 From Menlo Park, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube! Covering Cloud Now Awards 2020, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's Sonya Tagare. Hi and welcome to The Cube. I'm your host Sonya Tagare, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, covering Cloud Now's top women entrepreneurs and cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is Mata Segete, the co-founder of Branch. Mata, welcome to The Cube. Thank you so much for having me. So you're receiving an award today for being a top female entrepreneur in cloud innovation. How does that feel? It feels awesome. I'm humbled to be in such an amazing company with some great ladies that have started really great companies. So pretty excited to be here. Great. So just give us a brief overview of your background. Sure. My background, well, I probably don't have the regular Silicon Valley background. I was born and raised in Communist Romania in a pretty small town called Bako, in the region of Romania called Moldavia. I was very good at math, and my parents pushed me to explore applying to schools in the United States, which I did. And I applied to 23 colleges, ended up getting a full scholarship from Cornell, where I studied computer engineering. I dreamt of working for big companies, which I did for a while until one day when I remember I was doing a master's at Stanford. And one professor told me, I told him, I was like, I don't think I could ever start a company. And he was like, well, if you don't, who do you think will? So I was like, oh, I never thought about it that way. And that's when I think my entrepreneurial dream started. And a few years later, I started, found co-founders and started a few different companies that eventually ended up being Branch. That's a long answer to your question. No, that's perfect. So what inspired you to start Branch, and how did you navigate getting funding? It's an interesting story. I think we came together, my co-founders and I, we were in business school. Stanford, we all want to start a company. And we did what all business school students do, we just started something that sounded cool, but maybe it didn't have such a big market, and then pivoted and ended up building an app. So we worked on an app with a mobile photo book printing app called Kindred. We worked on that app for quite some time, it was over a year. We sold over 10,000 photo books. I've seen a lot of images of babies and pets, and we reviewed manually every single book. And we had a really hard time growing. So if you think about the mobile ecosystem today, and if you compare it to the web, on the web, the web is a pre-democratic system. You have the HTTP protocol and you are able to put together a website and make sure that the website gets found through social media, through search, to all these other platforms. Apps are much harder to discover. The Apica system is owned by the platforms. And we had a really hard time applying, I was coming from the web world. And all the things I had done to market websites just didn't work with apps. And it was hard, you could only market the app. And how about all the content inside the app? That's a lot more interesting than the app itself. So we felt that we were really, really struggling and we needed to kind of shut the company down. And then we realized that one of the things that we were trying to build for us, to a disability, to allow people to share and get to content within the app, which is, in our case, was photo books, was actually something that everyone in the ecosystem needed. So we asked a lot of people and it seemed like this was a much bigger need than the photo books. And we had started to already build it to solve our own problem. So we started building a linking and attribution platform to help other apps and mobile companies grow and understand their user journey. And help build interesting connections for the user. So, our mission is to help people discover content within apps. Through links that always work. And it's been a wonderful and pretty exciting journey ever since. That's really inspiring and solving a real world problem. A real world problem. And so, it's interesting when you ask about fundraising. It was so hard to raise money for the photo book app. And we raised actually from a pair of ventures. And they actually, even now I remember, the guy Pedgeman sat us down in a very Silicon Valley fashion at the Rosewood. And it was a very hot day and there was like Persian tea being served. And he gave us money and he said, you know, I just want to tell you something. I'm not investing in the idea, I'm investing in you as a team. And if you pivot away from photo books, you know, which we did. And I think we pivoted away because we ended up finding a much, much bigger problem and we felt that, you know, we could actually make an actual change into the mobile cloud ecosystem. And that's how it all started. And it wasn't actually, it was easier to raise money after. We had a really big problem. We had a good team that had been working together for almost two years. We had product market fed. So, so yeah. So what are some things that have influenced you in your journey to become an entrepreneur? Some things, interesting. Well, I would say the Stanford Design School. I think I came from working for Siemens, which is a giant company. And I started doing these projects. And I remember one of the projects was we built a tool bar. We were supposed to, we were doing a project for Firefox, which, you know, Mozilla's browser, which was in some ways precursor to Chrome. And we're trying to help it grow and we didn't know. And one of the ideas was we built this tool bar for eBay. And eBay hadn't had a tool bar for Firefox. And we, you know, we were some students for two weeks, we built this tool bar and then someone bought the car through our tool bar. And I was like, wow, like, how incredible is it that you can just kind of put your thoughts on something and just get something done and make an actual impact someone's life? And I think that's when the spark of the entrepreneurial spark, it was during that time that Michael Deering was a professor on one of my D-school courses, also told me the thing that if I don't do it, who will? I think that's when it all started. I think the things that have helped me around the way, I mean, my co-founders, I think I've been incredibly lucky to find co-founders that are incredibly good at what they do and also very different from me. So I think if you think about why many companies implode is usually because of the founding team. We've been together for almost seven years now and it's been an interesting way to find balance through so many failed companies, so many stages of growth, branches over 400 people now. So our roles have shifted over time and it's been like an interesting journey. And I think recently more in the past few years, I think one of the things that has helped me find balance has been having a group of female founder friends. It's really interesting to have a peer group that you can talk about things with and be vulnerable with. And I didn't have that in the first few years and I wish I did. My co-founders are amazing but I think in some ways we are also co-workers. So having an external group has been incredibly helpful and helped me find balance in my life. So I think a lot of women feel that way. They feel that it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated workspace. So what advice would you give to female entrepreneurs in this space? Yeah, I mean, it is really hard and I think confidence is something that I've noticed with myself, my peers, the women I've invested in, I do investing on the side. I would say believe that you can do it. Believe that the only disguise element, believe that you can do more than you think you can do. I think sometimes our background and the society around us doesn't necessarily believe that we can do the things that we can do as women. So I think believing in ourselves is incredibly important. I think the second part is making sure that we build networks around us that can tell us that they believe in us, that can push us beyond what we think is possible. And I think those networks can be peers, like my female founder group, we call each other feministas or I think investors, I think it can be mentors. And I've had, I've been lucky enough to have amazing women investors, women mentors, and it's been really incredible to see how much they helped me grow. So I think the interesting thing is when I was getting started, I didn't look for those communities, I didn't look for, I just kind of felt, oh, I can do it, but I didn't actually realize that being part of a community, being vulnerable, asking questions can actually help me go so much further. So the advice would be to start early and find a small group of people that you can actually rely on and they can be your advocates and your champions. So yeah. Well, thank you so much for those words of wisdom. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being on theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Stay tuned for more.