. And it probably is a better taco. But I like LA as well. I love nice weather. So it's a good place.
00:27:30 Scott: My friend calls Mexico City, it's the golden triangle between San Francisco, Mexico City and New York because it’s a four-hour flight between both SF and New York City, which is pretty magical.
00:27:40 Emma: I also think it has a lot of qualities from all those cities. You get warm weather, really good food, but it's urban and dense like New York is. There's public transportation, you can drive, so you get the best of all of that.
00:27:53 Scott: Best of both worlds. As far as productivity hacks, do you have any tips and tricks?
00:27:58 Emma: Two things. On Sundays, I use that as my planning day because a lot of times, if you work at a company, that falls on a Monday. But as a founder, there's just not enough time in the week. So I block off two hours every Sunday to go through my calendar and do any organizational planning stuff. And I sent an email to the whole team that I scheduled for Monday morning at that time. So we're just ready to go as soon as the day starts.
00:28:22 Emma: And then personally, I am an obsessive time blocker. So I just downloaded Notion's new calendar, which I really like. And I just block off every single day exactly what I'm going to get done. And then if I don't get it done, that time block has to move to somewhere else or I have to deprioritize and decide not to do it. And this sounds like type A and obsessive, but I'm not really like that as a person. It's just the only way I can get my work done.
00:28:50 Scott: You find that this is both personal and professional. So color coded for going to the gym or just doing work related?
00:28:57 Emma: I try not to get too obsessive about my personal life on my calendar, but if I want to work out, I have to put it on my calendar. Otherwise it's not going to happen. So there's certain things that if it's a priority, it has to go on my calendar.
00:29:09 Scott: I agree with that. I actually put lunch on my calendar every day because otherwise I don't eat food.
00:29:13 Emma: Yeah, that's what happened to me today. Right before this call, I just scarfed down a bunch of yogurt because I forgot to put it on my calendar.
00:29:20 Scott: And finally, where can people find you online?
00:29:23 Emma: I personally write at emmalawler.com. And then I write a lot of articles, more on tech infrastructure for Velvet at usevelvet.com.
00:29:34 Scott: Amazing. So those are places that we can subscribe to your writing. I can also find you on LinkedIn. And Emma, thank you so much for spending the time with us today with Everywhere Ventures and for being part of our portfolio company and larger global fam.
00:29:47 Emma: Thanks so much, Scott. This was a really fun conversation.
00:29:52 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, Invest Everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Emma Lawler in Founders Everywhere.