Podcast appearances and mentions of shanna tellerman

Shanna Tellerman, the CEO of e-design platform Modsy, has a background in tech. She worked at Autodesk and Google before the frustration of decorating her own home led her to an idea: why not use 3D rendering to power the design process and bring it to a wider audience? Seven years later, Modsy has raised more than seventy million dollars, employed hundreds of e-designers, and executed thousands of projects for clients all over the world. On this episode of the podcast, Tellerman speaks with host Dennis Scully about what artificial intelligence can and can't do in design, how Modsy could work with high-end designers, and what the future holds for technology in the home industry. This episode is sponsored by The Shade Store and Crypton.LINKSModsyDennis ScullyBusiness of Home

This week, Shanna Tellerman, the CEO and co-founder of Modsy, sits down with Samantha Walravens to discuss her passion for design and technology, and how she built this into a virtual interior design company. Before founding Modsy, Shanna was a partner on the investing team at Google Ventures. Learn about her journey from studying landscape painting to developing cutting-edge 3D visualization platforms and how she uses disruptive technology to solve problems and create value. Lehigh@NasdaqCenter is an exclusive academic in-residence collaboration between Lehigh University and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco. Our theory of change is to accelerate student transformation and societal impact through inclusive entrepreneurial education, research, and thought leadership.

Shanna Tellerman is the founder and CEO of Modsy, a design service that provides high-quality solutions to the pain points of home design. We got together over zoom, to discuss Shanna's entrepreneurial journey and the future of work in a post covid world.

Shanna discusses her path to starting Modsy, an online interior design platform to help you decorate your new living space. Before Modsy, Shanna started a company in the gaming industry that later got acquired by Autodesk. To be the best entrepreneur, she added #VentureCapital into her toolkit as a Partner @GoogleVentures to understand what it’s like sitting on the other side of the table. Beyond her incredible journey, learn about Shanna’s goal-setting technique that she makes all of her employees do at Modsy!

SEGMENT 1, starting at 0:00: In one of the biggest shifts in consumer behaviors we have ever seen, companies are rushing to bring traditional offline businesses online. Here to help is Shanna Tellerman, founder and CEO of Modsy, who has done exactly this many years ago. Additionally, she speaks on a range of topics including game development and women in technology for organizations.SEGMENT 2, starting at 19:15: Work days at small businesses today seem like one long virtual meeting. Employees are constantly on a tool like Zoom or Skype communicating with customers and each other. How do you ensure these virtual meetings are actually effective? Here to help is Howard Tiersky, co-author of Impactful “Online Meetings: How to Run Polished Virtual Working Sessions That Are Engaging and Effective.”SEGMENT 3, starting at 39:00: One of the most important things you need to do right now is to figure out how to effectively communicate with your customers, especially if you can't see them in person or you can't offer your service like you used to. Here to help with a road map for this is Kim Spalding who leads product management for the SMB and Emerging Market Advertising at Google.Sponsored by Mitel and Thryv

Shanna Tellerman is a two-time Founder and CEO. Her current company, Modsy, is a virtual interior design service that provides 3D photorealistic renderings of a user’s home space, supplies design expertise to furnish it beautifully, and makes everything in the design available for purchase – all on the same website. In this Growth Journeys podcast, Shanna traces her evolution from math-loving fine arts major to entrepreneur by way of 3D technology and venture investing at Google. Tina Hoang-To, Executive Vice President at TCV, also has both CEO and venture experience, so this lively conversation is filled with lessons about founding and leading businesses, raising capital, scaling a team, integrating technology and design, and forging a successful partnership with investors.

In this episode, Ethan talks to Shanna Tellerman, Founder & CEO of Modsy. Modsy is a culmination of Shanna’s background in art, design and technology: Using 3D and augmented reality (AR) renders of spaces, Modsy allows people to visualize design ideas in their own home. Ethan and Shanna talk about how she came up with the idea for Modsy, why diversity in tech is so important, and how visualization technologies open possibilities for the art & design space. - About Modsy- At Modsy, 3D and AR technology is used to unlock the potential of visualization. Modsy allows people to visualize how things look in their own home, helping them to make design decisions while simultaneously broadening their understanding of design through stylistic recommendations. Follow Modsy on Instagram @modsydesign and on Twitter @modsy, and visit www.modsy.com. - About Shanna- Having graduated with a degree in Fine Arts and later becoming Partner at GV, Shanna Tellerman is now the Founder and CEO at Modsy. At Modsy, Shanna combines her passion for design with technology, allowing people to visualise design ideas in their own home by offering 3D and augmented reality (AR) renders of spaces. Follow Shanna on Twitter @ShannaWP. - About Vango Studio - Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms. Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .

Shanna Tellerman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modsy.  This is a bit of a different interview since I typically don't interview founders, but Shanna is awesome and we had a fantastic conversation.  Shanna also has great experiences during her time at Google Ventures and Autodesk.    In this podcast we cover Confidence - what does it mean and how can you build more of it One phrase that can help fight imposter syndrome A new take on a vision exercise that’s way more fun than OKRs

Welcome everyone to the Girls-In movement Podcast series, today we go live with our first episode of the Series.  We are joined by Shanna Tellerman from the company Modsy Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannatellerman/Twitter: https://twitter.com/modsy

Shanna Tellerman hasn’t approached her career with a game plan in mind; instead, she’s been on a journey to pursue the opportunities she is most passionate about, the things she can’t not do, which may account for her love of both the engineering and design aspects of business and product development. On this episode of Making Ways, Shanna recounts her path from art-loving teenager to engineer enthralled with the potential of 3D design and development. After receiving her master’s degree and BFA at Carnegie Mellon, where she studied under the now-famous Last Lecture professor Randy Pausch, Shanna started a company that was eventually acquired by Autodesk after an arduous five years. She then worked as a venture capitalist at Google Ventures (now known as GV) before founding her new startup Modsy, which aims to revolutionize the way we decorate and furnish our homes by offering 3D and augmented reality renders of redesigned spaces. Listen to the conversation with Shanna for great advice for entrepreneurs, startup founders, and those who want a little guidance and encouragement as they navigate a career less traveled, a path of passion and flow over strict expectations and narrowly defined plans.

There’s been a lot of debate and controversy around the lack of women and minorities being represented in tech companies from entry-level to the C-suite and board room. However, what isn’t showcased is how there is sisterhood within tech, where women are helping each other out, and enacting change at every level from schools to the board room. To talk about how women are investing and encouraging each other, I’ve invited Samantha Walravens who is the co-author of the new book Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech. If you’re a woman, minority, or male ally you’ll learn from Samantha how: Women like Maria Klawe at Harvey Mudd have tripled the number of women graduating with Computer Science degrees Women are connecting female founders to female angel investors and influencers to grow their startups Corporations are changing and disrupting the dynamics of the boardroom   This is the last episode of FemgineerTV but don’t worry it’s not the end... After hosting FemgineerTV and listening to audience members like you for the past 2 ½ years, myself and my sponsor Pivotal Tracker decided it was time for a fun format! Starting next month, I’m going to be launching a new show called Build. I think you’ll enjoy the new format for Build. Each week you’ll receive a short video on a topic to help you build a product, company, and career in tech. So stay tuned for the launch of Build :) Want to help us get the word out about Build? Please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes here. If you’ve never left a review, here is a quick tutorial on how to do. -- Poornima: Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer.                                 In this show, I invite innovators in tech, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies.                                 One of the most heated topics today is the lack of women and minorities represented in tech; from entry level, to the C suite, to the board room. While we all know this is already a problem, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about some of the solutions, and showing how there are companies and organizations enacting these solutions.                                 And to help us out, I've invited Samantha Walravens, who is the coauthor of the latest book, *Geek Girl Rising: Inside The Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech*. Thanks so much for joining us today, Samantha.   Samantha: Thanks for having me!   Poornima: Yeah, it's wonderful.                                 Let's start by talking about why you and your coauthor, Heather Cabot, decided to write this book.   Sharing The Unspoken Narrative of Women In Technology   Samantha: The inspiration for this book was a conversation I had about three years ago with a friend of mine, who's been in Silicon Valley for 20 years. She's a woman, she's the VP of sales in business development, and she's worked in a number of tech startups, and we were having coffee, and she said, "Sam, I cannot tell you what just happened in my performance group review, it was last week, and my manager commented on what I was wearing, the color of my dresses, the jewelry I wore, and he told me that I was too aggressive, and too bossy, and I needed to tone it down a bit." Meanwhile, she is the head of sales, and she was rocking her number out of the park. So she said, "Sam, you've got to write something." She knew I was a journalist. She said, "You've got to write something and you have to talk about this kind of discrimination and this kind of sexism in Silicon Valley."                                 Mind you this is before the *Newsweek* article came out, "What does Silicon Valley really think of women," people were discussing women in technology, but it really was not a top of mind—and so I started to do a little digging, and researching and interviewing women. And what I found was, yes, there's sexism, there is harassment, there's discrimination, there's unconscious bias, it's there, it's a problem we need to talk about it and deal with it.                                 But there was another narrative, another discussion that wasn't being told, which was: these women want to talk about the companies they were building, the technologies they were creating, the women who are supporting them and helping them along the way in their careers. There was this whole other narrative that was missing from the conversation that was happening in the national news media about sexism in Silicon Valley.                                 And I thought, "we have to discuss this." So, Heather Cabot, who's my coauthor, was in New York, I'm in San Francisco, we talked, and she said, "Sam, I've been researching this topic," it was kind of a coincidence, it was like one of those weird moments of weird fate. And she said, "I've been researching this topic, let's work together." So we put our heads together and we just started digging into the topic, and it's been three years now, and finally the book is coming out!   The Sisterhood That Is Supporting Women In Tech in Silicon Valley And Beyond   Poornima: So one thing I experienced early on in my career, and it keeps me motivated, is the women who inspired me. So, early on, when I was a college student in engineering school, I had a professor, and she had twins, and she was doing her research, and she was teaching, and she was leading the department, and I thought, "If she could do it, I could do it." And as I was reading the book, I noticed the theme of the sisterhood kind of coming up again and again.                                 Tell us how you discovered this theme as you started writing or as you were doing your research.   Samantha: Of course. Well, I too had a mentor back in my Silicon Valley days when I worked for a software startup during the dotcom boom in 1998 to about 2003, so I saw the dotcom boom and the bust happen, I was living through it, our company went public, stock went to 130, then went down to two, so I lived and breathed the dotcom boom and bust.                                 My manager/boss at that point was Carol Carpenter, who has since gone on to become—she was the CEO, actually CMO of ClearSlide and then CEO of ElasticBox, so she's a prominent woman in Silicon Valley, and she really pulled me up. She really, when I was lacking confidence, and I thought, "I can't do this," I'd just had my baby, my first baby, we were going public, and I thought, "I can't do this, this is crazy." We're working 24/7 and I have a newborn at home. She was the one who said, "Sam, you can do it, you can do it." And having that kind of mentorship and that kind of woman who was going through it herself pulling me up, really encouraged me.                                 So as we were researching the book, we started noticing these pockets around the startup universe, women who were supporting each other, investing in each other, encouraging each other in their careers and inspiring the next generation of girls and young women to pursue technology and continue their careers in technology.   Encouraging The Next Generation of Women To Consider Careers In Tech   Poornima: Yeah, that's great. I think you're absolutely right, that is a narrative that's missing from the media and more women need to know that that's out there as well, so that they don't feel like all there is is just what the media portrays.                                 Now, the first place that you write about change happening is at the primary school up to the high school level, so walk us through what that looks like.   Samantha: Well, fortunately, before Obama left office, he did create an initiative, a $4 billion initiative called "Computer Science for All" that is encouraging and putting funds towards creating computer science curriculum in schools throughout the country. I was so excited to read about Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, in the Chicago public schools now, computer science is a requirement for all high schools in Chicago. So I think we're going to see more of that.                                 When you look at the numbers, though, we still have a long way to go, cause 25% of high schools in the U.S. offer computer science, I think it's like 22% of girls, of students taking the computer science AP exam are girls, so we still have a long way to go.                                 What we noticed, though, it's sort of this grassroots movement of women who are encouraging the younger generations to start building, to start creating, to start coding. For example, we start our book talking about Debbie Sterling, who's the founder and the CEO of Goldie Blocks, and she's got this great—I have two little girls, we have it at home, it's a great toy that encourages girls to build, and there's a really fun, positive role model, Goldie, who builds a spinning machine and she has all these sorts of engineering—you wouldn't even know it's engineering, it's really just building Ferris wheels and building merry-go-rounds and all these fun things, along with the story, talking about Goldie and her friends, and how she's building these different fun games and amusement park rides. We have that in our household.                                 These are the kinds of things that women are doing to try to inspire the next generation. There is a woman in our book who started a company called Bitcode, she's actually working with the public schools to get them to use video to teach girls how to code. So if you have kids you know that they're on video, they're on YouTube, and they're really tech savvy. I have four kids, they can get around YouTube, and iMovie, and they're all over it. So, this tool is used in the public schools, to teach coding, using videos, to make it fun.   How Colleges Are Changing The Ratio Of Women Graduating With Computer Science Degrees Poornima: It's great, yeah, it's good to see these grassroots efforts, so that even if there is kind of a gap in terms of change for public schools or the school system in general, there's ways in which parents and teachers can supplement that.                                 So, the next place in which a lot of women and minorities drop off is at the college level, tell us who's working on changing that.   Samantha: Well, we had the most amazing experience at Grace Hopper in 2015. I believe you were there, and Heather and I, my coauthor and I went, and just to see, I think it was 12,000 women there in computing, and it is a true celebration. And to see the enthusiasm and the excitement and the bonding between these young women, it was so encouraging.                                 When you look at specific colleges, there's a lot being done to encourage more women in to pursue technology and computer science. I met with Maria Klawe, who's the president of Harvey Mudd, and wow! What a firecracker she is, she skateboards around campus, she's just a really fun, wonderful woman, and she implemented a program along with her colleagues a few years ago, where there are two tracks for computer science, so as a freshman you can take the gold track or the black track.                                 The gold track is for students who have not had any computer science experience in high school; the black track is for students who've had some experience. So, by doing this, the students who have not had experience don't feel so impostered, they don't have the confidence cause no one's had this experience, so they get through this year and I spoke to a couple of students who have taken these classes, and they say that by the end of the year, everyone's pretty much at the same level.                                 So, she, Maria Klawe, and her team has tripled the number of women graduating with computer science degrees at Harvey Mudd in the past ten years, and the number is, I hate to throw in all these numbers, cause they get little mind boggling at times, but 55% of the computer science graduates at Harvey Mudd are now women.   Poornima: That's great, it's a nice change to—the numbers go up.   Samantha: There's also Stanford. Another example of what's going on to encourage women to pursue computer science is Stanford University, of course a top institution, but they have a Women in Tech group called She++, which was started by Ayna Agarwal, and who was not even a computer science major by the way, but she started this group to encourage women and they had a Gala, every year, which gathers all the women in technology, not just Stanford. What they do is they go out into the communities and they take on high school students in different communities around the country and they support these young high school girls to start programs in their communities. For example, I live out in Marin County, and there is a girl who started a robotics happy schooler box program in Marin City, which is an underserved community in Marin County, and she runs this afterschool program in Marin City.                                 So all of these girls around the country who are starting these programs through She++ gather together for this gala, and I am telling you, if you could be there to see these college women, these high school girls who came, they were dressed to the nines, they were glamorous, I mean, talk about debunking the myths and breaking stereotypes about what a woman in tech looks like, I mean, we could have been in an LA nightclub, not to sound like—but they were so beautiful and wonderful and smart and excited to talk about their programs, and they were so excited to be in technology. And again, this is why Heather and I said, "This is a story that no one sees," you don't see this kind of enthusiasm around technology, you see, "Oh, it's so hard, numbers are dropping, it's all doom and gloom." And so we really wanted to tell that other story.   The Angel Investors And Others Who Are Supporting Female Founders   Poornima: OK. That brings us back to industry, and I know there's a lot going on at the corporate level, as well as startups. I'm of course partial to startups, so let's start there and talk about how the ecosystem is changing for women and minorities.   Samantha: There's a lot of momentum behind supporting female founders. For example, there are accelerator programs like the Women Startup Lab, which is down here at Menlo Park; there's MergeLane, which is in Colorado; there's The Refinery in Connecticut. These programs focus on female founders, and really giving them the tools, the skills they need to grow their company into a venture, fundable company. And they give the tools to learn how to pitch venture capitalists, and we all know the venture capital world is very male dominated.   Poornima: Yeah, it is a challenge. I know I've had my fair share of doing the fundraising.                                 So, there's a very common problem around women and minorities getting up and pitching their business to VCs, either male VCs not getting their idea, or they don't think it's a big enough market, or there's a lot of unconscious bias around it, so how are women getting their training to get over all of that?   Samantha: Well, you've started a company, so you know what it's like. The founders that we've met, that I've met in my journey with this book, are so passionate about their idea. But you can have an idea, and it's not going to go anywhere—you have to have the product market fit, you have to test the idea, you have to build your team out—and so these programs are really teaching women what they need to do to get to that level, to actually pitch to investors. But when you look at the numbers, I think it's 10% of the venture funding, globally, goes to female founders—it's still a really small percentage.                                 We've also noticed that there's women who are angels. So angel investors who fund companies at the early stages—for example, Joanne Wilson, aka Gotham Gal, who has a tremendous momentum in New York City, who has invested in a number of really great companies; Caren Maio, Nestio, Shanna Tellerman, Modsy—she finds these women, who have ideas that are big, that are scalable, and she nurtures them, and she's like the fairy godmother to these women. And there are other women that we talk about, we'd had to read the book to learn about all of them, but there are women who really take these female founders under their wing and support them on their journey.   Poornima: I think it's great that there are women like Joanne Wilson out there. Do you have a sense of how many companies she's invested in?   Samantha: Joanne Wilson has invested in around a hundred companies, and they're doing fantastic. One of them, Shanna Tellerman, started the company Modsy, which is an immersive, 3D environment for home décor, home design, and she told us that she created this project called “The Pinnacle Project,” at Park City, Utah, and it was Wednesday through Sunday, I think. And she invited Joanne, and Susan Lyne, and a bunch of angel investors, as well as a number of female founders, to come gather, network, ski, and have fun, and she said it was funny, because all the women were thinking, "We should be home, we should be working, we should be with the kids, we have so much to do," and she said she had to tell and remind people that, "This is what the guys do. They have a boys call and they pick off and it's all about business, whereas women don't have that sense of, “Let's go out to ski, or golf,” and that kind of networking, so it was an example of this pinnacle project, which is going to happen recurring every year, of, "OK, women, we can get together, have fun together, network, introduce each other to investors and influencers, and have fun while we're doing it. It's OK."   Poornima: Yeah. That's fantastic. And I think another thing you had mentioned pipeline ventures, or pipeline angels?   Samantha: Pipeline angels, yes, yes. Natalia Oberti Noguera is a force of nature and she started this angel investing group for women and I went through it and Heather went through it. I did it in San Francisco, Heather did it in New York, and basically it's a training, it's a bootcamp or a training program for women who are credited investors, to learn how to invest in female and minority-led companies. So it walked us through the process of how do you set evaluation on a company, what do you look for in a startup that you're investing in, what kind of traits you want to look for in the team, what's going to make this a good investment. So it trains women to invest as angels, and then you actually make an investment at the end.                                 We made an investment in a great startup—which I believe is still hush hush, underground at this point—but I believe we made a great investment and we're following the course of these early stage female founders, and it's really her goal to change the face of angel investing, to increase the amount of money going towards these early stage female founders.   Poornima: As we were doing research for your book and when I was reading it, I noticed that there was some astonishing findings, like only 11 companies that were founded by African-American women have received funding over a million dollars. So walk us through who is working to change this.   Samantha: Well, that number has actually increased, it's now 13 companies that have received more than a million dollars, but the numbers are still really low. One woman who is really on top of this problem is Kathryn Finney, who is the founder of DigitalUndivided, which is an organization whose main purpose is to increase the number of women, minorities in the tech world, latino women, and black women founders, and she just recently launched an accelerator, in Atlanta, Georgia, called the Big Innovation Center, and I think their first cohort is gathering this year to help skill up and prepare these minority founders to raise money.   How Tech Companies Are Growing Up And Changing How The Nature of Work   Poornima: So let's switch gears, and talk about corporations. We previously had Lisen Stromberg on the show, talking about the changes that were happening for parents—what have you seen?   Samantha: Well, what we've noticed is that Silicon Valley is growing up. They are trading in their ping-pong tables and foosball tables for nursing rooms, which is inspiring to see. When I started out, I had my Medela Pump in Style in a cold bathroom out of the courtyard of our startup, so it wasn't pretty, but we spent a day at Eventbrite not too long ago, and Julia Hartz, who's now the CEO of Eventbrite, it's very focused on woman, developing women in leadership positions and allowing for work-life balance. And I say that word, “work-life balance,” a term that is loaded, what she's trying to do with that company is focus on the whole person, not just the employee self.                                 For example, they have a program called “Take the time you need.” So if you need time to care for a child or to care for an adult, you can work from home, you can take time off, so she's really interested in her employees, and telling her employees, "You can do what you need to do, so you can live a life and you can be an employee."                                 And she also tells the women who are having babies at her company, she says, "You know what? You can get through the first six to nine months," it gets a lot easier, because a lot of women when they have their babies early on, they think, “I can't leave this poor creature alone with a daycare with a babysitter,” and she says, “If you can just get through that”—she's got two little girls herself—”If you can just get through that time, stick with it, come back, and we will support you while you're doing it,” which is fantastic.   Poornima: You also showcase companies like Power to Fly. Walk us through what Power to Fly is.   Samantha: Yeah, Power to Fly was started by Milena Berry and Katharine Zaleski. Katharine actually wrote an article apologizing to all the mothers out there. Before she had children, she was a little bit judgemental of mothers taking time off and having to leave work early, and then she had her first baby and she thought, "Oh, my gosh, this is really hard," so she and Milena got together and started this company, Power to Fly, which connects women with remote and flexible job positions, so they can actually care for their family and pursue careers in technology. The great thing about technology is that it can be done remotely. Especially if you're in coding, you don't have to be in an office 24/7, so Power to Fly works on that.                                 Another great program is Tina Lee started a program called MotherCoders, and she's based in San Francisco, a fabulous woman, her program retrains mothers in tech skills, so they can go off and they can—either they've taken time off or they have background in some other field, they can skill up in technology, and go out and get the tremendous amount of jobs that are available in technology as they get back to work.   Disrupting The Boardroom   Poornima: Well, that brings us to the boardroom, so walk us through what changes are happening there.   Samantha: The number of women holding board seats in our country is still very, very low, I think the number is 18% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies are held by women. So we still have a long way to go.                                 One real pioneer in this area is a woman, her name is Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, she's fabulous, she is the CEO and founder of a company called Joyus, a tech company, and she, a few years ago penned an article called "Tech Women Choose Possibility." And she really wanted to profile the women in Silicon Valley, in the startup world, who are doing great things, just founding great companies. There was a lot of positive response to that article, and so she created an organization called #choosepossibility.                                 Part of that organization is a group called, or an initiative called "The Boardlist." And basically it's a matchmaking tool that matches qualified, board-ready women with startup, tech companies, looking to fill board seats with women, so she made that happen, and they placed three women on the board, which it seems like it's very low, but what they're doing is they're connecting the VCs and the startup companies with these women, and a lot more placements have been made not directly through the platform, but just through the connections that have been made on this platform.   Poornima: OK, great, so it's good to know that there is some change happening at the board level as well.                                 Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Samantha, I know our viewers out there are going to enjoy reading your book, *Geek Girl Rising*. And for our viewers who are women, minority, and allies, is there anything else you would like to share with them in terms of resources?   Samantha: Yeah. I would love to see everybody come to our website. We have a gazillion resources on how you can join the digital revolution, just take a peek.   Poornima: Thanks for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your teammates, your boss, and everyone so that they get to benefit from all the great resources, and subscribe to our channel to receive the next episode.                                Ciao for now! -- FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.

Have you woken up in the middle of the night thinking about a solution to a problem that you need to solve? Maybe your degree has nothing to do with the problem, but you are determined to be the one to fix it? However, there may have and may still be some hurdles in the way. Perhaps you have a minimal support system, didn't anticipate how hard the hiring process would be and don't know what to do when you have been pushed to the max? Today's guest, Shanna Tellerman, is not new to these problems faced in the startup world. She is the founder of her second startup Modsy and shares some valuable insight for all entrepreneurs. In this episode you will... Gather some lessons Shanna learned from her job at Google Ventures Identify 3 things Shanna looks for in a company and entrepreneur Learn what to do when you have a minimal support system Know about hiring during first stages of startup Manage your life and business with Shanna's fav apps Resources: She Did It Her Way Podcast She Did It Her Way Twitter She Did It Her Way Facebook Shanna's LinkedIn Shanna's Twitter Modsy Gusto Zenefits Slack INSIGHTS: “There was just this point where I woke up one morning, I had been thinking about it all night and I was still thinking about it in the morning, and I was like ‘ I need to go do this. The time is now.”-Shanna Tellerman “An investor and venture capitalist, they also have a goal. They also have a way that they are being evaluated, which is primarily return on their investment.”-Shanna Tellerman “You are going to do this for many years; you’re going to put your heart and soul into it and many, many hours. The problem has to matter and you have to be excited for that problem everyday. That passion has to be obvious.”-Shanna Tellerman “You are pushed to the max all the time, but when you really care, and it’s your company and you care about the thing that you’re building and you really want to see it happen in the world, there is kind of no end.”-Shanna Tellerman “The idea of ‘quit’ is just not in my vocabulary and hasn’t been for either of my companies.”-Shanna Tellerman “I try to just take care of myself physically, which I think means that my energy levels don’t fluctuate too hugely. It tends to only fluctuate when I overwhelm myself with too much going on and I can easily correct that in like a week.”-Shanna Tellerman “There’s a confidence level around knowing that even when things don’t work out, you’re going to figure something out, that only gets gained after seeing how many things go wrong and how often you are wrong, then correcting it and everything being maybe different than you had planned, but still fine.”-Shanna Tellerman “Don’t be so hard on yourself, at any given point don’t take it too, too seriously.”-Shanna Tellerman “Overthinking it, being too worried, being too stressed out, is going to have impacts both on your own health, on your potential to take the leap and on the people that you work with.”-Shanna Tellerman

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Shanna Tellerman Product Line Manager, Autodesk Date: October 3, 2011 [intro music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, National Center for Women & Information Technology. We're working hard to encourage more girls and women to pursue computing, education and career paths. This interview series with women who have started great technology companies is very inspirational. and to be having great advice for all entrepreneurs in terms of starting companies. With me Larry Nelson, w3w3. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Oh boy! It's a pleasure to be here. This is a great, great series. I know your listeners want to pass this interview along to others and you know would be interested and they can listen to it at couple of different places that we'll give you at the end of the show 24/7. Lucy: Today, we have another great person to interview. The talent just keeps coming. Today, we're talking to Shanna Tellerman who is currently at Autodesk, Cloud Services and Applications, but before that she was Founder and CEO of Wild Pockets. Shanna is in a post- acquisition mode. That's a very exciting thing to have a company that you are the founder of, be acquired. Wild Pockets is an end-to -end open source solution that supports creators through the life cycle of 3D game development. I can't wait to hear more about it. It was Shanna's first technology company out of graduate school, but she attended Carnegie Mellon University, which is just a great, great school. She attended the Entertainment Technology Center. Doesn't that sound like great deal of fun? Shanna welcome. We're really happy to talk to you today. Shanna Tellerman: Thank you, glad to be here. Lucy: Tell us a little bit about Wild Pockets/Autodesk and what's happening. Shanna: My company was Wild Pockets. We were building out a 3D game engine that you could access in a web browser. What we were trying to do is make the ability to build games, 3D games specifically, easier and more broadly accessible to anybody. When my company first met with Autodesk, Autodesk is the creator of 3D tools and all kinds of products for the media world, the entertainment world, architecture, manufacturing, engineering. They saw what we were doing and saw that we had an idea that could be applicable to a lot of their different tools and products here at Autodesk. There was a lot of synergy between our teams and the company. Ultimately they decided that we should join them. Now I work at Autodesk. I'm the Product Line Manager for our new Autodesk cloud product line, something that's coming out this fall. It has been started through the summer last year. It's a really exciting new space for Autodesk. We're doing some awesome new things. Lucy: Well, that's pretty exciting. We don't often talk to people who are in that post-acquisition mode, so maybe a sentence or two about what that was all like. Shanna: This Autodesk acquisition of our company was a pretty quick experience. We had been talking to them and working with them a bit over the course of two years. Then, when I met with one of their directors of engineering, he was really an exciting person to talk to and visionary here at Autodesk. Then I would think up on what we were doing and what he was doing on a fairly regular basis. We did that a couple of times over the course of two years. Finally, they said, "We really want to move forward. We want to make their team part of our company." Once they said that, the process went really quickly. It was really about working together, figuring out the right terms, making sure investors were happy, et cetera, but we all had the end goal in mind. Within a couple of months, the whole deal was closed. Our team in Pittsburgh can move into an Autodesk office in Pittsburgh. I was in San Francisco. I had moved into their San Francisco Office. Before I knew it, I was completely part of the Autodesk Company. Lucy: Surprised. That's very good. Congratulations. Shanna: Thank you. Lucy: Shanna, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about how you first got into technology? Everybody is always curious to know what was it that first sparked your interest. Shanna: I first got into technology during college actually. I had gone into college for fine arts, of all things. I was painting and drawing and doing very traditional art, but Carnegie Mellon is an extremely practical and tech-heavy school. It's one of the number one computer science schools across the country and a great engineering program. They have a lot of interdisciplinary programs. Even though I was in the art school, it didn't take very long before I was introduced to all of the amazing things going on in the computer science program. Specifically, I had seen this one presentation from this course called "Building Virtual Worlds." They did a big presentation for the whole school at the end of their semester. It was really like a show they put on. People were standing on stage, wearing these 3D virtual reality glasses, and taking you through like video games that were being projected live. They were playing through it in real time. I looked at that. I was like, "This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I have to go to that class. I have to take that class, because they combine artists with computer scientists, so I would get to build these worlds, but I didn't have to know how to program them." That was really what drew me in to technology. I had played around with some of the different editing programs, Photoshop, and other kinds of programs, Director, and a little bit of the 3D tools, but it was the end result. It was looking at the incredible things that could be produced. They were both visual, but also interactive that drew me in. Lucy: Well, Carnegie Mellon does that so well. They are so well known for interdisciplinary curriculum and computing, a great place to be drawn in, I must say. One more technology question for you. When you look out, your purview of the technology landscape, what technologies do you think are particularly interesting or up-and- comer? Shanna: Well, I'm going to have to say it's really all about the cloud right now. That's what I'm excited about working on it at this very moment. It's about not having to be tied to one particular device or your laptop or your computer or your phone, but it's about being able to take the thing you're doing anywhere that you want to be. You're working on a document. You can access it from or your phone or your iPad even, you're playing a game and you log in here and then log out and then you log back in from your TV. It's in the same place and remember who you are. The cloud is providing incredible opportunities for us to be super- connected and also things that people don't really usually think about, which is it can process in compute intense data at a rate that a single machine can't. Some of the really cool things we're doing here at Autodesk includes rendering in the cloud. Rendering when you take like a 3D model and you create a photorealistic version of that 3D model with all of the perfect lighting and the materials that were just like they do in the real world. Usually you'd be an artist and you'd be sitting at your computer and maybe building a model of a house. If you want to do a rendering a bit to show the client what that house is looked like, then you had clicked the render button and then you would probably log out for the evening and let it run for hours while it creates that photorealistic rendering. When you send that to the cloud, you can scale up. You can do renderings in minutes or they can take a few hours, but you keep working on your machine, because it's not processing locally anymore. That to me is just the tip of the iceberg of the incredible things that the cloud can do. Lucy: Speaking of rendering, too, I remember about eight or nine years ago watching something I thought was pretty simple get rendered, and it did, it took forever. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Speeding this stuff up is good. Larry: I'm more empathetic than I want. Lucy: Yes. Larry: Shanna, can you hear me? You came out of Carnegie Mellon and you formed a company. Why did you become that entrepreneur and what is that about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Shanna: I became an entrepreneur totally accidentally. I came out of Carnegie Mellon. Actually well I was still within Carnegie Mellon. I was working on a project in graduate school that to me felt like a really had legs. It was something that we had prototyped and we had shown to our end users. They were excited about it and they wanted to start using it in the real world. I said, "Oh! How can we make that happen?" The university was not planning to continue to develop it into a commercial product. They build prototypes, they build samples, but they don't commercially distribute software. I started looking at can we get grants to the university to commercialize this or is there another path? Before I knew it, I started talking to local business people and investors. They said, "I think there is a commercial opportunity here." At which point, I said, "OK. Well, let's see if we can make this happen." Really it was my eagerness to try to get something from prototype to reality that drove me into entrepreneurship. Larry: Wow! Lucy: Well, I suppose that the accidental entrepreneur is may be more common than we think. Larry: Yes. Lucy: You know for sure. Who influenced or supported you to take that path? It sounds like people, perhaps at CMU or in the local community who you had talked to, were encouraging you to take that technology outside the university. Who else influenced you? Shanna: I had a bunch of great mentors along the way. The very first one was somebody named Randy Pausch, which perhaps you've heard. He is famous for the book he wrote and the talk he gave called "The Last Lecture." He was actually the person who ran that class that I talked about Building Virtual Worlds. He was the reason I got into technology. He was influential through my whole course into starting a company and supporter all along the way for everything I was doing. He was one of my first mentors and I recommend seeing "The Last Lecture" if you've not seen that, because he unfortunately passed away from cancer a few years ago. But before he got sick, he was an incredible teacher. Another mentor for me was someone named Jesse Schell, very well- known in the game industry. He's done a bunch of talks on something called "Gamification" and he worked at Disney Imagineering and he's now a professor at the Entertainment Technology Center, he has a game studio. He was one of my early advisers, an adviser/co-founder when we started this company. He was somebody who really was there in the early days supporting me and encouraging me and helping me figure out how to get this company up and running. Very quickly after that, I met somebody name Jake Witherell. He had been a former entrepreneur who was a local person. He was just an informal adviser and guided me through all kinds of the bumps and chaos of starting a company in the early days. Then in the later days of the company, I moved from Pittsburgh where I started the company in the area of Carnegie Mellon. I moved out to San Francisco where I started working with venture capitalists and investors in Silicon Valley. There was one woman that I met out here who was actually a Carnegie Mellon grad as well. She was an accomplished entrepreneur as well as an accomplished venture capitalist. Her name is Cindy Padnos. She was an amazing mentor for me. She helped me establish myself out here. She connected me to people to invest in the company. She also connected me with lots of partners and lots of opportunities. A really incredible woman. Lucy: She is incredible. She has a venture fund that she's forming called Illuminate Ventures. She's just a fabulous person. Larry: All of these different things that you've done, graduating and starting your own business and getting acquired. What is the toughest thing that you've had to do? Shanna Tellerman: There's a lot of tough things when you're an entrepreneur. Stacking them up and saying the toughest one is a hard thing to pick, but I would say that actually it had to be letting people go. One of the toughest things that you have to do is manage a team. A team of people works best together when the culture and the environment is right. Oftentimes you'll hire somebody and they may be really talented or really smart or really good in some way, but they just aren't fitting. They aren't fitting the team or they aren't doing the work they need to do. To have to make the call that that person doesn't belong in the company anymore is the hardest call that I've ever had to make in my life. We've had that happen a few times. I really liked and respected the people, but the fit wasn't right. I just knew that that kind of a bad seed on your team can disrupt your progress. Lucy: I think too that generally the people themselves know that they're not a fit. They're going to be happier someplace else. That's what I always used to tell myself. "I'm doing them a favor." Shanna: You do think that. You think after the fact, I hope that their next opportunity really makes them look back at this and say, I'm glad that things ended and I'm glad I was able to move on, but in the moment it is such a difficult thing when the person is unhappy. I'm one of those people who really thrives on energizing people and getting them excited and making them motivated and happy. To deliver a message that's the total opposite is really difficult. Lucy: It is difficult. I think almost everybody that I had to let go ended up being the better for it and came back and told me so. Larry: There you go. Lucy: I can tell so far in listening to you that you have a great deal of passion about the technology and about energizing people and having a great team. What other kind of advice would you give a young person about entrepreneurship? What other kinds of things do you think are really important? Shanna: The first thing that's really important is just doing it. I think that most people stumble on the idea that they're not ready, that they're not prepared, that there's one more thing that they need to do first, the time isn't right, etc., etc. My personal feeling is if you've got an idea, you're motivated to make something happen of it, the best thing in the world you can do is go for it. You're going to definitely make mistakes. You're definitely going to fumble. It may not work out, but that's not the end of the world. It's really that journey and the learning experience that you get from it that's the most meaningful. The worst thing you can do is sit around and wait until everything feels like it's perfectly ready to go. Getting yourself out there and getting something started is the best thing that you can make happen. The other thing that I would say is surround yourself with incredible people. It's the people who have been around me that have made me who I am and have made these opportunities possible. I never could've done this on my own. I've always looked to a great team of people to work with, to a great team of people to advise me, to a great team of professionals to work with whether that be legal or whether that be HR or accounting, you look for people that you trust and that you know are going to be partners through what will hopefully be a long and very fruitful adventure, but could also be difficult and strenuous at times. Larry: Once again, you've been through a number of different things. I'm very fascinated by it, as well as your company. What are the personal characteristics that you have that makes you an entrepreneur? Shanna: I think entrepreneurs are generally curious people. They are people who get excited by the world and are excited by the possibilities of what they can do to change the world. They believe in themselves that they might have the opportunity to make that happen. I think there's a bit of confidence you have to build as an entrepreneur. There's a bit of fear of nothing. You have to believe that anything is possible and that your wildest dreams could come true. I also think you have to be extremely dedicated and extremely motivated because it's a lot of hard work. You need to focus and you need to get a lot done. You're probably the kind of person, if you're an entrepreneur, who has always over-committed or overdone everything that they've tried to do because that's just the personality that you have. But number one is really that curiosity or you're the kind of person who wants to explore and wants to try to make things happen. Lucy: I think that reminds me of the word "invention," too. You're curious. You take it one step. You see what happens. You take it another step and you just keep pushing forward with that relentlessness to really get it to move. You mentioned hard work and being dedicated. That gets us to our next question around having both a work life and a personal life. How would you integrate the two? Some people would even say balance, although I think we've come to realize that there is no such thing as balance in entrepreneurship. How do you address that in your own life? Shanna: Well I think the first thing is you have to love your work, because if you're an entrepreneur you're working a lot more than most people work. It does seep into every area of your life. If you don't like what you're doing you're not going to be very happy. That's the first thing I recommend. On top of that, I do think it's important to structure in balance. My first year or two I found that I was always on, I was always stressed, I was always anxious. I didn't really take time off for myself. It had a negative result. It made me more tired. It made me less focused at times when I needed to be focused. Eventually, by the 3rd or 4th year of my company, I started realizing on the weekends I need to take a good day or so where I'm not checking email and I'm not working, maybe even two days, which for an entrepreneur is a lot, but you need that time to rest and to get your mind off of everything going on. For me, I'm pretty active. I do that through sports. I've done triathlons. I've made a lot of friends out in the Bay area who also do triathlons. It's such a beautiful place to live in, the Bay area. There's so many places to explore that I just found being outside and being around people really rejuvenated me and put a lot of balance into my life. Larry: Wow, I could get tired just watching you, I think. Lucy: I think you might be an extrovert. Larry: Lucy, she does a lot of running too. Lucy: And I'm an extrovert: Larry: You have achieved a great deal for such a young person. I have to say that while you talked about the cloud and the things that you're doing with the company right now. What do you see is next for you? Shanna: I'd like to start something again at some point in my life. Right now I'm at Autodesk. I'm loving what I'm doing here at Autodesk. If it keeps going as it is today there's a good chance I will stay here because we're getting to start all kinds of things within the structure of a big company. I could also see an opportunity where something comes along and starting another company just makes sense and I dive into that and grow something from the ground up again. I'm pretty open. I usually let things come to me and roll in as they happen. I take the opportunity when something feels right to jump on it and try it out. Larry: Wow. I love it. Lucy: I think that's great. One thing I wanted to mention when you said that Shanna has accomplished a lot. I just have to give her a shout out for being named "Business Week's" best young entrepreneurs in 2009. That must have felt real good. Shanna: Maybe. Lucy: Yeah. One other thing too that I want to thank you for is your participation in organizations around women and computing and thank you for that. Great organizations like Astia, Women 2.0, Girl Geeks, etc. Thank you for your participation with those groups. They are most excellent. Thank you Shanna. We really enjoyed talking with you. Larry, do you want to remind listeners where they can find this interview? Larry: Absolutely. A couple of really neat places, ncwit.org, up there for sure, also at w3w3.com. You can listen to both 24/7. You'll see it in our podcast as well as our blog. Lucy: Shanna, thank you very much. Shanna: Thank you very much. This is definitely the area of passion for me. I hope that more girls do get into technology. I love opportunities like this. Thank you for having me. Lucy: Thank you. Larry: Thanks for being here. Shanna: OK. Thank you. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Shanna TellermanInterview Summary: Shanna Tellerman describes herself as an “accidental-entrepreneur” who turned a course project from Carnegie Mellon University into reality in the form of her first tech company, Wildpockets. The company focused on democratizing access to game development by providing a cloud hosted game engine. It was later acquired by Autodesk Cloud Services and Applications, where Shanna currently works as the Product Line Manager. Release Date: October 3, 2011Interview Subject: Shanna TellermanInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 20:42