 From Phoenix, Arizona, the Cube at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls Who Code Catalyst Conference. It's a great show, about 400 people, their fourth year is going back to the Bay Area next year. So we want to come down, talk to some of the keynotes, some of the speakers and really give you a taste if you weren't able to make the trip to Phoenix this year of what's going on. So we're really excited to be joined by our next guest, Fran Meyer. She co-founded Match, she co-founded trustee, serial entrepreneur, startup veteran, Fran, welcome. Thank you so much, Jeff, great to be here. Absolutely, so you were given a presentation on really what it is to be a woman entrepreneur. Yeah, so I've been an internet entrepreneur for now more than 20 years, going back to when we started Match.com and I joined that in late 1994. We really launched around 1995, about 21 years ago this month, April in 1995. Likewise. And many of the things that were still very much, I think in the early years of the impact of internet and mobile and cloud and connectivity on our lives. But Match.com has proven to be what they call a unicorn, a very successful new business model, but more than that many, many people have found their life partner or at least a few good dates on Match.com. So I'm always very happy about that. And you're way ahead of the curve. Now, I think, I don't know, I've been married for over 20 years, but I think a lot of people, that's kind of the first way to meet people, not the second way, where when you guys first did Match.com, that was a pretty novel idea. Well, now they call dating where, like we used to do it, where you met people at parties and bars. Now that's called dating in the wild. In the wild. So the more natural thing is using Match.com. But from an entrepreneurial support, I was one of the only women who was involved in starting a company in the mid 1990s. Still women are less than 10% of tech founders or venture backed founders. Women raise a lot less money. And so one of my passions and why I'm here at Girls in Tech is to try and impart some of the wisdom gleamed over 20 plus years. So what are some of the ways that you see that barrier starting to break down? Is it just, you just got to keep banging on it and slowly, slowly it'll move? I think there's been some difference. I think it's a lot easier to be an entrepreneur of any kind now than it was 20 years ago. I mean, now having meals delivered to you and the sort of support like Girls in Tech, there was very little of that guidance or certainly there were very few role models 20 years ago. So that certainly has changed. I think another big change and this is probably our last two or three years is that now women feel they can speak out loud about some of the issues. And that there is some, men are willing to listen at least some are. We still see things like TechCrunch a couple of years ago had a team present a new mobile app called tits there. We still hear about things like that. We still, there was a survey called The Elephant in Silicon Valley that itemized stories and stats about women and sexual abuse, other kinds of harassment, exclusion, not being invited to sit at the table. So a lot of that stuff is still going on, but I feel like we could call it out a little bit easier. Right, right. Without retribution potentially. Is there kind of a tipping point event action that you see potentially is kind of accelerating? Well, you know, I think the media since lean in has really kind of picked up on this and is covering it. And the Ellen Powell trial last year, I spoke a little bit about that where she brought suit to Kleiner Perkins. She lost the suit, but it started the dialogue. So I think that a lot of this is happening. And my approach is to try and continue. I see, I advise so many startups and I see business plans and almost invariably the business plans from women aren't big enough. They don't say, hey, we're gonna be a hundred million dollar company in five years and we need to raise five million dollars to get there. Women play it more safe. And I don't think that I'm trying to encourage them to take more risks, to figure out how to do it, to play to win. Right, play big to win. Right, swing big. Yeah, swing big. It's interesting that on the lean in, Sheryl Sandberg's kind of groundbreaking is the right word, but certainly groundbreaking. But the Golden State Warriors right now, probably the most popular professionals words team in the country at the zenith of their success, they have a lean in commercial. I don't know if you've seen it in the Bay Area where all of the players talk about leaning in. And it just so happens that Steph Curry, their number one superstar, is very close to his wife. She has a cooking show, they're very family oriented. But I thought you were going to... Dramon Green as his mom, who he just constantly, just gushes about his mom. And so they, as a male sports team, had a whole commercial that they run quite frequently on, specifically lean in. Well, I appreciate that. I also, though, read the article that that team is owned by a bunch of venture capitalists and they all get together and play basketball and reminded me of a little bit of another place where women have been excluded. And so I was talking to a venture capital friend of mine saying buy into the Warriors or let's buy into women's soccer team. And sports being what they are, it's almost a different thing but the news about the women's soccer players being paid much less than the men, even though they generate more income. It's just another example, profession by profession, where women are paid less or have less opportunity to advance. But to your point, I think people understand it, it's not right, but I think everyone pretty much knows that women aren't paid the same as men. But that was interesting about the soccer story, to your point, is it was brought up. And there wasn't a retribution, right? It's like, hey, we're not getting paid and they listed the numbers in Sports Illustrated. They were dramatically different. And in fact, one of the knocks on the WNBA is that you can't make a living as a player in the WNBA. You just can't. They pay them like, I don't know. $60,000 or whatever it is. They have to go play at other places, foreign countries to make enough money to live. So I do think it's interesting to your point that the exposure of the problem, the kind of acceptance that we need to do something about, it does seem to be in a much better place than it used to be. The other thing that I think that these things illustrate is one of the messages I try and get across is women tend to settle for too little. You know, they don't necessarily negotiate for themselves. They, out of college, they don't do as well. They, I've talked to many women who they felt that when they were raising capital or negotiating deals that the men on the other side of the table mostly, not always of course, it sort of said, hey, this is great. You should be happy to get this. How many women get this? And that's not really the issue. The issue should be, you should be getting what you deserve. I learned that the hard way, we talked about it a little bit a while ago, where match.com was sold in 1998 for less than $10 million. And I was the general manager. I had grown it. We were number one. We were cashflow positive, although probably shouldn't have been. And I walked away with $100,000. And at the time, sure, that's a lot of money, but nobody seemed to encourage me that I probably could have raised the money and led the investment and had an equity round. A year later, match.com was sold from Send It to IAC for $70 million. And of course I didn't get anything. So that's my big lesson. The good news is 10 years later, I took trustee, which was a nonprofit, switched it to a for-profit. I raised the capital and got my ownership in equity position. But tough lesson. Yeah, yeah, expensive one. But those are the ones you learned, though. I could go through a few of those too. So Fran, we're running low on time. I wanna give you the last word and get your perspective on kind of mentorship and sponsorship. We hear those words tossed around a lot and that there's a significant difference between just being a mentor and actually being a sponsor, taking an active role in someone else's career, pushing them to maybe uncomfortable places, giving them kind of the oomph, if you will, yes, you can't do this. You do belong. What are you seeing kind of the development of that as people try to help more women ascend kind of up the line? Well, you know, I tend to think of mentorship as something that happens within a company. And sponsorship can happen within a company, but advising, sponsoring, promoting, championing are things that we certainly need to do within the entrepreneurial community of women. So mentoring is, I see that as a little bit more passive. I don't know why, but it's important to have people to look up to and for you, role models are really important. But I think the active thing of championing or sponsoring or even being a more active coach or advisor is a little bit more hands-on and willing to challenge, you're not just a role model, you're really saying, tell me what you're dealing with and let me see how I can help. I just got off a phone call for one of my advisees. She just raised the money. Great news, you know. Now she's freaking out about how to spend it. I think we'll see your next problem. Yeah, it's like, been there done now, you know? Well, it's good for helping them out. And Fran, thanks for taking a few minutes. Sure, a lot of fun. Absolutely, track Fran down. If you are a budding entrepreneur, she's been there, she's got the scars and the wounds from the early days and learned from it on the success with trustee. Thank you. And some great videos on the web, by the way, that I was watching. The whole story on the match thing was pretty funny. You'll enjoy it. There's one of them where I start to cry, huh? I hate that. I didn't get to the crying part, but that's okay. Yeah, I am. That's what happens in Jerry McGuire all the time. All right, well, thanks a lot, Fran. Thanks so much. I'm Jeff Fricky. You're watching theCUBE. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference.