Building Teams That Compound, Not Just Scale

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video, cleaned for punctuation and names. Speaker labels are not included.

[0:05] In this episode of the GTM Vault Podcast, we sit down with Mariane Bekker, a powerhouse in the tech industry and the driving force behind Women Founders Bay and Progressive Ventures. With over 15 years of experience in leading engineering teams and a mission to empower women founders, Mariane shares her journey, challenges, and insights into building inclusive tech communities. Join us as we explore her strategies for scaling startups, fostering diversity, and driving innovation in Silicon Valley. Now, without further ado, I want to get right into it. Mariane, you have an impressive background in engineering and leadership. Can you share some key moments in your career that have significantly shaped your journey? Definitely. I have a lot of moments in my career where I thrived and where it defines the rest of my career. For example, let me give you an example. The first time when I graduated college, after I graduated college, I knew

[1:08] that I wanted to move to Silicon Valley, so I actually came here a little bit before to find my role. And my first job out of college, I worked at the media company Hearst, and I joined the startup called Manila, where I became their web integration engineer. It really shaped my career because I was working at a very small startup, and for a year I learned so much working at a startup about engineering, how to manage a team, how to grow an engineering team, that within a year I actually got promoted to a senior software engineer position. And then after I got promoted to a senior software engineer position, I was able to get more and more responsibility that ultimately led me to become a head of engineering at a Series A company called drbox, where I managed the entire engineering team. I became part of the executive team, and that really allowed me to experience what it was like to be a tech executive. So after that moment,

[2:12] another moment that defined my career was at Mindbody. So at Mindbody, I joined as a head of engineering of their SF office, and I really wanted to prove to the tech industry that we could build a team that is truly diverse. So for the next two years and a half, we grew the team from 7 to 50, but we were able to maintain a 50% ratio of women engineers. And then I learned so much about how to foster and have a high performing engineering team that is truly diverse. So because I had that experience, I was able to then really create and start my own company called Upward Recruiting to help companies hire more women engineers. But that allowed me to become an entrepreneur, which significantly marked my career. So those are just some of the few moments that really impacted me and my life. What inspired you to start Women Founders Bay, and what are your primary goals? Definitely. So

[3:15] when I started Upward Recruiting, my network was mostly engineering leaders because I've been leading engineering teams most of my life. So then I wanted to meet other entrepreneurs to really share and learn from them about the journey of being a founder. So then I would start going to different founder events, and I would find myself, like engineering, always being the only woman in the room. So then I'm like, well, where are the women founders? I cannot find them. So that's when I decided to start my own community of tech female founders. We've been around for almost a year now, but within that short period of time we grew really fast. So now we have over 300 startups, all women founded. We do events almost every week, and then we brought together thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs and investors. That's awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the biggest challenges women founders face in the tech industry, and how does Women Founders Bay help them overcome these

[4:19] obstacles? Definitely. I would say there's a few challenges that women face. The first one is access, access to resources. So because there's not as big of a network of women founders, women often find themselves building their company alone, so they don't have access to the mentorship or to the network that others may have. So that's where we come in. So our community is extremely active. We have events almost every week. We suddenly provide them with a network of women who are there to support them. Our community is extremely active. Every day there's a woman asking for introductions, for educational resources, for resources related on how to grow their startup. For example, one of the things that I started doing, every month or two we provide free legal advice to women, and any time that we have this partnership with a law firm to provide free legal advice, those spots fill in within 30

[5:23] minutes. So for example, yesterday I posted about our August spots. Within 30 minutes, nine women signed up. So that's just one example of the resources that we provide. Other than that, we help them access funding, and we do that by a few ways. So we do pitch events. Our last pitch event, we had 200 people join us, 200 on the waitlist, we had 60 investors, and we had 11 awesome women pitch on stage. And then we also do intros to investors in our networks. Resources, educational content, and access to funding are three ways that we help them thrive. And I would say, you asked about the biggest issue for women, is really access to funding. So I don't know if you know, Rick, but less than 2% of funding goes to women, and that number decreased over time. So last year it went from 2.1 to 1.9%, and without access to funding it's really hard to grow your company and grow your startup. So we got to come

[6:26] together to help increase the number of funding going to women so they can thrive and they can grow their startups. Wow, yeah, I wasn't aware it fell to that low. That's phenomenal that you guys were doing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you successfully scaled engineering teams at companies like Mindbody and New Relic, and some of the key strategies you used to achieve this growth? Definitely. So at Mindbody was actually an extremely interesting experience, because we had to triple and quadruple our engineering team within such a short period of time. The way that we did it is through very, very specific processes. And what I mean by that is that when we knew that we need to double our engineering team, we planned out how we're going to do it. We brought together all of the engineering leadership in a room, and then we figured out, we want to go, for example, from 7 to 14. Well, what does it mean in terms of

[7:30] how our engineering team is going to look like? Who is going to report to who? What responsibility were they going to take? And even though we didn't necessarily know exactly who we're going to hire, we knew what our vision of doubling the engineering team meant. So we knew who's going to be on which team, we knew who's going to report to who. Once we had that plan, it was easier to double, because suddenly you can really identify which skill you want to hire for and which gap you're missing in your engineering team. So let's say you're saying, okay, well, we need two front-end engineers to make this vision of this 14 team engineering team happen. Then you know exactly who you want to hire. First off, devise a plan on what it's going to look like. Figure out what are the skill sets that are missing. Once you really know what the future is going to look like and who you want to hire, you want to start defining what your interview process looks like, so that all of your engineering team, when they go in the interview process, they are prepared to

[8:34] ask the right question and they know how to really rate those engineering talents so that you make the right hire. Because if you make a wrong hire, then it can really affect your culture, it can affect the performance of your team. So we actually defined our interview questions to the T. We knew exactly who was going to ask who, and then we devised rubrics, which made it easier for engineers to then rate those candidates. So once we had our interview process defined, we needed to hire fast, which means we needed to get more engineers into the door. So we did tons and tons of outreach and outbound. We used LinkedIn every day to probably send 200 to 300 messages to engineers to start adding more people to the recruitment pipeline and start getting the number of candidates we need so that we eventually made the hire. So all these strategies allowed us to grow really fast. And I want to add into that, because we wanted

[9:36] to make sure that we were building a truly diverse engineering team, we also, in our outreach messages, we made sure to message as many women as men. So that's how we were able to hire almost 50 to 55% women engineers. It got cut off there for the last second, but I guess we can move on. As a general partner at Progressive Ventures, what do investors look for when investing in startups? So investors will look for different things for different stages of your startup. So I invest in seed stage startups, and so I'm going to talk a little bit more about it. So in the pre-seed and seed stage, the number one thing that investors look for is really for the team. They want to see that you have the ability to execute on your idea and on your vision. So what does that mean? That means that they look at your unique experience. Do you have the experience needed to really execute on your idea? For example, if you're building deep tech that has AI in it, do you have the

[10:41] technical background needed to really achieve that, or do you have someone on your team who can do that? The second thing that they look for is what unique advantage do you have compared to all of your competitors. And your unique advantage could be patents, it could be your experience, it could be your distribution channel. Do you have maybe a huge audience or a community that you can then go and sell to? So unique advantage, your experience. And I would say the third thing that they look for is size of the market. So investors really want to invest in home runs. They want to invest in a company that is going to be the next unicorn. So is your market size big enough that you can actually become a unicorn? So those are just a few things that they look for. That makes a lot of sense. Can you tell us a little bit about Upward Recruiting and the process that goes into recruiting top engineering talent for startups? Yeah, definitely. So as I said, Upward Recruiting, I really started

[11:44] it to help startups hire more women engineers, but at the end of the day we are looking for the best engineer for that startup. So at first we meet with the company to really try to identify who they're looking for, especially founders. It's really important to get a profile and a technical profile. Who are you looking for? Are you looking for a frontend engineer? Are you looking for a backend engineer? Are you looking for a product designer? Are you looking for someone with experience in startups, or are you okay with someone with experience in big companies? Once we really identify who the hire or what the hiring profile looks like, then we go, and then with LinkedIn we try to identify every week probably 200 to 300 engineers that match that profile. And then we A/B test different outreach messages to see what really resonates with them. Because we are hiring for startups, and startups don't really have the resources to provide salaries that big tech can provide, we really need to be creative on

[12:48] what is the unique value that you are providing for this candidate. Why are you convincing a candidate not to take double their salary or their total compensation so they can join your startup? So that's when you emphasize the mission, that's when you emphasize the growth opportunities. But once you find something that resonates, then every week we go and then we message 200 to 300 engineers, we get three to five engineers in the door, and then we introduce them to the startup to eventually make the hire. There's a lot of talk about AI, and slowly we're seeing it gain more mainstream adoption. Are there any specific trends or technologies you are most excited about? Everything is now about AI, especially here in Silicon Valley, but it's an exciting time to be, because now is the time to really get your foot into the AI game, because we're still very early on. And although it seems like it's been adopted widely, it still hasn't. A few of the trends that I'm seeing, and the

[13:51] trends that I'm most excited about, is AI in the B2B space. AI now is making, already, even though LLMs only existed for the last almost 2 years, it is making people very, very productive. So I'm excited about the different tools that are AI powered that would allow enterprises to be more and more productive. And I really think that that's where the next unicorn is going to be created. And I can also give you an example of how I found AI productive personally. I'm a coder, I'm a software engineer, and in the last year I've actually helped a few companies build their MVP from the ground up. But with AI, we were able to be so efficient in doing that. So in the past, to build an MVP, it would take probably three to six months with four to six engineers to build the entire MVP. But because now AI can code and can provide us really

[14:55] amazing code, we can build an MVP probably in six weeks with one person. So that's just one of the ways that it's making us more productive, and that's just going to continue. Those kind of tools and those kind of capabilities are going to increase over time. So I think now, in the future, one person will be able to do much more than an entire team in a short period of time. Yeah, that's mindblowing. It sounds like it's really changing the game for product development. Definitely. It's changing the game, and it's going to continue changing the game. Achieving a 50% ratio of women engineers at Mindbody is remarkable. What are some of the initiatives or policies that contributed to this success? Yeah. So we really wanted to achieve a diverse engineering team, so we thought a lot about, well, how do you do that? So we had a recruitment funnel, and we optimized every step of the recruitment

[15:58] funnel to be more, how do I say that, welcoming to women and to diverse engineers. So for example, it starts with the top of the recruitment funnel. In order for you to hire a woman, you need to interview as many women as men, so you need more women in your recruitment funnel. So we had campaigns that would identify the women engineers, and we would reach out to them to try to get them in the recruitment funnel so that we had as many men as women engineers in that funnel. The second thing that we did, optimized our interview process to remove unconscious bias, which means that we did rubrics. So for every question that we would ask, we would have specific ways to evaluate the candidate that would remove the unconscious bias, so that the interviewers were interviewing and were quantifying the candidates' response similarly for men and women, so that unconscious bias didn't really exist. And then the third thing that we did is that

[17:01] throughout our interview process, we really talked about our mission for these women. We talked about the advantages they would have to join our company. We talked about work life balance and family-friendly benefits. So we made our whole interview process very welcoming to women. We removed unconscious bias, and then we made sure that in our interview processes that women, when they get interviewed, it's not only a panel of men that they see, that there are other people who look like them within the engineering team. So all of that made it that we were able to achieve 50% women engineers. But it's not also only about hiring women for the sake of hiring women. Those women were extremely, extremely performant, were extremely smart, that our engineering team at Mindbody was actually one of the most performing teams. And then once we had this truly diverse engineering team, we put a lot of programs in place to promote these women and to encourage them to grow in their career. So we had mentorship programs, we provided them opportunity to lead

[18:04] projects, so that every single woman that we ended up hiring, we ended up promoting. So all of that made it that we achieved, in Silicon Valley, a really diverse engineering team that was highly performant. That's amazing. As a leader and mentor, what advice do you give to aspiring women founders and engineers looking to advance their careers in tech? So the number one thing I would give, especially in this day and age, is network. Your network is your most valuable asset, because your network will open doors for you that you didn't even think could be open. For example, let's say you start your career as an engineer, and then you develop a huge network of founders and investors, and then you have an opportunity for an idea that you've always wanted to build. Well, because you already have a network, suddenly you can ask your network to introduce you to investors, which means that you'll have more chance

[19:08] to raise funding. So that's just one example of why your network is important. So focus on building your network. There's a few ways that you can do that. The easiest way currently is just to go to events. Especially in Silicon Valley, every week there's probably a hundred events, hundreds of events happening on topics that you're interested in, whether it's AI, whether it's software engineering, whether it's entrepreneurship. So start going to two to three events a week and start networking with people. There's a really good book that I read, and that book is called 98 Ways to Talk to Anyone. Get your networking game on. Start networking, start forging those connections, start adding them on LinkedIn, and it's a great way to meet new people. So that's number one. The second thing would be to always, always keep learning about different topics that interest you. I personally read at least two books a month, and I've been reading ever since I started my career. So I read about

[20:12] entrepreneurship, I read about engineering management, I read about networking. Continue having that curiosity, because it'll teach you more than sometimes one-on-one interactions would. And then the third thing that I would say, specifically for women, is do not be afraid to ask for what you want. For example, when I started my career at Manila, that was my first job out of college, as I said previously, and I knew that I wanted to be an engineering manager early on so that I could help affect and promote more women engineers. That was always my mission in life. So I knew that in order for me to get to engineering manager, I had to get to a senior role fairly quickly. So even though I was one year out of college, I became one of the most productive engineers on the team. I was always learning, I was always taking more responsibility than I was assigned to. A year passed, and then I went to ask for a

[21:14] senior position. And then it's a crazy thing to think about, right? Like, why after a year of college would you ask for a senior position? But then my thought process was, well, what do I have to lose? And that's the thought process that you should have. What do you have to lose by asking for that promotion, for asking for that higher responsibility? And in my case, the worst case was that my manager was going to tell me no. Because I was so productive, my manager told me yes, and I was able to get that senior role. So go and ask for even the position that you don't think you're ready for, and then if you get it, it'll significantly impact your career. Running a private community of women tech founders must come with its own set of challenges. How do you foster a supportive and engaging environment for your members? Definitely. So anytime you foster community, and I think this is something that I realized after running this for a year, is that it's not really different than running a startup, which means that culture, and the culture that

[22:19] you have as the leader of that startup or of that community, propagates throughout the members. So I would say how I did it is I led through example. With my community, I started being very supportive to other women. I started making intros to them, and then I started doing a lot of pro bono consulting, getting others to do pro bono consulting. Every single time a woman had an issue, I would respond and try to help her out. But because all these women saw this is the culture that is in our group, they started following that example. So now every single woman who has a request, probably you get 10 to 15 women trying to do everything they can to help her out. So just by setting that example, it kind of propagates throughout the community. And then I keep talking about our values. So every event that we have, the number

[23:22] one thing that I emphasize is that we need women supporting women in order for us to grow together. We are our biggest advocates, and let's come together to grow within each other. So that's the number one thing in our culture, is that we don't want anything from the, like, we're not expecting anything from the group except us being there for each other, supporting each other, being our biggest supporters and advocates. And I can give you an example of that, of how that happens. A few days ago I announced my new role as a GP at Progressive Ventures, and I announced it on LinkedIn, and I wanted more visibility on my post, so I posted it on my group. And then suddenly, over 200 women went to like and to comment, which really increased the visibility of that post. That's one example. But that happened also to other women founders. So recently, two weeks ago, there's a woman who just raised her seed round. So she raised $3 million in seed round, and she

[24:27] announced it on LinkedIn, and she wanted to get visibility for that announcement, because it's really good brand recognition for her startup. So then she posted in that group. I replied, okay, ladies, this is when we come and we support each other, so let's mobilize and let's like and comment her post. And then suddenly, over 200 women liked and commented, and that post went viral. So that's just one example of how you can set culture and how women can support one another. Yeah, that sounds like social selling to the max. That's phenomenal. Exactly. And what do you envision for the future of women in tech? How can the industry continue to improve in terms of diversity and inclusion? So there's a few ways that we could really help promote women in tech and making sure that we are more diverse. And also I want to reiterate, diversity is not only the right thing for society, but it's also really good for

[25:29] business. There's so much studies that shows that actually diverse teams perform better and have a higher profit than non-diverse teams. So diversity is really good for business. And then another stat that also kind of resonated with me is that for every dollar that you invest in a woman, she returned 77 cents on that dollar, compared to her male counterpart, which is 33 cents. So investing in women is actually really good for business. It produces higher return, and it's also, who wants to live in a society where women do not have a voice, right? So diversity is good all around. How do you achieve that? Well, there's a few ways. The number one thing in tech especially is to change this perception that, one, women are not technical, that women cannot make amazing founders. And that starts in people in tech really seeing women in positions of power, really seeing women in engineering positions and

[26:31] founding companies. What that means on a lower level is that for all the events that are happening, all of the social media content that is being created, we need more women being represented. So for example, we do a lot of events. Sometimes it's women only, but a lot of the times we partner with other founder groups to do events for men and for women entrepreneurs, because we want a diverse team and we truly believe that. But in all of our panelists, in our judging, we try to bring women to the forefront and we try to highlight them, so that others see that women are in tech and they are leading and in the position of. So that's the number one thing for women in tech, is just the visibility, to increase that visibility for women. The second thing that I would love to see for women in tech is getting more women in leadership positions, getting more women CEOs and more women really making the big decisions when it comes to companies. And that starts getting mentorship and

[27:36] resources in place so that women can get promoted, they can get the skills in order for them to grow in their career, and in order for us to get more women in leadership positions. And then the third thing for women that I would say is definitely, as I mentioned before, access to funding. We need more women having the money that they need to grow their startups, to have that startup become a unicorn. Because if we get more women to have unicorn startups and they have the money to then go and invest in other women, to really grow that ecosystem of women funding women. And then the last thing that I want to note is that I'd love to see a tech ecosystem where now women are becoming the venture capitalists, where women are creating the next VC fund, and then we get more women funding women, we get more women hiring women, we get more women supporting one another, to really make the tech industry diverse. Absolutely. Mariane, thanks so much for joining the

[28:39] GTM Vault Podcast. I really enjoyed learning from you, and I'm sure our listeners will do so as well. Thank you so much for having me, Rick. It was such a pleasure being here.