Running Lean and Building in the Right Direction, with Jennifer Smith of Scribe | Future of Work

The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Jennifer Smith (@scribeceo), Co-Founder and CEO of Scribe, a software tool that makes it easy to learn from your most productive people without slowing them down by automatically generating step-by-step tutorials for any task, while they work. Scribe seamlessly captures how work gets done across your organization, enabling you to analyze, optimize, and standardize processes, in a way your employees will love. Founded in 2019, the Scribe team imagines a world where the best of what anyone knows how to do is available to everyone. Instantly and automatically. So every person, company, and community can do their best work, every day. With a little more ease and joy.

Prior to founding Scribe, Jennifer spent time at McKinsey & Company and Greylock Partners. She is a Princeton and Harvard Business School alum.

Website: Scribe
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jenniferreneesmith/
Twitter: @scribeceo

Show Notes:

• How Scribe is making it easy to share how to do something
• Jennifer’s background and realizing she needed to build Scribe to solve a problem she observed for years
• Going from “someone else will solve it” to “I’m going to solve it” and the first steps she took to start a company
• Finding developers early in Scribe’s journey
• Talking to 80+ engineers before she connected with her technical co-founder, Aaron Podolny
• The importance of finding a co-founder that shares your value and vision
• How organic growth enabled Jennifer and the Scribe team to run lean and focus on building in the right direction without any marketing for the first 1.5 years
• How their approach to growth and marketing has shifted
• How they narrowed their target market for a product with such a wide variety of use cases
• Raising an unexpected Series A for Scribe while pregnant with her first child
• Jennifer’s strategy behind bringing on great angel investors
• Making Scribe an extremely user-friendly product

More about the show:

The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.

Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.

The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.

The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.

More about us:

Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The Vitalize Team:

Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212

Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/