Allison Barr Allen On Raising $125 Million To Help You Shop And Buy In Seconds

Allison Barr Allen is the cofounder and COO of Fast which provides an online login and checkout solutions designed to provide users with a secure shopping experience. The company has raised over $100 million from top tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, or Global Founders Capital to name a few.

In this episode you will learn:

• Company culture and team building
• Growing your company in a post-COVID world
• The future of payments and checkout
• Allison’s top advice before moving forward with a business idea
  

SUBSCRIBE ON:

For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here).

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

About Allison Barr Allen:

Allison Barr Allen is the co-founder and COO of Fast, the world’s fastest online login and checkout platform. Previously, Allison was the head of global product operations for the Money Team at Uber, where she helped scale Uber from 2,000 employees to more than 26,000 worldwide. Allison’s team launched and scaled Uber’s payments, risk, and

compliance products globally, including on-demand payments, cash products, debit cards and credit cards.

Prior to Uber, Allison served as a healthcare strategy consultant at PwC. In addition to her role at Fast, Allison is a limited partner at Operator Collective, a venture capital firm that brings together leaders from diverse backgrounds to invest in the next generation of enterprise technology. Allison is also deeply committed to supporting entrepreneurs through Trail Run Capital, her angel investment fund.

Allison graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Connect with Allison Barr Allen:

• Crunchbase
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

00:01.92

Alejandro

Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the dealmakerr show. So I’m very very excited about the guests that we have today. We’re gonna be learning quite a bit and they you know going from consulting to hypergrowth more on the growth site to then you know lounging so you name it. So I guess without further ado. Let’s welcome our guest today Allison Bar Allen welcome to the show. So originally born in collumbus ohio you know to a mom that was a nurse and then also a father that had a restaurant a business. So how was how was life growing up.

 

00:22.40

Allison Barr Allen

Thanks so much for having me.

 

00:36.29

Alejandro

Tell us about your upbringings right.

 

00:37.63

Allison Barr Allen

For sure it was um, awesome I grew up. Um, right outside Columbus Ohio in a town called Bexley um I went to public school all the way through. Um I I think through my parents and growing up I really learned a lot about hard work. My dad had a. Restaurant that I spent a lot of time and hours at working and he also was a runner a distance runner. so I so I run quite a bit today but then he was both managing this business and then he would run a lot of half marathons and marathons so he was sort of. Was on his feet doing something and I really learned um, sort of the value of of really really hard work so it was great.

 

01:20.78

Alejandro

I mean I’m sure because in hospitality I mean that’s crazy hours. So.

 

01:25.95

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, it was crazy. It would start like especiallyally in the summery would go with him. He would go to Sam’s Club or Costco that equivalent and get all the food for the restaurant and we’d ride around on the card and then he’d go to the restaurants and do a big lunch service and then he wouldn’t really come home until. Ten o’clock after he shut it all down. So um, yeah, it was. It’s sort of a ah, always on thing and you’re you’re always on your feet doing something.

 

01:53.97

Alejandro

So after seeing your dad I mean did you know or did you have an idea that maybe you know you may want to follow his footsteps on having your own company in the future now.

 

02:05.64

Allison Barr Allen

It was never really my dream to have a company I joke that I was in an accidental founder because originally I well when I was at uber I didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up and I discovered venture capital and I loved investing I um. Taught myself how to invest in the stock market and really just loved following companies and investing and I bought Tesla stock like a long time ago and just had loved following the company and sort of um ah loved reading about different products and sort of mapping out with that. Means over time on on the stock market and then I discovered venture capital and it was sort of I was able to apply what I learned in investing with what I learned while I was at uber building uber so I loved investing in early stage companies and trying to think through. If you see a couple founders in a pitch deck like how do you extrapolate and what are the patterns that it that you see when you create really really large companies so that thought exercise was really fun for me. But um. Yeah I ended up meeting Dom as a potential angel investor in his company and it just so happened that I had built very similar products at uber around what he wanted to build so and we just got along really well and sort of aligned on what the future of the world could look like in ah in a new world with better.

 

03:25.70

Alejandro

Got it.

 

03:35.53

Allison Barr Allen

And identity and checkout and e-commerce technology and um, yeah, that was sort of it and I was able to apply a lot of what I had learned at Uber so it was sort of a match rate in heaven.

 

03:45.18

Alejandro

And we’ll talk about that in in just a little bit but I guess in your case like rewinding a little bit back to to kind of like your your walk through the the walk here through memory lane in your case you want at first to become a doctor. Why.

 

04:03.90

Allison Barr Allen

Um, I think so school was always pretty easy for me. Um, and it was something I excelled at and was pretty good at and sort of at the time I was um, math and science were definitely my favorite things. Um, especially math. But I sort of liked the science as part of it as opposed to the more writing or creative side and that’s sort of what you did when I was growing up. It’s like you’d get really good grades and then you’d go to school and like the highest performing academic people would um. Go into medicine and I Also I did a lot of music growing club classical music and I was really interested in ah initially I wanted to be an ear nose throat a doctor. It’s sort of a type of sergeant. But yeah I Just I thought it was really interesting but I got burnt out by. School and study and so I was able to discover other things that I was really passionate about.

 

05:03.13

Alejandro

I Mean you did you did to certain degree I mean you continued on the on the Healthcare path because you went then into consulting and you were consulting with the bigger corporations and I’m sure that that was very helpful for you because I meet a lot of entrepreneurs that that have had that consulting experience where. You really get to understand how you let’s say grab big problems break them into small problems and then you tackle one after the other. So I Guess how would you say you know like the the consulting experience shaped your ah way of thinking towards a challenges in front of you.

 

05:39.71

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, great question I think through my career I’ve been able to work at companies of different sizes and I think that’s been able to equip me with the right tools and ah tools and Frameworks and way of thinking about organizations as I’m building Fast. So um. When I was working in consulting I helped work at like really big Health insurance companies and you sort of learn what those operate like internally and how they’re structured and what systems they have and sort of their ways of working and then after that I went to high growth tech which was uber and it was still a pretty big company. It was. Over 2000 people when I joined and much bigger than that when I left so it was much larger and then from there I was able to sort of um, go smaller but without sort of the Frameworks and understanding how bigger companies operate I think it’d be more difficult for me to think through. How fast should be structured in the shorter term and longer term because I’ve seen it done different ways and can sort of take best practices that I’ve seen throughout my career and things that I like and didn’t like and um, use that to try to create the best culture that we can.

 

06:47.75

Alejandro

So in your case and and in this journey that that we’re discussing I mean going from consulting and being with big corporations and traveling a lot to Connecticut. Ah I mean. It’s a big switch going from that to all of a sudden you know finding yourself in silicon valley I mean that’s quite a jump. Can you tell us you know how that transition came about and.

 

07:10.60

Allison Barr Allen

Yes, so when I was in consulting I was in Chicago um, and I worked at pwc or Presswaterhouse Coopers for 4 years Um and was sort of traveling all over to these consulting projects. Um, and it was. A bit old school and that you still showed up to the office on Fridays I traveled Monday through Thursday and often leave on Sundays we’d wear business casual every day and sort of go out all the time for these like different work dinners but it was sort of ah um, yeah, a bit more old school and. Think finally after who knows how many years maybe 10 years I got rid of my all my business casual stuff I used to wear but um, it just like wasn’t fun and I so my brother was two years younger and he was a self-ot frontend developer and he got a job after college in. Ah, startup so he was working with like a few people in Boston on these like cool ideas and I’m just like that sounds way more fun and entertaining than what I’m doing. Um so I was like I’m going to work at a startup. Um the problem I realized when I I would research all these companies and apply for them is I was a consultant and there’s It’s kind of hard to get a job at startups when you’re a consultant and you don’t have technical experience so I did more strategy and operation stuff. But I wasn’t a coder I didn’t have these like super technical skills so it was sort of hard to find. Right? fit? Um, but it just so happened at the time that uber was growing really rapidly and they were hiring a lot of smart generalists to build up their operations team so they would hire people from sort of all types of different backgrounds. But um, embed them in sort of a new environment and for me it was. Like really fun because it was very hands-on and scrappy in a way that consulting wasn’t and it was like very tangible so when I started at uber we had about 100 employees in the Chicago office. My team helped manage operations for the entire midwest region. Um. But when I first started I was in we had these there was the uber office with employees and then we had these driver support centers and you would have like thousands of drivers come in every single day to get help uploading their documents and answer questions about how much they got paid and. Um, at the time when I first joined uber we didn’t even have an Android app so they all the drivers would come and print these phones from uber so they was like this intense ah like it was like a Dmv but it was really intense operations and when I first started I was there I think two days a week from ten a m to 6 p m

 

09:51.35

Allison Barr Allen

Um, helping drivers. They would sit across the table from you and you’d help them nonstop the entire time and it was like so exhausting and um, but it was also like very tangible you like were helping these people. Um, earn money because a lot of them had a difficult time getting a job or didn’t have a lot of other options. So that’s why they were there was to make money. So um, like it was like fun to go to that environment where it was like you really felt like you were making difference and like that you were really impacting. People’s lives and um. Sometimes I don’t know if that part of uber story got out as much. But um, we were really helping a lot of people and um, yeah, then you just I learned so many things about um how you can make it was like very intense operations behind the scenes and um for the consumer. It’s It’s all about making it seem simple for the consumer but there’s like there’s a lot of things that have to go right for that like magical experience to happen. So yeah, it was incredible operations training and just sort of how to to make any magical thing happened and it was just so fun. We did all these like on-demand campaigns. Um, we did uber for kittens and so we would like go around and like people could request kittens on demand in the uber app and like we did all these things that were just like so fun. Um, but through that I realized um. Mostly from my experience working directly with drivers and talking to thousands of them that payments was the most important part of this entire thing for them because if they didn’t understand how much they got paid or if their payment was late. It was a really big deal and a lot of them were living paycheck to paycheck and. Using it to support their family. So I just like saw how crucial that part of it was um so I ended up moving to San Francisco to work for uber’s global team working on payments and payment technology. Um so it was there that I really sort of went really deep on fintech and payments and um. How all of this backend payment infrastructure works all around the world to to make these incredible experiences.

 

12:05.17

Alejandro

And I’m sure that you also learn how to deal with putting out fires because I mean when the app a you know instant pay you know was going down then you know people were not happy about it.

 

12:16.35

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah I had lots of fires and and fire drills. Um uber had him has and had a really large payment operation business internally. Um, we were paying out drivers in 70 plus countries and. Lot of these countries too weren’t really their banks weren’t structured to support this velocity of payments. There were multiple cases where we would pay to certain countries that are used to paying monthly and then you’d suddenly send all these wired transactions or bank transfers that you wanted to pay weekly and they just. Didn’t have the infrastructure to support it. So sometimes payments relate. But yeah I managed some outages where um so the main product I worked almost called instant pay where drivers can press a button and pay themselves twenty four seven anytime after they’ve completed a trip. Um, so it’s ah. Sort of is a hightenity high intensity thing because before that we just paid drivers once per week. So it was a really big change and it was a very popular product and most drivers used it. But yeah on on occasion either something would happen with our bank or. Order processing platform for uber and there may be some delays and when the drivers could get their money and they were never very happy about that and I think there were at least a couple outages that lasted more than a day where they would call up the newspapers and tell them that uber wasn’t paying them which. Wasn’t true. But I think it sort of shows you how important these these products are to people and are like huge responsibility to make sure that they’re they’re working and available.

 

13:53.75

Alejandro

So you were mentionuring earlier that you met Dom as a result of your angel investments. So after uber when you gave your notice to uber I mean you were really excited about the opportunity of maybe becoming a part of a venture firm but that ended up not panning out. Um, so you decided to do it yourself and you created your own angel investment operation and that’s how you actually came across a dumb but before we actually go into talking about that moment where the 2 of you connected. What can you tell us about what you’ve learned about you know. Perhaps you know pattern recognition on the founders that you failed at the most potential and that have gone out to perhaps do big companies from maybe the ones that you know didn’t have what it required to build something you know, meaningful. Yeah.

 

14:46.13

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, great question I think um, hindsight’s always 2020, but for me, it’s it’s all about the people. So I think um, both like starting a company and investing. It’s. 1 you have to have a really big idea so at least especially now a lot of times I’ll talk to founders and sort of level set I’m like investors are out there trying to find the next ten billion dollars companies so you better be able to pitch a vision that you think is going to be really big and. Convince them that you are the person who can run this massive company or be part of this massive company because that’s sort of like the goal of venture capital and I think sometimes people lose sight of that when they’re first starting out that’s like oh I just want to raise this money and like play around with this idea which. Okay, but it’s like that’s what that’s the lens that investors need to look at these ideas for and I think sometimes that can be lost ah a little bit and um, sort of how we’re thinking about early stage capital. But so that’s one like have a really big idea and is this something that you think can be. Worth $10000000000 or more and if so how will you get there both in like the shorter term and the longer term um and the second is all about people so being a founder is a lot of times a sales job and you have to convince employees to join you to build the company you have to convince investors to give you money you have to convince. Customers to partner with you. So it’s talking so much about the why all the time so you have to be really passionate about what you’re building and because you will talk about it a lot. So if you’re not passionate. It’s not going to be very fun for you. Um, and going back to I think what you look for in founders. It’s like. You need to find someone who’s like really passionate about what they’re building and is in it for the long run like and not just like a year. This is like a multi-year thing and as I said you like live and breathe this thing it’s it’s like a part of you. So. You need to find people who are just like so passionate about their idea that they can’t do something else because if they’re not that passionate. They’re going to get bored and sort of give up and do something else. So it’s like you can sort of like feel that passion or feel that energy a lot of times when you’re talking to people and I think. There’s like some cases where people say oh I want to build a business and then sort of academically figure out what to focus on and then build it and like there’s examples of that happening and but I think um I think a lot of times the the other cases. Um, it’s.

 

17:28.81

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, it’s ah it’s about telling the story and that’s sort of what I look for as well. It’s like why this person and why this idea and can this person like really build something meaningful that that can see on the test of time. Yeah.

 

17:39.92

Alejandro

Yeah, so talking about the story Allison what was the story of do and you you know coming together. How did that happen.

 

17:48.50

Allison Barr Allen

Um, yeah, so I met Dom about two and a half years ago um I was still at uber at the time and I had started angel investing and networking with a lot of investors and. Um, I really thought that my path would go into venture capital and do this really early stage investing that I just talked about um I really loved meeting potential founders with like this huge idea and like just a pitch deck and um. People that wanted to take on the world and um, it was so fun to hear all these different ideas that people have but um, so yeah I invested in um, in several companies over the first six months actually I just had my first company that went from seed stage to unicorn this week called azizu which is. Pretty fun. Um black owned as well which there’s like there’s not enough black owned unicorns. But I’m glad to be a backer of one of them. Um, but yeah, so I started angel investing and I met Dom um, he had come from Australia and he had a.

 

18:40.60

Alejandro

Yeah.

 

18:53.68

Allison Barr Allen

Prototype for a password list login company and he wanted to build checkout and it was called fast and I had actually when I was looking to get in a venture capital I wrote an investment thesis called frictionless finance which is based on my experience at uber but it was all the different ways I thought you can remove friction in payment flows to. Um, add business value and this was ah I think 2017 this was in crypto had first gone bitcoin had gone up to 20 grand and then had sort of gone back down and um, when no one was really talking about fintech which is like really funny now because like. Half of investment is in fintech or something but at the time everyone was focused on other things and saas and all these other things. Um, and I said I wanted to invest in fintech which most people like didn’t even consider much of a category then but anyway so I had this in 3 hree -page investment thesis and the first part was about.

 

19:30.60

Alejandro

Now.

 

19:49.62

Allison Barr Allen

Reducing friction at checkout and I had different ideas or I looked up different companies and um I had some other ideas too around like identity. But yeah I had ah data around why checkout was such huge opportunity and the opportunity you can have in the space and. I met Dom when he was basically building my investment thesis in real life so he wanted to build sort of exactly what I had thought and researched about so um, yeah I entro him to index ventures who ended up leading the the seed round and then Dom came back and convinced me to join and. Um, I did because we just like got along really well and sort of saw a very similar vision of the world and how big this opportunity could be and we had very complimentary backgrounds. He was more of a kid. Um. Was technical but he’d also worked in like sales and more go-to-market stuff in in Australia at other companies and I had a more like fintech or payments focused background in network in the Bay Area so um and it had built similar products at uber or so yeah.

 

20:58.15

Alejandro

So in terms of the business model for fast for the people that are not right now like following you know the conversation. How does how do you guys make money. What’s what’s the business model.

 

21:08.58

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, so fast is a 1 click checkout company and we’re really here to reduce friction and make it easier for people to buy things online. Um, and with that on product pages that you see or on the cart page. There’s a fast checkout button. It’s a black button and you click on it and it’s. First time you use it. It’s an optimized checkout form where you enter your information then you’re sort in our network. Um, and then if you use fast again. It’s really one click so you can go to um products or on the cart page where you see fast again and we remember who you are you don’t have to create an account. You don’t have to. Login and reenter your information over and over again. So it’s a really seamless user experience and what that does for businesses is it helps. It’s a growth mechanism and it helps increase their sales. So it increases conversion and their people’s likelihood to buy things. Um.

 

22:03.45

Alejandro

And in that case I mean you guys have also raised them. You know, um a good amount of money I mean how much money have you guys raised today.

 

22:05.14

Allison Barr Allen

So yeah.

 

22:11.91

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, we’ve raised about um a hundred and twenty five million dollars over three different rounds. So our last was a hundred million dollars series b

 

22:21.30

Alejandro

And obviously great people indexliner I mean great. Great investors How how was the process of ah of raising the money from going to see to perhaps the series B that is the last financing cycle that you guys did so.

 

22:38.20

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah I think it’s it’s all about um I mean raising capital is a big responsibility and with that it’s really about executing on the vision that you set out when you raise the money. So yeah for us it was like. You you raise the first round on vision and then you really we really assembled the team over the next year to to build the infrastructure of the product and um fast isn’t just payments but payments is part of it. It’s very much we’re really at the intersection of ecommerce and payments and um. Identity and different things so compared to companies like Addin or brainreeer or others that are just payment processors. We. We also manage the consumer component of it. So there’s a lot of parts that need to fit together. Um to make this frictionless experience. So. Um, yeah, the first year was about building the team and launching our initial version of the product and then once we got the initial product live and and working then we use that traction and execution to to raise our next round.

 

23:43.60

Alejandro

And I mean it’s it’s humble boligo because you are originally from collubus oh high. Your domi is from Australia. How did you both go about building their relationship with those investors because there’s a lot of people broadly that are right now listening or watching and. And they’re like oh my god I’m outside of the us and I’m planning to go to the us and I’m wondering how aliceson and Don did it.

 

24:06.27

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, it was a lot of hustle. Um, well when I was still at uber I would be with a lot of investors because I wanted to work at a venture fund. So I would reach out to them I was active on Twitter at the time. Um. And sort of meet them that way and I also like followed a lot of people because I was like trying to learn a lot about venture capital. So I would follow investors to to learn how they think and I would ask them to get coffee and a lot of investors would say yes because I had an interesting background at uber that they were like curious about. But. Um, it was also this magical time in silicon valley that I don’t maybe it’s happening in Miami again or it will come back but like you would just meet up with people all the time to get coffee and then get to know them and it was sort of really fun to build a network that way and just have like. Super interesting conversations with all sorts of interesting people and then like later on I’d go to dinners and just like network with a lot of people and it didn’t like feel like networking because it was always about talking about interesting things and like especially founders. It’s like everyone has an interesting story and it’s like. Never bored because it’s someone’s building something impactful and and meaningful so it was it was really fun. Um, so yeah, it’s like I feel like so much of not all the fundraising today but Zoom can be a bit more transactional I think and that organic part of.

 

25:35.92

Alejandro

Now.

 

25:37.91

Allison Barr Allen

Stanford like at the time that that was like this organic magical thing and you just like run into people all the time and it was really fun. So um, hopefully that that comes back eventually or that magic. But um, yeah, it was a special time in the bay area and um. Met a lot of interesting people. So yeah, when I joined fast I was able to reach out to a lot of those people and connect with them again because they already knew me and I’d already been talking about payments in fintech for who knows how long so it’s I was so ah, always focused on sort of the same areas. Um.

 

26:05.11

Alejandro

Nice. Yeah, relationship building that’s for Sure. So I Guess same let me ask you this? Um, for the people that are listening to get a sense of the maybe the size of fast to them and anything that you can share maybe like number of employees or anything that you feel comfortable sharing.

 

26:12.43

Allison Barr Allen

So yeah, yeah.

 

26:25.79

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, we’re about 400 people now. So yeah, pretty large.

 

26:31.42

Alejandro

Wow. So what about the culture. How do you guys go about culture so that you know you’re able to grow so fast and you’re not breaking things when it comes to culture.

 

26:41.30

Allison Barr Allen

Yeah, great question. Um, very deliberately I think um, we were sort of at a turning point when covid hit right? when we were starting to hire and build out our team so we have a great office in San Francisco that um still haven’t and people go to but it’s much more of sort of a co-working space now and we don’t force people to go into the office. But um, yeah, when we shift to global or when covid hit. We just sort of immediately started hiring other places as well and. Just had to be a lot more intentional about how we were building the company culture I think um, part of that is through recruiting and making sure that people you hire are like a good fit for the company. Um, what was interesting to me as covid sort of like kept going on and on. Not ending was people would meet up um in cities all over the us or even globally, um, just because they enjoyed hanging out with each other and meeting other people from fast. So I think that was a good indication for me that we were hiring great people that they just like wanted to hang out because they had similarities and enjoyed talking to each other. Um, I do a weekly all hands with the whole company. Um that I help plan and structure and I think that’s like the 1 hour of the week that we’re sort of all in the same place even though it’s virtual and I think that’s a really good time to sort of. Iterate what’s important to the company and really celebrate what we’ve been able to build and also sort of look forward um to things things ahead and make sure everyone’s aligned and sort of like moving in the right direction. So um, those are a few things.

 

28:20.54

Alejandro

Nice. So imagine Allison that you go to you got to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world Five years later where let’s say the vision of fast is fully realized what does that world look like.

 

28:33.88

Allison Barr Allen

Ah, great question I think if I’d love for fast to be the default way that you pay for things online where it’s like you don’t really think about it but everything is just done through fast and it’s like so simple and seamless that you don’t really have to think about it. Um, and then we also have a consumer dashboard as well. That’s sort of basic at the time but over time we can add additional features but we think of it as like in some way fast is like the buy now button on Amazon where there’s like the buy now button and then there’s add to card and it’s really like the friction list checkout and then. Um, on Amazon you can also see all of your purchases and orders and things like that and um, we also think about post-purchase experience a lot and how can we make it as easy for you to um, one do business with sellers. So how can you? How can. How can we make it really easy for you to buy things. But then. Postpurchae how can you have an amazing experience. Um with the company if you have an issue or a problem or return or you want to save something to a wish list or there’s sort of a lot of different ways. It could go. But um, we think we have a buyer dashboard now that’s similar to to Amazon as well where you could. Track your deliveries right now and over time we we can think of other features that you can add on top of that. Um, so yeah, it’s it’s all about um, reducing friction and making it as easy as possible to buy things. We’ve also done a lot of really cool. Um, omni channel experiences especially in sports where. You can go to a sports game and scan a code and purchase like a special item of the game. That’s just there and then it’ll be delivered to your house after and you don’t have to you don’t have to wait in some long line to to pick it up. So I think it’s it’s all about how can you create better um better experiences um and that new sort of age of tech or age of commerce. That’s really omni channel.

 

30:31.00

Alejandro

Yeah, absolutely now imagine I mean there’s a question that I typically ask the guests that come on the show and that is imagine I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time you know and we’re talking about now. Let’s say you know that moment where you guys were sitting down. And thinking about the future. You know that was back in. Let’s say November Two thousand and nineteen where you and do were like thinking about like what what was possible? No, it’s fast. Imagine you had the opportunity of going back to that moment maybe to one of those discussions where you had the 2 of you the 2 younger selves. You know of you and and dumb right there you know in front of you and you were able to give them 1 piece of business advice before moving forward with the company. What would that be and why given what you know now.

 

31:21.39

Allison Barr Allen

Great question I think um I tell people this a lot and I don’t think it really would have changed how we were thinking about buildinging the company but to me it’s all about relationships and all about people so like. You really can’t forget that no matter what stage of the company or trajectory you’re in because it’s I think great people build great products and they also build great companies. So it’s like no matter what stage you’re at like thinking very carefully and putting so much emphasis on the people that you really have. Um, with you and around you and I think um, yeah I don’t really think we would have done anything differently as we were building the company. It’s like some things you can a lot of it’s just like steps you go through and um it I’m all about like It’s all about just getting a little bit better every day and like continuing to make progress towards that bigger vision and like making sure that you um understand what that longer term vision is and aligning people around that. But yeah, it’s it’s not like 1 thing I would do differently but.

 

32:33.70

Alejandro

Amazing. So for the people that are listening I Listen what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi.

 

32:40.37

Allison Barr Allen

Ah, you can follow me on Twitter at a bar Allen that’s probably my most active social channel.

 

32:49.47

Alejandro

Amazing! Well aison thank you so much for being on the deal maker show today.

 

32:54.32

Allison Barr Allen

Great. Thank you.

 

* * *
If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@pa**************.com.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More